Tablet: A fine young criminal

Tablet magazine is presenting a series of articles based on historic newspaper accounts.

The introduction to the series reads:

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, who didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. That began to change in the late 19th century, when the Yiddish press hit the streets, for the first time recounting the lives of the unwashed masses of Jews in the public record. Tablet Magazine offers some of their stories, reconstructed from century-old newspaper accounts.

Tablet previously carried the Benjamin Nathan case, and today's piece is the story of Yitzhok Farbarovitsh, a yeshiva boy who became a gang member and then wrote about it in plays which "portrayed the street life of Jewish pimps, prostitutes, and criminals in its own raw reality, complete with nasty language and foul behavior."

Read Eddy Portnoy's story about Farbarovitsh, later known as Urke Nahalnik (Yiddish, brazen master criminal).

Yitzhok Farbarovitsh was known as a good kid in the shtetl of Vizne, a small town in Russian-ruled Poland, in the years just before World War I. He excelled in cheder, Jewish elementary school, and, when he reached his tweens, was sent to another town in the Pale of Settlement to attend a yeshiva. Yitzhok was on track to fulfill his mother’s dream that he become a rabbi. But not long after his bar mitzvah, his mother died, sending the Farbarovitsh household into a depression, and throwing Yitzhok’s life onto a different track.

The detailed story contains blockbuster elements: sex, crime, religion, jail, bad boy makes good, theater, spicy Yiddish slang and mentions YIVO along the way.

About one of his plays, the story relates:

Warsaw’s Jewish underworld was not the only group dissatisfied with the play. The socialist Bund’s arts magazine fulminated angrily against what they called theatrical “trash.” On the front page, an editorial griped that “when the prostitutes are on stage, talking their dirty talk, and the thieves are doing business in their pubs and hideouts, it’s ugly, it’s disgusting…. For three hours, the audience and the theater is dragged through the mud.”

The critics didn't like it, but the people did and it was a minor hit.

Farbarovitsh was also involved in some of the first attacks on the Nazis, according to the article, and demanded funding from Jewish underground leaders to organize attacks against the Nazis. Although they refused, he returned to his town of Otwock, outside Warsaw, where he sabotaged rail lines to Treblinka and helped Jews escape the trains and hide in the forest.

He was caught by the Germans in 1942. As he was being led to his execution in Otwock, he attacked his guard and nearby soldiers fatally shot him.

Read the complete story at the link above. Tracing the Tribe is waiting for the next article in the series.

New York: Beth Moses cemetery surname lists

The online Museum of Family History has added gravestones and photographs for burial society plots of towns in Ukraine, Belarus and former Yugoslavia.

The complete list has some 200 shtetls, towns and cities

Although there are additional society plots for each town located within other Metro New York cemeteries, the new additions are only from Beth Moses Cemetery (Pinelawn, New York). There are no plans to photograph the other plots for the towns noted., according to Museum creator Steve Lasky.

Find the links to these lists here.

For the vast majority of the 200 shtetls, towns and cities (and some other organizations) listed at that page, every society plot has been properly photographed and databased. The list of some 105,000 names from more than 30 Jewish cemeteries in New York and New Jersey, is available only through the Museum of Family History.

As just one example of the various plots, click on Mogilev, Belarus on the museum page link. The Name List contains some 280 surnames - many familiar to Mogilev researchers - of those buried in three of the five Mogilev burial society plots in the Metro New York area.

Readers who find a surname of interest and would like to receive the gravestone photo, should email the Museum. Remember to list the surname and town.

Here are the recently added towns:

UKRAINE:
Budanov
Lokachi
Khoshchevatoye
Stavishche
Pomoryany
Shargorod
Raygorodok
Shumskoye
Voynilov

BELARUS:
Pukhovichi
Divin
Novogrudok

YUGOSLAVIA/MACEDONIA:
Bitola/Monastir

Steve Lasky's continuing achievement at his cyberspace Museum of Family History is to be commended. Visit the Museum and sign up for his blog to learn about new exhibits which may provide a break-through in your research.

Jamaica: Unique Jewish heritage

Tracing the Tribe's friend Ainsley Henriques is a distant relative of a Jewish merchant from Amsterdam who arrived in Jamaica in 1670 to find Columbus' hidden treasure.

The ancestor didn't find the treasure, but the family has remained on the island for more than 300 years.

JTA's Gil Shefler wrote this story of Jamaica's Jews as he attended the island's week-long conference on the Sephardic Jews of the Caribbean.

Although the story is excellent and provides insight into this unique community, I don't understand why Shefler continues to use the pejorative Marrano when he means Converso.

