Böcker av Ella Romm

The author completed a comprehensive research on her Jewish ancestry. The oldest ancestor was born around 1780 in Bessarabia, now Moldova, and more than 300 descendants from different continents were identified during the research. The book includes historical facts, memoirs, graphs and statistics.

This book is devoted to the Jews of Kishinev who were numerous at the dawn of the 20th century but mostly disappeared in pogroms, wars and immigration waves. You will meet the people killed in the 1905 Kishinev pogrom and some prisoners of the ghetto during the World War II. I am also including the burial listings from the Kishinev Jewish cemetery and, finally, famous people of Kishinev.

My granduncle, Eliyahu Meitus, lived through the first three quarters of the XX century, the turbulent times in the history of the European Jews. His life began in Bessarabia, a distant province of the Russian Empire, and ended in the state of Israel 85 years later. He was a poet and writer, a teacher and translator, a polyglot and Zionist. My interest in Eliyahu Meitus was sparked when I found his poetry book in the family library. The book was written in Hebrew a language I do not know. Translations into English or Russian were not available either, with one exception of thee short poems in a Jewish writers' anthology book. In any case, this was the starting point of my journey into the poet's biography, mind and passions.