Los Angeles: Yiddish theatre, music, Dec. 7

The JGS of Los Angeles will present a program on the influence of Yiddish theatre and music on American culture by Cantor Hale Porter, at 1.30pm, Sunday, December 7, at the Milken JCC in West Hills.

The modern Yiddish theatre came into being in Romania in 1876. Its goal was to convey middle-class Western European standards of education and enlightenment to “uneducated” Jews. In this sense, the Yiddish stage was designed as an institution for and by Jews, but when it moved to the Lower East Side of New York City it also became a venue for cultural exchange between Jews and non-Jews. The Yiddish theater district -- centered on Manhattan’s Second Avenue -- was home to dozens of Yiddish theater troupes, theatrical establish-ments and vaudeville houses, and the stage was the main cultural institution of the immigrant Jewish community.

JGSLA board member Hale Porter has spent a lifetime in and around Yiddish theater and radio, working as an entertainer in the Catskills and on Second Avenue. He'll offer music, laughs, film clips and more, explaining how Yiddish theater, radio and music have influenced American culture.

Members, free; others, $5. For more details, click here

Seattle: Digital imagery tips, Dec. 8

While we may be daunted by new technology, there are always people out there to help us out with the tips and tricks of using these innovative features.

The next program of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Washington State (JGSWS) will feature Sally Mizroch on "Tips and Tricks on Digital Imagery for Genealogy," at 7pm, Monday, December 8.

The JGSWS meets at the Stroum JCC on Mercer Island. Admission for JGSWS members, free; others, $5. WiFi is available (bring your laptops).

The digital revolution is in full swing and there are many, many ways to digitize old photos, records, and other genealogical data. This program will present a comprehensive overview of digitizing methods and photo editing software. You’ll learn about clever ways to label your digital images that integrate well with websites such as Google Earth and Flickr. You'll also learn how to use hardware and software that allow you to georeference your images. Digital beginners and experts are welcome.

Sally began exploring her Litvak family genealogy in summer 2003, when she answered a posting on the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF) for information about her grandmother, Sarah Mizroch. Since then, she has discovered and visited cousins all over the world.

She has used web-based databases and visited archives in Lithuania and South Africa in search of information about her ancestors. Sally’s genealogical research focuses not only on the “where and when” facts of her ancestors, but also on the professions, distribution and movements of relatives in the old country to recreate the lost Eastern-European-based culture.

A marine biologist, Sally studies large whale populations at NOAA Fisheries National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, using both photo-identification and historical whaling data to estimate whale life history parameters, vital rates, distribution, and abundance.

The first time I met Sally in Seattle, she showed me a whale family tree!

For more information, click on the link above.

Museum of Family History: New material

Museum of Family History founder Steve Lasky's visit to the 12th annual International Association of Yiddish Clubs conference (La Jolla, California) where he recorded more than 12 lectures, the first lecture is available here: "Growing Up in Czernowitz," by Dr. Julius Scherzer.

Two new video previews - "Return to Ozarow: Mending a Broken Link," and "L'affaire Grynszpan" (this one in French) - are here.

Steve has added a new section - "Yiddish Vinkl Bookstore" - where visitors will be able to both read and hear works by famous authors. Currently, there are two short poems, written and spoken in Yiddish, by Peretz Miransky, a member of the Yung Vilne literary group. See them here. On the same page, read about a Yiddish theatre book by Joel Schechter and a 1940s book of poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger of Czernowitz.

The final chapters of the Maurice Schwartz biography - "Once a Kingdom" - is now available here.

View a grounds map for Washington Cemetery (Monmouth Junction, New Jersey) and Dalton Cemetery (Scranton, Pennsylvania). Map page links can be seen under Cemetery Project on the Site Map page.

A new project will memorialize the Jews of Szczekociny, Poland. Steve reports that he already has information on cemetery restorations in Losice and Wachock, Poland, the reopening of Warsaw's B'nai B'rith Lodge, the Lodz Ghetto Liquidation 60th anniversary commemoration, and the future Vilnius Jewish library of Vilnius.

Whenever you check out the museum's site, look at Recent Updates and 2008 Updates for information as Steve adds it online. Those links are found on the Site Map page.

New library blog: Yeshiva University

Yeshiva University (New York) has started a YU Libraries Blog to share news about important additions to collections, new services, and to provide timely information at the school's Beren and Wilf campus libraries.

Recent postings have included journal articles of interest, such as Judaica Librarianship, published by the Association of Jewish Libraries. An article in the new 25th anniversary issue offers: "Yizkor Books in the Twenty-First Century: A History and Guide to the Genre," by Michlean J. Amir and Rosemary Horowitz.

I also did some looking around the YU Library site and found some interesting collections for Sephardic researchers interested in Egypt and France (see links below).

Another posting contains an online comprehensive guide to a major Soviet Jewry Collection. Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Collection may now be viewed online.

