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The Six Decades
• Of Separation

STEVE LIPMAN
Special to The Jewish News

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rs. Grossman, this is
your first cousin, Wolf
Bergman." With nine
words, a Polish-born
-* Jewish family's separation of more
than 60 years ended recently in
Brooklyn.
Alice Grossman, 86, a granddaugh-
ter of Haskel Meir Berkman, and her
• brother Nathan Bergman, 83, were
reunited in a Borough Park apartment
with Wolf Bergman, 72, also a grand-
child of Berkman.
a. The introductions were made and
the reunion arranged by Wolf
Bergman's son Morris, an attorney
from Worcester, Mass., who took a
week-long genealogical tour to Poland
last year with his wife Wendy.
Bergman searched old records in
the town hall of Zwolen, a village in
the country's southeast corner, home
of his great-grandfather Haskel
*Berkman (1856-1936)- He found doc-
uments with the family's name, "reams
of this," some dating back to the
1780s. Subsequent research took him
to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
•
Museum in Washington, and to a
Zwolen Yizkor Book, with listings of
the shtetl's former Jewish residents.
"I discovered there were a lot of
Berkmans," carpenters and tailors and
*cantors, some of whom, like his father,
had changed their name to Bergman.
Morris, whose father survived the
Holocaust and was convinced that the
rest of his- extended family had per-
ished during the war, found that
Grossman and her brother had immi-
grated to the United States in 1928.
Their father Leibus was the brother of
Wolf Bergman's father.
* Morris called Brooklyn and con-
firmed the relationship — both sides
wanted to meet.
"Too bad you live so far away,"
Grossman declared Sunday to the
Massachusetts Bergmans, who drove
down for the afternoon. "Why don't
you move to Borough Park?"
"Bittersweet," Wolf Bergman called
the four-generation reunion. "I missed
•
relationships with these people all
these years. But I found that other rel-
atives survived." ❑
— New York Jewish Week

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10/24
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