In 1901, my maternal great-great-grandmother, Yetta Bloomgold, lost a child. Her 16-year-old daughter, whose name would remain a mystery for generations, disappeared while en route to the United States from London. The tragic story spans three continents, from Bialystok to London to New York City and, finally, to Buenos Aires, where the young woman’s trail runs cold.

The Bloomgolds’ exodus from Bialystok had been one of hope—an escape from poverty and pogroms, and a new beginning in the Goldene Medina. The price of that freedom, however, proved impossibly steep.

Yetta was given tiny glimpses of her daughter’s fate in the few letters she received from her, but sadly those letters were lost decades ago. The information they contained, however, must have been worrying to Yetta who, in July 1913, appealed to readers of the Yiddish daily Forverts for help in the front-page story “Desperate Mother Searches for Missing Daughter Through ‘Forverts’.”

I first heard about Yetta and her “desperate search” as a young child, but exactly what that search included was family lore that I would get barely a hint of back then. Yetta’s deep fears for her daughter were only revealed to me a few years ago when that 1913 article resurfaced.

Now, my cousin Matt Brown and I, as the family genealogists, hope to discover our great-great-aunt’s fate and with it, her grave, to place upon it a long overdue stone.

Grandma Sally, granddaughter of Yetta, was keeper of the family history. I knew the stories by heart: her hardscrabble Brooklyn childhood, her mother’s untimely death. When I was 9 years old, she told me that her aunt had disappeared in Argentina.

“What happened?” I asked.

Grandma wiped her hands on her apron and left the kitchen. She returned with a delicate, yellowing newspaper clipping.

“The Forverts,” Grandma said.

“It’s in Hebrew.”

“Yiddish,” she said.

“What does it say?”

“Nothing good.” Grandma extracted the clipping from my hands. “She was my mother’s twin.”

I stared at the beautiful young woman in the photo, her dark hair swept into a loose bun.

“She wrote letters. Then the letters…stopped.” Grandma’s voice trailed off. “She fell in love. Maybe…she was tricked.”

She never told me her aunt’s name.

For the past several years, Matt and I have been painstakingly disentangling the gnarled branches of our family tree. We are a good pair: obsessive about genealogy, resourceful and multilingual. Matt speaks Bulgarian and some Russian; I speak French and some Hebrew.

Many years ago, Matt interviewed Grandma to get our complex tree straight in his head. When I told him about my childhood memory of Grandma recounting a missing great-great-aunt, he was intrigued. Then my own aunt fortuitously opened an old box that had belonged to Grandma, who had since passed away, and found the Forverts article.

Matt had the article translated. We had a name for our missing great-great-aunt: Elka. Sadly, the article also provided insight into the unfortunate fate that our family believed befell her. It also revealed the depth of Yetta’s heartache. “Everyone in the family is well,” she told the Forverts. “I could be happy, but the pain outweighs everything.”

In 1888, Yetta’s son Alter had established a foothold in Manhattan. The rest of the family arrived piecemeal—the trip was costly—and in 1901, Yetta began the journey with twin daughters Chana and Elka. Delayed in London due to an illness Elka suffered, they temporarily settled in its labyrinthine, overcrowded East End. London was foreign to them, making life there difficult to navigate and leaving them vulnerable.

Out of funds, and with her husband, Israel, still in Bialy-stok, 56-year-old Yetta made a heart-wrenching decision. She left her 16-year-old daughters in London and joined her son in Manhattan to earn money for the girls’ passage. Chana stayed with Bialystoker friends, Elka with a local dressmaker.

In New York City, Yetta worked grueling hours as a sick nurse. After five months, she’d saved enough to bring the girls to America.

In London, however, “a young man, also from Bialystok had sidled up to the 16-year-old Elka,” as recounted in the Forverts, and convinced her not to go with her sister to America. He claimed he was traveling to New York City soon and promised they would go together.

In December 1901, Chana—my great-grandmother—landed at Ellis Island. Alone.

In the Jewish consciousness at that time were reports of the well-heeled, attractive landsman who visited cities and villages throughout Europe, deceiving young women into false marriages or employment and then trafficking them into prostitution in South America. Such a character is featured in Sholem Aleichem’s 1909 short story “The Man from Buenos Aires,” in which he boasts: “What do I deal in? Ha ha! Not in Hanukkah candles, my friend, not in Hanukkah candles!”

Was Elka’s young man a sex trafficker? That had been Yetta’s fear.

The Varsovia Society, the notorious Buenos Aires-based traffickers later called Zwi Migdal, is perhaps familiar to contemporary readers from Talia Carner’s novel The Third Daughter. The group operated for decades until taken down in 1935 by former prostitute Raquel Liberman in conjunction with law enforcement. One coercion method sometimes used by Jewish traffickers was the stille chuppah, meaning “silent wedding” in Yiddish, which was a religious marriage without official documentation and holding no civil weight. Such arrangements deceived “brides” while offering no legal marital protection.

