Blog post #1 SYBonda.Blogspot.com
On how I tracked some cousins, the descendants of Shloim Yankel Bonda and Shaine Czerwonagura of Kosow Lacki, Poland and their related families, scattered across 3 continents
Hi all, Thought I might try a blog to start to get us all acquainted and to convey some family history I have uncovered. This blog is for descendents of Shloim Yankel Bonda and Shaine Czerwonagura of Kosow Lacki Poland and associated family members. Although we are now scattered across three continents, the children of SYB and SC were all born between around 1902 and 1918 in Eastern Poland in a small town Northeast of Warsaw and very, very close to the town of Treblinka.
Here are the children of Shloim Yankel and Shaine--they were:
1. Chaim Velvel Bonda (Jaime), father of Frymet Bonda, of Uruguay.
2. Lieb Mendel Bonda (Leo Bond), father of Martin and Thelma Bond, of USA (My grandfather).
3. Hershel Bonda (Herman), father of Luis and Zulema Bonda, of Uruguay.
4. Chana Bonda, mother of Jose and Sara Szeiman, of Uruguay.
5. Chashke Bonda, mother of Yehudit and Nava Gilboa, of Israel.
6. Elya Bonda, no children, of Uruguay.
To see where you fit in, look at my family tree on Geni or Ancestry (write me, Sharon Silber, for an invitation). Dana Stolowicz, the granddaughter of Zulema, also has a tree on My Heritage, but some people are missing there.
So how did I find you you might be wondering (or as my son would say, why are you stalking these people mom?) I will say a little about this…
I had sent my DNA to be tested through Family Tree DNA, didn’t recognize anyone on the list of potential 3rdthrough 5th cousins I got and thought, why don’t I look up my real second cousins instead? I had met Eduardo Bonda (son of Luis) many decades ago when he visited New York City—we were both very young then--and had met the Israeli cousins in the mid 1990s in Haifa (and was lucky enough to meet Chashke!) but hadn’t had any contact since, and my mom had lost contact too.
So I googled the name Bonda in Uruguay and also looked on Facebook. Googling, I found memorial notices that Luis Bonda had put in the newspaper in Montevideo. I also found the Facebook page for Zulema Bonda which conveniently listed her children and grandchildren. (The notices that Luis put in the paper also listed family members). From these sources, I pieced together the descendants of Shloim Yankel and Shaine in Uruguay, or at least the Bonda and Stolowicz cousins. I tried contacting people through Facebook but didn’t get a response, having what I am sure was an unrecognizable name. So I googled and found Dana Stolowicz listed as a psychology student at University in Israel with an email address. I wrote her giving her family info and she was nice enough to write back! She said her father Bernardo remembered my grandparents coming to his bar mitzvah. So now we were off, and I began using Facebook (and email) to identify and contact Bonda and Stolowicz relatives.
My mom by this time had unearthed a letter from Sara which gave me the spelling of Szeiman which allowed me to find Jose on Facebook. He in turn introduced me to his nephew Javier Borkenztain, the son of Sara Szeiman--and the grandson of Chana Bonda--who was about to visit the US. So one of the last parts of the Uruguay Bonda family that I found was actually the first side that I met in person. We got together with Javier with my mom and sister and nephew and cousin Beth (daughter of Martin Bond) and her son when he was attending a conference in New York City.
Ironically, two sets of descendents I had difficulty finding were those who our family had actually had the most contact with several decades back. Frymit (Felicia) Bonda Trapunski, the daughter of Chaim Velvel Bonda, the oldest child of Shloim Yankel and Shaine, was the cousin who had visited my mom the most extensively many years earlier, However, although I had some leads on finding Frymit,.I could not quite track her. Eventually, when we got to Montevideo, a more distant relative of ours, Miguel Korytnicki, a descendant, I believe, of the ancestor who my mom was named for, Sara Tova Czerwonagora Korytnicki (more on this later), found Frymit in the Montevideo phone listings and we called her from our hotel.
Also a bit convoluted was re-finding the family of our Israeli cousins, the descendents of Chashke Bonda. My family had visited Chashke’s family several times in Israel and my mom had written to Chashke over the years but eventually she did not hear back and could not locate the contact information she had for Chashke’s daughters. My mom remembered the name “Kirshenbaum” so I tried looking through Haifa phone directories online for the name but I was spelling it incorrectly (It is actually Kirshenboim) and we thought that it was Yehudit’s married name rather than Nava’s. I found nothing. But on the genealogy site where I had found our family records of our ancesters, JewishGen, there is a service called Family Finder where you can put in the name of your ancestor and the town and find others who are looking for the same ancestor. I had listed Shloim Yankel’s father, Abram Yitzak Bonda (the name appears on SY’s gravestone which my mother had a picture of) in Kosow Lacki, and I found two other people, both in Israel, who also listed Abram Yitzak Bonda of Kosow Lacki as an ancestor.
One man named Jacob Bonda did not write back to me. The other wrote back immediately. Yair Ben-Dov, a professor of entomology (bugs) at the University of Tel Aviv, wrote me back a friendly note and said that he knew my parents and grandparents and was putting me in touch with my closer relative, my cousin Yehudit Hollander, the daughter of Chashke, in whose home I had stayed years ago when I visited Israel. Yair’s mother was our grandparents’ first cousin and in a future post I can write more about him and his family and about the listings of Bonda relatives that died in Treblinka that his family has documented at Yad Vashem. I will also write more about how I found the name of our great-grandmother and how I figured out that the Yiddish “Kosovo” was Kosow Lacki. And about our many, many Grapa relatives from the Czerwonagora side in Mexico, Europe and the US and how their family tree uncovered the name of our great-grandmother. But first perhaps, we should document the lives of our grandparents.
In the next post I will write about my grandfather Lieb Mendel and will include a story written by my mom about the celebration of the Jewish holidays in her home growing up. (Please let me know if you would be willing to write a story about your parent or grandparent and I will post--Spanish or English is fine),