The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) collection was donated to YU by Jacob Birnbaum, who founded the organization in 1964 and donated the collection in 1993.

This collection, one of the largest in the Archives’ holdings, documents the full scope of SSSJ's activities on behalf of Soviet Jewry, as well the condition of Jewry and individual Jews in the Soviet Union through numerous firsthand accounts. It includes case files of hundreds of individual refuseniks, correspondence, especially with Jewish “establishment” organizations and members of the United States and Israeli governments, newsletters and other SSSJ publicity information, clippings, thousands of photographs of SSSJ events, posters, buttons and other artifacts from SSSJ demonstrations, reports, and hundreds of sound and video recordings.

The collection has been used by historians, documentary filmmakers, authors and others in their work documenting the American Soviet Jewry movement, an area of growing interest among both scholars and the general Jewish public. In 2007, Jacob Birnbaum received a YU honorary degree for his achievements on behalf of Soviet Jewry.

There is a very detailed finding aid here, which indicates inclusive dates (1956-2006) and size of the collection: about 250 linear feet (350 manuscript boxes, 10 record cartons, 1 map box, 15 flat storage boxes and 40 artifact boxes). Contents include correspondence, questionnaires and statistical information on refuseniks, administrative and financial records, press releases and publicity material, newsletters, clippings, photographs, publications, reports, reel-to-reel tapes, audiocassettes, videotapes, CDs, and buttons, bumper stickers, posters, uniforms and other ephemera; mostly English, some Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish.

Sephardic researchers will also find details of collections from Egypt and France:

- An Inventory to the Jamie Lehmann Memorial Collection Records of the Jewish Community of Cairo, 1886-1961

- An Inventory to the French Consistorial Collection, circa 1809-1939 1809-1939.

Consistories were created by Napoleon I in 1808 to administer Jewish religious matters and facilitate the acculturation of French Jews. This collection contains diverse materials relating to Jewish communal life in nineteenth-century France, and includes personal and official correspondence, drafts, engravings, essays, community and organization records, accounts and financial records, petitions, demographical statistics, reports and membership lists. The Consistorial system was dissolved in 1905, after which some Consistories regrouped into Consistorial associations ("Associations consistoriales"). Materials in French, Yiddish, Italian, German, Hebrew.

For more information about YU's Archives, email them.

NARA: Genealogy awards competition

The US National Archives (Washington, DC) has announced, in celebration of its 75th anniversary, two awards to recognize significant achievements in genealogy research, based on records from the famed institution.

The National Archives is known worldwide as a treasure chest of genealogical information. Each year, millions of people use Federal records in the National Archives to search for their family roots. Census schedules, ship passenger arrival lists, citizenship papers, military pension files, land patents, and court records offer detailed evidence to flesh out family histories. This competition provides an opportunity for students to share their research "treasures" with the public.

The awards are $1,000 for first place; $500 for second place. Winning articles may be published in Prologue, the quarterly magazine of the National Archives, and/or on the National Archives web site.

To be eligible, an applicant must be either an undergraduate or graduate student enrolled in an accredited institution of higher learning; have completed at least one semester; and have not yet advanced to candidacy, if in a Ph.D. program. An applicant does not have to be an American citizen, but must be attending an American college or university. Permanent National Archives employees are not eligible.

Awards will be announced at the National Archives annual Genealogy Fair on April 22, 2009.

An original, unpublished work (1,000-3,000 words) must demonstrate the use of National Archives holdings for genealogical research. It must be typed, include a works-cited page or bibliography; end notes suggested but not required. A cover sheet must include the author's name and contact details, enrollment proof at an accredited academic institution and signed permission for the publishing of the article.

Applications should be delivered (in-person, e-mail or regular mail) by 5pm EST, March 1, 2009 or postmarked by February 25, 2009, to:

Diane Dimkoff
Director, Customer Services Division
Room G-13
700 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20408
EMAIL: diane.dimkoff@nara.gov

For more details about the awards or applications, email KYR@nara.gov.

Chicago: The Obamas' Jewish house

Leave it to the Chicago Jewish News, edited by Pauline Yearwood, to come up with a fascinating house history - the Jewish history of President-elect Barack Obama's house in Chicago - by Charles b. Bernstein and Stuart L. Cohen.

A Chicago attorney, Bernstein is a genealogist of the Chicago Jewish community, and a Chicago Jewish Historical Society founder. A mortgage banker, Cohen's hobby is Jewish genealogy and Chicago Jewish history.

Its future is to be the Chicago White House. But a look at its past shows the construction of the Obama home was financed by a prominent Chicago Jew, that it was once lived in by a Jewish family and that it was home to both a Jewish day school and a yeshiva...

After Pauline Yearwood's recent startling scoop in the Chicago Jewish News, which revealed that First Lady-elect Michelle Obama is a first cousin, once removed, of Rabbi Capers Funnye, it appeared unlikely that another significant Jewish connection to the Obamas would be found.

