Tabachnik Family Reunion

I was the oldest grandchild in both my father's and mother's families, and so I knew much about the histories of both of my families. I knew that my father's family grew up largely in the United States, but that my mother's family had emigrated from the Ukraine, part of the then Russia, from a small town called "Balta," now a part of the Ukraine, with a different name. My maternal grandfather's family emigrated to the United States one year after my grandparents came to the United States in 2006 as newlyweds. I was also told that my maternal grandmother's family stayed on their farm in Balta, and they continued to live there until Germany invaded Russia in 1940. After that, my grandparents had no contact with her family. and being Jewish, the presumption was that they had died in the Holocaust. So, I grew up believing that! My wife Nancy and I became members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum after we were married in 1997. In 2000, we decided to visit the museum in Washington, DC. After a four hour and very moving visit to the museum, as we were about to leave I noticed a sign over a room with a closed door entitled: "Holocaust Survivors." I was curious so we went in. Inside there was one woman with a bank of computers, and I asked what this was about. She asked me if I knew any Holocaust survivors as they were establishing a database of Holocaust survivors around the world. I told her that my grandmother's family had perished in the Holocaust. She asked if I knew the family name and where they came from. I told her that I did, and she told me to type that into a computer. I typed in "Tabachnick" (the family name) and "Balta," the small town that they came from. I did so, and the computer printed out two photos of an Alexander an Raisa Tabacchnick from Balta, Russia. I didn't know these people, but the woman told me that this meant that they were alive. She advised me to fill in a form with everything I knew about my grandmother's family and about myself, and I left it there. Later that day, we drove home to North Carolina, and I forgot about the whole thing. Two weeks later, on a Sunday, our telephone rang at dinnertime, which I answered. The voice on the other end, with an unfamiliar accent, asked whether I was "Stuart Namm, the retired judge from New York," which I was. I then asked who this was. She responded, "I am Tabachnick from Balta, but I am not the person whose picture you saw. They are my parents, but thy don't speak English. I then let out a scream and asked, "where are you calling from?" She responded "Boston," and she said your grandmother and my great grandfather were brother and sister, and my father and you have the same Jewish name, "Shaya", Isaiah in English. He was my father's grandfather, and he was your great grandfather which she said, and I already knew this because I had been named for my grandmother's father. I learned that many of my grandmother's family had survived the German onslaught, and that they had been confined in a ghetto because the fighting had been so intense that they couldn't be transported to the dreaded "death camps." I continued to communicate with my cousin by telephone almost every evening, and I learned more and more about my family. In March 2001, we visited my family in Boston, and we had a great reunion in a Russian restaurant in Foxboro. This is the video that I shot of that reunion where I learned that in the case of my lost family: "The Phoenix Had Arisen From the Ashes of the Holocaust," and I now had a family that I never knew existed. This is one of the treasures of my life, now in my 81st year! On my first visit to New York I made it a point to visit my maternal grandparents' gravesite in Queens, in an area which was built by the "Balta" organization of persons who had emigrated and who helped others to emigrate to to the United States. Unfortunately, although both my grandmother and her brother had both lived into the 1960's, neither ever met the other again since 1916 when he had visited the United States. I have never began able to express, sufficiently, the gratitude that I felt to the Holocaust Museum for helping to bring my family together again.
Judge Stuart Namm (Ret)