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Chief Rabbi Lau's Family
Photos Home…
After 75 years!

Thanks to ongoing collaboration with the Kraków Archives (Grodzka Street), we were most fortunate to receive high-quality scans of several documents belonging to Rabbi Simcha Fraenkel-Teumim — the chief Rabbi of Kraków during the early 20th Century. Among these documents were the two images shown at the right. The writing on the reverse of the photos include the name "Moses Chaim Lau" (see below).

Now, we know that the current Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel is Rabbi Israel Meier LAU, and we also know that the Lau family married into the Fraenkel family. We deduced that it was highly probable that these two images were of Rabbi Lau's family — possibly his parents, who perished in the Holocaust. So, on 1 June 2003, after a function attended by Rabbi Lau, Miriam Romm (one of our researchers) handed the Chief Rabbi scans of the original two photos, as well as an explanatory letter. He was most surprised and very moved by these photos as they were of his parents and brother!

After a period of seventy-five years, these photos have finally found their home!

Our thanks to the Kraków Archives Director Robert Bogusz, as well as to Miriam Romm and Julian Schamroth, for making all this possible. Our thanks, too, to Rabbi Lau for kindly permitting us to put this personal material on the Web.

 

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