About a week ago I posted several mystery photos-–pictures that included people I could not identify, including this one:

What I did not know was that on the back of this photo were two inscriptions in Yiddish, depicted below:

I tried to decipher it, but had no luck (especially since I don’t know Yiddish and have trouble reading Hebrew cursive!).  I sent it to a friend who knows Yiddish, and he was able to translate much of it, but could not decipher the names.

I then sent it to a service provided by the Jewishgen.org website called Viewmate.  You can post text or even photos and ask others to help translate or identify the subjects in the photograph.  Within a few hours, I received a response from a volunteer named Sara.  She told me that the inscriptions translated to read,

“”By my right hand is Yitzhak’s son.” “By my left hand is Chaimke’s son.”

Joseph’s granddaughter Ariela believed that the picture was of Abraham’s wife Rebecca with her two grandsons, and that is consistent with the translation of the inscriptions.  Abraham and Rebecca had two sons, Max H. and Irving.  My guess is that “Chaimke,” a nickname for Chaim, is Max H., the H presumably for Hyman or Harry or some other H name standing in for Chaim; “Yitzhak” likely refers to Irving.

But what are the names of the two grandsons in the photograph? That I still do not know.  I am now searching for the children of Max and Irving so that I can fully solve the mystery of who is in the photo.

One door opens as another closes…