Ukraine: Jewish agricultural colonies updated

Material has been added to the Jewish Agricultural Colonies of the Ukraine site, which states:

The study of Jewish agricultural settlement in an organized form in the European Diaspora contributes to an understanding of the endeavors of Jews to improve their social and economic situation under the restrictive and oppressive Tsarist regime.

The Jewish farmers’ efforts were a unique episode in the struggle for Jewish survival in the Diaspora, even as they held to Jewish values and lifestyle.

As archives in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine become more accessible, more new material is now appearing. In those countries, descendants of the colonists are finding material and developing websites. Although most are in the Russian language, various online translation tools help researchers.

Chaim Freedman is the force behind this site.

Here are some highlights:

Two valuable Russian books hold information about the Ekaterinoslav colonies:

L. Uleinikov [Binshtok], Jewish Agricultural Colonies in Ekaterinoslav Province in 1890, St Petersburg, 1891;

I. Kankrin, Jewish Agricultural Colonies of Aleksandrov Uyezd Ekaterinoslav Province, Ekaterinoslav, 1893.

The authors made detailed censuses of the colonies and provided statistics.

The census of the households included an overview of each colony and a summary of its history and assets. Kankrin added detailed house and street handwritten plans of the 10 colonies he studied, and sketches of buildings.

Uleinikov includes complete lists of heads of all families (surname, name and patronymic) in 17 colonies of Ekaterinoslav Province, Aleksandrovsk and Mariupol Uyezds, with detailed record of family composition, military service, type of house, agricultural implements, livestock, land and its subdivision within family and notes about profession etc.

Kankrin studied in a similar fashion 10 colonies in Aleksandrovsk Uyezd and has even more information about colonists' families. He was obsessed with the idea that colonists in reality remained artisans and not worked much as agriculturalistsPartial translations are available.

Other additions to the site:

-- Interview of Ukrainian residents of former Jewish colony Novozaltopol by Father Patrick Desbois; a horrifying account which demonstrates who actually carried out the massacre of nearly 800 Jews.

-- Photographs from the St. Petersburg Film archive and World ORT Photographic archive taken of many colonies in 1904 and 1922 showing public buildings such as schools, synagogues, municipal offices, and farmhouses.

-- "Nayzlatopler Rayon" [Novozlatopol Region] an account of the Sovietized colonies after the Revolution and Civil War.

-- "Destruction of Jewish Tradition under the Soviet Administration" [in process]

-- An article assessing the affect of Sovietization on the destruction of Jewish cultural and religious life with particular reference to the role of the Yevsekzia.

-- Revision lists from colonies Zelenopole and Mezhirech, 1850 and 1858.

-- Memoirs of Grafskoy 1907-1921 by the son of the colony's rabbi. Description of colony life, and reaction to post-Revolution pogroms.

-- Prenumeranten lists from two 1911 books include many residents.

-- A new links page for more information.

Chaim adds that Yakov Pasik's Russian site has been updated with English, photos and maps.

For more information, contact Chaim Freedman.

South Jersey's Jewish genealogists spotlighted

I first met Rabbi Gary Gans back at the Boston IAJGS conference a very long time ago.

He's the First Rabbi of Rabbit World, over at the International Jewish Graveyard Rabbit blog (in fact, I've got to get some of his new posts up there!). His congregation, Beth Tikvah in Marlton, is the meeting place of the South Jersey affiliate of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Philadelphia, and he's also active in DNA genetic genealogy.

So with all these interconnections, Tracing the Tribe was happy to see this story in Jewish Voices, published by the Southern New Jersey Jewish Federation, which covered several South Jersey Jewish genealogists.

For Rabbi Gary Gans of Marlton's Cong. Beth Tikvah, the best week of the year is when the international conference on Jewish genealogy takes place.

"This is one of the most creative weeks, when fellow genealogy addicts end up in the same place. It brings about a great new energy level," said Gans, whose synagogue is the meeting site for the Jewish Genealogical Society's South Jersey affiliate group. The rabbi, a tombstone maven, presided over two well attended workshops on the history of grave markers, focusing on how to decipher Hebrew inscriptions and use them to gain clues valuable in family research.

At the conference, Gans also discovered more contacts and resources to aid his own research. He has already found his great-grandmother's Lithuanian postal bank account in rubles, and noted that with the fall of the Iron Curtain and archives from Eastern Europe resurfacing, there has never been a better time for budding genealogists.

The story noted that conference co-chair David Mink who lived in Cherry Hill (where the paper is published) for more than 30 years before moving to Philly. The area proved important at the conference:

"South Jersey's Jewish agricultural communities are a story that isn't told too often, but this was an opportunity to tell that story," he said. Workshops and panel discussions about the Jewish agricultural colonies were followed by a mid-week bus tour of key sites.

The story covered other researchers from the area, such as David Brill, whose great-great-grandparents settled in the Carmel colony in the early 1880s but later moved to Philadelphia.

