Slovakia: History of Jewish Bratislava-Pressburg-Pozsony

Do you have roots in Bratislava (Pressburg, Pozsony)? A new book may shed light on family history.

A. Robert Neurath, who lived in the city for 31 years has written a soon-to-be-released book about the history of the city: "Bratislava / Pressburg / Pozsony: Jewish Secular Endeavors (1867-1938)" (Xlibris).

It was in Austro Hungary, but is now the capital of Slovakia.

According to the press release:

Unknown to many, Bratislava, presently the capital of Slovakia, used to be in the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, a multi-national city. German, Hungarian and Slovak speaking residents represented the majority of the population, explaining why the city had multiple names – Pressburg, Pozsony, and Bratislava. But it took a long time before the Jewish community in this city was given the same privileges and rights that other religious groups enjoyed. Legal emancipation of Jews was achieved in 1867, after the conversion of the Empire into the Dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Bratislava being in the Hungarian part).

Neurath attempts to tell the story of the emanicipated Jews of Bratislava and their contribution to its economy, culture, education and political life. it begins with architecture providing documents “written in stone,” and continues with arts, sports, politics, business and medicine.

Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, Neurath graduated from the Technical University there in 1957, immigrated to the US in 1964, and received a doctorate in microbiology at the Technical University (Vienna) in 1958.

For more than 45 years he conducted virus research - influenza, rabies, hepatitis B, human immunodeficiency virus I - and on vaccines against them. Neurath authored 250 scientific papers, including monographs and book chapters, and 23 patents.

Following the fall of communisim, he visited Bratislava and read new books about the city's past Jewish community, which he felt did not give enough credit to the secular endeavors and achievements of local Jewish professionals and businessmen prior to WWII. The present book, according to the release, attempts to correct those deficiences by relying on pre-war information and input from family and friends.

For more information, contact Xlibris (888-795-4274), or contact the author for more information.

Florida: The right place, the right time

Historic preservationist Josh Wilks was in the right place at the right time when he saw a suitcase in a trash pile outside the Finkelstein home in Pensacola, Florida.

The owners gave permission for him to take it, and thus began the story of its contents - handwritten trans-Atlantic Holocaust-era correspondence in English and Yiddish - as Wilks, 31, tracked down generations of Fuchs and Finkelsteins.

In the Pensacola News Journal, the story, by Louis Cooper, covers a tragic era, refugees, immigration, Prague, London, a Jewish community's help and more. There are also images of the original letters.

In 1939, Eugene Fuchs and his family, from Prague, wrote to his cousin Katie Finkelstein in Florida, asking for help so that they could come to America because of the worsening situation. Through Finkelstein's years of effort and eventual sponsorship, Fuchs, his wife Ester, and children, Klara — now Claire — and Harry, arrived in America in 1948 and changed their name to Fox.

With the family's permission, Wilks researched the letters and searched for the people mentioned in them - and their descendants, checking records, manifests and cold-calling Fuchses and Foxes around the country.

"I was hit with an overpowering feeling of awe that one person, Katie Finkelstein, a housewife in 1939 Milton, Florida, was trying everything she could to help this family she had never met. She was their only link outside of Europe — to survival — and she knew that."

Wilks found Fuchs' daughter, Claire Perskie, who was 5 when she fled Prague with her mother and brother. All she knew was that they only had her mother's knapsak when they left at night, traveled by train and boat to Holland and England. where they rejoined Fuchs. The little girl was sent to foster care while her parents and brother went to a Czech refugee camp. Meanwhile, they were trying to get to the US.

She had never known how Finkelstein had helped until she saw the letters.

Read the story of how Finkelstein organized a group to help the family, including the Department of State, Temple Beth El, a local attorney and a congressman who was later governor.

Wilks wants the primary source letters to be used to focus the impact of the Holocaust on a local family. He's working with the family, the University of West Florida, the Library of Congress, local historians and others to decide the best way.

Read the complete story and view letter images at the link above.

Holocaust: Czech Jews documentary

Several years ago, when I was still writing "It's All Relative" for the Jerusalem Post, it was my pleasure to meet a young filmmaker and director Lukas Pribyl of Prague.

A detailed story in the Jerusalem Post was the result of our Tel Aviv meetings. Lukas and Jakub shared a Persian dinner at our home. They later traveled to Australia, where my cousins - Bob and Di Conley of Sydney - took good care of them while the young men interviewed more survivors.

Lukas, born in 1973 in Ostrava, was one of the first young Czech students allowed to attend high school and university in the US, following the Velvet Revolution.

He studied at Philips Andover Academy, followed by political science, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and History at Brandeis University, Columbia and Central European University. His interest in World War II and Jewish history resulted in a number of published studies on various chapters of the Holocaust and exhibits in the Jewish Museum in Prague.

Lukas became interested in the Holocaust as a direct result of his own family's experiences (his grandfather survived a little-known camps) and devastation. He spent 10 years researching, photographing and collecting archive material to document exactly what happened to them. It took a long time, but he eventually persuaded almost all the survivors to share their stories. For most of them, it was the first time they had spoken.

The series of four feature-length (90-minute) documentary films on virtually unknown concentration camps and ghettos and little known modes of survival is Lukas's directorial debut.

