Cleaning and History

My first cousin made an announcement to me yesterday that really shook me up.  Our fathers did almost no talking about their experiences during the war nor about what happened to the rest of their family. Outside of the names of all of their siblings and the names of their parents (kind of obvious since some of us are named for them) we had very little information about the family.

Both my father and her father are no longer living, and her mother is also not living.  In cleaning out her parents' apartment, my cousin found a document, written in Yiddish, which gave the full names of our grandparents, the full names of their parents and, amazingly, the place and Hebrew date of their petirah.  All these years we kids had no idea of when the yahrtzeit was for these grandparents, thus having no idea of when to have kaddish said.  Many have the custom of giving kiddush on a yahrtzeit in memory and honor of the departed, something we could never do before.

The yahrtzeit is this upcoming Friday in the Jewish calendar and strange as it may sound, I'm excited that I can now honor these grandparents in a traditional way.  A yahrtzeit candle lit for the actual day of death, the saying of kadish, a shalosh seudos sponsored in their memory, so that people can say "May the neshomos have an aliyah."

All this family connection because someone decided to do some cleaning up. Let's hear it for cleaning!