Our journey from Galati, Romania, to Israel

My name is Iulian Rubin. I was born in Galați, Romania, in 1954 to my parents: Ella Erna and Israel Rubin - Holocaust survivors. My father was born in Galati and my mother in Chernivtsi. I studied the first grade and part of the second at an elementary school in Galati. At the beginning of 1962, when I was 8 years old, my family left Romania on the way to Israel. The separation from childhood landscapes on the banks of the Danube river and from childhood friends was sad. The journey that started in Galați passed through Bucharest, Vienna and Naples by train and from Naples by boat to the port of Haifa in Israel. In the first months in the new country I wrote a letter, in Romanian, to my childhood friend, Dănuț Bumbaru, in which I described our trip to Israel. Decades later, in 2019, I found a copy of the letter presented below, which was written in pencil and therefore the writing was almost completely erased, as could be seen, and as could be understood, the decipherment of the handwriting was not easy. Maybe my mother helped me with some details about the trip and maybe with some words, but I don't remember if that was the case. It is also not clear whether the letter was really sent to Danut. Below is presented the first page of the two of the original letter. Danut and I are friends to this day.

For Romanian speakers the restoration of the letter is presented in print by the link below with spelling and punctuation errors and even geographical errors as they were originally written.

https://www.ernarubin.org/julian/ro/galati_israel.html