The four segments have been screened on their own at various venues in the past, but the full six-hour series was shown in its entirety at its US premiere Sunday at the Legacy of Shoah Film Festival (John Jay College, Manhattan). Read Joseph Berger's review of "Survival Tales Told in Snapshots: Czech Jews Enduring the Holocaust" in the New York Times. It details the survivors and how they survived.

The survivors sometimes chuckle as they look back in disbelief. Mr. Pribyl said he felt that survivors had a sense of humor and an optimistic outlook in common. But ultimately, Mr. Pribyl said, his research proved that “the only recipe for survival is to have a lot of goodluck.”

The four segments are "To Poland," To Latvia, To Belarus, and To Estonia.

Two have already won awards: 2008 Academia Film Olomouc - Dějiny a současnost magazine Award for Best Czech Documentary Film in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Forgotten Transports: To Belarus); 2007 Czech Film and Television Association's Trilobit Award for Best Czech Documentary (Forgotten Transports: To Latvia).

He and his team have traveled the world, interviewing the few remaining Czech survivors and hearing their stories.

The segments trace the experiences of 76 of 270 survivors among thousands of Czech Jews deported to rarely-mentioned camps like Jagala and Kaiserwald. The documentary process produced more than 260 hours of interviews, collected in 30 countries. Each tells the story of the people deported to a particular destination, as well as a different method of survival.

Each is based on the experience of Jews sent to virtually unknown camps and ghettos - in Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and the Lublin region of eastern Poland. Almost all of them were sent to places where nearly everyone perished. The locations of Ereda, Maly Trostinec, Salaspils and Sawin don't appear in most Holocaust histories as hardly any people survived to tell what had happened.

Read more about it at the film's website:

It is not just that the tragic events depicted are almost unknown, even to specialist historians. Just as significant is the way they have been recreated. Instead of a detached outsider’s narrative, each film is built from the gripping stories of individual survivors, seen through their own eyes and told entirely in their own words. While they speak only of what they experienced themselves, their impressions weave together to form a poignant picture of ordinary individuals caught up in an era of atrocity and terrible violence. Every detail of what they describe is illustrated and confirmed through contemporary photographs and other visual material, most of it previously unseen, meticulously sourced everywhere from official archives to the garages of former SS men.

The films illuminate a neglected chapter of the Holocaust, as well as spotlight the tactics adopted by people who suffered such persecution and terror. Importantly, those who survived relied on many strategies including self-reliance, family loyalty and solidarity.

According to the website, it is thrilling to hear a handful of elderly survivors - who defied all Nazi attempts to kill them - who still tell their stories. It also reveals much about the sheer lust for life of human beings everywhere.

Check your local film festivals and other venues to see if the segments or the entire series will be screened.

Australia: Jewish genealogy conference, March 7-9

The weather in Melbourne couldn't be better, sunny and breezy. Tracing the Tribe is blogging away and getting ready to speak at the second Australian National Conference on Jewish Genealogy, March 7-9.

The Australian Jewish News reported on the conference in a story on February 22.

The story focused on Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem who will also speak at the conference and describe his search for long-lost relatives in Australia.

Rotem, 50, was posted to Canberra in 2007; he spoke at the first conference in 2008, which the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society held in that city. The embassy hosted a reception for attendees at the conference.

Lionel Sharpe, secretary of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society (Victoria) said in the story that the conference theme is "Our Jewish Roots," and that it will look at ways that genealogists - from beginners to experts - can use today's resources most effectively.

One important point that Lionel stressed is that there are so many new sites appearing and more archives are becoming accessible. Many experienced genealogists did a lot of work decades ago and couldn't find anything then, but they are not aware of the new sources.

He says that the conference will recommend that researchers start looking again, but through different glasses.

Dr. Sallyann Amdur Sack-Pikus and myself are among the international speakers.

Other speakers include:

Writer-lecturer Arnold Zable (media as a resource for finding family); researcher Krystyna Duszniak (locating relatives in Poland); journalist-filmmaker Daniela Torsh (genealogy in the Czech Republic and Austria); Holocaust researcher Jenni Buch (Belarus); and Gary Luke (Australian Jewish colonial period.

Tracing the Tribe is very excited to be here and to take part in this event.

New York: Jewish Film Festival, Jan. 13-28

The 19th New York Jewish Film Festival will run January 13-28, sponsored by The Jewish Museum and The Film Society of Lincoln Center.

NYBlueprint.com offered details.

The Jewish Museum and The Film Society of Lincoln Center will present the 19th annual New York Jewish Film Festival at The Film Society’s Walter Reade Theater, The Jewish Museum, and The JCC in Manhattan, January 13-28, 2010.

The festival’s 32 features and shorts from 13 countries—28 screening in their U.S. or New York premieres—present a diverse global perspective on the Jewish experience. Several filmmakers and special guests will join in onstage discussions following the screenings.

Films include the New York premiere of Lukás Pribyl’s “Forgotten Transports: To Poland,“ which looks into the lives of Czech Jews deported by the Nazis to camps and ghettos in Eastern Poland’s Lublin region during the Holocaust. I've known Lukás since he came to Israel to interview and film survivors.

