Beginnings.

With his wife, three children, and a horse and cart, Avraham completed a dangerous five-month journey to Jerusalem that began by walking from Lithuania to Constantinople. They went by boat from Constantinople to Akko, the port just north of Haifa, then part of the Ottoman Empire, arriving in 1811. To obtain building permits, Avraham later traveled to Cairo and subsequently to France, where he secured financial backing from the Rothschild family to rebuild the Hurva Synagogue. By 1837, a small synagogue was erected where the ancient synagogue had stood. In 1864, a larger synagogue was dedicated. Avraham, however, was murdered in 1851 in the wake of violent disagreements between him and his followers, with Arab creditors who had financial claims on members of the Ashkenazi community. 

Note about my ancestor’s names: Avraham’s family name is Solomon; Zoref means “silversmith.” He added zoref to his name to establish his reputation as an expert silversmith. Some of his creations are in the collection of The Isaac Kaplan Old Yishuv Court Museum in Jerusalem. According to Wikipedia, Avraham was also known as Ibrahim Salomon. Salomon and Solomon are two different English spellings of the same name.

The Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlomo_Zalman_Zoref entry is incomplete and not entirely accurate.

Jerusalem is one of the most ancient cities in the world. It has been inhabited for over 6,000 years. Jerusalem was still ruled by the Ottomans when my grandfather, Shlomo Zalman Solomon, was born in 1895. This is a 1901 photograph made in Jerusalem when my grandfather was five or six years old. He is seen on the lower left wearing a hat, holding his left side with his hand. To his immediate left are his brother, his sister, and his parents, who ran this soup kitchen at the center of the table. Like many of Avraham Solomon’s descendants and predecessors, his father was a rabbi. His family was poor; the people around them were more so. Zalman Solomon was the 5th generation of Solomons living in Jerusalem since the family’s return to Jerusalem in 1811 from Diaspora Europe.

Avraham Shlomo Zalman Zoref and Zalman Solomon both made epic journeys, at great risk. Each of them created a life for themselves and their families in a new land, and had lives they couldn’t have imagined. When Avraham was a teenager in Kedainiai, Lithuania, the city had recently come under rule of the Russians. Life for Jews had become harsh. A few years before he left and his family left , a cholera pandemic decimated the Jewish community. His adventurous life in Jerusalem, his travels to Egypt and France, and his death are mythic. 10,000 of his descendants live today, mostly in Israel, but in many other countries, from the United States to Australia. 

Zalman too, left his home and could not have imagined his fate in Europe during the Great War, and could not have foreseen his life in the United States. Without question, both Avraham and Zalman were intimately familiar with the story of Abraham leaving his home at the behest of God, seeking a better life.

About 30 years after Zalman and Tilla and their two little boys settled in Philadelphia, they had become proud parents and grandparents of a rapidly expanding family. In this photograph, my mother, pregnant with me when the picture was made, is seated on the stone wall, dressed in an elegant sailor’s outfit.

My father, born in Jerusalem in 1920, revered the traditions of his family, but sought a different life. Below is the street where my father was born. Roman columns with Corinthian capitals proudly march along the part of the city known as the ‘cardo’ or heart of the ancient city.

As a boy growing up in Philadelphia, my father studied Torah and Talmud at a yeshivah (Jewish school). My father also attended public school and had a sign painting business with his brother Lou. He won a city-wide scholarship that enabled him to be the first in his family to earn a college degree. When World War II began, he volunteered for the U.S. Army. Initially he was turned down because of a slight hearing problem. In 1944 he was inducted and like his father, boarded a ship that took him to battle. On the About Solomon page, is a photograph of him working in Linz, Austria, after Germany surrendered. His job in Linz, was to figure out who the rightful owners of art and other treasures stolen by the Nazis in that area. The G.I. bill enabled my father to go on to earn a graduate degree in art at Tyler School of Art (Temple University).