Ainsley Henriques, in his 70s, leads the small community and guards its history and traditions.

"I restructured the congregation, established an office, employed staff and persuaded the community to open a museum," Henriques tells JTA. "We have hundreds of school children coming in to the synagogue every week to learn aboutthe community."

Henriques teamed up with the Jamaican government to host an academic conference last week in Kingston on the history of the island's Jewish community. Participants came from around the world.

But Henriques harbors few illusions: He knows his may be a losing battle.

The community has shrunk from more than 2,500 in 1881 to only 450 in 1974. Today there are some 200, and there hasn't been a full-time rabbi for three decades.

Jamaican Jews are a subspecies of their own. A significant minority are black, the descendants of intermarriages or relationships between Jewish plantation owners and their slaves. They speak in the same unmistakable accent for which the island is famous. And like most Jamaicans -- but perhaps unlike most Jews -- they are laid back.

In downtown Kingston on Friday nights, prayers can be heard coming from the beautiful Sharei Shalom Synagogue-United Congregation of Israelites, the only remaining shul on the island. Prayers are read in English, Hebrew and Spanish -- a reminder of the community's Sephardic origins.

Sharei Shalom was constructed in 1908, on the site of one destroyed by a major earthquake. It is one of only four synagogues in the world with a sand floor.

"There are four main reasons why the floor is covered in sand," Henriques explains as he stands on the bimah. "First, to remind us that we are desert people. Second, that we may be as many as the grains of sand. Third, because it muffled the steps of our ancestors who worshiped in secret. And four -- and perhaps the most important reason -- the kids love it."

The community survived in isolation for a long time and adapted traditions to what was available. Instead of etrog (citron) on Sukkot, they used oranges. Today, writes Shefler, five etrog seedlings are growing in the garden of a community member.

Jamaica's Jews were merchants and also owned plantations, there were pirates as well as those involved in the slave trade. They've been elected to parliament and founded the biggest newspaper, The Gleaner.

There is a Hillel Academy, opened in 1969, with several hundred students - only a few are Jewish. The Jewish students study religion outside of normal classes.

While some descendants of Jews attend services regularly, assimilation and emigration have taken their toll, and Henriques feels he is fighting a losing battle. He tries to draw Jewish tourists to the island's synagogue and cemeteries, but also feels that the community may vanish, according to his estimate, in perhaps another three decades.

Read the complete story at the link above. Visit the United Congregation of Israelites website for much more information on this community.

Jamaica: Reggae Jewish connections

Jewish Jamaican ties are the subject of an interview with Ainsley Henriques at the Caribbean Sephardic Diaspora conference in Jamaica.

Tracing the Tribe wrote several posts leading up to the event.

Read one of two JTA stories, by Gil Shefler on his visit to Jamaica, here.

After a week of attending a Jewish conference here, I'm starting to feel like everybody in Jamaica has some kind of connection to Judaism.

Ainsley Henriques, the don of the local community, says thousands of Jamaicans have Jewish backgrounds, though they don't identify as Jews.

A scan of the local telephone directory seems to confirm his claim: Thousands of Cohens, Levys and Gabays are listed. But the local Jewish congregation numbers a mere 200 members.

Shefler mentions Jamaican dance-hall musician Sean Paul, whose paternal grandfather was a Jew named Henriques, just like my friend Ainsley's.

Island Records founder Chris Blackwell's mother's maiden name was Lindo, a prominent island Jewish family.

Ainsley says he believes that Harry Belafonte also has Judaic through his Jamaica-born father whose surname was a corruption of Delevante, an island Jewish clan.

[NOTE: Of course, many Sephardic name indexes indicate Belafonte as a confirmed Jewish name in that spelling, so there is also Belafonte and Delevante and other spellings.]

Ainsley told Shefler that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was on a tour of the Kingston synagogue when Farrakhan said that he had paternal Jewish Portuguese ancestors from Jamaica.

Reggae king Marley is not Jewish, says Ainsley, who knows the family well and says one of his sons is married to an Israeli.

Read the complete story at the link above.

JGSLA 2010: Registration open, plans galore!

It's only January, but July is right around the corner, and that's when Jewish genealogists and family historians from around the world will be in Los Angeles, from July 11-16.

Registration for the 30th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy is open now, as well as hotel reservations at the JW Marriott. This year's event is hosted by the Jewish Genealogy Society of Los Angeles.

See all conference details at the JGSLA 2010 site.

Sign up now for the conference and special interest group (SIG) lunches and dinners. Coming soon: registration for Breakfast-with-the-Experts, Midnight-with-the-Mavens, computer labs/workshops, tours and other special events.