There will also be two restored archival films: (1947) "The Axe Of Wandsbek," (1935) Yiddish classic "Bar Mitzvah," with Boris Thomashefsky in his only film performance. The other films and documentaries:

"Saviors in the Night"
"Within the Whirlwind"
"Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades"
"The Jazz Baroness"
"Mary and Max,"
"Ajami"
"Eyes Wide Open"
"Ultimatum"
"Valentina's Mother"
"Protector"
"Berlin '36"
"Gruber’s Journey"
"Happy End."
"Gevald!"
"Chronicle of a Kidnap"
"Ahead of Time"
"Making the Crooked Straight"
"Human Failure"
"Leap Of Faith"
"Leon Blum: For All Mankind"
"A History of Israeli Cinema"
"Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness"
"The Peretzniks"

For details on each film or documentary, tickets and all festival information, click here.

Most screenings will be at the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, with other screenings at The Jewish Museum (5th and 92nd St.) and the JCC in Manhattan (Amsterdam at W. 76th St.). Single tickets are $11; seniors, $8; Film Society and Museum members and students, $7.

Leaving Prague: Retracing her steps

In 1938, Sudetenland was occupied by Hitler's troops. On the border with Czechoslovakia, thousands were driven from their homes. In other countries, "kindertransports" were organized to save Jewish children by sending them out of central Europe, but no plan had been created in Czechoslovakia.

Two months later, a young British stockbroker - today Sir Nicholas Winton - was planning to go skiing in Switzerland when he received a phone call from a Westminster School teacher Martin Blake, also an ambassador for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. Blake asked Winton to make an emergency visit to Prague.

After visiting refugee camps outside Prague, Winton realised he had to act quickly.

"I found out the children of refugees and other groups of people who were enemies of Hitler weren't being looked after. I decided to try to get permits to Britain for them.

"Everybody in Prague said, 'Look, there is no organisation in Prague to deal with refugee children, nobody will let the children go on their own, but if you want to have a go, have a go'.

"And I think there is nothing that can't be done if it is fundamentally reasonable."

Winton recruited a team to organize a series of trains, while he returned to the UK to find homes for the children.

From March-August 1939, eight trains saved 669 children. The last train, with 250 on board, was to leave September 1 - the day the war began. German troops stopped the train, the children and families left behind were deported to concentration camps.

Born Lisa Dasch, Lisa Midwinter was 3 when she traveled to England with her brother. They were born in Teplice, near the German border to a wealthy family who were vacationing when they received word not to go home but to go to Prague. Of the journey to the UK, she says:

"I remember this great big black object as high as you could see. I remember figures in blue, which must have been the train driver, singing and handkerchiefs, and terrific noise.

"I remember handkerchiefs being waved and crying, and seeing grown-ups crying."

At the end of the journey, Ms Midwinter said she felt "totally desolate with a card on the front of me".

"I remember this feeling of being all alone in a totally foreign place."

The story describes how Midwinter, a Londoner, is preparing for a trip back into her past. The four-day journey with her son and granddaughter will retrace her childhood experience and to meet the man who saved her.

Her first home was with a dentist's family in Manchester but they could not cope with the traumatized child, who was taken in by a friend of her mother's. Fortunately, Midwinter's story ended happily as her parents made it out and settled in Stoke-on-Trent, and also served as surrogate parents for many Czech children.

More than 100 people will join with Midwinter on the trip between Prague and London; 20 of them are Winton's "children," with their own children and grandchildren.

Midwinter is determined that her family should understand how much they owe to Sir Nicholas, and gain a glimpse of the agony faced by Czech parents who knew they were seeing their children for the last time.

But above all that they should understand they are part of an extraordinary worldwide family which owes its existence to the man who, at the age of 100, will once again stand on the platform at Liverpool Street to welcome them.

Read the complete story here. And for much more about Winton (Thanks, Judith!), click here. That article reveals that "Winton was born to Jewish parents that converted and baptized him."

Guidelines: Preserving historic Jewish property

Sam Gruber's Jewish Art Monuments blog is always interesting. On June 10, he published the final statement of Principles and Procedures of the Bratislava Seminar (March 17-19, 2009), covering care, conservation and maintenance of historic Jewish property. Immediately after the event, he posted a review.

Sam has been president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments (ISJM) since 1997, and on the board of the Preservation Association of Central New York (PACNY) since 1996.

The conference was organized by IJSM, the Joint Distribution Committee and the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center and sponsored by the World Monuments Fund, the Rothschild Foundation (Europe), the Cahnman Foundation and the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Sam served as co-chair of the event.

The final statement has implications for all countries and Jewish communities concerned with historic Jewish property.

Seminar on Care, Conservation and Maintenance of Historic Jewish Property
Bratislava, March 17-19, 2009
Final Statement Adopted By Participants

The participants in the Seminar “Care, Conservation and Maintenance of Historic Jewish Property,” meeting in Bratislava March 17-19, 2009, agree on the following principles and procedures which guide their work.

Introduction

The ongoing struggle for property and resource restitution has often overshadowed the practical issues of how to manage community properties already held, or those returned.

Proper care of these properties; often involving substantial costs, difficult planning and use issues, and demanding historical and architectural preservation concerns, have preoccupied many Jewish communities for years. In many cases, and especially for smaller Communities, the needs of these properties continue to stretch professional and financial resources. Everyday community needs often delay or prevent the attention that properties require.