And while Jews were not the only group involved in sex trafficking at the time, they did organize their own forces to try to fight it. The Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW), founded in London in 1885, and Ezras Noshim, established in Buenos Aires in the 1920s, worked to combat sex trafficking, often dispatching agents to identify vulnerable women. In 1910, JAPGW agent Samuel Cohen reported receiving “contradictory answers” that convinced him that a Jewish girl traveling with a man in the English port of Southampton—they were set to sail to South America—was being trafficked.

In the 2017 documentary The Impure, director Daniel Najenson uncovered 6,000 requests for help from women to Ezras Noshim. Was Elka among the “impure,” that tragic designation that for more than 100 years has followed the people stained by working in the sex industry—prostitutes, madams, pimps and traffickers?

In 1904, after two excruciating years, the Bloomgolds in New York City received a letter from Elka. She was in Buenos Aires.  Elka didn’t mention the man from London, nor why she was in Argentina, according to the Forverts’ report. Her address, in care of an “M. Wachs,” was on Calle Lavalle in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood Once—but also near brothels. The article explains that Wachs had a brother in Manhattan, whom Yetta visited to demand answers. He offered that Wachs was a synagogue shamash in Argentina, but he was otherwise evasive.

Yetta and her husband, both now in New York City, attempted to reach Elka, but their letters went unanswered.

Modern genealogical tools enable Matt and me to examine digitized records and DNA. Still, challenges abound. Our queries to multiple sources in Argentina have gone unanswered. Cemeteries are best searched by name. But if Elka is buried in an “impure” plot, for instance, in the overgrown, graffitied and inaccessible “impure” area of Avellaneda’s Jewish cemetery, we may never discover her resting place. Mainstream Argentine Jews of Elka’s era actively separated themselves from “the impure,” including with separate synagogues and burial grounds.

Beyond these obstacles, there is a reluctance to discuss what may be one of the seediest chapters in Jewish history. This is evident in Najenson’s film when he’s challenged by Abraham Lichtenbaum of Argentina’s IWO, the Jewish Research Institute, for dredging up the past. Even Grandma Sally gently shut down our long-ago conversation, and a now-deceased elderly cousin once said to me, “The twin? She fell off the ship.”

Lost at sea was a preferable outcome.

For years, no more letters arrived. Then, in 1911, a stranger visited the Bloomgolds. He claimed Elka had been sending her parents money, but the couple’s daughter-in-law, Mary, wife of their other son, Jake Bloomgold, was stealing it. As written in the Forverts, Mary denied this but somehow had an address for Elka in Rosario, Argentina, care of “Salomona Reinu.” Who was Salomona Reinu?

According to Mary, Elka now called herself “Señora Siems/Seymes.” Was she married? Matt and I found a July 30, 1903, article in The Evening World detailing Mary’s arrest for defrauding Jewish immigrant women. Given Mary’s criminal activities and correspondence with Elka, is it possible Mary knew of or was connected to Elka’s fate?

Yetta wrote to Elka at the Rosario address. Her daughter responded, but with little information other than that she wasn’t well and spent her money on doctors.

It was the last the family would hear from her.

Did Elka travel to Argentina by choice, marry and have a family? If so, Matt and I believe she’d have told her parents. We hope she lived a long life. That no letters arrived after 1911 tragically suggests otherwise.

While visiting Tel Aviv a few years ago, I met Najenson, the director, for coffee. We discussed Elka’s story. “It still impacts our family,” I said.

Najenson considered me.

“Does it?”

Did it?

Those directly affected by Elka’s disappearance are long gone. Why are Matt and I so resolute? Who benefits when tragedy is unearthed, when closure remains forever out of reach for those who would most need it?

Matt summed it up well. “I love this research for the potential for justice and memory to finally come for Elka,” he told me, and “for the challenges genealogy hits us with—linguistic, historical, archival, cultural.”

If I could reach across time, I’d take Yetta’s hand into my own. I’d reassure her that life has been infinitely kinder to her descendants. I’d tell her the sacrifice she made over a century ago to immigrate to New York City saved us.

In the final scene of Najenson’s documentary, women place stones on prostitutes’ graves in the “impure” plot of La Tablada’s Jewish cemetery near Buenos Aires. It’s an act of grace and solidarity—a gesture indicating those buried there, who’d lived on society’s margins, are not forgotten.

We may never learn exactly what happened to Elka, but we gave her back her name and documented that she lived and was loved. A vast, evolving network of genealogical resources has made our family cold case at least partially accessible.

For now, our research and intent serve as a testament to a life remembered—and perhaps, in a small way, a stone for Elka. 

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Jennifer Wolf Kam writes books for children and young adults. She lives in New York with her family. Visit her website here.