Coming in early for the conference? Join the other "early birds" at two pre-conference, all kosher, welcome dinners, with thought-provoking speakers and a special Shabbat-friendly learning session with Jewish genealogy pioneer Arthur Kurzweil on Kabbalah.

Evidenced by proposals submitted during the just-ended Call for Papers, the program will include an extraordinary series of presentations by renowned scholars, archivists and research specialists from around the world.

Also on the schedule will be the film festival, methodology workshops, evening musical and dramatic performances, and the all-important networking and shmoozing opportunities with our friendly, global community of Jewish genealogists. and family historians.

This year's resource room will be staffed by representatives from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Shoah Foundation, the Steven Spielberg Visual History Archive, the Jewish Genealogy Learning Center in Warsaw, and Yad Vashem - all will be ready to provide attendees with one-one-one research assistance.

The IAJGS Awards Dinner will feature Canadian singer Mitch Smolkin will present"Rexite on the Radio: Live from the Golden Age of New York's Yiddish Broadcasts." He'll croon the songs of the "Yiddish Frank Sinatra," accompanied by Russian concert pianist, Nina Shapilksy. Experience classic Yiddish tunes along with the great Broadway hits of the 20th century - Yiddish - as they were heard on radios across the country. You'll never listen to Oklahoma the same way again.

For more on the Golden Age of Yiddish radio, see these Tracing the Tribe posts here and here, along with some of Seymour Rechtzeit's (Rexite) recordings:

The Yiddish Frank Sinatra was crooner Seymour Rexite (originally Rechtzeit - for the genealogists reading this!) and listen to his Yiddish versions of "Surrey with a Fringe on Top/Oh, What a Beautiful Morning," 1948; "Tea for Two," (with Miriam Kressyn), c1950; "Love and Marriage," (with Miriam Kressyn) c1950; and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," 1954.

The full conference program and schedule will be announced in March. Watch for sneak previews and breaking news on the JGSLA2010 website, its newsletter and the blog. Make sure to sign up for the newsletter so you won't miss anything.

Subscribe to the "Los Angeles 2010" JewishGen discussion group. Ask questions, get answers, kvetch and quibble about what to expect and what's planned for this great event.

Tracing the Tribe will be blogging from JGSLA 2010.

Haiti: The Jewish remnant

In the midst of the Haiti's great tragedy, there is also a long Jewish history.

A branch of our Talalay family escaped Berlin before the Holocaust with Haitian identity documents. According to their descendants, the documents were provided in exchange for the purchase of land. No one seems to know where that plot was located, and there is no evidence that any member of the family actually visited Haiti.

Resources Online: There is some information on this historical episode here, which mentions the immigration of European Jews, and here on the Jewish Virtual Library site, which mentions an ancient Jewish synagogue discovered by archeologists in the city of Jérémie, where mulatto families of Jewish origin lived. A 2004 JTA article by Larry Luxner is here.

Here is information on the Jewish community of Haiti from the Encyclopedia Judaica. Other articles mention that Jewish tombstones were discovered in port cities such as Cap Haaitien and Jacmel. Read more here (Jewish Social Studies, 1983). "The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, experiences, and culture" by Ehrlich, speaks of Haiti's Jewish history on page 660 (check Google Books).

Before the earthquake on January 12, there were an estimated 25 Jews among 9 million residents. Many lived in Pétionville, a community in the hills above Port-au-Prince. There is no rabbi or synagogue, but one resident, Gilbert Bigio (whose father came from Aleppo, Syria), keeps a Torah in his home.

Many of the country's Jews are among the wealthiest residents, with interests in many sectors.

For an excellent article on the Jews of Haiti - before the earthquake - read The Forward's interesting article, by Gabrielle Birkner, here ("Haiti's Jewish Remnant Keeps the Faith and Lends a Hand").

Back in 1492, Luis de Torres, Christopher Columbus’s interpreter, was the first known Jew to step foot on what is now Haiti. Brazilian immigrants of Jewish ancestry settled in what is now Haiti in the 17th century, though many perished in the slave revolts at the turn of the 19th century that ultimately established Haiti’s independence from France.

Then came a small wave of Jewish immigration to Haiti from Lebanon, Syria and Egypt — the influx that brought Dana’s grandparents — during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Many of these Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants made a living importing and selling textiles, and they sent their children to the local Catholic schools. The island’s Jews were joined during the 1930s by about 100 European Jews who came to Haiti fleeing the Nazis. The Haitian Jewish community peaked mid-century at about 300 members, many of whom left for larger, more established Jewish communities in the United States, Argentina and Panama.

