A Miracle Happened Here

Kate Froman

So this is the story of a family picture that has dramatically

 brought together so many generations. 

      My mother left Russia and her family in Moscow to live in South Africa where I was born on 31.12.1907. We always kept in touch and corresponded regularly in Yiddish with the Russian family. My mother used to read their letters to me and I grew to know them and love them through those letters.
      It was a large family, each member highly educated and interesting and I often wondered whether we would ever meet. It seemed an impossible dream.
      Almost thirty years after she had left Moscow, my mother managed to get to Russia via Paris as it was not possible to go to Russia from South Africa.
      She arrived in Moscow to a wonderful welcome from her mother and her sisters from whom she had been separated for so many years.
      When my mother came back to South Africa after this emotional and final reunion, she brought a family picture with greetings and loving comments in Yiddish on the back of the picture. I have treasured the picture through all the years and it hangs on the walls of my home in Achuzat Bayit.
      The Holocaust years followed and the Iron Curtain came down. I lost touch with my Russian family and nobody knew what had happened to them.
      In 1995 just before I returned to live in Israel again, my son Ian Froman who has lived in Israel since 1962, phoned me in Johannesburg and told me that a Russian lady had phoned him to say that she had seen him on television when he was interviewed about his tennis projects. She recognized my married name from the days when my mother had sent photographs to Russia just after her visit in 1933. She asked Ian whether he was a long lost relative of the Lipschitz family, my mother's maiden name. Ian didn't really know, but he said he would come to Jerusalem shortly when his brother Colin came to Israel on a visit.
      Colin took with him a copy of the family portrait from Moscow 1933. When he and Ian met the family the first thing they showed him was the same picture, the identical picture to the one he was carrying. They had treasured their picture as we had treasured ours - the family picture of my grandmother and all her children including my beloved mother Riva Sless.
      So this is the story of a family picture that has dramatically brought together so many generations.
And now the pictures on my wall, the picture from Moscow 1933 and many pictures of my family, depict six generations of my family, my grandmother, her daughters, my late husband Phil and myself, our children, grandchildren and my thirteen great­ grandchildren.
      My Russian family here have been very successful and a few years ago I had the great pleasure of attending the wedding of my Russian family's daughter also a great­granddaughter of my grandmother whom I never met in her lifetime.
      And stranger than fiction, the father­of-the-bride, a physicist at the Weitzman Institute at this time, was born in Moscow on the 6th May 1937, the same day that my younger son Ian was born in Johannesburg.
      So miracles never cease to happen. The gene pool and the family connection cross the oceans of history to be reunited in Eretz Yisrael over a span of more than a century. May the future generations be united in peace and happiness in the century to come.