Louisiana: Historic Jewish cemetery vandalized

In 1873, a Yellow Fever epidemic struck Shreveport, Louisiana.

In 2010, vandals struck the Jewish cemetery called Hebrew Rest where those Jewish epidemic victims and many other deceased individuals have been buried since.

According to an article in the Shreveport Times, the vandals could face hate crime charges resulting from the recent desecration of several historic graves in the Jewish section of Oakland Cemetery.

Nine headstones were overturned or broken.

Local historian Gary Joiner is working with a group of LSU-Shreveport students who are electronically cataloging the historic graveyard.

A student in the group called the desecration anti-Semitic, and said the cemetery was like a museum and the vandals destroyed history.

Fortunately, the group had already recorded those graves. A group of vandals is suspected, as the size of the stones would have made it difficult for one person to desecrate. Most of the stones date from the 1873 epidemic, which killed 25% of Shreveport's residents.

The police are working on the case. Those arrested will face a felony charge, and other penalties of up to a $5,000 fine, five years in prison or both.

For an exhaustive history of Jewish cemeteries in Shreveport, click here for the specific entry at the IAJGS International Jewish Cemetery Project. There are three Hebrew Rest sections (established 1858, 1886 and 1993). Earlier burials were in the non-sectarian Oakland Cemetery.

UK: Black Death, gold jewellery

In 1349, nearly 1,000 Jews died in one day from the Black Death in Erfurt, Germany. The plague wiped out about a third of Europe's population.

In Erfurt, the Jewish population was destroyed and Europe's oldest synagogue abandoned.

Fast forward to Erfurt in 1998, when a trove of jewellery weighing nearly 30kg (66 pounds) was discovered. Earlier, in 1863, another collection was found in Colmar, France, hidden in the walls of a home.

The collection of gold and silver is considered priceless. Experts say the items were hidden by families during the Black Death, when Jews were being blamed for the spread of the plague.

An exhibition - The Treasures of the Black Death - brings together two hoards of medieval gold and silver jewellery. at the Wallace Collection in central London, which will run through Sunday, May 10.

Included are three of the earliest known examples of Jewish wedding rings. The rings show a house which symbolises the home of the couple and the Temple of Jerusalem. The inscription reads mazal tov (good fortune, Hebrew).

Also on display, a 650-year-old perfume bottle. It is part of the only surviving medieval cosmetic set, complete with ear cleaners and tweezers.

The Erfurt synagogue is being restored as a museum and will house the artefacts permanently beginning in autumn 2009.

Read the complete article here

Genetics: Jewish communities & the plague, Jan. 25

Throughout Europe, the arrival of the Black Death - bubonic plague - saw major attacks on many Jewish communities. Before people understood how plague was caused and transmitted, Jews were often charged with poisoning wells presumed to have sparked the terrible incidences.

If the plague deaths were lower among Jews, this would have been enough evidence for many townspeople to believe the Jewish community had caused the plague. However, new research has shown that some Jewish communities have been found to have genetic protection against the illness.

This recently discovered genetic protection will be just one of the topics to be presented by Dr. Edmund C. Tramont at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Washington DC, at 1.30pm, Sunday, January 25.

The program will also address the influenza pandemic of 1917-18 and its impact on Jewish communities as well as additional historical pandemics throughout the Jewish world. The venue is Bnai Israel in Rockville, Maryland.

Tramont is associate director for special projects at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

He will devote much of his talk to recent research which indicates that an unusually large percentage of Ashkenazi Jewish communities have(and in the past had) genetic protection against the plague. He will also discuss the Influenza Pandemic of 1917-18 and its impact on Jewish communities. A Q&A will allow participants to explore both subjects with the speaker.

In discussing the fact that the plague of the 13th-17th centuries had less impact on Jewish communities than on others, Tramont will discuss new data showing a genetic trait that strongly appears to have protected many European Jews from the plague pandemics of those times.

He will trace how this trait was discovered (from research related to HIV infection), how it works, and how it was recently connected to protection from the plague but found to increase mortality from West Nile virus. He will also share his thoughts on how this greater resistance to the plague might have influenced Jewish history.

A well-known pandemics expert, Tramont was director of the Division of Aids at NIH for many years before taking up his current position.

The meeting is free to members; others, $5. B'nai Israel is located at 6301 Montrose Road, Rockville, MD 20852. For more details, click here.

