Today is August 12, 2015, an Ace of Diamonds day and the 11^th anniversary of my visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem.  I had been looking forward to touching the wall and was expecting a magical experience.  As I touched the wall, a strong vision of my paternal grandfather’s face appeared before my eyes.  I was quite surprised, as he died when I was only 8 years old and I owned only one photo of him.  I shrugged it off, but he kept following me around the rest of the time in Israel.  From Yad Vashem to the Dead Sea to King Solomon’s Pillars, wherever I went, there he was!  I always thought that my father and grandfather were my only paternal side relatives, as my father was an only child and my grandfather was a widower (my grandmother died when my father was only 5 years old).  My father died in 1996, so the only hope for more information was to call my mother and ask if she had any files left behind by my father.  She said that she did, but she was ready to discard them because they were falling apart.  I asked her to please bundle everything up and send them to me.  When the package arrived, the first piece of paper I saw was my grandmother’s ship transport ticket from Poland to America in March of 1921.  The name of her town of origin, Radzilow, Poland, was on the ticket.  After googling Radzilow, I discovered radzilow.com, a memorial to a once vibrant Jewish Shtetl.  The webmaster invited people with roots in the town to e-mail him for more information, so I scanned in the ship transport ticket and dropped him a note.  He wrote back within a few hours and said OMG, you finally found my website!  We’ll be in touch soon.  A few days later, I received a call from a young man in England named Saul Marks.  He excitedly started the conversation with “Let me tell you how we are related.  Your grandmother and my great grandmother were sisters!”  It turns out that Saul is a professional genealogist, and he had family trees all the way back to the 1700’s in Radzilow.  So I went from thinking I had no relatives on my father’s side to learning about dozens of relatives in England, Israel, and the U.S., literally overnight!  But the very best part of this story is the e-mail Saul shared with me that he sent to a fellow genealogist in America.  It was dated August 12, 2004, the same day I touched the wall and saw the vision of my grandfather’s face.  The e-mail was asking for help in solving the frustrating mystery of Moszk and Szejna Rajchel Kowalski’s descendants in America!  Thank you God!  Everything is from Hashem, but it isn’t always this obvious!

In July of 2009, I purchased a book by Robert Lee Camp entitled "Cards of Your Destiny - What Your Birthday Reveals About You and Your Past, Present, and Future".  I began by doing card readings for myself, and then expanded to family and friends.  I am now ready to do card readings for a wider audience.  My birthday is July 4, 1956, which means that I am a 59 year old Jack of Diamonds, and that my long range card this year is the Ace of Clubs.  Aces are powerful indicators of new beginnings, and tomorrow's journal entry will be on August 12th, an Ace of Diamonds day!