“I know they didn’t do it for me, but they gave my father a chance to have a different life,” he says. He appears to say he will visit her grave in Queens, New York. Moshe’s mother, Duchovny’s great grandmother Doba, died of tuberculosis six weeks after coming to New York City and Duchovny sees her face on a picture for the first time. “It makes me so sad that I didn’t get to know him really,” Duchovny says. His grandfather died at age 59, just as he was supposed to start his job as a press agent for Israel Bonds. “Your ancestors were among 6,000 Jewish residents of Jaffa who were deported to Egypt in December of 1914,” Gates responded.ĭuchovny was also stunned to learn that some of his family members were dairy farmers who came to the United States via Greece. “Are you saying that my family was involved in that or is that just something that happened?” Duchovny asked Gates. Gates told Duchovny that Jews were ill-treated and robbed aboard a ship taking them to Egypt, and had Duchovny read newspaper clippings. This week, I had an extraordinary experience - and it was all the more extraordinary because it was so unexpected. Men were murdered.Ī Stunning Reminder of the Holiness of the Torah The family ran an inn, but the Ottoman Empire was not kind to Jews. Gates told Duchovny that his grandfather Moshe was a journalist for The Morning Journal and wrote in Yiddish, which Duchovny knew, but he wasn’t aware how prolific his grandfather was, writing novels, and coming to America on a boat as a teen.ĭuchovny also didn’t know that his great-great-grandfather took the family from what was then Berdychiv, Russia - and is now Ukraine - to Jaffa. surprised both guests with information about their families. Kind is a heralded character actor known for Showtime’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the film “A Serious Man,” as well as “Spin City,” in which he played Paul Lassiter. On Tuesday night, the popular PBS show “Finding Your Roots” had an episode titled “Chosen,” which revealed startling information regarding the Jewish ancestry of actor David Duchovny, known for starring on “The X-Files” on Fox, as well as Richard Kind. Most of us don’t know the histories of our families as well as we should.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |