http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Joaquin_Valley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresno,_California
Famous Fresnans include: Kirk Kerkorian - Billionaire businessman, Tom Seaver - Hall of Fame baseball pitcher, William Saroyan - Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright; novelist
I grew up spending weekends with my family at our Ranch, which we named Deer Park Ranch, which you can see at http://www.zillow.com/ by entering this address: 5500 Millwood Road, Dunlap, Ca 93641 Scroll to the upper right to see our lake near the Ranch house.
My father, a surgeon and President of Fresno Community Hospital, had bought Deer ParkRanch in 1960 and its still in the family today as a vacation property. During my childhood, it was a working ranch. We raised Appaloosa horses, Quarterhorses, and Shetland ponies. We raised cattle. We had orchards of various kinds of fruit, mostly apples and pears. We made our own ice cream in the Summer and added fresh blackberries that we picked on the Ranch.
My mother, with a Masters degree in art and another Masters in Theatre, taught at what is now California State University at Fresno.
The Ranch is in the California Land Conservation Act of 1965--commonly referred to as the Williamson Act--which "enables local governments to enter into contracts with private landowners for the purpose of restricting specific parcels of land to agricultural or related open space use. In return, landowners receive property tax assessments which are much lower than normal because they are based upon farming and open space uses as opposed to full market value".
When I was 16, I learned that my mother survived the Holocaust, and was liberated by the British at a concentration camp called Bergen-Belsen, http://www.bergen-belsen.de/en/chronik where Anne Frank was killed along with my uncle, my aunt and grandparents on my mother's side. My father, a surgeon, had my mother's concentration camp number on her right arm removed and helped my mother hire a lawyer in Berlin to sue the German Government for restitution for crimes against her family--loss of freedom, loss of education, loss of opportunity, and loss of family members. The Chilewich side of her family provided legal testimony to help verify her claims. They were part of the Jewish intelligentsia, and the social and business elite of Poland, not simply poor Polish or Russian schetl Jews. They were well educated and believed in the values of the laws of tzedukah a concept in Judaism called "tikkun alom" (social action, literally "restoration of the world").
After my father passed away in 1977, my mother remarried--a Ph.D. in Theatre from Stanford University and future professor named Robert Ware. Here is my mother's story as told by student reporters for California's Holocaust Day: http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/a31/Pressroom/News/20060425AD31AR01.aspx
Date: April 25, 2006
By E.J. Schultz / Bee Capitol Bureau
You could begin with the time she danced with a future pope.
Or you could start with her dreams of medical school.
The obvious choice would be Auschwitz. The gas chambers. Losing most of her family.
But Rachel Pevsner and Darrow Pierce decided to begin with the bowl.
"A simple bowl," the high-schoolers write, "usually doesn't mean the difference between life and death, as it did for Anna Levin-Ware."
Ware is a Holocaust survivor. Pevsner and Pierce were charged with telling her story.
The three of them came to the Capitol on Monday and were recognized on the Assembly floor along with other survivors and high school students.
Ware's story, as written by Pevsner and Pierce, was combined with the stories of 81 other survivors.
The resulting book was presented to the Legislature as part of California Holocaust Memorial Week.
Like many survivors, Ware doesn't like to share her story, even with her four children and five grandchildren.
"She will never be able to escape," her husband, Robert Ware, said. "In her mind, in her memory, in her dreams ... it still haunts."
But Pevsner, 16, and Pierce, 15, sat with her for at least eight hours over two days.
The two volunteered for the project as part of their affiliation with Temple Beth Israel in Fresno.
Ware opened her home to them. And she shared her story.
She was born in Poland in 1922, she told them. She took dancing, ballet and piano.
As a teenager, she danced with Karol Wojtyla.
He would later become Pope John Paul II.
The girls learned of Ware's medical school dreams.
But after the Nazis invaded, "everything changed," the high-schoolers write.
Ware's family was sent to the Krakow ghetto and, later, to an extermination camp.
Ware lived outside the ghetto, she told the girls, with her Hungarian husband.
After Hungary was invaded, Ware and her husband were sent to Auschwitz, then to the Birkenau camp.
The men and women were separated. Ware never saw her husband again.
Pierce and Pevsner describe the details:
Six to a slab in three-tiered wooden bunk beds.
Mattresses made of straw.
No privacy in the latrines.
The lice.
"To stay alive," Ware told the teenagers, "one had to work."
For meals, a thin soup, she told them. Which led to the bowl.
"Without that bowl," the students write, "one would starve."
After the British vanquished the Nazis, the survivors were fed thick, hot soup.
