Mina Trachtenbroit

This is a picture of my mother Mina Trachtenbroit at the age of 103. The photo was was taken in Chernovtsy in 2000 during an interview with her entitled ?Living through three centuries?, published in the Chernovtsy newspaper on 24th March. After our graduation my husband Esiah Kleiman and I were sent to work as teachers of mathematics at the secondary school in the Romanian village of Vanchikovtsy. We were teachers there for two years before we moved to the town of Yedintsy where we worked for twelve years before we received an apartment. My parents lived in Briceni and my husband's parents lived in Chernovtsy. They were getting older and we wanted them to be with us. We exchanged our apartment in Yedintsy to one room in a communal apartment in Chernovtsy. My parents joined us there in the 1970s. Their house in Briceni was sold to be removed. My mother lived with a clear mind until the end of her days. In her last years she was confined to bed since she had her hip bone broken, but she read a lot and we discussed what she had read. On 19th May 2001 my mother celebrated her 104th birthday. She died on 27th May the same year. We buried her beside my father. On the day of the funeral we couldn't have Jewish funeral rituals performed because it happened to be on the day of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. After the holiday we invited a rabbi to say a prayer at my mother's grave. My husband goes to the synagogue on the anniversaries of our parents' death. I make some special food for the mourning and my husband takes a bottle of vodka to commemorate our parents. He also recites the Kaddish.