One evening in 1992, while sorting through some papers that had belonged to my late father, I came across an old and fragile Hebrew document that I could not recall seeing before. Because of the old-fashioned printing style, I suspected that it might be part of an old prayer book or Hebrew manuscript. Curious, I decided to stop and analyze the contents of this mysterious text.

Despite my modest Hebrew skills, I quickly skimmed over the thousands of words that filled the densely packed four-page document. The lack of vowels and the formal manner in which the Hebrew of the document was written made understanding anything in the document difficult. Nevertheless, I began to pronounce two words in bold print on the back side: “Efffra’eem… Baal..chav..er.” I recognized these sounds. Bolchover was my grandmother’s maiden name (spelled “Bolchower” in Polish). My initial suspicions seemed to be confirmed. This document was not just an old sheet of paper; its contents were potentially significant. Perhaps it was a manuscript whose author, Efraim Bolchover, was a relative or ancestor?

My paternal great-grandfather’s name was Jacob-Eliezer Bolchover. I wondered who Efraim was and what information was contained in this document. Taking a Hebrew-English dictionary off the shelf, I worked on the title. After translating the first line, I realized that I had uncovered something important, because the words Megilat Yochsin translate into English as “scroll of genealogy.”

Like an archaeological artifact waiting to be unearthed and studied, this important paper had the potential to reveal a part of my paternal family’s history, but first it had to be translated. In light of the subject matter, it seemed that a rabbi should be consulted. My brother, Richard, approached a rabbi he knew who agreed to look at the manuscript. Over the next three and a half months, bit by bit, we had a translation (on audio-tape, which I then transcribed). We soon learned that this Hebrew-language document consisted of two parts, divided by a central line. The first half presented the intricate genealogy; the second section contained tales about some of the rabbis mentioned in the first half. A few of these family stories I later found in Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, published about 50 years after Efraim Bolchover wrote his document.

With more ancestors’ names revealed as each week passed, our family’s intricate tree became larger. The result was an impressive roster of learned rabbis, scholars, and judges going back many centuries. Given that these were direct ancestors, this was an awe-inspiring discovery.

Of his forefather, Rabbi Yitzchak Dov-Berish, Efraim Bolchover wrote that he was “head of the rabbinical court of Yaslovitz and the district of Podolia” (a large, historic region of present-day Ukraine). The document also stated that Yitzchak Dov-Berish was the elder brother of “Rabbi Meir Margoliot, head of the rabbinical court of Lvov, afterwards in Ostrog, and later chief rabbi of the region that had 280 towns.” Indeed, according to the volumes of the Encyclopaedia Judaica (EJ), which I consulted often during my research of the document’s contents, Meir Margoliot (in EJ, spelled “Margoliouth”) had been, from a young age, together with his elder brother, Yitzchak Dov-Berish, “devoted and loved disciples of the Ba’al Shem Tov.” In 1777, Meir’s position establishing his authority over all of the rabbis in his area of jurisdiction was officially confirmed by the King of Poland, Stanislas II Augustus. As further described in the Horodenka Memorial Book, Rabbi Yitzchak Dov-Berish Margoliot

was elected chief Rabbi in Jazlowicz [i.e., Yaslovitz] and Zaleszczyki…. He was one of the main participants in the public debate with the heads of the Frankist movement. The debate occurred in Kamieniec-Podolski…. Another debate took place in Lvov in 1759. (“History of the Jews of Horodenka” www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/gorodenka/gor086. html).

Efraim Bolchover continued to trace his family, generation by generation, to the noted 16th-century rabbinical figures, the Maharal of Prague and Maharam of Padua, both of whom claim descent from King David (according to the document, the former through Rav Hai Gaon and the latter through Rashi). The Maharam’s grandson, Saul Wahl, the legendary King of Poland for a night in 1587, was also prominently listed. In libraries in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Jerusalem, I researched all of the names and detailed ancestral branches in as many sources as I could find.

