Known and seen

I’ll never forget the day your dad and Ruben Arquilevich came to find me because, while visiting Camp Newman, your dad asked Ruben about the HUC students working that summer. When my name came up, they told me later, your dad had asked if I was from Los Angeles, and when Ruben said yes he thought so, your dad immediately told him, “I think we’re cousins!” Your dad had spoken to my Year In Israel class only a few months before, and it was clear from how my classmates who knew him interacted with him, how much they liked and respected him, but I had no idea then of the connection between our families. When they found me and told me the story, I couldn’t believe the odds. He could not have been warmer or seemed more pleased to be related to me, without knowing me at all. We called my grandmother right then who was delighted to hear from your dad, since I think their last interaction was a long-ago stay at her house when your dad was a teen. He spoke fondly of his memories of my grandparents taking him to Lawry’s, and she asked about your grandma, who she’d gone to camp with, though it was my grandfather who was cousins with your grandmother. After years of my family joking about how it was possible they produced a Jewish professional in the family, to my grandma your dad was like finding the missing link! When I started rabbinical school in New York two years later, he made a point to say to grab coffee with me to check in periodically and he always said hi whenever we ran into each other. He’d proudly introduce me to anyone we ran into as his cousin. As someone who didn’t really grow up a movement kid and felt my lack of network pretty keenly when I was in school, your dad helped me feel known and seen as a professional. When I gave my senior sermon and my parents flew out, he made sure he got to meet them, and they were so appreciative. When I finished school and left New York, we would text occasionally, and your dad was always so warm and kind. One of our last text exchanges was a photo he sent of my great-great-grandfather’s Haggadah. That’s how he described it - even though M. Bernstein would have been his relative (I think great-grandfather?) too, he described the book through my connection to it, to our shared family history. It was a deeply generous way to bring me into contact with a side of the family I knew so very little about. He had, he said, lots of other Ulmer and Berne family memorabilia for me to check out one day. I never got the chance to see his collection, but a few years ago, I found this article (https://web.archive.org/web/20230610220030/https://www.ulmer.com/uncategorized/legal-legacy-ulmer-berne/) and learned more about my great-grandfather and his brother-in-law than I could have imagined - and I only found it because of the small bits of family lore your dad shared with me. He didn’t just step into my life as a fully-formed cousin: he also made it possible for me (and my dad, aunt, and brother) to connect to family history I thought was lost. For that, I am truly, deeply grateful.