"A lot of the Philadelphia Jewish community find they have connections to these Jewish colonies," Brill said. He ran one of the workshops that gave the conference a unique local flavor, and helped lead the bus tour, which stopped at the one-room, circa 1890 Garton Road Shul in Rosenhayn, and visited the Alliance, Carmel and Woodbine colonies.

Ruth Bogutz, also of Cherry Hill, is president of the Tri-County Jewish Historical Society, and the story mentioned Rosenhayn, Jewish community buildings in Camden, Springville and Mount Laurel. Her conference session attracted area residents as well as those who had moved away.

"The dedication of the generations that came before me was quite amazing," said Bogutz, who plans to make a film about the Jewish communities of Burlington, Camden and Gloucester counties.

Mount Laurel resident Steve Schecter, who created the excellent 200-page Philadelphia and New Jersey resource guide for the conference (which he's planning to turn into a book or larger CD), was mentioned as well. He became interested when his mother talked about the old days in South Philadelphia.

"She'd refer to folks as 'boat relatives,' meaning they came over (from Europe) on the same boat. After my mother died and I did more research, I learned that they did come over and band together, but frequently they were related through marriage or were distant cousins," Schecter said.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Germany: Learning to farm in the 1930s

My eyes are always looking for Sullivan County (New York) news, and here's one about a Loch Sheldrake exhibit at Sullivan County Community College. It details the story of the Gross Breesen agricultural training camp.

The exhibit is not your typical Holocaust exhibit, but focuses on the pictures and words of young men and women learning to farm, despite the chaos around them in 1930s Germany. It was created by Dr. Curt Bondy who saw it as a way to counter Nazi oppression, to create a place where young people could learn skills and languages which would allow them to emigrate.

The project gathered the stories and photos of the 130 young men and women who found refuge there.

The farm has been an obsession of Steve Strauss for nine years.

Strauss, a photographer who used to work for "60 Minutes" and now splits his time between New York City and Sullivan County, started the project when he met George Landecker, a farmer from upstate New York who is a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp and a former student at Gross Breesen.

Strauss began to restore and blow up for display Landecker's nearly microscopic photographs of the farm.

The result is "Learning Seeds," a multimedia exhibit, portions of which are on display for the next few weeks at the Sullivan college.

According to Strauss:

"The majority of (the Gross Breeseners) survived the Holocaust and went on to contribute great things all over the world," Strauss said. But he said an accounting of all 130 wasn't possible.After Kristallnacht, the Nazis took over Gross Breesen. They sent all the 18-year-olds to concentration camps and essentially made the farm a prison for the rest. But most had learned the skills to survive.

The exhibit will move to the New Jersey Museum of Agriculture later this year.

Read the complete article here. Learn more about Gross Breesen here.

Canada: Calgary's Montefiore settlers

Calgary marked the 120th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jewish settlers as a crowd of 2,000 viewed the dedication and grand opening of the Little Synagogue on the Prairie, built in 1916 to serve the Montefiore colony of Eastern European Jewish farmers.

Years of research and planning and more than $1-million in donations transformed the synagogue from its former use as a private home in Hanna into the first Jewish house of worship to be housed in a Canadian historic park.

Although the Montefiore settlers had a difficult time farming, they used their resources to build the synagogue to celebrate the freedom of religion they had found in Canada.

Rabbis and representatives from all four Calgary synagogues joined forces in leading prayers.

Read the complete article here.

Ukraine: Jewish agricultural colonies resources

If you have relatives that settled in or founded Jewish agricultural colonies in Southern Ukraine, Chaim Freedman has some excellent resources for you.

Colonies of Ukraine is a JewishGen Shtetlinks site offering much information about the history of Jewish agricultural settlement, mainly in southeastern Ukraine.

Archival material includes revision lists, election voting results, photographs, maps and personal memoirs of colony life, pogroms, war and the Holocaust.

Added this year: Photos of Ekaterinoslav colony synagogues, schools, administrative offices and general scenes from St.Petersburg Central State Archive; click here.

For maps of 1865 colonies, see Yakov Pasik's site, The Guide to Jewish Agricultural Colonies of South Ukraine (software needs to be installed, so make sure you are okay with doing that).

Resources include:

- Zatishye colony - donor list, Hamaggid Hebrew newspaper, 1872
- Translation of names, Dobra colony
- List of Novozlatopol massacre
- Victims of the Holocaust (Russian, Cyrillic and English)
- List of Jews of Vitebsk Guberniya settling in Novozlatopol (Russian, Cyrillic and English)
- Prenumeranten list, 2,000 names in colonies and towns of Yekaterinoslav and Kherson Guberniyas, 'Imrei Shmuel', Part 3, 1912
- Grafskoy revision list, 1858
- Mezherich revision list, 1858

Some material has not yet been translated from Russian; volunteers are welcome. Volunteers are also sought to key in list details so all lists can be included in the JewishGen Ukraine database.

Readers with additional material should contact Chaim Freedman

Argentina: Basavilbaso community site

For 25 years, Yehuda Mathov (Monosson, Israel) has collected information on more than 6,000 residents of the town of Basavilbaso, Argentina, also known as Lucienville. It was established by Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Colonization Association in the 1890s.