Exciting as it was to learn that my father’s family had so many esteemed figures in its past, knowing that a more recent ancestor had actually taken the painstaking efforts to write down our family’s ancestry carefully was just as intriguing. In the Hebrew document’s introduction, Efraim Bolchover wrote:

Since I have found in my possession a sheet containing the genealogy of my family, I said to myself I would make a copy, so that my children will know, and they who will follow, generation after generation, that their origins are of holy seed, all men of renown.

For this to have more personal meaning, I wanted to know who Efraim Bolchover was and how we were related. My uncle, Irv Wolak, explained that Efraim Bolchover (1810–1908) was the father of Jacob-Eliezer Bolchover (1864–1948), who was the father of Rachel Bolchover (1885–1974). Born in Jezierzany, Rachel married Jacob Wohlmann in 1908 and was the only one of her siblings in Poland to survive the Holocaust. One brother, Meir Bolchover, and one sister, Chava Menczel, had left Europe in the early 1930s and settled with their families in Tel Aviv. My father, Dr. Efroim Wohlmann (1910–79), was born to Rachel and Jacob in Jezierzany. Prevailing anti-Semitism in Poland after World War II necessitated name changes: Wohlmann became Wolak; Rachel became Rosa; Efroim became Edward; and Yitzchak became Ignatz, then Irv. With their new identities, the Wolak family left Poland and settled in Vancouver, Canada, in 1951, where my brother and I were born in the 1960s. Hence, Efraim was the grandfather of Rosa Wolak and, therefore, my father’s and uncle’s great-grandfather. In fact, my father had been named after him.

With these answers, I now knew exactly who the author was and how I was descended from him, and I also had some understanding of our family’s distinguished ancestry. Satisfied with this knowledge, I ended the investigation quite content. Yet my discovery of the printed family lineage led to more, equally interesting developments.

In January 1993, Richard gave me a mail order catalogue of Jewish books that he had come across and thought I might like to peruse. Examining the contents to see if there were any titles of interest, one specific volume immediately caught my eye, The Unbroken Chain: Biographical Sketches and Genealogy of Illustrious Jewish Families from the 15th-20th Century. Glancing at the book’s description, I began to wonder if any of our ancestors might be included. I tried to find out but couldn’t; no library that I consulted in Vancouver had this book.

Rather than wait weeks for an interlibrary loan, I asked Richard, who was about to leave for Seattle, to stop by the Seattle Public Library where I had learned a copy of the book was held. He found it and was able to sign it out on a two-week loan. A jackpot of fascinating information was found within those pages. The entire volume is devoted to the descendants of the Maharam of Padua, as Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen was known in the rabbinical world. This 16th-century rabbinic leader was my direct ancestor according to our document. In fact, all of the individuals named in this book, extensively researched by genealogist Neil Rosenstein, trace back through various branches, generation by generation, to this particular rabbi.

Among the thousands of descendants, many became famous and influential in diverse fields: Jewish philosophers and theologians, Martin Buber and Moses Mendelssohn; the latter’s grandson, composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy; cosmetics industrialist, Helena Rubinstein; violinist, Yehudi Menuhin; and numerous noted academics, scientists, authors, diplomats, as well as many famed Hasidic figures, including Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the revered former Brooklyn-based Lubavitcher Rebbe. Even Karl Marx traced back—all just a few of the newly discovered cousins on our growing family tree.

After finding several of our ancestors in this single volume book published in 1976, I decided to order a copy. A second revised edition had been published in 1990, expanding its highly informative contents to two very large volumes. According to the document, Rabbi Yitzchak Dov-Berish Margoliot had married into the family. Hence, the links in our document were the same as the links in the book. In early February 1993, the second edition that I had ordered arrived in the mail. Rabbi Jacob Margoliot was now listed (see Rosenstein, The Unbroken Chain, Vol. 1, p. 467, item G10.4). He was one of Yitzchak Dov-Berish’s sons, from whom my paternal grandmother Rosa descends. We were getting closer to the present.

With so much information in my possession, I decided it was time to communicate some of this knowledge about our descent from the acclaimed Maharam of Padua, Meir Katzenellenbogen (1482–1565). I sent a letter together with a copy of Efraim Bolchover’s authoritative 1896 document to Rosenstein and received an immedi­ate reply.

