Connecticut: 'An 800-year Sephardic Journey,' April 17

Dr. Daniel Laby will be speaking on his family's eight century journey from Aragon (Spain) to Massacusetts, for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Connecticut on Sunday, April 17.

The program starts at 1.30pm, at the Godfrey Memorial Library, 134 Newfield Street, Middletown.

Dan and I share some roots in Lerida (Lleida) in Catalunya, the same great researcher (Maria Jose Surribas) and a Persian connection. The Lerida archives provided him with a document dated 1204, while our earliest document from the same archive is dated 1353.

Dan is a great speaker and his family's story is fascinating. A few years ago, his family went on a roots trip to Spain. He presented a multi-media program on that trip to the Jewish Family Research Association (JFRA) in Israel. I was privileged to also meet his parents during the 2006 IAJGS conference in New York.

"From Aragon to Massachusetts" follows Dan's family history (Laby de la Caballeria or Cavalleria) from western Massachusetts and New York’s Lower East Side back to the Ottoman Empire and pre-Inquisition Spain.

Dan will describe how he traced his family to 13th-century Spain using both modern DNA analysis and microfilms. He shares his story because he hopes to make Sephardic Jewish genealogy more widely known.

An assistant clinical professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, Dan is also a sports vision specialist, working with the Boston Red Sox and several other professional and Olympic teams. His search for his family predates his medical practice.

For more information, click on the JGS of Connecticut website.

Dan's story is worth telling to many more family historians and genealogists, and not only because it is Sephardic story. If your JGS can convince him to speak - if he has time - it will be worth it.

Military Jews: 39th Royal Fusileers

My grandfather, Sidney (born Szja) Fink (left) lied about his age and joined the 39th Royal Fusileers, which fought with the British against the Turks in Palestine in 1918.

Steve Lasky of the online Museum of Family History has a link to a great 1919 article from the New York Daily Tribune about the experiences of Reuben Bushmitz, who perhaps knew my grandfather as they served in the same battalion.

Grampa's experiences are displayed at Bet Hagdudim in Avichail, near Netanya, Israel, where there is a museum dedicated to these young men. Some of them did not return to the US after their service, settled in Avichail, and created the museum.

This story about Bushmitz answered many questions I had about Grampa's experiences.

One story Grampa told was that during one battle, a voice called out from across the trenches - from the Turkish side - asking "Szja, is that you? This is your cousin David." I never understood how that was possible. Two Jews from Suchostaw in Galizia (Austro-Hungary at the time), each fighting on opposite sides?

Bushmitz's story explained about Jews impressed by the Turks to fight in their army. So Grampa's cousin, who had obviously arrived much earlier in Palestine, was in the Turkish army and fighting the Brits.

Here's just a bit of the long story:

From the East Side to Jerusalem and Return: Wearers of the "Mogen David" Enlisted in a British Contingent to Fight the Turks

Reuben Bushmitz, of Flat No. 9, 135 Eldridge Street, late private of the 39th Battalion, Royal Fusileers, is going back to cutting knee pants next week. He expects to be a bit rusty at it, because he has been crusading in the Holy Land and against the Turk for considerably more than a year.

Part of the crusading, the last part, wasn’t so interesting, he said. It consisted merely of feeding and exercising a compound full of formerly Terrible Turks who had run themselves ragged for several months up to October, 1918.

More than three hundred crusaders like ex-Private Bushmitz have come back from Turk-taming in the last ten days and will resume knee plants cutting, or delicatessen store keeping, or shipping clerking, just where they left off when some voice which had been silent a couple of thousand years or more called to them to come and free the Holy Land.

The voice was penetrating. It was heard even above the sweatiest of sweatshop machines, and above the assorted whimperings of a dozen children of the noisiest family which ever crowded into three rooms. Young men whose shoulders were on a lateral line with the backs of their heads and whose only exercise had been some footwork on a pants sewing machine, got up, straightened their spines in a tentative style and went out to fight.

The British Canadian Recruiting Mission, then situated at 220 West Forty-second Street, became the objective for these young men who wanted to win back from the infidel the land sacred to Abraham and Isaac and David. ...

Do read the entire story.

Thank you, Steve, for this story which explains so much.

World Jewish Studies: Italian section

An extensive section at the conference focused on the Italian Jewish community, in cooperation with ASSEI (The Israeli Association for the Study of History of Italian Jews)

Here are some of the categories and lectures (E=English, H=Hebrew):

The attitude towards the other in Italy
Silvia Cappelletti (E) The Expulsions of the Jews from Rome under Tiberius and Claudius: A Juridical Study
Yosef A. Cohen (H) The Place of the Apostate Alessandro Franceschi in the Jesuit Mission to Italian Jewry in the First Half of the 16th Century
Francesco Spagnolo (E) Participants-Observers: Christian Presences in Italian Synagogue Life
Itzhak Sergio Minerbi (H) Pope Benedict XVI and the Jews