The Southside home - at 5046 S. Greenwood Avenue - is across the street from the city's oldest Jewish congregation - KAM-Isaiah Israel Congregation. Secret Service agents guarding the home use the temple's facilities. Only residents and temple members are allowed to pass through the street barricades at both 50th and 51st streets.

The earliest document for the house is a construction loan, dated Oct. 4, 1905, obtained by real estate developer Wallace Grant Clark from Moses E. Greenebaum. A prominent mortgage banker and real estate developer, Greenebaum was a member of a pioneer Chicago family which became a leader in both the general and Jewish communities. Moses's father, Elias Greenebaum, came to Chicago in 1848 and eventually entered the mortgage and banking business. Elias's father, Jacob, followed Elias to Chicago, so Moses was already a third generation Chicagoan. Elias was a founder of Sinai Temple, Chicago's first Reform congregation. Elias, Moses and Moses's son Edgar were all presidents of Sinai.

Built about 1908, its first Jewish owner - in 1919 - was Max Goldstine who bought the house and the adjacent vacant lot for about $13,750. Goldstine and his wife - Ethel Kline - were born in Hungary and immigrated to America as children. They married in September 1901 and had three daughters. Lucille (1902) married Harold Rosenheim; Viola (1905) married Robert L. Leopold; and Maxine (1908) married Harold L. Newmann.

Goldstine's grandson Fred M. Newmann, 71, is a retired professor in Madison, Wisconsin and campaigned for Obama. Bernstein and Cohen contacted him and he was excited to learn that his mother's childhood home was the Obamas' house.

Granddaughter Nancy Rosenheim, 83, is married to Robert J. Greenebaum, 91, son of Edgar N. Greenebaum, Sr. (the son of mortgage banker Moses Greenebaum). Nancy and Bob's grandchildren are seventh generation Jewish Chicagoans. Lucille Goldstine Rosenheim told her daughter Nancy that the home had a third-floor ballroom.

Maxine Goldstine's childhood friend Dorothy Eckstein Herman Lamson of Highland Park, 95, grew up at 5125 S. Greenwood. She remembered Max had built a wooden toboggan slide on the adjacent vacant lot and that area children sledded there in the early 1920s.

Max and Ethel Goldstine sold the property via an April 1, 1926 deed to Virginia H. Kendall and Elizabeth K. Wild, as joint tenants.

During the Depression, the property went through foreclosure. The Foreman State Trust Savings Bank - the Foremans were a prominent Chicago German-Jewish banking family - was involved in the mid-1930s. Family and bank founder Gerhard Foreman (1823-1897) was married to a sister of Elias Greenebaum.

In about 1920, the Hebrew Theological College (HTC) formed and served mainly the Orthodox Russian immigrant community.

On March 26, 1947, the house was bought for the HTC with a donation from Anna Sarah Katz of Milwaukee, for about $34,000. There was also a $20,000 mortgage, $500 to be paid every three months until May 9, 1957, and signed by Rabbi Oscar Z. Fasman and Samuel S. Siegel. The Chicago Tribune reported September 22, 1947, that Katz "purchased a $50,000 plot of land with a building to be contributed to the Hebrew Theological College expansion drive."

In the late 1940s, the house was the first home of the South Side Jewish Day School, which later became the Akiba Day School, merging with the Solomon Schechter Day School.

The Orthodox Jewish population declined in the 1950s; the house was sold in 1954 to the Hyde Park Luthern Church for $35,000. The Obamas paid $1.6 million for it.

Read the complete article at the link above.

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.

Boston: Two dramatic stories, Dec. 7

Two dramatic stories of digging into lost histories and reuniting long separated families will be featured by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston (JGSGB) at its December 7 meeting at Temple Emanuel in Newton.

The stories are Stephen Denker's "documenting business history in Cuba," and Alexander Woodle's "reuniting family divided by 250 years."

Denker reports on seven years of research, worldwide travel and internet chats. By tracing his American family’s manufacturing business and life in Cuba early in the 20th century, he unraveled a genealogical history and reconnects cousins separated for more than 70 years. In summer 2007, Denker spent two weeks in Havana completing his research and visiting the family home and factory.

Woodle reports on re-tying a genealogical thread after 250 years. His quest started with discovering a familiar surname in Austria and Romania in a search of international telephone directories. JewishGen and Familysearch database resources provided evidence of relationship. He then contacted a family in Romania, and utilizing the latest tool of genea-technology, dispatched a DNA kit. Last May, Woodle traveled to Central Europe to visit his distant cousins.

Both presentations exhibit an additional important facet of genealogical research: historical context. Denker describes the circumstances of Jewish immigration to Cuba. Woodle’s review of Jewish history in Central Europe yields clues to the dispersal of his family from 18th century Bohemia to Banat (now partially in Romania) in the southern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Join the group from 1.30-4.30pm, Sunday, December 7, at Temple Emanuel, 385 Ward St., Newton. JGSGB members: free; others: $5. For directions and additional details, click here.