Rosenstein had done his own translation and then confirmed its contents with other sources. He informed me that my particular document had been printed in Palestine by the Chorev printing house, not in Eastern Europe as I had thought. Rosenstein also brought to my attention some information about Efraim Bol­chov­er not even I, a direct descendant, knew. Efraim was indeed a rabbi. In fact, as listed on page 514 in volume one of Me’orei Galicia (Rabbi Meir Wunder’s Encyclopedia of Galician Rabbis and Scholars), he was Av Bet Din, head of the rabbinical court of Zaleszczyki (today situated in the western part of the Ukraine near the Romanian border) in the last quarter of the 19th century. Indeed, as stated on the last page of my manuscript, Zaleszczyki is where Efraim prepared this document on 19 Sivan 5656 (1896), declaring, “All of this I copied, letter by letter, so that this should be a memorial to remember forever.” He is cited in published responsa (legal opinions of rabbis), dated 1859 and 1894, which I later obtained from visits to the libraries of New York’s Yeshiva University and Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. While visiting the Spertus Library in Chicago, I also found Rabbi Efraim in Otzar HaRabbanim, Rabbi Nathan Tzvi Freedman’s encyclopedic tome of leading rabbis spanning from 970 to 1970. (Efraim’s entry is #3009.) I was fascinated to learn these details that further enhanced my understanding of Rabbi Bolchover’s work.

From subsequent and extensive correspondence with my father’s first cousin, Romanian-born Israeli academic Professor Efraim Menczel, I learned that Jacob-Eliezer Bol­chover had reprinted his father’s original Hebrew manuscript in British-ruled Palestine after his emigration from Poland to Jerusalem in the early 1930s. Bolchover later perished in the siege of Jerusalem during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. My father, visiting Israel in 1950 shortly after he emigrated from Poland, having survived the horrors of Nazi occupation in wartime Lvov, was given his grandfather’s document. I also learned that, like my father some years earlier, Dr. Menczel had been named after their common great-grandfather.

Rabbi Efraim Bolchover’s authoritative document had one particularly interesting consequence. Rosenstein had asked me to bring this document up to the present, piecing together the last hundred years of our family history to complete the story begun by Rabbi Efraim Bolchover. This provided the impetus to contact cousins in Israel that either I had never met or had not known well. It was a great opportunity, but also a serious responsibility to be factually correct. Written inquiries were initiated; library research was conducted. The work was arduous but ultimately worthwhile. Hence, through considerable correspondence followed by visits to Israel, the U.S., even Poland, I was able to become acquainted with my international family. Not only has genealogy helped me learn about my family’s past, but it also provided me a means of connecting with my cousins. It also brought Rosenstein’s records of our branch forward to the present.

Without the detailed 1896 document prepared by Rabbi Efraim Bolchover and the information on our family that I was able to compile from 1896 to the present, Rosenstein would not likely have been able to discover us on his own. Considering the Holocaust, which took the lives of most of my grandmother’s siblings (a disturbing fact later verified at the UCLA library where I found Oziran ve Ha-Seviva, the Jezierzany yizkor book—page 367, item 24—that includes among the list of victims my grandmother’s brothers, together with their wives and children), the emigration of surviving family members to Canada and Israel after the war, the exodus of some to British Mandate Palestine before the war, not to mention the added complications arising from changed family names, our particular branch of the Maharam’s family tree would have been lost to the dust pan of history. I believe that my great-great-grandfather, Rabbi Efraim Bolchover, would be pleased to know that the memory of our distinguished forefathers will not only be preserved, but that it has enabled many of his descendants to become reacquainted—or, in many cases, to meet for the very first time—and maintain a family bond that transcends their common ancestry.

Arthur Wolak, PhD, born in Vancouver, Canada, is a freelance writer and co-founder of Arelco Promotional Group, Inc., an advertising specialties firm located in Vancouver. His articles have appeared in newspapers and academic journals in Canada, Australia, the U.S., and U.K.