Clay in My Boots: A Romp Through My Genealogical Past

לדור ודור A TISHA B’AV MEMORIAL On Tisha B’Av, we sit with the sorrow of the Jewish people. We mourn the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem, the exile of our ancestors, and the calamities that have befallen our people across the generations. The words of Eicha ask us to remember a city once full of people, now sitting alone. In our own time, those ancient words became true again in the Jewish towns of Europe. Homes were emptied. Synagogues were silenced. Families were torn apart. Entire communities were destroyed. My four grandparents came to the United States between 1900 and 1917. For many years, I believed that because they had escaped Europe, my family had not been directly touched by the Holocaust. But they had left family behind. Through years of research, their names returned to us—first twenty, then sixty, then more than two hundred. Today, on Tisha B’Av, we remember 278 men, women, and children from these families who were murdered in the Shoah. They came from Biržai, Ši...

This image was created from authentic family photographs using AI-assisted restoration and composition techniques. Every effort was made to preserve the unique facial features and identity of each family member while imagining them together in a single portrait. Five Generations. One Family. One of the greatest rewards of genealogy is discovering that our ancestors live on—not only through documents, photographs, and DNA, but also in the faces we see every day. This portrait brings together five generations of my direct paternal line : Aaron — my son Michael — me S. Sidney (“Sid”) — my father Mike — my grandfather Yashua — my great-grandfather These five men never had the opportunity to stand together for a family portrait. Their lives span more than a century, yet through modern AI and carefully selected family photographs, I was able to create a realistic studio portrait imagining...