But it was "too rich for starved people," the teenagers write, and some died.
"Anna's typhus made her too weak to eat at all," they write. "That saved her life."
Sitting in a Capitol conference room Monday, Ware has trouble repeating her story.
She doesn't want it in the newspaper.
She doesn't want people to feel sorry for her.
She finally agrees, but asks that people not pity her.
And please, don't send her food.
Ware came to the United States at age 23. She married Manuel Levin, a doctor, and later followed him to Fresno.
Ware earned degrees in art and theater at California State University, Fresno.
She invented a new process: bonding silver and copper to porcelain.
She used it to make bowls.
Pevsner and Darrow end the story here.
"She used this technology to make bowls," they write, "bowls without any function but to be beautiful."
The reporter can be reached at eschultz@fresnobee.com or (916) 326-5541.
unquote
The family firm, founded by my grandfather in Warsaw and Cracow, was supported in London by Aaron Chilewich, who married my grandfather's sister. The firm moved in 1939 to 120 Wall Street, and once again became a global commodities trading firm, and eventually became the 56th largest privately held firm in the United States in the Forbes list of the top 500 privately held firms in 1986 and the source of enormous philanthropic gifts to Israel. In the 1980's, I went dozens of Black Tie Galas for Israeli charities, from Ben Gurion University of the Negev, to Council for a Beautiful Israel, to Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces. My great-aunt and uncle, and their kids moved from London to New York in September 1939, just after the Nazis invaded Poland. My mother and her parents and extended family, a total of 39 members, were trapped in Poland behind Nazi lines, and eventually my mother was deported to Auschwitz, Dachau and then Bergen-Belsen. I looked up some relatives in the
|
http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_2KE/.cmd/acd/.ar/sa.portlet.GoAdvancedSearchAction/.c/6_0_1L5/.ce/7_0_2KI/.p/5_0_2E6
| Name | Town | District | Region | Country | Birth Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mordchelewicz Szymon | CRACOW | KRAKOW | KRAKOW | POLAND | 1923 | Page of Testimony |
| Mordchelewicz Felicja | CRACOW | KRAKOW | KRAKOW | POLAND | 1938 | Page of Testimony |
Here's the record in Yad Vashem about my mother's brother:
Szymon Mordchelewicz was born in Grodno in 1923 to Maximilian and Lova. Prior to WWII he lived in Cracow, Poland. During the war he was in Czestochowa, Poland. Szymon perished in 1944 in Czestochowa, Camp. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 21-Jul-1983 by his sister.
Full Record Details for Mordchelewicz Szymon | ||
| Source | Pages of Testimony | |
| Last Name | MORDCHELEWICZ | |
| First Name | SZYMON | |
| Father's First Name | MAXIMILIAN | |
| Mother's First Name | LOVA | |
| Sex | Male | |
| Date of Birth | 1923 | |
| Place of Birth | GRODNO,GRODNO,BIALYSTOK,POLAND | |
| Permanent residence | CRACOW,KRAKOW,KRAKOW,POLAND | |
| Place during the war | CZESTOCHOWA,CZESTOCHOWA,KIELCE,POLAND | |
| Place of Death | CZESTOCHOWA,Camp | |
| Date of Death | 1944 | |
| Type of material | Page of Testimony | |
| Submitter's Last Name | LEVIN | |
| Submitter's Last Name | MAXELL | |
| Submitter's Last Name | LEVIN | |
| Submitter's First Name | ANNA | |
| Relationship to victim | SISTER | |
| Registration date | 21/07/1983 | |
Here's the record of my mother's sister:
| Mordchelewicz Felicja | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It was this part of our family history that sensitized me to the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the rule of law and how the nuances and mistakes in a country's foreign policy can affect lives directly and dramatically. I would not be here if it were not for the invasion of the Nazis in Poland in September 1939.
