Bronia’s Album

Bronia’s Album
Phyllis Mindell’s journey through family letters, photos, and other original documents. Published online at broniasalbum.wordpress.com

When my mother left the shtetl of Jaworow in 1925 to go to America, her family and friends gathered for a farewell event at which they signed a blue velvet autograph album and added their names to a list of guests at the event. Participants in a flowering of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, they signed in five languages. The album traveled, along with postcards and other documents, with her to New York and later to Brooklyn. When she died in 1989, the album moved to my home and later my apartment in Washington, D.C. It won little attention until I trained to be a guide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and decided to have it translated and preserved online. Visit broniasalbum.wordpress.com to learn more about Bronia and see original photos and documents.