OUR COMMUNITY

f the nine children born to Esther and Jacob Allweiss in Jaslany,
Poland, only my dad Zyga “Zygie” and Uncle Salek “Sol” survived
the Holocaust.
This was a given, a fact our family knew to be true — until the
miracle happened.
Now 77 years since the end of World War II, we descendants of the
late Zygie and the late Sol found out this spring that another Allweiss
brother, Fishel, made it through! He and his wife, Klara, their three children
and three grandchildren lived in Belarus, then part of the post-war Soviet
Union. All of them moved to Israel in the early 1990s, around a decade after
Fishel died in Belarus.
The individual responsible for bringing our three families togeth-
er is Fishel’s only granddaughter. Irina “Ira” (pronounced “EE-rah”)
Kuravsky of Haifa is a married mother of two working in commercial real
estate.
“Everybody looks for their roots, and I didn’t know anything about my
family,
” said Ira, explaining why she decided to search for Fishel.
Ira said it took years to find proof of her grandfather’s origins because
their family didn’t know his last name at birth was “
Allweiss.
” Fishel entered
the Soviet Union without documentation; there was no written record of
how his name was spelled.
“In Russia, all the documents were exclusively in Russian,
” Ira said. “Grandpa could read
and write Polish, but there was no need for that. He knew excellent Russian from school in
Poland and also knew Yiddish very well.
”
Everyone in Fishel’s family thought their last name was “
Alvais,
” spelled the way it’s said
in Polish, with “v” substituting for “w.
” Zygie and Sol pronounced “
Allweiss” the same way.
Ira, an only child, also has two first cousins in Israel, brothers Alexander and Gershon
Alvais.

Long-lost brother’s
descendants discover
their U.S. family eight
decades after the Shoah.

An Astonishing
Search
for

Esther
Allweiss
Ingber
Contributing
Writer

ON THE COVER

Alexander Alvais

Zygie Allweiss spoke about
his wartime experiences
to a group of eighth-
graders after their tour of
the Zekelman Holocaust
Center in Farmington Hills.

continued on page 14

12 | AUGUST 25 • 2022