Each Jewish community faces its own specific situations, and has unique needs, but there are many shared problems and needs that can be addressed collectively. Importantly, there are also solutions - many of which have been pioneered by Communities themselves - that can be shared,
too.

Jewish Properties and Jewish Heritage

Jewish heritage is the legacy of all aspects of Jewish history – religious and secular.

Jewish history and art is part of every nation’s history and art. Jewish heritage is part of national heritage, too.

Documentation, planning and development of sites benefit and enrich society at large as well as Jews and Jewish communities.

Jewish historic sites and properties should also be developed where possible within the context of diverse histories – Jewish, local, national, art, etc.

Jewish tourism and tourism to Jewish sites should be part of every country’s tourism strategy.

Inventories and Documentation

All past and present Jewish communal properties, and all Jewish properties and sites deemed to have historic, religious and/or artistic significance, should be documented to the fullest extent possible.

Inventories must be made and maintained of all properties in each country, and more substantial documentation should be made of historically and architecturally significant properties, especially all synagogues, institutional buildings, cemeteries, monuments, and Judaica and archival materials.

Jewish communities and institutions should cooperate and collaborate in this process to the fullest extent possible, and should welcome the assistance of other public and private institutions and individuals in pursuing these documentation goals.

Information on Jewish sites is most useful when it is most widely available. Efforts should continue and expand to make documentation available in publicly accessible research centers and through publications and on-line presentation, all the while considering safety, security and privacy concerns.

Materials relevant to Jewish history and properties in public, state archives and Jewish community archives should be open for everyone for historical and legal research.

Good documentation must be accurate and complete in its description, and it must be historically informed so that it presents something of the significance of what is recorded.

Synagogues and Former Synagogues

Synagogue and former synagogues should retain a Jewish identity and or use whenever possible, though each one does not necessarily need to be restored or fully renovated.

Former synagogues, no matter what their present ownership or use, should be sensitively marked to identify their past history.

As part of the effort to restitute communal and religious property, when a property of historic value - such as a synagogue - in disrepair or otherwise in a ruined condition (while in the government's possession) is returned, States should help either by modifying laws which impose penalties for not maintaining properties in reasonable condition, or by providing financial and material assistance to undertake necessary repairs and restoration.

Cooperation and Trust

Honesty and transparency are Jewish values and should be especially apparent in the handling of all matters concerning Jewish property, which is held as a communal trust.

Jewish communities should manage their properties to maximize their use for present and future generations.

Jewish communities and institutions should work together as much as possible to share existing information, methodologies and technologies, and they should work together to develop new and compatible goals and strategies to optimize the care and management of historic Jewish properties.

Regular meetings of Jewish community leaders, members, staff and expert professionals to discuss property issues is encouraged within single communities, and between communities. Regional, national and trans-border meeting are useful for the exchange of information and ideas, and for effective planning purposes.

Any sale or development of communal property must be to meet identified community needs.

Wherever possible, proceeds from the sale or development of some properties should be allocated to the care and maintenance of other properties including, but not exclusively, cemeteries.

Jewish communities and museums should work together to develop historic, descriptive and exhibition materials that can be shared.

Jewish communities and local heritage, cultural and tourist bodies should work together to develop regional, national and trans-border heritage routes.

This final statement was well-developed and should be widely disseminated.

JewishGen: New ShtetLinks added

The following new pages have been added to JewishGen's ShtetLinks. These pages create memorials to those Jewish communities that once lived there and provide a valuable resource for future generations.

Some are new (N), some updated (U) and some newly adopted (A). Do check them out for valuable information.

ARGENTINA

Basavilbaso (Lucienville) (N)

HUNGARY

Hodmezovasarhely (N)

Tiszalok(N)

Ujfeherto (Ratzfert) (N)

SLOVAKIA

Michalovce (Nagymihaly) (N)

CZECH REPUBLIC

Mikulov (Nikolsburg) (A)

CHINA

Harbin (U)

For more information on either starting a page or adopting an orphan page, email ShtetLinks to reach JewishGen ShtetLinks vice president Susana Leistner Bloch or ShtetLinks technical coordinator Barbara Ellman.

Television: House of Life, Prague

If you are in the US, do watch out for the screening of "House of Life: The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague." Reports indicate that various PBS stations are scheduling it this week, so check your local listings.

Narrated by Claire Bloom, the documentary tells the story - layer by layer - of The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, which attracts nearly 700,000 international visitors each year.

It chronicles history, including lore, mysticism, tradition, philosopy, great rabbis and philanthropists, and even the Golem.

The 12,000 stones on the surface of The Old Jewish Cemetery may be covering as many as 100,000 members of Prague's historic Jewish community.

During World War II, it was the only place where Jewish children were allowed to play. When the country was under communist rule, lovers used it as a meeting place.

The cemetery serves, as does the film, as a reminder of the indomitable spirit of a people compelled to honor their past and preserve the lessons of history.

