
WJRO’s #MyPropertyStory campaign encourages Holocaust survivors and their families to share their personal stories. The campaign raises awareness of the need to address the restitution of Jewish private and communal property seized during the Holocaust and its aftermath.
The fourth annual campaign, #MyPropertyStory: Connecting Community & History, will kick off on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2023. The four-week campaign will run from Friday, January 27 through Sunday, February 26,2023. The campaign will focus on community property such as cemeteries, synagogues, schools, and other possessions and how these properties are important links to Jewish heritage and history. We encourage you to submit your own personal story about your or your family’s home, possessions, or community by clicking on the “submit your story” button above.
Behind your family’s home, business, and keepsake, there is a story.
What connects you to your family history?

View of the entrance to a Jewish owned business in Zagreb, Croatia belonging to Vilim Weiss (circa 1941). Credit: @USHMM, courtesy of Marta Kupfermann Elkana
My family house in Wlodawa Poland across from the town synagogue
House of my family in Wlodawa, Poland prior 1939
At Jozefa 12
At Jozefa 12, Spielberg had discovered a building that he could use to relate a terrifying chapter inside an even more horrific series of events. And at Jozefa 12, I had finally found a tangible symbol of a past to which I could finally begin to accept and from which I could build a family’s story as well as a new set of memories.
Bringing a Lost Community Back to Life
Dan Oren, M.D. from Connecticut, tells a moving story of coming back with his mother to her birthplace in Poland in 1993. While there, he visited an overgrown and neglected cemetery in Markuszow (near Lublin), where he found a tombstone with an epitaph in Yiddish. After 20 years of research, he was able to prove the tombstone was his great-great-grandmother’s.
Maurice Tabaksman fought for many years for the return of properties
Maurice Tabaksman fought for many years for the return of properties – two apartment blocks and a parcel of land – owned by his family in Warsaw before the Second World War.
How my property became the Embassy of France in Croatia
The government of former Yugoslavia gave our property as a gift to the USA which later sold it to France to be used for their embassy.
Praying as German Nazis enter the town
I never met my Grandparents as they all were killed in Poland
Store & Properties in Vienna and Poland
Aryanized stores, homes & merchandise in Vienna & Poland
My 75-year Warsaw property pursuit brief
75 years claiming my father’s property and maybe almost there