Parallel Journeys: One Story

Few Jews today can trace their lineage back more than two or three generations. The Holocaust, waves of expulsions, and centuries of pogroms erased much of our collective and individual memory.

My great-great-great-great-grandfather, Avraham Zalman Tsoref Solomon, was born in Kėdainiai, Lithuania, in 1786—three years before the storming of the Bastille and three years before George Washington became the first president of the United States. At a time when nations across Europe were awakening to questions of identity and homeland, Tsoref Solomon embarked on an extraordinary quest. At age twenty-five, he resolved to reach Jerusalem and restore an ancient synagogue known as the Hurva (“the ruin”).

The Hurva’s history stretches back to antiquity. Archaeologists have uncovered mikvehs carved directly into the bedrock, dating to the first century CE. Over centuries, successive synagogues rose and fell on this very spot, destroyed and rebuilt again and again—giving the site its enduring name.

Together with his wife Chesha, their three sons, and a single horse and cart, Tsoref Solomon undertook a dangerous five-month journey that began with walking from Lithuania to Odessa and then Constantinople. From there, they sailed to Akko, then part of the Ottoman Empire, arriving in 1811. Finally, they settled in Jerusalem.

In 1830, Solomon traveled to Alexandria and obtained a royal decree affirming that the Hurva site belonged to the Jewish community. He later made multiple trips to France and other parts of Europe, securing financial support from Jewish philanthropists to rebuild the synagogue. A small structure was completed in 1837, and a grander synagogue was dedicated in 1864—though Avraham did not live to see it. He was murdered in 1851 by an Arab assassin angered by the growing strength and visibility of the Jewish community in Jerusalem.

A note on names:
Avraham’s family name was Solomon. He gave himself the additional name Tsoref, meaning silversmith, to establish his reputation as an expert silversmith. Several of his silver works are preserved today in the Isaac Kaplan Old Yishuv Court Museum in Jerusalem. 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 oldest continually inhabited cities on earth, with a history stretching back more than 6,000 years. When my grandfather, Shlomo Zalman Solomon, was born in 1895, the city was still under Ottoman rule.

This photograph was taken in Jerusalem in 1901, when my grandfather was five or six years old. He appears in the lower left corner, wearing a hat and resting his hand on his left side. Standing beside him are his brother, his sister, and his parents—who operated the soup kitchen visible at the center of the image. Like many of our ancestors and descendants of Avraham Zalman Tsoref Solomon, my great-grandfather was a rabbi.

The family lived with modest means; those they served were often far poorer. My grandfather represented the fifth generation of Solomons living in Jerusalem since the family’s return to the city in 1811, after centuries of dispersion in the European Diaspora.

Shlomo Zalman Solomon in German military hospital 1918 recuperating from self-inflicted wound (top row, mustache, cap, with hand on shoulder of another patient to his right)

Tilla (Roth) Solomon, my bubbe (grandmother), posing with her arm around my father, Emanuel Solomon, and her older son, Louis Solomon. The boys are wearing costumes provided by the studio photographer. The photograph was made in 1922 or 1923.

In 1913, my grandparents, Zalman Solomon and Tilla Roth, were married in Jerusalem. Tilla Roth had been born in Budapest, Hungary. A few years after their marriage, Zalman was conscripted into the Ottoman Army and sent from Jerusalem to fight alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I.

Zalman had no intention of fighting for the Central Powers. Upon reaching the front and being issued a weapon, he deliberately shot himself in the leg. After recovering in a military hospital, he escaped and made the long journey back to his home and family in Jerusalem. When the war ended, British forces occupied Jerusalem. Under the British Mandate, relations between Jewish and Arab communities deteriorated rapidly, and the city grew increasingly violent. By then, Zalman was the father of two young boys—my uncle Louis and my father Emanuel—and he concluded he had to leave. In 1922, he said goodbye to his hundreds of relatives and promised his wife he would send for her and their sons as soon as he could.

