No matter how much you ask people for their help, there are times you just have to do it all yourself. Take my quest which became a hunt for stones, to find more about a distant relative whose name was Shlomo Steiner.

The family name STEINER is derived from the German word, stein, meaning a stone. How this became this family’s name is not known, although sometimes, it could refer to someone who had a profession working with stones, such as a stonemason for larger cruder stones or a jeweler, for finer, more precious stones, and therefore became a “steiner.” Or it might simply be a variation of the name Stein. Another suggestion via ancestry.com[1] is that it is a topographic name “for someone who lived on stony ground or near a prominent outcrop of rock.”

When I first began to be interested in family genealogy, the earliest information I had on my father’s side was through his maternal grandfather, named Samuel David (aka Shmuel David שמואל דוד) Steiner. In 1996, when Jerry and I traveled to Kezmarok, Slovakia, and found Shmuel David’s tombstone, we learned that his father was Shlomo (probably, Salomon) Steiner and his mother was named Henne.

Figure 1 Tombstone of Shmuel David Steiner, Kezmarok, Slovakia

Figure 2 Shmuel David Steiner, 1830-1927.

According to family lore, Shlomo was a miller. Could the STEINER name have been used as a reference to a millstone? Pure speculation. Eventually, we developed a website once called “The Descendants of Shlomo Steiner Family[2]” because he was the earliest ancestor we could find and document. That site was where we posted any information we learned about the Steiners, and specifically his two daughters: Roza (aka Rachel, רחל) and Regina (aka Rivka,(רבקה who became successively, the wives of Isak (aka Yitzchak, יצחק) Goldman. In the beginning, we only knew of these two daughters as the offspring of Shmuel David Steiner. Over time, we discovered a total of nine children; a few of whom emigrated to the USA, some died a natural death, and some perished in the Holocaust. Among the sons, was one Josef Steiner.

Yitzchak Goldman married Rachel Steiner, my great-grandmother, known secularly as Roza Steiner Goldman, who died in childbirth with her third child. My paternal grandmother, Giza, was her middle child and only daughter. Roza, like her biblical namesake Rachel, gave birth to a son and died a few days later, in May 1889. As in the Bible, her husband Yitzchak Goldman, named their motherless son, Benjamin. Yitzchak subsequently married Roza’s sister, Regina (Rivka) Steiner and had 15 more children.

While I never had the pleasure of knowing my own grandparents because they were killed during WW II, I did know this great uncle Ben, at least a little bit. That’s because he immigrated to the USA in 1913 and eventually raised his family in Detroit, Michigan.

One surviving son of the aforementioned Josef Steiner was Shlomo, apparently named for his great-grandfather. I met Shlomo Steiner all of one time in 1969 when, at the time we were living in Israel, he attended a family wedding, that included descendents of the second Steiner wife, who were all Holocaust survivors. In his mid-70s then, he introduced himself, telling me how he was related to me; he was my grandmother’s cousin and he was delighted to meet me. Once again, I listened to the words in German that my relatives who had known my grandmother would always say when they saw me,

“Sehr Ähnlich!” You look so like your grandmother.

On the other hand, I was struck then at how much he looked like my great-uncle Ben, complete with mustache and hair in his ears! Definitely a family resemblance; no need for any DNA testing! At the time I didn’t really understand how he was a “cousin” and didn’t even know or realize that his name, Shlomo, was the same as that of his great-grandfather — and my great-great-grandfather!

We left Israel in the middle of 1975 and never saw him again but I always remembered him and wondered what had happened to him. I hate loose ends and perhaps it is my love for solving problems and mysteries that I wanted to know more about him. I had learned that he was living in Israel, in a town called Afula — a town I never visited in the 10 years we lived there. He lived in a Shikun — a community housing project –where like many other WW II survivors and displaced people, he was given residence. His address was Amidar 12. As far as I knew he lived there the rest of his life.

Since I have pursued genealogy with an emphasis on my father’s side, with all its Holocaust martyrs and survivors, I have accessed Jerualem’s Yad Vashem[3]’s database records hundreds of times on-line and visited it in person several times. It contains pages of testimony that survivors – whether relatives or friends – have taken great pains over the years to record the life and death of those near and dear to them, lest their existence be completely obliterated.

Shlomo Steiner in the mid-1950s had painfully provided the testimonies for his wife, Pesl, and their two little children, 10 year old Rivka, and 6 year-old Shmuel David, named for Shlomo’s grandfather, all of whom had died in 1943. There were others – his parents, siblings and their spouses, and more little ones. The more I reviewed these documents, the more I could feel his pain and perhaps the tears he shed as he dictated the information to the transcriber.