My mother's great uncle send my cousin Simon Chilewich, then an office of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Army G-2 Intelligence Division, in 1945, to find family members who may have survived the Holocaust. My mother and her cousin (now Swiss citizen), Stephen, were the only 2 survivors--39 other members of the family were killed by the Nazis. Simon, Aaron's son, my mother's 1st cousin, found my mother in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Person's camp, after the British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen from the Nazis on April 15th, 1945: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen-Belsen_DP_camp
Simon commandeered the house of a Nazi officer who was on the Russian front, and my mother stayed there until he could arrange for her to go to Paris to stay with family friends, a Jewish luxury mink fur-trading family in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne until papers arrived allowing her a visa to the United States. Her aunt Bronia, Aaron's first wife, picked her up and brought her to the Chilewich estate at Wallach's Point Stamford, Connecticut. (hear the sweet violins and harps and the rising chorus)
Here's records filed in the Archives of Yad Vashem by Aron Chilewich:
| Mordchelewich Eliahu | KRAKOW | KRAKOW | KRAKOW | POLAND | 1890 | Page of Testimony |
| Mordchelewich Shmuel | GRODNO | GRODNO | BIALYSTOK | POLAND | 1903 | Page of Testimony |
| Mordchelewich Mordchai | KRAKOW | KRAKOW | KRAKOW | POLAND | 1900 | Page of Testimony |
More family members:
| Mordchielewicz David | GRODNO | GRODNO | BIALYSTOK | POLAND | 1887 | Page of Testimony |
| Mordchelewicz Ida | CRACOW | KRAKOW | KRAKOW | POLAND | 1895 | Page of Testimony |
Here's Aaron Chilewich's obituary: quote
CHILEWICH, ARON, businessman, philanthropist;
b. Pskov, Russia, Dec. 1, 1900; d.
NYC, Sept. 2, 1985; in U.S. since 1939. An
international trader in hides, leather, and other
commodities. A founder, Albert Einstein
College of Medicine; Chairman., Board. of Governors,
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; founder and
trustee, Sam and Esther Minskoff Cultural
Center/Park East ESHI Day School;
trustee, Park East Synagogue; active in behalf
of many Jewish and Israeli causes, including
the Hebrew University, Haifa University, Tel Aviv
Univesity, UJA, United Israel Appeal.
Recipient: honorary Doctorate, Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev; American Arbitration Association
Award, and numerous other honors. unquote
I worked for my family's firm, Chilewich Sons & Co, right out of college,
when Aaron's son, Simon was President. Here's Simon's obituary from the New York Times:
quote
CHILEWICH, SIMON
CHILEWICH--Simon, long time resident of New York City passed away April 24th, 2007 at age 88. Simon was born in Poland, but soon after immigrating to his new country in 1939, he served in World War II as an army intelligence officer in the United States Army. Thereafter, he rejoined the family business, Chilewich Sons and Company, which became a prominent, international, commodity trading firm based in New York. Simon was very instrumental in forging strong commercial ties with the former Soviet Union during much of the Cold War years. He strongly believed at the time that commercial ties were necessary in order to build a meaningful foundation for the development of peaceful relationships between the two nations. He opened the first official American trading offices in Moscow in 1972, from which he could represent many western firms also dedicated to developing business connections with the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he continued to help with the establishment of several new commercial organizations emerging from the old system. He has been a civic leader in New Rochelle and Westchester County for many years where he was active in local politics with his former wife, Norma. Like his father Aaron before him, Simon was involved in many philanthropic efforts, especially in regards to the support of several universities here and in the State of Israel. He also followed in the footsteps of his father with an active support of the American Friends of Ben Gurian University of the Negev, in Israel, and the United Jewish Appeal, where he chaired the Hide and Leather Division on several occasions. With his support, the Chilewich Family also helped with the formation of a number of small businesses in the young Jewish nation. His numerous activities of helping small minority-owned businesses and others became known as Simon's ''Better World Department''. Simon Chilewich graduated from the London School of Economics before the War and had a true love of the Arts. He spent much of his life supporting and encouraging a number of artists in the music and art fields, some born here and others whom he assisted in immigrating to this country where they could pursue artistic freedom.
unquote
I first met my mother's side of the family in New York in 1964. I had grown up in the most luxurious neigborhood, but because we had a swimming pool, a Spanish-style stucco and red tile roof "mansion" with an acre in the back yard, and a 465 acre ranch in the Sierra Nevadas, my friends thought I was very rich. When I got to New York, I learned that wealth is a spectrum that is not positively correlated with class and happiness, and that because I was circulating at the same philanthropic events, many became long-term friends.
In New York, I developed friendships with younger leaders from philanthropic families throughout the international Jewish community, I realized that my friends who were not as lucky were far more interesting in many ways--no sense of nobless oblige--better educated to some extent--and had more education and were in the "creative class". One of my friends who is an artist, Jenny Joswiak, is a photographer: http://www.jennyjozwiak.com/ Last year, at TED Global, I met Chris Ranier, a National Geographic Photographer: http://www.chrisrainier.com/
One of my best friends, since the early 1980s and one of my business partners, is a member of the French Rothschild family. I met him when I was trading pork belly futures and my broker
at Bache has a French accent so I began to speak to him in French, which I learned as a foreign exchange student in political science at the Faculty of Letters in Bordeaux. I invited him to lunch and later found out that he was in New York because the French Rothschild bank was nationalized in 1981 by the socialist government of François Mitterrand.
