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We, Dvora and Gadi Eshel, organized a roots trip to Poland - Bialystok and Lomza, on 21-24.07.2023. This trip continued a Jewish community and Holocaust trip to Poland - of "Masaot", under the guidance of Itzik Khiderski, which ended on Friday - 21.07.2023 in Krakow. On our journey, we spent two days in Jewish Bialystok, and continued to a full day Lomza. The purpose of the journey was to discover the roots and history of our families: Dvora’s in Lomza, and of Gadi’s in Bialystok, and to get an idea about their lifestyle in the community they were part of, their whatabouts, and if possible, to save something about their fate in the Holocaust.

Gadi's family has roots in Bialystok: father was born there. He and his brother – Binyamin – made Aliyah to Israel before the war, and thus were saved of it. His father, mother and 4 brothers and sisters, who stayed there - perished in the Holocaust. Dvora's family has roots in Lomza: her maternal grandmother and her great grandmother, whose roots are in the Sheinkop and Shimonowitz families, made Aliyah to Eretz-Yissra’el in 1927, before the Holocaust.

For the roots journey we hired a local Polish guide - Daniel Paczkowski. Daniel is a genealogist and owner of a company for guiding roots and history tours in Bialystok. Polish Catholic; philo-Semite, and connected to organizations that are engaged in the preservation of the history of the Jews there, and the Jewish Bialystok Museum. This museum was recently opened by the Polish researcher Dr. Tomasz (Tomek) Wisniewski. He has been establishing it, and intensively builds it and collects exhibits for it. The training and discussion were conducted in English, and Polish inscriptions were translated on the spot.

Before the trip, we prepared a list of places, sites, and mentions of records that we were interested in, and Daniel researched and tried to dig out relevant information. In Polish of course.

This included hard-to-get-in archives of municipalities and churches, while we tried hard to study the whatabouts therein; remotely, as deep as possible... On the journey, we passed all the places we had intended to visit; both in Bialystok and in Lomza. These included community sites and family roots sites. During the tour we have been hearing reviews of the sites and their histories - Polish and Jewish ones - combined, starting with the founding of the cities and the Jewish communities therein - Lomza 1000 years ago and Bialystok 600 years ago, and what is known about their extermination in the Holocaust.

As for the root sites - those that are personally connected to our family, the success in

discovering them was partial.

In Bialystok, we located the house where the family had been living in, at Pierackiego 36, and its history for the last ~150 years! The house remains standing and finely functions today, because it was outside the Jewish quarter, and therefore was not destroyed by the Nazis. The history of the house, the family ties of the entrepreneur who had built it - David Halpern, with his/our family ties - Livshitz, in future generations, also became clearer. In the active cemetery - 'Bagnowka', we located the grave of Gadi's great-grandmother - Bluma Halperin-Livshitz. However, we were unable to identify other graves, which are hidden in a forest thicket. We also located the Polish army building, where my father - Yehuda, served, for a few months, and the building used by the local soccer team, which he took part in. On the other hand, the institutions where they had been studying, working, praying and living at large, were totally destroyed in the Holocaust, and only commemorative plaques and monuments remain to signify the glorious past.

In Lomza, we didn't have the addresses of the houses the Sheinkop’s and Shimonowich’s extended families lived in, but we had pictures of the gravestones of the great-grandfather on both sides and of Dvora's great-great-grandmother, from both sides. Despite intensive searches, we could not find these gravestones, but we located in the “New” cemetery (since 1891) tombstones and graves of other family members: Yissra’el-Yakob Sheinkop - brother of Dvora’s great-grandmother and Shlomo-Aharon Sheinkop, brother of great-grandfather - Ari Zvi Yehuda Sheinkop. None is left of the pioneering Hebrew Kindergarten of the “Hatek’hiya” (Revival) association - 'Shalom Aleichem', where Dvora's grandmother was a teacher in, and only a commemorative plaque can be related to the magnificent Yeshiva and Great Synagogue.

Community sites in Bialystok refer to sites featuring the city's history, including the occupations and the annexations it had undergone in its 600 years of existence, such as Barnicki Palace, the Jewish neighbourhood and the ghetto, and the magnificent institutions that had operated before the Holocaust. It is also features in the recently opened Jewish Bialystok Museum.

• Synagogues: The Great Synagogue and the Massacre Memorial, Citron Synagogue, Piascover

Synagogue, Shmuel Mohliver Synagogue. The 'Bagnovka' cemetery is also a heritage site and the inscriptions on the tombstones tell the story of the community and the family.

• Cultural and educational institutional included the Gutman Gymnasium, ‘Tarbut’ School, Puppet Theatre and the Esperanto Center and memorials.

• Holocaust sites included the “firing pits” and the mass graves in the Pietrasze forest, the

memorial of the Great Synagogue, the ghetto and its gates, the memorial to Yitzhak Melamed and the Judenrat building, the place of Deportation to Treblinka, and locations of the ghetto uprising led by Mordechai Tannenbaum, until all the fighters were killed in the last bunker on Khmielna Street, on 21.08.1943.

Lomza is one-fifth the size of Bialystok, and it does not have similar large centres and palaces, and it looks like a well-kept suburb. Its community sites included the New Jewish Cemetery and the earlier cemeteries - scattered in parks above the Narev River, and the stately community institutions. institutions, a large part of which is today is just coordinate on the map, and even a modest plaque or some other mark, does not mention their glorious past. The community institutions in Lomja that we visited included: the “Hatek’hiya” (Revival) Association; the Hebrew Kindergarten - today the place is not marked as a historical site and no other landmark mentions it; the Jewish Hospital in Senatorska, the Jewish Orphanage in Senatorska, the site of the Great Synagogue - today there is no trace of it – whatsoever; the home the Midrash of the Great Yeshiva of Lomza - which had been totally leveled, and a Polish-Jewish-Hebrew school, that somehow remained standing.