Massachusetts: Remembering Dvur Kralove

A Boston suburb synagogue that has held a Czech Torah scroll for 30 years, will hold a memorial to honor 123 Jews of Dvur Kralove who died in Auschwitz-Berkenau. Only recently - thanks to an Internet search - have the names of those souls been recovered.

On April 27, Temple Emanuel in Newton will unveil the names on a Wall of Remembrance, according to this Boston Globe story. To see the names, click here.

Alan Edelstein, 82, chairs the congregation's Holocaust memorial committee and it was his personal journey that led him to the Drur Kralove community.

For 30 years, Edelstein has walked by the Torah, encased in glass, in the synagogue’s lobby. And while he said he felt relief that the Torah escaped Nazi harm, something else pulled at him: Who were the individuals who once read from its scrolls, which contain the Five Books of Moses?

‘‘Walking by it, I felt something was missing, not fulfilling the Torah’s place in our community,’’ said Edelstein, 82, of Waban.

Three years, he embarked on a mission to find the names of those who belonged to the synagogue, where the Torah was once used. His motivation was not personal - he's a second-generation Bostonian - but for Jewish continuity. Edelstein and his wife funded the memorial.

On April 27, the synagogue's youth will read the names of 123 Jews from the town who perished in Auschwitz.

Wayne Goldstein, the director of informal youth education at the synagogue, said the memorial service is meant to ‘‘connect the generations.’’

‘‘The kids pass by [the Torah] every day. They don’t stop and look. Now, we hope there will be real resonance with them,’’ he said.

The Zachor (remember, Hebrew) memorial will list the names, their place of death and their age.

Edelstein's chase began by calling the Czech Embassy three years ago with few results. Then he went to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, with not much more. He sent emails to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

‘‘I got nowhere fast,’’ said Edelstein. The names of Jewish victims from the town remained a mystery.

An online search connected him to Rabbi Emeritus Norman Patz of Temple Sholom of West Essex, in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, whose congregation also has a Dvur Kralove Torah.

Patz and his wife Naomi published a monograph ‘‘Thus We Remember, ’’ which tells the story of the Dvur Kralove Jews and lists their names.

The rabbi also teaches post-Holocaust thought at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. He said said Edelstein’s efforts to personalize a Holocaust relic is part of a larger trend in World War II commemorations.

‘‘In the early years, people talked about the huge numbers, the 6 million,’’ said Patz, in an interview from his home in North Caldwell, N.J. ‘‘But there were no names. Today, the development has been in the direction of telling personal stories with people’s names.’’

In 1942, says Susan Boyer, the US director of the London-based Memorial Scrolls Trust, the Czech Jews organized a rescue effort to save the Torahs. The Trust distributes Czech Torahs to institutions through the world.

Fifty Czech Torahs are in Massachusetts, and more than 1,000 in the US, including one at the White House. The organization lends these scrolls on a long-term loan for a donation of 2,500 British pounds. The scrolls must be used at least once a year according to the conditions set. Boyer says they are more than scrolls, they are witnesses to history.

In 1942, one year after the Nazis began mass deportations of Jews from Czechoslovakia, curators at Prague’s Jewish Museum proposed a plan to the Nazis with the hope of preserving Jewish ritual objects from destruction. The Nazis agreed to the plan, although no one knows why, since the Nazi policy was Jewish annihilation.

The result was a substantial collection held at the museum and at more than 40 warehouses around Prague of about 100,000 liturgical items. Among them were five Dvur Kralove Torahs. They remained in Czechoslovakia until 1964, when an art dealer from London orchestrated the purchase en masse of 1,564 Holocaust Torahs from the Communist government of Czechoslovakia.

Drur Kralove's community dates to 1838. Its synagogue was established in 1890 and, by the 1930s, there were 182 Jews within the town's greater population of 16,545.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Holocaust Remembrance: Human faces of tragedy

This year's stories - published in connection with Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 - touched on survivors in many countries and their stories.

Here are just three: A Connecticut resident who returned to his German hometown and saw how the citizens had restored the synagogue and cemetery, a Texas writer recounting her trip to Terezin with a Holocaust survivor, and two Kindertransport children revealing their stories.

Returning to Wetter

From The Connecticut Post, by managing editor Michael J. Daly

Bridgeport resident Harry Weichsel, 75, recounts his harrowing escape from Nazi Germany as a boy, and his decision to return 16 years ago to Wetter, Germany, where his nightmare had begun. The story focuses on his 5-day November trip to the small town (some 9,000 residents), to a restoration of the old synagogue, a Jewish museum, a restored Jewish cemetery.

This most recent chapter in Harry's odyssey started 16 years ago when he decided to act on his longing to reconcile his own past and present, and a longing, as he put it, "to validate my faith in the intrinsic goodness of man."

In 1992, Harry and daughter Donna flew to Wetter to find people who remembered his mother and grandparents. They met the then-mayor Dieter Rincke, and over the next few years, Harry proposed reclaiming the old synagogue building, making it a place where people could come together, and where they could learn about the town's Jewish heritage.

Ultimately, the town embraced the idea. They secured the building in 2005 and began work. "It's amazing what these people did," Harry said the other day. "You can imagine what the politics might have been. 'Why are we digging all this stuff up from the past?' " he said. "But you know," he said, "the Germans of today are not responsible for the actions of generations before them. These families got together and said we should not deny history, but they made the statement that we are a new generation. We're not going to carry the anger and the guilt forward."

