Expressing thanks is one of man’s greatest traits.

As Thanksgiving gives way to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, most normal people continue to give thanks for all of the good that they have in their lives. If one actually sat in a comfortable chair and began to rattle off all of the good in his life, he may be sitting there for some time: his health, family, dough in the bank, roof over his head and food in the fridge and on and on. There are many Jews in Israel from the lands that are Kurdistan. One descendant of Kurdish parents told me that his mother has an old book of Psalms that has at the end a list of things for which to thank God. One of them is, “Thank you for all of the things that You did not give me.”

When going through my late folks’ stuff, it felt like being rushed through a museum 15 minutes before closing. There were all of the goodies that they had collected over decades of going to auctions, visiting every trading outpost in the southwest and buying goods wherever we traveled. There were also tons of documents, letters, and pictures. In going through the documents, I tried to grab things that seemed to have familial significance. It definitely was not scientific, but some of the materials did find their way here to Jerusalem.

Three items are related and are reasons for me to give thanks to people, also whom I never knew. My mother had two uncles who set out from Germany to Utah to make their fortune. And apparently they did very well with a silver mine, converting some of their wealth into railroad and other holdings. Their last name was Bamberger, as was that of the only Jewish governor of the state, who was in office around the same time. The two men never found Jewish brides in the land of Mormon and did not marry. The first document is the will of the older brother. It’s a pleasure to hold it, as it is a typed document on the kind of paper that you can’t find any longer. He wrote it in November of........

© Townhall