Zalman arrived safely at Ellis Island, and Tilla and the two boys followed not long afterward. After a period in New York City, the family settled in Philadelphia. Making a living during the Great Depression was challenging, especially for a religiously observant immigrant. My grandfather was indeed a rabbi, but he also worked as a cantor (leading and singing in synagogue services), a shochet (a ritual slaughterer certified in the laws of kashrut), and a labor union organizer.

Like so many immigrant families of the time, Zalman and Tilla’s children contributed to the household income. They ultimately had four children—three boys and one girl. Their lives were marked by hardship, but also by many simchas, the joyful occasions that sustained them.

My grandparents dancing at the wedding of my parents, Miriam (Bressen) and Emanuel Solomon on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1949.

Both Avraham Zalman Tsoref and Zalman Solomon lived lives that echo the ancient journey of their namesake, Avraham, who left his homeland in search of a promised future.

Avraham Zalman Tsoref, born in Kėdainiai, Lithuania, came of age just as the city fell under Russian rule. Jewish life grew harsh and uncertain. Leaving everything familiar behind, he journeyed with his family across continents to Jerusalem. His subsequent life in Jerusalem—his travels to Egypt and Europe, his leadership in rebuilding the Hurva Synagogue, and even the circumstances of his death—has taken on a mythic quality. His life—marked by peril, courage, and faith—became foundational for the generations that followed.

Zalman and Tilla Solomon with children and grandchildren, 1953

A century later, Zalman Solomon, his descendant and namesake, left Jerusalem under threat. Conscripted into the Ottoman Army, forced to fight with Germany and Austria-Hungary, he risked his life by shooting himself and returned to Jerusalem against all odds. As violence intensified under the British Mandate, he, too, chose an unknown world. Two men, a hundred years apart—each compelled to leave, each forging a new beginning far from where he was born. Their journeys, taken in faith and necessity, now connect more than 10,000 descendants across Israel and throughout the world.

Thirty years after Zalman and Tilla arrived in Philadelphia with their two young sons, they had become proud parents and grandparents of an expanding American family. In this photograph, my mother—pregnant with me at the time—is seated on the stone wall, dressed in an elegant sailor-style outfit.

My father, born in Jerusalem in 1920, revered his family's traditions but sought a different kind of life. Below is the street where he was born. Roman columns with Corinthian capitals march proudly along the ancient thoroughfare known as the cardo, the heart of the old city.

Growing up in Philadelphia, my father studied Torah and Talmud at a yeshivah (a religious Jewish school). He also attended public school and ran a small sign-painting business with his brother Lou. He earned a citywide scholarship, making him the first in his family to complete a college degree.

When World War II began, he volunteered for the U.S. Army. At first, he was rejected because of a slight hearing problem. In 1944, however, he was inducted and—like his father a generation earlier—boarded a ship bound for war. On the “About Solomon” page there is a photograph of him in Linz, Austria, taken after Germany’s surrender. His assignment there was to help determine the rightful owners of artworks and cultural treasures stolen by the Nazis.

After the war, the G.I. Bill enabled my father to pursue graduate study in art at the Tyler School of Art, part of Temple University, shaping the course of his life and career.

Solomon cousins (from left to right), Tania, Lliana, and Orna Bird, introducing the documentary film, **In the Footsteps of Zalman Tzoref**, made by Orna Bird and Omri Lior about Avraham Shlomo Zalman Zoref and his journey from Lithuania to Jerusalem.

My father’s experience during World War II, from 1943 to 1946, is the subject of a play I wrote between 2001 and 2004, Aching to Go Home, which can be read here.

In 2011, my son Ari Solomon joined me in Jerusalem as we gathered with more than 900 Solomon cousins, aunts, and uncles to celebrate two centuries of our family’s life in Jerusalem. It was extraordinary to meet relatives we knew, and equally moving to encounter so many we were meeting for the first time. A remarkable concert and a commemorative film honored the return of Avraham and his family from the Diaspora in 1811.

As I look back on these generations, I feel not only gratitude but a deep sense of responsibility: to honor the journeys that brought us here, and to carry their courage forward in my own life.