INTRODUCTIONMy name is Donald Richter. I was born in New York City on the 21st of November 1931 and at present I live in Ramat Hasharon Israel. I am the firstborn of four children of Alex Richter and Rose Schechter. Rose was my father's second wife and first cousin (my two grandmothers were sisters). In the mid-18th century my Richter and Schorr antecedents lived in a region of Northeast Hungary called Carpathia. My own parents met, married and lived thier lives together in the United States, but many relatives remained in that same geographic region until the time of the Holocaust - when they were transported from there to Nazi Extermination Camps: some survived, most did not. |
FOREWORDWhen my family and I made Aliya from the United States to Israel in 1969, we were met at the port of Haifa by a gaggle of relatives whose existance I had barely been aware of. In Israel I found five five first cousins (four daughters of my father's sister Aranka Rothkirchen, and one daughter of my father's brother Joseph) and thier families. Many were at the port to welcome us to Israel and we have maintained contact ever since. Later, I found other relatives in Israel. Over the years, tales told to me by my new-found relatives disclosed an interesting, at times fascinating and tragic family history of which I had been almost completely unaware. In January 1995, three of the four Rothkirchen sisters died within a period of less than two weeks. It was a traumatic time for the family - in spite of the fact that all three were over seventy years old, all were in poor health and all had lived full lives (overfull in some ways - having survived the horrors of holocaust and Eastern European concentration camps). Some time earlier my sister Paula had given me a scroll which depicted our family tree - very wide and (at that time) about five generations deep. She suggested that she had done her bit and that maybe I would like to follow-up ... especially since I was in touch with various knowledgeable family members in Israel. In fact, aside from setting up a PC data base for the information, I didn't do much to advance the project at that time. Amid the sadness, the events of January 1995 highlighted the fact that a generation was dying out, and that with it would go the memory of more family history and tradition, much of which had already dissolved in the mist of an unrecorded past. The bizarre coincidence of these events lent added motivation to the idea of recording my family's chronicles. I intend to use this web-site to record the history and genealogy of my family as I am able to reconstruct, compile and relay it. |