The story caught the eye of an ex-pat American in Barcelona, Micah Brandt, a documentary filmmaker. A portion of his film, "Robbery of the Heart," is online and documents the trip. The group of 10 toured Wetter and a nearby university town, Marburg.

At one point, the current mayor Kai-Uwe Spanka called Harry aside.

"He was crying," Harry said, "and I said 'What's wrong?' and he told me that the Jewish cemetery had been desecrated over night."

Two young men were arrested a few days later. Harry calls it the work of a couple of pathetic losers, and that what stays with him is what the true people of Wetter did.

"It shows what one person, or one little town in this case, can do to set a tone for a larger world in terms of reaching out and celebrating our shared humanity. Harry gave a speech the night before they left. "What did you say?" I asked. He looked at me and said, "I said exactly what I told you I was going to say. I said, 'When people ask me where I'm from, I've told them I'm from Bridgeport. But now, I'm so proud to tell them I'm from Wetter in Hessen in Germany.' "

Visiting Terezin with a survivor

From the Austin (Texas) Statesman, a Terezin travel story, by Becca Hensley, who says that some holidays teach unexpected life lessons.

The door slams shut in the van, encapsulating our small group of strangers in a weighted silence. Outside on the streets, a cold wind blows and the early morning sun casts an orange light on the eerily beautiful buildings of the Jewish Quarter.

The small, baseball cap bedecked man in the front seat turns to us solemnly and looks us each in the eye, as if gaining our unspoken permission — as if to say: "Are you ready for this?" Instead, he introduces himself: "Hello, My name is Pavel Stransky — and I am a survivor."

Nobody says a word. To answer seems somehow inadequate. We wait and slowly the van moves along the ancient streets of the Jewish Quarter, crosses a bridge that spans the Vltava River and continues to the edge of the castle district. We're heading to Terezin, a place of suffering, a former concentration camp 40 miles from the city.

In Prague, Wittman Tours offers intimate tours of the city and its environs. For Terezin tour, Holocaust survivors are the guides. Along the way, Stransky tells stories.

"Some people said that Terezin was not a concentration camp," he says, wistful, shaking his head and looking out the window at the passing landscape. "But for the old, the very young, the sick, it was a place of extermination." Indeed.

They visit a gallery filled with art created by the inhabitants, which says more than words. He tells his story and those of others, as they visit the Ghetto Museum, railway, crematorium, underground factory, a hidden prayer room and other locations.

Most amazing, is Stransky's infectious joy and wit, his sense of humor amid the gloom. "My testimony is my gratitude for my survival," he says. "I am a messenger." He makes a true connection with my children, who are enthralled. My daughter confides in me that she wants to give him a hug and hold his hand. He's vulnerable, but strong — and she knows it. Spritelike, he leans over both of the kids, looking into their eyes soulfully — he transmits history to them. This is one of the best — and most difficult — days of our lives.

The story includes travel and hotel details for readers planning their own visits.

The Ultimate Sacrifice

In the Coventry Telegraph (UK), a story by Cara Simpson about the remembrance ceremony held in that town, focusing on twins Susi and Lotte Bechofer who, at age 3, and Gerda Lewin Kerr, who arrived at age 7, both on Kindertransport.

Their mother was aware she might never see them again, but she also knew it was the only way of saving them from the persecution of the Nazis.

Susi, who now lives in Rugby, was one of 10,000 young war refugees taken out of Germany just before the Second World War on what became known as Kindertransport.

It probably saved them the horror of the Nazi death camps.

Adopted by a childless Welsh Baptist minister and his wife, near Cardiff, their identity was stripped away.

Susi became Grace and Lotte became Eunice. They were told never to ask about their past. The twins were brought up as Christians, never knowing of their Jewish ancestry and that their mother had perished at Auschwitz.

Lotte fell severely ill with a brain tumour and she was to die at the age of 35. Susi suffered years of cruelty at the hands of her foster father.

Susi, now in her 70s, first came across her real identity as she entered an exam room to take her O-levels and was told to sit in the B section – B for Bechhofer.

Only in her 50s, did Susi finally discover the truth: her mother, Rosa Bechhofer, was unmarried; her father, Otto Hald, was a Nazi soldier.

Inspired after hearing a radio program about Kindertransport, Susi (a psychotherapist) found relatives in New York whom she later visited.

“I think my mother stood up to hatred the day she put both me and my sister on to the Kindertransport,” she said. “Knowing what she did makes me respect her even more because it takes a lot of courage to stand up to hatred and there’s a real need for it today.

“It’s thanks to people like my mother who made the ultimate sacrifice of sending their children away that the story is still being told.”

Susi wrote a 1996 book titled Rosa’s Child.

Recalling her early years, Susi said: “Those who grow up with loving families cannot understand what it is like to grow up without a single relative in the world.

“I had become more and more lost as the years went by. I was depressed and it was becoming increasingly difficult to mobilise myself. My life became quite dark and gloomy.

“It really was like a fairy-story to find my family.

“The clouds have lifted and I do feel wonderful after all that pain.”

The Coventry event was the first time Gerda Kerr, 76, had gathered with other survivors. She was 7 when she fled Germany on Kindertransport.

