“Why didn’t grandma give me the “heirloom” that she spoke about?” asked my son, Yoav. “It’s a long story”, I answered.

My son, Yoav married his bashert, Danielle on June 7, 2026.

My mother, her husband and my uncle (my mother’s brother) made the journey from the U.S. to the wedding in Israel. My mother proudly carried with her what we coined, “the Heirloom”.

This thick gold necklace was the only piece of jewelry that my biological grandfather, Denes Istvan bequeathed to my grandmother, “nagymama”. Yoav carries Istvan’s name.

We know little about Istvan. I didn’t even know he existed until I was about nine or ten years old. My mother only told me when the man I had thought was my grandfather had passed away.

During the Holocaust, Istvan was sent to a forced labor camp, escaped and spent the rest of the war hiding in the forests. While he was part of the 10 percent of Jews from the Hungarian countryside who survived, he........

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