Seattle: Epidemics and family history

Stephanie Weiner's program at the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree in June focused on epidemics and plagues impacting the worldwide Jewish community, including the 1918 flu pandemic. It seems the Seattle Public Health organization is also in on this act. According to this blog entry, local comic artist and art teacher David Lasky was hired to produce a comic about the possibility of an upcoming flu pandemic. It was in comic form for non-English speakers to understand the message

When Lasky took the job, he wasn't aware it would hit close to home.

"My great-grandmother died in the 1918 flu pandemic," he said. "It was a connection to my past and gave me a much better understanding about what happened to her."

Lasky said he wasn't aware, and so many other people aren't aware, that half a million Americans died of the flu in 1918.

"Doing this comic I realized I wasn't alone," he said. "This affected thousands of families in this county."

It has been translated into 12 languages and will be distributed at schools throughout Washington, as well as local King County health offices.

New York: 1832 cholera epidemic

Family historians are always interested in the lives of their ancestors, and for those whose families lived in New York in the early 19th century, today's story in the New York Times will explain what life was like in the face of a cholera epidemic.

"How Epidemics Helped Shape the Modern Metropolis," focused on an 1832 cholera epidemic, in connection with a New York Historical Society exhibit.

Cholera appeared in South Asia in 1817, spread to other seaports and to London in 1831, reaching New York the next year.

On a Sunday in July 1832, a fearful and somber crowd of New Yorkers gathered in City Hall Park for more bad news. The epidemic of cholera, cause unknown and prognosis dire, had reached its peak.

People of means were escaping to the country. The New York Evening Post reported, “The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stagecoaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic-struck, fleeing the city, as we may suppose the inhabitants of Pompeii fled when the red lava showered down upon their houses.”

An assistant to the painter Asher B. Durand described the scene near the center of the outbreak. “There is no business doing here if I except that done by Cholera, Doctors, Undertakers, Coffinmakers, &c,” he wrote. “Our bustling city now wears a most gloomy & desolate aspect — one may take a walk up & down Broadway & scarce meet a soul.”

The epidemic left 3,515 dead out of a population of 250,000. (The equivalent death toll in today’s city of eight million would exceed 100,000.) The dreadful time is recalled in art, maps, death tallies and other artifacts in an exhibition, “Plague in Gotham! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York,” at the New-York Historical Society. The show will run through June 28.

The story addresses life in crowded cities when sanitation and medical science were not prepared to deal with germs. The disease hit hardest, as these things usually do, in the poorest neighborhoods, such as Five Points. The story details the words of those who lived through the epidemic, through letters written (and included in the exhibition).

It took until 1854 for a British doctor, John Snow, to connect contaminated water with cholera, but not until 1883 was the disease-causing bacterium discovered.

As if predicting future shows like CSI, Snow plotted cholera cases on a Soho map, showing that most victims got their water from one public pump. The story mentions "Ghost Map," a reent book by Steven Johnson, which tells of the discovery that a baby's infected diapers were thrown into a cesspool near the pump.

Snow's research applied mapping in investigations - now computers analyze the data data - and medical historians credit him with the foundations of scientific epidemiology.

The epidemic forced cities to begin cleaning up but it was too late for the victims of the next bout in 1849. The population had doubled to 500,000 and cholera deaths numbered 5,071.

The story describes the growth of the city "as far north as 14th Street," and how residents sought clean air in the village of Greenwich, calling attention to small brick houses - still bearing their dates of construction today - built after 1832 in the Village.

In 1842, the Croton Aqueduct system brought in clean water and the 1866 founding of the Metropolitan Board of Health helped to regulate conditions.

Read more here .

Epidemics and lost branches

Why do individuals and entire family branches suddenly disappear?

Dick Eastman has provided researchers with some fascinating information on epidemics.

The rampant spread of disease was common in the days before penicillin and other "wonder drugs" of the twentieth century. Our ancestors lived in fear of epidemics, and many of them died as the result of simple diseases that could be cured today with an injection or a prescription.

If you ever wondered why a large number of your ancestors disappeared during a certain period in history, you may want to investigate the possibility of an epidemic. Many cases of people disappearing from records can be traced to dying during an epidemic or moving away from the affected area.

You'll have to subscribe for the rest.

I first became aware of the genealogical impact of the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918-19 when searching for family in Philadelphia a few years ago and I posted about the possibilities to JewishGen.

According to experts, Philadelphia was one of the hardest-hit cities. On one day, some 10,000 individuals died. The story goes that city services were so overwhelmed that individual graves could not be dug and victims were buried together.

Earlier worldwide flu epidemics took place in 1775-6 and again in 1857-9.

Dick's story, on his newsletter's Plus Edition (subscription required) provides dates and locations of worldwide and U.S. major epidemics, such as flu, cholera, yellow fever and typhus.