The grandmother-of-three said: “I’m quite apprehensive really as I’ve never been to anything like it before and there are people who have experienced it all first hand, whereas my only experience is that I had to leave my homeland.

“I was lucky, very lucky indeed. I may have been young but I have a good memory. I was old enough to know what was going on and how devastating it was.

“I just hope history doesn’t repeat itself although hatred is happening all around us today.”

Read the complete stories at the links above.

Prague's Jewish treasures

Prague and environs are the focus of this Los Angeles Jewish Journal story on Jewish sights in the Czech Republic.

The Czech Republic's strong cultural balance between bustling urban life and calm rural communities features a wide variety of tourism options, from breweries to castles to Jewish ghettos. Major cities like Prague and Pilsen are ripe with history at nearly every corner, and Jewish tours offer everything from the construction of the second-largest synagogue in Europe to the creation of the mythical Golem.

Birthplace of Theodore Herzl, Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud, this increasingly progressive country is trying to shed the specter of the Nazi and Soviet occupations and embrace its Jewish past and present to bolster tourism, an important part of its national economy.

The story touches on Prague's Jewish Museum, its Jewish Quarter, the Old Jewish Cemetery with some stones more than six centuries old; famous synagogues (Maisel Synagogue, Spanish Synagogue, Klausen Synagogue and Ceremonial Hall and Pinkas Synagogue) and their artifacts.

More than a half-million tourists visit the museum annually. The revenue aids the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Czech Republic, which compensates Holocaust survivors and develops programming for young people. Two active synagogues (Alt-Neu Shul and the High Synagogue) are not on the tour, but visits can be arranged through the museum.

The Alt-Neu Shul's fame, of course, is tht Rabbi Judah Loew is rumored to have created the Golem there in the 16th century.

In Bohemia, visit Europe's second-largest synagogue, The Great Synagogue of Pilsen, built in 1892, when there were some 5,000 Jews in the city. Pilsen is also branded as the beer-drinking capital of the world.

A visit to Moravia demonstrates the smaller Jewish communities, such as the Jewish Quarter of Trebic, a UNESCO World Heritage site, with 120 homes along the bank of the Jihlava River. Although no organized Jewish community exists today, the town maintains the Jewish cemetery, a renovated synagogue-turned-museum and a recently discovered mikvah.

In Boskovice and Mikulov, non-Jewish villagers preserve the memory of Jewish cultures, with tours of old synagogues, buildings and cemeteries. One of the largest Czech cemeteries is in Boskovice.

Terezin, the former concentration camp and memorial, is also on the itinerary.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Montreal: Czech Mate, Sept. 25

The next meeting of the JGS of Montreal, Quebec, Canada will feature Thomas O. Hecht, who will present "Czech Mate - A Life in Progress," and speak on his biography and his family's genealogy.

Born in Czechoslovakia, he escaped from Europe during World War II, and arrived in Canada in 1942.

The meeting, in conjunction with the Jewish Public Library, is at 7.30pm Thursday, September 25, at the Gelber Conference Center, 5151 Cote Ste-Catherine Rd.

The JGS of Montreal also offers Sunday morning Family Tree workshops. For more information, click here or call the JGS 24-hour hotline, 514-484-0969.

New York: Sleuthing for roots

Psychologist Gayle Berg of Roslyn Heights (Long Island, NY) says people 45 and older have reached a stage called "generativity" which drives them to reassess their lives and to become concerned about passing on culture, values and history to the next generation, adding that younger people don't feel this "inner need" to delve into the past.

While I disagree with this - I see an increasing trend among younger people to research their families with some 30-somethings as major contributors - this Newsday story (Sleuthing for roots: Seniors explore genealogy), by Cara S. Trager, focuses on an older group of researchers.

Spotlighted, among others, are Renee Steinig, former president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Long Island and the well-known John Martino of the Italian Genealogy Group.

The web and its myriad resources has encouraged people to connect their ancestral dots. On Long Island, it means one doesn't have to trek into the city (Manhattan) to turn endless rolls of microfilm or go overseas to search dusty archives. As Renee Steinig says in the story, today's technology means researchers can now do genealogy in their pajamas. However, researchers need to be prepared for what they find - research usually raises as many questions as it answers.

There's the story of the mission of Rosemarie Courbois, raised Catholic, who has found relatives in Scotland and Ireland, but has learned about Jewish family members from her great-grandfather's town in the former Czechoslovakia. The mother's maiden name was Schwager; they perished in the Holocaust.

Steinig, 61, began her obsession with her roots more than 30 years ago - when a cousin in Israel sent her a family tree based on her father's side of the family.

"I decided to invest in creating the equivalent for my mother's side," said the Dix Hills resident, who went professional about a decade ago with the research skills she had honed as a hobbyist. The Holocaust plays an important part in my desire to memorialize family members who perished in the camps."

Your fingers do the walking

Years ago, Steinig said, her genealogical research required her to make frequent treks into the city - to the National Archives, the Municipal Archives, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the New York Public Library. In addition, she made about a dozen journeys to Washington, D.C., to the National Archives and the Library of Congress and at least three trips to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, in Israel.

