Michelle Burzynski’s older sister Lauran played the role of matchmaker. Lauran thought Eido Walny, a young lawyer interning at Reinhart, Boerner, Van Deuren, where she was also working, would be perfect for her sister.
Michelle remembers the exact date — July 18, 2002 — of their first “date.” Born in Appleton, raised in Valders, a farm town near Manitowoc, and living in Oshkosh at the time, she knew her way around Milwaukee. Her parents were native Milwaukeeans and she has a grandmother in Mequon, so she had spent time here growing up.
At Lauran’s urging, Michelle offered to show newcomer Eido around Milwaukee and they ended up at Festa Italiana.
That first date was obviously a success — Michelle and Eido were married in Boerner Botanical Gardens, in an Orthodox evening ceremony, last September, with a Skokie rabbi officiating.
Now residents of Elm Grove, where they live with their cat, Kelev (dog, in Hebrew), the Walnys are happy with their neighborhood. “We found a nice house that was owned by one of the [Green Bay] Packers, who added lot of unique touches,” said Eido.
It was in some disrepair when they bought it and they are working on bringing it back to its original pristine look and modernizing it a bit, he said.
“We like Milwaukee. I like it that there is a Jewish community. I was hoping for that. We have the best of both worlds — Elm Grove is a small community — we like living outside the city where it’s quiet — and Milwaukee is an interesting, lively city,” Michelle said.
Though he was born in Chicago, Eido lived in Israel as a small child and later returned for visits 13 times. With a grandfather who was a veteran of the Israeli War of Independence and a father who fought in two other Israeli wars, he has a strong bond to the land of Israel. A dual citizen, Eido is bicultural and bilingual, but he grew up in Chicago and his parents and two brothers still live there.
Eido, 28, graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in political science and earned a law degree from Boston University in 2001. He now practices estate planning and corporate law at the law firm of Niebler, Pyzyk, Klaver & Wagner in Menomonee Falls.
Michelle, 28, will soon start her second year as a full-time English and speech teacher at Nicolet High School. A graduate of Silver Lake College, she taught in Oshkosh for three years until she moved here to get married. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in intercultural communication and rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Michelle visited Israel for the first time last year on a birthright israel trip and through it learned of a program called “Partners in Torah,” in which both she and Eido now participate.
“It is an Israeli-based mentorship program, through which you can study any aspect of Judaism you want. I’m studying the holidays and the tzadikim. My mentor is Sorah Greenberg, who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox home, the daughter of a rabbi. Sorah has recently moved to New York but we still study together by phone,” said Michelle.
In August, Michelle traveled to Israel again, but this time with Eido’s parents. “We went to see where they grew up, as well as to attend the wedding of one of his father’s war buddy’s daughters and vacation in Eilat,” she said.
Although relative newcomers to Milwaukee, Eido and Michelle have already gotten involved in the Jewish community here.
Michelle serves on the JCC’s Jewish Book and Culture Fair Committee. And both Michelle and Eido serve on the Harold & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center’s Holocaust Essay Contest committee and Michelle traveled to Washington, D.C., this spring with the essay contest winners.
For Eido, volunteering on that committee is particularly personal. “My family lost about 1,500 family members during [World War II],” said Eido. Both sets of his grandparents came from large families and were among only a few survivors from the small towns in Poland where they lived.
His maternal grandfather had 11 brothers but only three survived. Eido’s father’s family was on the run from the Nazis when his father was born in Berlin near the end of the war. The family reached Israel about the time the state of Israel was established in 1948, he said.
Eido’s mother’s family fled Europe during the war and arrived in British Mandate Palestine in time for her to be born there.
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