Special to WJW

Last Sunday, Daniel Halprin drove from Newark, Del., to Washington, D.C., to commune for a few hours with complete strangers.

Halprin, 37, grew up without many family members nearby, but he longed for a stronger connection with his roots. So when his father, Arthur, told him about a planned gathering for descendants of the Jewish town in northwestern Ukraine where he had been born, the younger Halprin jumped at the opportunity to connect with people he had never met. "It's like hanging out with a bunch of ghosts," he said.

At least 140 people, representing three generations of Trochenbrod descendants, came together for the event. Although most attendees were from the Washington area, participants came from 11 states, including those on the West Coast.

They gathered at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in the District, which already has a strong Trochenbrod connection. Shelton Zuckerman, the synagogue's vice president, and Esther Safran Foer, its executive director, can both trace their roots back to the shtetl.

Also in attendance was Foer's celebrity son, Jonathan, author of the 2002 best-selling novel-cum-film, Everything is Illuminated, a fictionalized tale of the author's journey to his grandfather's shtetl -- Trachimbrod.

The real Trochenbrod was founded by a handful of settlers in the early 1800s, according to a slideshow narrated by shtetl descendant Avrom Bendavid-Val, the principal organizer of the event.

The Russian government called the settlement "Sofiyovka" and officially recognized it in 1835. It was located near the city of Lutsk, in present-day northwestern Ukraine. The town remained part of Russia until World War I, and wound up in Poland throughout most of the 1920s and '30s because of border changes.

Trochenbrod grew to become a thriving commercial center in the region with a population of about 5,000, all of them Jews. But in 1942, the Nazis invaded and killed all the residents who did not manage to escape. By 1946, the streets and buildings that made up the community had been destroyed.

As Bendavid-Val came to the end of the series of vintage pictures and maps of the town where his grandfather and father had once lived, he arrived at a color photograph of a bare field bordered by trees and containing a dirt road. "This is Trochenbrod today," Bendavid-Val said with unmistakable emotion in his voice.

He has visited the town seven times, and is planning to organize another excursion in 2009 for Trochenbrod descendants.

Two years ago, Bendavid-Val was part of a cohort of 85 Israeli and American Trochenbrod descendants who visited the area where the town once stood and to memorialize their friends and family. The trip was organized by Bet TAL, an organization based in Israel that was founded by first-generation descendants of Trochenbrod and its sister village of Lozisht.

The visit stimulated a resurgence of interest in Trochenbrod and in maintaining connections with other families that also have roots in the town, according to Bendavid-Val. As a result, he is helping resurrect Trochenbrod-oriented groups in several North American cities. Such groups had once existed, but they disappeared by the 1970s when some of the original immigrants died out.

Bendavid-Val thinks the new groups might endure "with the reach of modern technology, renewed interest in Jewish family roots, and reawakened awareness of Trochenbrod encouraged by Jonathan Safran Foer's book." He said that since January, people from 15 cities in the United States and Brazil have sought to get in touch with fellow Trochenbrod and Lozisht descendants.

After an evening that gave Jewish geography a whole new meaning for him, Halprin indicated that he had found what he came looking for. "My family always jokes about not being stereotypically Jewish," he said.

So when he learned that Trochenbrod was first settled by a group of Jewish farmers -- atypical for Jews at that time ----he got the feeling he was among that extended family he had always wanted.