Attendees at the 2006 International Jewish Genealogy Conference in New York were fortunate to hear John Martino speak. Since 2000, his group's 500 members have created an online index of more than 12 million pages of military discharge, naturalization and vital records - some dating to 1848 - in New York and New Jersey.

"You still need to write or go to the repository to get the original document," said Martino, who spends at least eight hours a day hunkered over the computer in his basement, scanning and downloading indexes for Web-accessibility. "But, eight years ago, if you wrote Nassau County for a record, it would take six to eight weeks to get it. Now, with the index, which we've also given to the county, it takes a week to get the document in the mail."

The story does, of course, mention that not everything is online ... yet. There are a host of possible problems that necessitate checking original documents and materials that may never be online.

Other topics addressed are DNA, family secrets, working with professional genealogists, as well as a shortlist of some online sites.

The complete article is at the link above.

Texas: Czech Holocaust Torah lives on

Jan Meisels Allen of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Conejo Valley (California), Ventura and environs provided this tip about Holocaust Torahs in Texas.

Nearly 40 years ago, Beth-El Congregation obtained a Torah — a parchment scroll containing the first five books of the Bible — that survived the Holocaust, although most of the Czech Jews who treasured it did not.

Beth-El, in Fort Worth, Texas, recently installed an exhibit paying tribute to the scroll's poignant history.

The Torah, from a small farming community called Uhrineves in Czechoslovakia, is one of 1,564 such scrolls seized by Nazis as they deported Czech Jews to concentration camps and death camps.

Rabbi Ralph Mecklenburger read from the Torah on September 22 - Yom Kippur. It is not a museum piece, he said, but used from time to time and is kept in the Ark with the congregation's four additional Torah scrolls.

The exhibit includes a congregant-created needlepoint mantle placed on a representation, and Jewish-owned belongings smuggled out of Czechoslovakia or entrusted to neighbors and retrieved following WWII.

The accompanying history of Uhrineves was the idea of Beth-El's archivist Hollace Weiner, who visited the town with her husband five years ago. She also visited London's Czech Memorial Scrolls Centre in May, where staffers asked whether Beth-El knew the history of the community. Weiner said no.

Said Weiner, "They gently prodded me to figuratively take the Torah out of the closet — or the ark — and make its history and its people come back to life."

In 1939, the Nazis closed the synagogue. On Sept. 12, 1942 — the first day of Rosh Hashanah — most of the 392 Jews living in Uhrineves and environs were deported to Terezinstadt, and most perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and other camps. Only 14 Urhineves Jews lived.

As part of a museum project envisioned by Hitler, many scrolls were stored in a synagogue near Prague, catalogued by Prague Jewish Museum staffers who later perished. Post-war, the scrolls were forgotten, deteriorating in poor environmental conditions, until 1963, when a British art dealer learned about them. A benefactor paid and brought them to London.

Read more here.

Online gravestone inscriptions: Frankfurt, Prague

Logan J. Kleinwaks of Virginia is one of Jewish genealogy's rising stars. He's involved in OCR (optical recognition technology), as well as Holocaust issues, and has developed several websites, such as ShoahConnect.

He is also great at locating interesting and useful items for Jewish genealogists. Here are late 19th century and early 20th century gravestone inscriptions from Frankfurt am Main and Prague in two volumes he discovered through Google Books.

Caution: These links will show a "download" or "read this book" button in the US, but perhaps not in all countries. In the past, there were some books he recommended but I could not download them in Israel because of certain copyright issues. In this case, I could not access the Frankfurt book, but was able to download the Prague book.

FRANKFURT, GERMANY

Rabbi Marcus Horovitz's 1901 Die Inschriften des alten Friedhofs der israelitischen Gemeinde zu Frankfurt a. M., containing thousands of gravestone inscriptions from Frankfurt, is viewable here.

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

Gal-Ed. Grabsteininschriften des prager isr. alten Friedhofs mit biographischen Notizen, ed. Koppelmann/Kalman Lieben (M. J. Landau, Prague, 1856), containing gravestone inscriptions from Prague, is viewable here.

Although the name lists and text are in German Gothic, with inscriptions in Hebrew, it wasn't difficult to decipher the names.

For more on Kleinwaks, read this recent posting:

Prague: History uncovered

From the Prague Post comes a story focusing on the Israeli government list of account holders made public in 2005.

Active in Holocaust-era restitution and claims, Tomas Jelinek of Prague found family among the names listed.

His great-grandfather Adolf Krokauer, his wife and four children were expelled from their home in Teplice in 1938. He arrived in Prague and began making plans to leave, deposited funds in a foreign bank.

“At that time it was still OK for Czech Jews to leave,” Jelínek says. “He was trying to get his family to Palestine.”

In 1941, the family was rounded up before they could move and taken to the Lodz Ghetto where five perished. Jelinek's grandmother was the only survivor. Today, Margarete Jansky, 86, lives in Vienna. At the time, she was married and the couple were sent to Terezinstadt and then to Auschwitz.

Although eligible to make a claim, "she must endure the wearisome process involved in most restitution cases, each of which is decided on an individual basis."

Says Jelinek, she knows about the claim but cannot fill out the forms; she is already too old. He plans to submit a claim for her.

Read more here.