In 2010, The Jewish Travel Agency and Mrs. Kulich received top honors from her peers being named by Travel Agent Magazine a “Top 25 Agent.”
There are specialists for every kind of travel, but a specialist in Jewish heritage travel? That’s pretty unique. “My true passion is customizing tours for individuals and groups wishing to personally experience their Jewish ancestors’ cultural and physical landscapes,” Kulich says. “Working with a network of expert in-country guides and local companies, I conduct family-specific Holocaust research.” She compares her work to the ancestral detective work of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. “Like Jonathan, many of us yearn to uncover the lost stories of our Jewish heritage in distant lands, to trace the footsteps of our ancestors, but unlike Jonathan, we choose not to travel in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. So that’s where we come in!”
Of course, focusing on one particular group for travel can present certain unique situations for an agent: “Kosher travel presents challenges, from special food arrangement to travel. We have to arrange travel so clients do not travel on Shabbat (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown). They cannot even open the door with electric keys, so in some cases we got hotel staff to open the doors for them.”
Heritage travel can also be some of the most rewarding. “We’ve done research for a family of six that was looking for families in Lithuania and Ukraine who knew their parents during the war. In a small village near Lviv, Ukraine, we found a son of the woman who had hid the client’s mother during the war, quite like Anne Frank had been. But unlike Anne Frank, the girl survived. The clients connected with that family. We also found for them people in Lithuanian village who knew their father.”
http://www.travelagentcentral.com/agent-profiles/top-25-agents-2010?page=5