(Jo)Hannes Graf
I live in Vienna, Austria, with my wife, Elfie. I have been a Burgenland Bunch member since 2000, and a BB Staff member since 2001. More recently, I served as the BB membership editor and songbook editor (the latter with Tom Steichen). Also, I worked on the Gerry Berghold award page, the Staff page (including photo montage), and the web pages for Where We Are, Burgenland Impressions, Burgenland Village Pictures, and writings of the Wallern chronicler, Father Graisy. Currently, I am the owner of the domain www.burgenland-bunch.org and I am aslo the Burgenland Bunch Newsletter editor.
I am interested in all Burgenland-related highlights. During the past twelve months, I traveled in the Burgenland for more than 200 days, driving more than 15,000 miles, and taking 20,000 pictures. I have worked for some time at the railway between Oberwart and Oberschützen, with another Bunch called FrOWOS. There, I do a variety of jobs (blacksmithing, locksmithing, and engineering), and also built a new homepage, www.frowos.com, with pages in the English, Croatian, Hungarian, and Romanji languages. Away from work, I am a satirical artist with my own Homepage, where I publish together with some friends at: www.scholemandfriends.com. Also, I edit an art and satiric newspaper in Vienna.
All the things (people) I love: Elfie and the grandchildren. All the things I like: Walking in the Danube National Park between Vienna and Bratislava, between 5 and 15 miles daily; people I can trust; all the food that Elfie cooks; desserts; operas and classic music; the spirit of Yogi Berra; driving around at Güterwege (NL 175), and if I come to a fork at the street, I take it (;-). All the things I don’t like: people who smile in my face, but kick me from behind, if I turn my back; pompous and know-it-all people.

                                            Maureen Tighe-Brown
Hannes and I are working together to assemble and polish our regular Burgenland Bunch Newsletters. Here is a little self-introduction:
Currently, I am finishing my dissertation in history for the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. My working title is: „Two Separate Worlds? Jewish and Catholic Households and Demgraphic Lives in the Habsburg Village: Deutschkreutz, Hungary, 1683-1920“.
Deutschkreutz has been part of the Burgenland province of Austria since 1920. In 1998, I found our dear Gerry Berghold’s Burgenland Bunch on the Internet, and have been a BB member ever since. So I am BBer because of my research interests, not for genealogical searches for any ancestral roots. Since my research involves Yiddish-, Hebrew-, and Hungarian-language sources, Gerry asked me to help out with our members interested in „Jewish Burgenland“. Before switching to history as an acadmic field, I earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing, and taught students in a school of nursing. Hence, when Gerry Berghold wrote to the BB staff in early 2007, saying he was not well enough to drive to Allentown, PA, where some BB staff and a group of Burgenland visitors were to arrive and spend several days, I jumped in. I e-mailes Gerry to suggest that he and Molly fly to Allentown, where a nurse friend and I would meet them, and escort them while they were there. Gerry agreed to my idea, and we all had a fabulous time. The Burgenland visitors gave Gerry a special award at a dinner with local Burgenland-Americans; our new BB president and his wife, Tom and Lois Steichen, entertained us with wonderful, professional-quality dancing; our Allentown resident and BB staffer, Bob Strauch, presented an authentically Burgenland orchestra; and Emma Tanczos Farkas, the sister of BB staffer Anna Kresh held a terrific woriking luncheon at her home.
I had never met any of the BB staffers before. We had just communicated by e-mail. What a treat to have all of us interacting, no delicate egos competing, and everyone just relaxed, pleasant, and interesting. That was amazing enough. But the most amazing thing for me was to see Gerry’s ability to utterly enjoy each moment, each person, and each event, with his dear face wreathed in smiles, bliss and utter satifaction, despite his discomfort from cancer treatments. Wherever we were, and whatever was going on, I watched Gerry create a war, calm, giving atmosphere around him: As Shakespeare said in Hamlet: „He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.“ A certain kind of man is very appealing: one who is kind, gracious, calm and happy; solid and confident. Gerry Berhold was that sort of man.