visits his home village — once part of Poland just months after the Soviet Union collapsed Shimon Peres walked through a small town graveyard in Volozhon searching for a tombstone with Hebrew writing on it in the newly independent state of Belarus He was looking for the graves of his relatives Like many members of Israel's founding generation he was born in Eastern Europe and emigrated to the Middle East The Cold War friction between the Soviet Union and Israel meant it was extremely difficult if not impossible to visit It was a region that had served as a spiritual core for Jews of Central and Eastern Europe before it was all but decimated during World War II and the Holocaust His family left in the 1930s to escape religious persecution and reached what was then known as Mandatory Palestine His family's story mirrored my own family's — both sought religious freedom and a better life — and as a young reporter for The Moscow Times I talked my way onto his private plane while he was visiting Moscow and sat next to him for the two-hour plan ride to Belarus "I hope to find the place I was born," he told me knocking on doors asking if people remembered his family The entire town had been burnt to the ground Any house he might have recognized was gone Markers in Hebrew were in broken pieces on the ground but he found one belonging to his great grandfather He put on his yarmulke and solemnly said the Hebrew prayer for the dead I took a picture of him saying the blessing and laying the traditional stone on the grave and the picture was picked up by the Associated Press and ran in newspapers across the world it was clear the visit had touched him deeply He recalled his first encounter with anti-Semitism when the local newspaper showed a picture of two Jews murdered in a nearby forest "I understood for the first time that people were killed just because they were Jewish," he told me But perhaps most moving for Peres was something he didn't find on his visit "I wasn't prepared to find grass instead of a home," he said Become an NPR sponsor Site developed by     Copyright © Yedioth Internet You don't have permission to access the page you requested What is this page?The website you are visiting is protected.For security reasons this page cannot be displayed.