Jewish Thought and Society in Italy
Pier Gabriele Mancuso (E) Sefer Yetzirah: Early Jewish Mysticism
Lea Naomi Vogelmann Goldfeld (H) Mordechai Shmuel Ghirondi, Rabbi of Padova, Scholar and Kabbalist
Asher Salah (E) From Odessa to Florence: Elena Comparetti Raffalovich and Jewish Russian Intellectuals in Post-Risorgimento Italy
Cristina Michal Bettin (E) Jewish Youth in Italy: Between Integrations and Assimilation, 1861–1938
Anna-Dorothea Ludewig (E) Marranism and Identity Construction in 19th-Century German-Jewish Literature
Paola Ferruta (E) “New Marranism” and the Encounter Between Jews and Universalism
Marina Arbib (H) The Diaries of Gershom Scholem: A Jewish Intellectual Shapes His Identity
Amir Ashur (H) Developments in the Status of Jewish Women in 12th-Century Egypt as Portrayed in Prenuptial Agreements from the Cairo Genizah
Avraham David (H) Culture and Trade Connection Between Egypt and Crete in the Late Middle Ages, as Reflected in Cairo Genizah Documents

There is also another list that didn't seem to be categorized, but included the following very interesting topics:

Joseph Rapaport, “The Leadership of the Jewish Community in the Kingdom of Navarre Before the Expulsion”
Yosef Hacker, “Charles the Eighth, the Conquest of Italy and Hispano-Jewish Aspirations on the Eve of the 16th Century”
Luis Cortese, “Isidore of Seville, Thomas Aquinas, and Alonso de Cartagena on Forced Conversion”
Ahuva Ho, “Alfonso de Zamora: an Apostate in the Service of the Church”
Ricardo Munoz Solla, “Conversos burgaleses: Historia de una silenciosa presencia (siglos XV-XVI)”
Samuela Marconcini, “Tolerance and Anti-Judaism: the Politics of Conversion to Catholicism in Tuscany Between the Seventeenth and the Nineteenth Centuries”
Matteo Al Kalak, “The “House of Catechumens” in Modena between Dukes and Popes (1583-1797)”
Ilaria Pavan, “The “House of Catechumens” in Modena during the Emancipation Age (1804-1941)”
Yosef Kaplan, “The Building of Sephardic Communities in the “Confessionalization Era”: A Comparative Approach”
Anita Waingort Novinsky, “A Critical Approach to Sephardic Historiography: The Forgotten Marranos of America”
Jose Alberto Rodrigues Da-Silva Tavim, “A Troublesome Theme: The Jews and the Intelligence Networks in Portugal’s Asian Empire In the 16th Century”
Schulamith C. Halevy, “Los Trevino: a `Tribe of Sefarditas’ in El Nuevo Reino de Leon District”
Asaf Ashkenazi, “Historia general de las Indias”
Limor Munz-Manor, “The Old World and the New”: The Jewish Discourse on America in 16th-Century Italy”
Claude B. Stuczynski, “Jews and Judaism in the Juridical Debates on Amerindians in 16th-Century Spanish-America”

Women and Widows
Tirtsah Levie-Bernfeld, “Sephardi Widows in Early Modern Amsterdam”
Ruth Lamdan, “Widows, Old and Respected Women in Ottoman Jewish Society”
Michal Ben Ya’akov, “From Marginality to Opportunity: Widows in Nineteenth Century Eretz-Israel”

What a wide panorama of topics addressing women, history, America, pre-Expulsion issues, conversion and much more!

Tracing the Tribe believes that Jewish history and genealogy cannot be separated. Each helps us learn about the other and to understand events on a very personal level as we realize that our own ancestors may have lived through those exact events and in those places.

Seattle: Jews of Rhodes, May 11

The family history and genealogy of the Jews of Rhodes and their diaspora will be presented by Leon Taranto of Washington DC, at the next meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington State (JGSWS), co-sponsored by Congregation Ezra Bessaroth and Sephardic Bikur Holim.

The event begins at 7pm, Monday, May 11, at Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, 5217 S. Brandon St., Seattle. The city is home to a large Sephardic community with many families from Rhodes.

From the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Rhodes in 1522 until the Holocaust, a vibrant Judeo-Spanish community flourished on this Mediterranean isle. From antiquity, a Romaniote Jewish community lived there.

By the 1700s, Rhodes became an important rabbinical center, and home to a dynasty of Grand Rabbis. In the early 1900s, Rhodeslis émigrés founded colonies in Africa and the Americas.

Taranto will focus on the history of Jewish Rhodes, and genealogical sources such as cemetery gravestones, burial records, Holocaust deportation lists, Italian census records, synagogue plaques, ship manifests, Hebrew books and manuscripts, and marriage, tax, and Alliance Israélite Universelle records.

In his research on the Judeo-Spanish communities of the Ottoman Empire, particularly Smyrna (Izmir) and Rhodes, Taranto has identified more than 5,000 relatives in two dozen countries linked to another 26,000 Sephardim.

He has assisted cousins in developing a 16-generation tree of nearly 3,000 people for the Israel dynasty of Chief Rabbis that served the eastern Mediterranean from 1714-1932.

His articles on Ottoman Sephardic genealogy have appeared in Avotaynu, ETSI--Revue de Genéalogie et d'Histoire Sépharades (France), La Lettre Sepharade (US), and Sharsheret Hadorot (Israel). He has presented programs at four IAJGS conferences and has appeared twice on the Washington DC-area cable program “Tracing Your Family Roots.”

For more information and directions, see the JGSWS site.