State Of The Reunion

It takes a village to plan a successful family gathering,
especially when it requires travel to a foreign country.

BY RUTHAN BRODSKY

mages of Tevya-like characters in the
musical Fiddler on the Roof are part
of Zelda Robinson's memories. As a
small child, the family frequently vis-
ited her grandparents in Canada. It was
during those days that Zelda shared a bed-
room with her grandmother, Betty Lewis.
"Her bedtime stories were tales about
my cousins, about my aunts, and mostly
about her life in Vilna, her immigration to
Leeds, and then to Glasgow," recalls
Robinson, of West Bloomfield. "After her
marriage, my grandmother and her family
moved to Canada but she kept in touch
with relatives in England and Scotland
through lengthy correspondence."
One of Robinson's favorites is the story
of how her great grandfather and two of his
brothers were the first in the family to trav-
el to England in the early 1800s to escape

I

religious persecution. Their primary
accomplishment was establishing a Vilna
school in Leeds. At the time, the Jewish
population of Leeds totaled between 2,000
and 3,000 but there was no money to
build and no money to buy any land. The
school started in a basement in 1883 and
became the Vilna synagogue in 1919.
"I had never seen these people but I
knew all about them, or at least my grand-
mother's version. They were very real to me
as I grew up," continued Robinson.
Sixty years later Zelda Robinson was a
major player planning a family reunion that
brought the descendants of these cousins and
their families together in Glasgow.
Octogenarians and an infant were among the
120 members of the family who journeyed
to Glasgow from the United States, Canada,
and England for an extended weekend.

Not everyone has the good fortune,
the tenacity, and the interest to make an
event like this happen. And it certainly
wasn't one of the primary goals in Zelda
Robinson's life as wife and mother.
"My grandmother's stories never left
me," says Robinson. "The 1976 bicen-
tennial was my impetus to put together
my mother's family tree as a special proj-
ect for the Women's League for
Conservative Judaism. I had made con-
tacts of my own with some of the family
in previous years. For instance, after
World War II, several of our British rela-
tives came for a visit and stayed at my
parents' home. My mother kept in touch
with them. Then, as a young adult on my
way to Israel in 1950 to work on a kib-
butz, our American contingency stopped
in England. I took the time and traveled

Left to right:
Zelda with her
great-grandmother
Bubbe ICailee,
a midwife.
Zelda Robinson
catches up with cousins
om Glasgow.
Raoul Taylor, born in
South Africa, now living
in London, shares some
family memories with
Zelda Robinson.
Opposite page:
The men of Glasgow:
Abe Segaa Isaac Louis
and Abe Taylor, left;
same men, same place,
27 years laten right.