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