The photo above shows immigrants arriving at Buenos Aires port circa 1900.

Mathov has created a new JewishGen ShtetLinks website for the town; view it here.

Many settlers emigrated from Kherson and Bessarabia (southern Ukraine and Moldova). The first South American agricultural cooperative was established in this settlement.

To see names of immigrants in the smaller settlements of the area, click here. These smaller areas were Novabuco, Aquerman, Villa Mantero, Las 1300, Escrinia, Gilbert, Lucienville, Colonia San Juan, Linea and others. This link shows the size of the plot and plot numbers for each person/family.

Under Historical Records, find documents from many sources, including business records, occupations, farm records and censuses, town residents and addresses, abandoned farms. One interesting example lists the assets of a farm back in 1896 and compares it with the much more extensive assets in 1926.

Under Family Stories, find memoirs (PDF format) in English, but mostly in Spanish. The Photo Gallery shows images of people and documents. There is a list of useful links and a bibliography.

Readers with connections to the town are invited to contribute memories and material. Contact Mathov here.

Utah: Clarion's Jewish colony

The Salt Lake City Tribune carried a story about the Clarion Jewish agricultural colony in Utah.

I first learned of Clarion through a colleague at the Henderson Home News in Southern Nevada - her family had lived in Gunnison. Later, I discovered more at sessions on Utah's Jewish history during several international Jewish genealogy conferences held in SLC.

Jessica Ravitz's story includes two sidebars, multimedia, historic and contemporary photographs.

Three miles west of Gunnison in south central Utah, where tumbleweeds roll across several thousand acres of rocky and barren land, 200 unlikely families once arrived to plant dreams. They were new Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, people who, in most cases, had been in America for less than five years.

Leaving crowded city tenements and East Coast sweatshops, factory and peddling jobs behind, they signed up in 1911 to be part of a global experiment.

The back-to-the-soil movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw 40 Jewish agricultural colonies sprout up across America. This happened just as similar projects took root in Canada, Argentina and Ottoman-ruled Palestine, now Israel -- the genesis of the kibbutz movement, communal settlements that flourished in Israel's early years and still exist today.

The man who led the charge for those who journeyed to Utah was Benjamin Brown (nee Lipshitz), a Russian-born ideologue living in Philadelphia who believed this effort would save his people by getting them out of congested environments, diversifying their skills and instilling in them greater self-sufficiency and confidence.

The story has quotes from Brown's daughter Lillian Brown Vogel, now 99 and living in Ukiah, California.

University of Utah history professor Bob Goldberg wrote a book - Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World - about the colony and its struggles.

Four years of irrigation woes, a flood, an early frost, broken-down equipment, bad weather, financial troubles, poor soil and abysmal crops took a toll, causing most everyone to hop trains to cities. Along the way, three had died, including Aaron Binder, a strapping member of the community who was crushed in a logging accident.

Goldberg recently led high school seniors of Utah's largest synagogue, Congregation Kol Ami, to the area to see the remnants: a few headstones in Hebrew, ruins of foundations, etc.

In 1982, while looking at a book about the state's ghost towns, Goldberg discovered Clarion, and he wanted students to see an often overlooked chapter in Jewish and Utah history.

The Clarion colony was part of a final push for these agrarian developments in America. It was the largest in land area, as well as population, and lasted longer than any other settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, Goldberg said. Brown and his scouting partner, Isaac Herbst, had settled on Utah because the land was cheap, the state was hyping the promise of the new Piute Canal, and it was situated near railroad tracks. But, perhaps as important as anything else, Goldberg added that it was also far enough away from the East that it would make giving up and leaving more difficult for farmers.

Most families left in 1915 after the struggles proved too much. Their train tickets were paid for by Jews living SLC. Most went to cities, although a few went to farm elsewhere. The Jewish community tried to help and the history documents the fact that Mormon farmers offered assistance and knowledge. The church even donated $500 to help the Clarion group survive its last winter. The Clarion community utilized only half of the 6,000 acres they purchased.

A few families stayed until the late 1920s, but finally left when they became concerned that their high-school teenagers might marry Mormons.

Bruce Sorenson, 49, understands the intrigue. The local Mormon farmer, reached in his Centerfield home, first spotted the cemetery headstones when he was 16. Ever since then, he's remained fascinated and has taken it upon himself to watch over the grounds. He used to bring flowers to the two gravestones, which are surrounded by small fences to protect them -- until Eileen Hallet Stone, another Salt Lake City historian, told him Jews don't traditionally honor their dead that way. Every now and then, when he thinks of it and even though he admitted he doesn't know what he's doing, Sorenson shows up with candles to light on Hanukkah.

He occasionally spots people wandering around in search of something. visitors have included Brown's daughter Lillian and her son, other colonists' descendants, and even people from Israel. He helps out by showing them where to go, what he knows and asks them to sign his copy of Goldberg's book.

There's much more in the complete article at the link above.