Farewell

Muzsaj is a small picturesque village located in the Carpathian Mountains located in the western part of the Ukraine on the Hungarian border. In 1930, when my father was born, the Czechoslovakian government controlled the town, but in the years preceding and following, the area was conquered many times by different countries . Today the village is part of Ukraine and its Ukranian name is Muzhijevo. Muzsaj was its Yiddish name and it's Hungarian name is Nagymuzsaj. Jews settled in the village in the early 19th century. All Jews were religious, many of them quite orthodox. They lived pleasantly side-by-side with some 5,000 local non-Jewish residents, mostly Hungarian with a sprinkling of Ukrainians. The village belonged to the Berehovo-Beregsaz Jewish Community, as it was adjacent to Berehovo, the Czech name of the closest city, also known by its Hungarian name, Beregsaz.  There are no Jews living in the village today.

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The "Valley of the Communities" at Yad Vashem was established to commemorate the thousands of Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazis, an eternal remembrance of a Jewish world that no longer exists. The valley sprawls over a spacious area, built as a maze of courtyards and walls, correlating to the geographical locations in Europe and North Africa of the destroyed communities. The names of more than 5,000 communities are etched on the stone walls. The letters are proportionately sized according to the size of the community. My father Yehuda's birthplace, Muzijovo, was not etched there. My father was deeply hurt by this, and until the day he died, in July 2005, he tried repeatedly to convince Yad Vashem to add the name of his village, and give it proper commemoration.

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In February 2007, two years after my father's death, the name of his village was added to The Valley of the Communities at Yad Vashem.