My father, Dave Block, Jr., died in 1993. He was the third generation, and the last,
of his family to work out of the same office in Wynne, Arkansas. Among the archived business papers, I
discovered correspondence that documented attempts to provide a bequest to a
French ancestor in the years immediately following World War II. Those letters set off a slow and
sporadic search for Block ancestors in western France.
In 1870 my great grandfather, Rafael Block, left Alsace for
America. A century later a namesake,
my uncle, visited the ancestral village and copied Rafael’s birth certificate,
showing that he was born in 1853, the son of Herman Block and Rebecca Feist in
Trimbach, Bas-Rhin.
(As an aside, this would have made Rafael seventeen years
old at the time of his emigration, an age ripe for conscription for service in
the Franco-Prussian War.)
In 2009 my wife and I made a trip to Trimbach to see if we
could discover any traces of Rafael’s family. We located the village cemetery, adjacent to the parish
church, and walked through the headstones. A woman from the village—I assume she was local; she was
placing flowers at a gravesite—sensed our purpose and asked for our family
name. My first answer employed an
anglicized pronunciation. “No one by that name buried here,” she said. Another attempt, that changed the vowel
sound to a long “o”, made a better impression. “Were they Jews ?” she asked. “Then you want to visit the Jewish cemetery.”
She told us to drive south on highway D-104 and look for a
wooded area on the west side of the road.
After a bit of searching—there are several wooded areas—we spotted a
pillar standing at the edge of cultivated fields. That five-foot obelisk marked the north entrance to the
cemetery. Our efforts at exploration
were severely handicapped by a tangle of trees and vines that covered most of
the plots and by the Hebrew inscriptions on most of the tombstones that we
could reach. I took photographs of
some the inscriptions, and we drove on to Switzerland.
On our return to the States, I sent images of some of
inscriptions to my nephew, Sam, who had recently studied Hebrew for his bar mitzvah. Nothing ever came back from Sam, but our
2009 visit verified that there was a Jewish cemetery in Trimbach and sparked
hopes that exploring it might turn up markers of our ancestors.
Although my sisters and Block cousins greeted reports of our
trip warmly, several years would pass before we followed up.
At the end of 2016, the descendents of one branch of the
family agreed that the time had come to return to Trimbach. Cousin Diane began to search the
copious genealogical information now available on the internet and turned up
several possible leads. I made contact, in Google Translator French, with the
Trimbach City Hall and received an immediate response promising access to
village archives. Searching for
someone to decipher the Hebrew inscriptions proved more of a challenge.
On our 2009 visit, my wife had the presence of mind to
annotate our guidebook with the address of the synagogue in Haguenau, located
on the Rue Rabbi Bloch. (We thought the name might be providential.) And using that address, I wrote a
letter (ink on paper; I could not locate an e-mail address) explaining our
purpose and need. I have no idea
of how many hands that missive passed through subsequently-- the Haguenau
synagogue is now closed-- but in four months a representative of the Jewish
community in Strasbourg e-mailed to say that he had located a person willing to
accompany us to Trimbach and interpret the headstones.
Six months later nine of us-- Blocks, spouses and offspring--converged
on Strasbourg from Santa Fe, Houston, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Washington, DC,
and Prague. After a couple of days
spent comparing notes and enjoying ourselves, we decamped for Wissembourg, our
base camp for exploring the cemetery.
Our interpreter, Yanir Ritter, arrived the next day, and with the corps
of discovery now complete, we set off for Trimbach, twenty kilometers away.
According to
Wikipedia, Trimbach, Bas-Rhin, has a population of 462 (seems about right). There’s city hall
(mairie)-- open Tuesday through
Thursday-- a Catholic Church, and the Boulangerie Pâstisserie La Minzbrueck. It’s the kind of place where locals
notice strangers. So with only a
little effort, Diane made a contact, which led to another contact and through
them we learned that the location of the Jewish cemetery was quite well known;
it appears on the map displayed prominently on the Rue Principale. And an added gem, Madame Reine Birie had
taken particular interest in it. At
10:00 the city hall opened, and we were invited to review the documents stored
there. We, and especially Diane,
were disappointed to learn that the birth certificate we already had in hand
exhausted the traces left by Rafael Bloch.
A little before noon we left Trimbach for the cemetery. One
of the villagers alerted us to watch for a large poultry farm across the
road. Sure enough there stood the
pillar, but where were the woods?
Something had changed.
Working from memories of conditions in 2009, I advised
everyone to carry work clothes, gloves and heavy shoes. At one time we considered buying garden
tools capable of clearing at least our relatives’ plots. In the end we settled for a pair of
hand clippers bought in Wissembourg.
To my surprise, and our delight, advanced planning went for naught. Sometime in the recent past, a work
party had cleared away the undergrowth and righted most of the gravestones,
making our search much easier.
Turns out that there are several Blochs buried in Trimbach: Nanette
who died in 1899, Emmanuel (d. 1892) and Babette (d. 1909). The inscriptions on their markers
offered no additional information, and the Hebrew characters, citing passages
from the Old Testament, were likewise unrevealing. None of these Blochs matched the names and birthdates that
Diane had discovered.
But there was one other Bloch plot in the cemetery. And this one held the remains of a
Rebecca, neè Feist, died 1855.
This was Raphel’s mother who died when he was only two years old. We all rejoiced; Diane called it the
happiest day of her life.
On the second day Reine Biri joined us. She brought along a wealth of
information about the cemetery itself and about its clearing in 2015. The cemetery dates from the mid 19th
century and served as the resting place for several small communities in the
area. The last burials date from
the mid 1930s, just before the forced evacuation preceding World War II. Diane
copied it all and is working on a compilation.
So ends our America to Alsace. If nothing else, the trip to
Trimbach furnished time to share meals, drinks and family stories. Perhaps it
will provide an impetus for additional research and travels. Where is Herman?
