Alti Rodal:
I was born in Czernowitz in October 1944, where my parents spent only
one year after surviving the camps in Transnistria. They then
moved
to Suceava (Roumania) where we lived until 1950, when we immigrated to
Israel, and then to Canada in 1954, encouraged by siblings of my
parents.
I grew up speaking Yiddish and Hebrew, and received my early education
in Israel. I have a degree in French literature from McGill
University and a graduate degree in Jewish history from Oxford
University. My
professional experience includes university teaching in Jewish history
(eight years full-time at Concordia University in Montreal and
part-time at
universities in Ottawa), research, writing, and varied work for the
Canadian
government, including several commissions of inquiry. I was
director of
historical research for the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in
Canada (the Deschnes Commission) in the late 1980s and authored the
report "Nazi War
Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s
to the Present" (the Rodal Report). I am currently working with
the internal consulting group in the federal government of Canada,
evaluating programs offered by various government organizations and
providing
advice on collaborative arrangements with the private and
not-for-profit
sectors.
In the summer of 2001, I returned to Czernowitz for the first time on a
project sponsored by the Ottawa Jewish Genealogical Society to
digitally record the tombstones (of which there are some 55,000) in the
Czernowitz Jewish cemetery. Over a period of six weeks, I was also able
to find and photocopy all the burial registries for the cemetery, and
as many of you may know, these have now been entered into a database
and work is under
way to match the burial registry names with the digital images of the
monuments.
The six-week experience in Bukovina was many faceted, intense and
emotionally overwhelming I described it in some detail in an
article I wrote in 2002 for Avotaynu, the magazine on Jewish genealogy
(Bukovina
Cemeteries, Archives and Oral History). The journey also turned
out to be a personal pilgrimage to two small adjoining villages,
Kisilev and Borivtsi, located about 38 km northwest of Czernowitz,
where both my parents were born and where most members of their
families were
massacred by local Nazi collaborators in July 1941.
Within a half hour of
arriving in the villages, 60 years after these terrible events, I was
quite
shaken when I was led by a local woman to a small valley that is the
site of
two unmarked mass graves, where lie three of my grandparents and many
other members of my family. Over the next five weeks, I
re-visited the
villages a number of times with a view to somehow marking the site of
the mass graves and learning what I could about both the 1941 events
and prewar
life of the family I never knew.
In the course of these visits, I
video-taped several elderly local people who were eyewitnesses to the
1941 round-ups and massacres, some of whom remembered my family.
Before
returning to Canada, I managed (with the help of Rabbi Kofmansky of
Czernowitz), to
put up a monument at the site of the mass graves, in the presence of
the
local mayor and villagers.
My maiden name is Feder-Prostak. Other names in the family are
Preminger and Vidman. I greatly appreciate the Cz-List and highly
commend
Bruce Reisch and Jerome Schatten for their excellent work as
facilitators/moderators. I would also like to commend Mimi Taylor
for taking a leadership role in advancing a clean-up and restoration of
the cemetery I would have liked to (but was not able to)
participate
in the recent reunion-trip, walk through the streets of Czernowitz in
the
company of people who have lived there, and meet some of you in
person. I
still look forward to meeting some of you on other occasions, and, in
the meantime, to see photos from the trip and read your stories.