The Rothschild family history as fascinating as my own family's history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_banking_family_of_France http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR2007061302318.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_René_de_Rothschild http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_de_Rothschild
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/baron-elie-de-rothschild-460791.html
quote
Prepared for just such an opening, the Rothschilds had created a communications system of fast coaches and a Yiddish-German cipher to link the family diaspora. Meyer sent Prince William's Hessian thalers to London, where Son Nathan's speculations multiplied them and won the family a small fortune and big reputation. When the British asked Nathan to smuggle gold to Wellington's troops trapped in Portugal during the Napoleonic wars, he shipped the gold straight to France, where Brother Jakob slipped it through the Pyrenees. Nathan found out about Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo before anyone else in Britain, thanks to a courier who sped a Dutch newspaper to him. He used the news to make a killing on the London stock market, where he customarily leaned in stoic solitude against a post that became known as "the Rothschild pillar."
With these triumphs, the Rothschilds earned wide acclaim for shrewdness, reliability and profitability, quickly became lenders to the great. Jakob's loans helped France conquer Algeria. From Vienna, Brother Salomon raised millions for the Habsburgs, who—after some hard prompting at a highly anti-Semitic court—in 1822 rewarded the Rothschilds and all their descendants with the title of baron and their noble coat of arms. From Naples, Brother Kalmann floated huge loans for the Papal States and the King of Naples by placing them with the other Rothschilds.
unquote
Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,938990-4,00.html
I was invited by my partner to a dinner in his cousin's honor last month: http://www.frenchamerican.org/cms/pressreleases?nid=315&title=French-American%20Foundation%20to%20Honor%20David%20de%20Rothschild%20at%202008%20Annual%20Gala%20Dinner&pic=6
French-American Foundation to Honor David de Rothschild at 2008 Annual Gala Dinner
Bank chairman and philanthropic contributor to receive prestigious Benjamin Franklin Award on November 18, 2008 in New York City
Contact: Margaret Bensfield, Media Advisor, (212) 751-3476, mbensfield@groupsjr.com
New York, NY (October 14, 2008) – The French-American Foundation announces today that David de Rothschild, Senior Partner of Rothschild et Cie Banque in Paris and Chairman of the Rothschild Group worldwide, will be the 2008 recipient of its prestigious Benjamin Franklin Award. The award will be presented on the evening of November 18, 2008 at the French-American Foundation’s Annual Gala Dinner in New York City, held at the Four Seasons Restaurant.
“The French-American Foundation is honored to recognize Baron de Rothschild for his considerable role in strengthening ties between France and the United States,” said Nicholas Dungan, president of the French-American Foundation. “His instrumental contribution to the trans-Atlantic partnership has directly impacted the work of the French-American Foundation – and we are proud to bestow our award on him this fall.”
David de Rothschild serves as Senior Partner of Rothschild et Cie Banque in Paris and Chairman of the Rothschild Group worldwide, a privately owned and internationally-renowned banking group created by his family over 200 years ago. He is an Officer of the French Legion of Honor, who served for 18 years as mayor of the Normandy town of Pont L'Evêque. He is a graduate of the Institute of Political Studies of Paris. He has been active in the worlds of business and philanthropy for many years.
The French-American Foundation
Founded in 1976, the French-American Foundation is committed to advancing the dialogue between France and the United States. The French-American Foundation brings together key policymakers, academics, business leaders and other prominent individuals from both countries so that they may exchange their ideas and create productive bonds likely to have a lasting effect on policies in France and in the United States. To reach these objectives, the French-American Foundation creates multi-year thematic programs, holds conferences, organizes exchanges and produces publications meant to foster and share best practices between the two countries.
The Benjamin Franklin Award
The Benjamin Franklin Award is the French-American Foundation’s highest honor for contributions to the French-American relationship. Last year’s recipients were Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive officer of Areva, and Patricia Russo, chief executive officer of Alcatel-Lucent, both former French-American Foundation Young Leaders. Previous recipients include Henri de Castries, John A. Thain, Ambassador C. Douglas Dillon, Ambassador Walter J.P. Curley, Médecins sans Frontières, Mr. Bernard Arnault, Mr. Michel David-Weill, the Forbes Family, Mr. Maurice Lévy, CEO of Publicis, and Mr. Frederick W. Smith, CEO of FedEx.