Somehow I was haunted by having known him and later learning this sad story of his life. I don’t know exactly when he married for the second time to Ita, but the couple were too old by then to have had children. But some of the cousins of his generation then living in Israel kept in touch and visited with them from time to time. That generation has also passed away and there are few around now who even remember who he was.

Inspired by my genealogy work on behalf of the Steiner-Goldman descendants, in 2002 a couple of the family members arranged a family reunion together with a photo-filled PowerPoint presentation. While this took place in Rechovot, Israel, we in California were sadly unable to attend. But they did send us the presentation. In it, I found a photo of the same Shlomo Steiner holding a Torah scroll that he must have commissioned. On the outside was a velvet cover with an embroidered inscription including the Hebrew year at the bottom of תשכ”א(5621), corresponding to 1961. The inscription is imperfectly visible, but enough to see that it was dedicated to deceased family members[4]. Again, in this photo, the family resemblance was unmistakable.

For years I have been trying to find out more about this man and realized that he must have died, because he was quite advanced in age when I had originally met him. But no one now seemed to know if had always lived at the same old address or if there was a newer one. Afula is off the beaten path, and as much as I pestered my 150 plus relatives in Israel, no one had the time or inclination to try and find out what had happened to him.

So therein began my quest. I wanted to pay my respects, but how? How could I find out when he died and where he was buried?

I learned that each town in Israel has its own cemetery and if you die there, you are entitled to a burial place. In 2007, in an e-mail to an Israeli genealogy site, I received the name and phone number to contact Afula’s Religious Council and their local Chevra Kadisha, the department that takes care of burials in Afula. But despite this information no one in Israel was willing to take the initiative to make further inquiries.

At the end of May 2011, we traveled to Israel for yet another visit – this time for three weeks — and I was determined to try and ferret out this information. As soon as I got over jet lag, I called the phone number and spoke to a very pleasant and soft-spoken woman named Rivka.

“What can I do for you, Motek (Sweetie)?” she asked in Hebrew.

I responded in my rusty Hebrew, but she was sensitive and patient, amazingly unrealistic attributes of most contemporary Israelis! I told her my quest to find this relative and that I knew he was buried in Afula.

I gave Rivka his family name, first name and wife’s name. There were five Steiners buried in the cemetery and sure enough she found him. He had died in 1985, 10 years after we left Israel, and his wife, five years before him. They were buried side-by-side: Section 17, Row 10, he at position 13, she at 14. I also asked how I could get a death certificate. Rivka accommodatingly gave me their identity numbers and sometime in the future I will try to get their certificates.

Armed with this information, our rented car, cameras, and a borrowed GPS, a somewhat reluctant Jerry and I set off to find Afula and its cemetery. We made it to the city center but the cemetery’s location was elusive. We had a street name but it was not easy to find just where along the street it was supposed to be. Stopping to ask pedestrians, two or three people sent us in the wrong direction, until we were directed to a rough looking road, in an undeveloped area full of dried out weeds and rocks that looked like a road to nowhere. But it did indeed reach a palm-treed entrance to the cemetery.

Figure 5 Entrance to the Afula Cemetery

It looked almost deserted but evidence of some construction was obvious, even if there was no one around. Fortunately we managed to find a man who was just about to leave, but gave us some vague directions like, “Just over there; take the path on the right.” So we ventured out and what seemed to be by sheer luck we found section 17 and walked until we located row 10. We paced it off until we found ourselves in front of sites 13 and 14, in what looked like a concrete double bed complete with headboard and footboard for their eternal rest.

It had been a treasure hunt and we had found the treasure – precious stones of a different kind. To complete the hunt, we bent down and picked up some little pebbles from the ground and placed them on top of their gravestones as an indication that someone had visited there.

We were so gratified to have located these and Jerry, the expert photographer, captured the images of the stones for posterity; for inclusion in our family tree, to share with our relatives, and more important — similar to a page of testimony — to preserve the memory of their existence.

This mission accomplished!

Figure 6 Gravestones of Shlomo son of Josef Steiner (L) and his wife, Ita (R) daughter of Abraham Koza.

Shlomo Steiner died on 30 Av 5645, 17 August 1985, at age 89.

Ita (née Koza) Steiner died on 9 Kislev 5641, 17 November 1980, age 75.

 

[1] To search for the meaning of a family name: http://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts/

[2] Now called, “The Steiner-Goldman Family,”at http://www.steiner-goldman.com.

[3] Yad Vashem יד ושם= Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, founded in 1953. Yad means a memorial, shem means a name. To search the archives, go to http://db.yadvashem.org/names/search.html?language=en

[4] Tracking down that Torah to be able to read the inscription properly is another one of my projects, since I don’t know where he attended synagogue, but that will have to be at some other time.