Family members are for most of us a matter of course and not really interesting.
When you have parents, siblings and cousins around, you are allowed to love them, grumble about them, fight with them, gossip about them with other relatives, have fun with them on weekends or suffer from them on holidays.
But when they disappear without a trace, it's a completely different story.
As a child in the prehistoric 1960s, I heard the mythological section "The search for relatives" every afternoon on the radio.
For those who don't remember, or didn't exist then: instead of busying themselves with finding Israel's next ninja, the Voice of Israel announcers would read the names of Israelis who were looking for their relatives after the Holocaust.
The "Guy Pines" stars of the period were not "Survival" stars, but somewhat different survivors, such as Rivka Yankelevich, who was looking for her sister Deborah, who was born in Poland in 1930 and lived on this and that street in the city of Warsaw.
And so on, a rather sad and tragic matter.
In real time I didn't really understand what I was hearing, but looking back I shudder at the thought that, like many others, my mother, a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Israel from Belgium as a teenager with her mother Deborah and her brother Menachem, and lost her father Alter in Auschwitz, stood in the kitchen every afternoon, frying schnitzels for the family she raised in time that she listens to the program, hoping to hear that her father, or one of her other missing family members, may still be alive.
Unfortunately this did not happen, she never heard of family members who survived, and as far as she was concerned her father and his five brothers all perished.
A year ago, when the "relative search section" seemed like a memory from distant days, our family was contacted by a young American woman named Ilana, whose DNA test she conducted revealed strong signs of kinship with our family.
At first the name Nitzani didn't sound Ashkenazi enough to her to be part of her Polish Frankel family (Nitzani is a Hebrew for Gennazani - the original name of my father's family from Italy).
But my mother's original surname is Frankel, and after searching, Ilana located the Frankels who live in Israel, my mother's brother, my uncle Menachem, his wife Esther, and with them their four children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
My cousin Yehiel, named after our grandfather who perished in Auschwitz, received the email and sent back - and without much explanation - a picture of our grandfather.
Ilana, who was staying at her parents' house in Brooklyn, collapsed at the sight of the photo.
It was a "male" version of her grandmother, Rachela Frankel, who died when Ilana was 12 years old - and she turned out to be a picture of the brother she had never heard of.
They were five siblings, Grandma Rachel was sent to the quarantine and labor camps in Skarzysko and Buchenwald, and after the war she immigrated with her husband and the only child born to them, Bernard, to the USA. Apparently, she, like my mother and the rest of our family, did not talk much about the Holocaust and the brothers hers, and did not engage in searches. Of course, there was no Internet then, and it was much more complicated to locate relatives. Her son, Bernard Rosenberg, became an important rabbi and dedicated his life to the memory of the Holocaust.
His daughter Ilana, the one who started it all, arrived in Israel this week, and her meeting with the family members was accompanied by many tears of sadness and joy.
Joy, because in the end we knocked out the Germans, and we live and kick on their noses and their anger.
The survivors established families, farms, businesses, built the country and served in the IDF. Sadness, because it took 70 years for this meeting, and if it had happened a few years earlier, my late mother would have had the privilege of meeting her cousin and his family, whose existence she did not know.
I am happy that at least my uncle and the rest of the family got it, and the excitement of him, of Ilana and of the rabbi in the USA, who will also soon be visiting Israel, cannot be described in words.
In the meantime Ilana told me that she is a teacher, and her husband is the owner of a famous bucket in Manhattan called "Mandez".
Immediately, tantalizing visions of a pastrami sandwich with pickles and mustard, with a steaming flaky soup on the side, came to my mind.
My stomach began to rumble and led me to a short wander on the Internet, where I discovered that the bucket in question is the bucket that Jerry Seinfeld talks about several times in his series.
Seinfeld mentioned the excellent "Mandez" kenyadelh soup, and in his honor there is even a pastrami and chopped liver sandwich named after him, so you can say that now I am also a distant relative of Seinfeld.
When you arrive in Manhattan, go to Mandy's bucket and say that Yair, Ilana's cousin, or alternatively Jerry Seinfeld - sent you.
***
In recent weeks, one of the most popular topics of conversation, along with the state of the justice system, the state of Avi Hami, the protests, the rising prices and wondering who is singing in the artichoke, is Anat Goren's film, which was broadcast on the "HaMkor" program.
This is a film about a young woman named Hila Tzur, mother of four, daughter of an Air Force pilot, who grew up in an apparently "perfect" family.
Hila revealed in the film that she was raped by her older brother for a decade from the time she was four until she turned 18, including getting pregnant by him and having an abortion.
The brother, a pilot and married doctor and father of children from Ramat Hasharon, was revealed by her in the program.
As a child, she was paralyzed with fear and believed that it was better for her to remain silent and not tell the terrible secret that would tear the family apart, when inside she estimated that the family members would choose the family appearance and do nothing.
I won't tell you what happens in the movie, and how it ends, I'll just say that it's an important and painful document that turns your stomach.
Following it, the filmmakers received hundreds of emails from those who had a similar experience, and wrote to the program's system: "I am Hila".
In short, want to see.
yairn@israelhayom.co.il
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