JDC Archive: Finding gold!

Looking for lost relatives? Try the searchable, online archive of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) launched earlier this week. Even more documents will be added during the summer.

Read about the goldmine of records in an NPR story, which mentions the work of volunteer transcribers and how the past president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of New York - Linda Cantor - found a relative.

JDC has made a collection of its historic records and photographs from the Holocaust period available online on its Shared Legacy website. During and after WWII, the organization cared for hundreds of thousands of Jews in many places around the world. JDC supported Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler in Kobe, Japan until 1941, and supported Jewish refugees in Yokohama (1918-20), most fleeing Russia. It supplied free parcels to thousands of Jewish individuals and families in the Soviet Union, 1943-45. And that's only scratching the surface.

JDC was also active in Iran until 1978 or so. It supported schools, an old-age home, kindergartens and the Jewish hospital, particularly in the 1950s and earlier. But this current collection focuses on Holocaust records.

The online database has more than 500,000 names; more will be added. There are some 1,500 photos from 14 countries - readers help in tagging the photos is sought.

Among those receiving assistance from the JDC was number 665 on page 2 of a list of beneficiaries of JDC’s free parcel service in the Soviet Union, 1943-1945:

There is a list of more than 6,300 individuals and families who received these packages. An addendum lists name and address changes for those in the main list. This was an interesting find in their new online archives.

When searching for BANK, my maternal great-grandmother's family near Kovno, my first search brought up a list of 270 names -  but only a few were Bank, many others were Band, Blank and others. There is no provision for "exact" searches.

I tried to go through the many pages, clicking on names to see the birthplaces of individuals in various lists, but when I tried to return to the search results there was often an error page ("There are no results matching your query. SEARCH AGAIN"). Whether this is due to high traffic, I don't yet know. I tried several times, sometimes reaching the list, more often not.

A second try brought up the list again. People were listed as going to Uruguay, Australia, the US and many other locations. I haven't yet found any on the list from around Kovno, but I'll keep looking.

For FINK (my maternal grandfather), there were some 135 results with geographical locations of Shanghai, Israel, Brazil, Australia and more. Some were from Galicia - I was looking for Skalat and Suchostaw and have not found those yet, although I did find Grybow, Lemberg (Lviv) and other towns I knew relatives had lived in, according to JRI-Poland.org.

Tracing the Tribe believes this information may be a goldmine for many researchers. Unfortunately, the search engine is far from ideal. Where is Steve Morse and his One Step programs when we need him?

To search properly through these valuable records, there should be provisions for "sounds like," "begins with," "exact," etc. To avoid going through a list of hundreds of names, it would have been good to put the person's birthplace with his or her name in the list of results. Thus, a search could be narrowed down more usefully. There should be a way to search for birthplace or other geographical locations to narrow down results for a more practical search. There is only one search field - last name or first and last name.

To see what JDC has done in its history, click here for a roundup by decades.

This is a very valuable collection of records but somewhat difficult to negotiate because of the current search engine. So grab yourself a cup of something, and settle down for a long search.

New York City: Jewish walking tour, Sept. 25

James Kaplan will lead a walking tour to important lower Manhattan Jewish sites at 1pm, Saturday, September 25.

The New Rochelle resident - a Wall Street tax and estates lawyer in his real life - has been leading walking tours for some 25 years.

According to Kaplan, "Jewish history in New York is Jewish history in America."

In 2004, he began developing a tour of key Jewish historical sites when he was commissioned to lead a tour for the 350th anniversary of Congregation Shearith Israel, the first Jewish congregation (formed in 1654) in what is now the US.

The tour will track Jewish history from the arrival of 23 desperate Jews from Recife, Brazil in 1654, to the role American Jews played in the establishment of Israel in 1948.

The tour - rain or shine - will take two-to-three hours and cover about two miles, starting at the point where the refugees landed and concluding at the Jewish cemetery on St. James Place.

Kaplan began developing the tour of key Jewish historical sites in 2004, when he was commissioned to lead a tour for the 350th anniversary of Congregation Shearith Israel, the first Jewish congregation (formed in 1654) in what is now the US.

On the tour is today's parking garage, where the refugees first established a synagogue on South Williams Street.

LowerHudson.com covered the story by Gary Stern.

For more details, read the complete story at the link above.

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.