Archaeologists have also found evidence of a Crypto-Jewish, or Marrano, community that once existed in the western Haitian city of Jérémie.

The Forward story focuses on Rudolph Dana, 61, who owns a propane-distribution company, and his efforts to locate his friends and 500 employees. He says hundreds of his friends and acquaintances died in the disaster. Those who survived are homeless. His own home suffered major structural damage.

He has deep Haitian roots, as his grandparents settled there in the early 20th century.

He has been in touch, via an Internet-enabled satellite phone that he kept in his Port-au-Prince office, with many of his employees, who have managed to set up a makeshift office, outside of the badly damaged building that housed his company. These days, they’re not dealing in propane, but in rice, beans and cooking oil. Dana said he managed, through his business connections, to get a shipment of food staples, and that his company has been distributing meals — cooked with firewood — to some 300 people camped out near the office park.

Read the complete story at The Forward link, as well as the additional links under "Resources Online."

Israel: 'Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints' opens Jan. 25

Sculptor Bernie Fink's Memorial to the Jewish Soldiers (1985) at Yad Vashem.

Bernie is a FINK cousin from Suchostaw and Skalat

(Austro-Hungary, Galicia->Poland->Ukraine).

His father went to South Africa from Galicia. (See below for more)

"Architecture of Murder: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Blueprints" is a new Yad Vashem exhibit opening on Monday, January 25, as part of a diplomatic symposium.

On display will be original architectural blueprints of Auschwitz-Birkenau, given to Yad Vashem for safekeeping last summer by the German newspaper Bild, published by Axel-Springer.

“The original plans detailing the construction of Auschwitz, constitute graphic illustration of the Germans’ systematic effort to carry out the ‘Final Solution’,” said Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem. “We have chosen to display them to the public to illustrate how seemingly conventional activities of ordinary people brought about the construction of the largest murder site of European Jewry.”

Marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the opening will take place as part of a special symposium in the presence of dozens of members of the diplomatic corps - representing some 80 countries - and Auschwitz survivors, and with the participation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Among the speakers will be the Prime Minister, Minister of Education Gideon Saar, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, Holocaust survivor Ruth Bondy, Prof. Shlomo Avineri, Prof. Moshe Halbertal, Bild Editor Kai Diekmann, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Director Dr. Piotr Cywinski, Historical Advisor to the exhibition Dr. Daniel Uziel, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council Rabbi Israel Meir Lau and Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev will address the participants.

Also displayed for the first time will be the photo album of Auschwitz's construction. Other items include an aerial photo of Auschwitz from the RAF, the Vrba-Wetzler Report (authored by two Jewish Auschwitz escapees in 1944), quotes from SS men and Jewish prisoners describing the site and its murderous purposes, and a copy of the poem “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan.

The exhibit was curated by Museums Division director Yehudit Inbar. A traveling version of the exhibit will open at the United Nations in New York on Tuesday, January 26. Attending that opening will be Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Public Diplomacy Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gabriela Shalev, American Society for Yad Vashem chairman Eli Zbrowoski, and the exhibit curator Yehudit Inbar.

*The Memorial

Bernie's work is dedicated to the 1.5 million Jewish soldiers, ghetto fighters, partisans and soldiers of the Allied forces who fought against Nazi Germany.

Six oblong, hexagonal blocks of granite are arranged in two groups of three. A Star of David - Magen David - is created between the hexagons, sliced down the middle by a stainless steel sword. The blocks represent the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, the Star of David symbolizes the Jewish People, and the sword, the fight against the Nazis.

The Star of David and a sword is usually associated with the Israeli Defense Forces; the symbolism connects Allied Jewish soldiers and today's Israeli soldiers.

An annual ceremony is held on May 9 at the memorial, marking the victory of the Allied forces over Nazi Germany.

For more information, view the Yad Vashem site.

Haiti: Israel/Jewish response to the disaster

For those who have been following the disaster in Haiti, here is a list of Jewish organizational relief efforts as well as an opinion piece by the editor of a Florida Jewish paper.

Here is the list of Jewish organizational relief efforts, as posted by Joel Magalnick, editor of Seattle's JTNews:

The 7.0 earthquake on Jan. 12 that hit Haiti devastated its capital and has left tens of thousands of people dead, with many thousands more injured. Several Jewish organizations have opened up relief funds and some have sent teams to the country to assist in rescue and burial efforts.

The following links take you to donation pages to assist in those efforts:

American Friends of Magen David Adom:
http://bit.ly/6QwnJm
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee:
http://bit.ly/5889Iq
American Jewish World Service:
http://bit.ly/7oywcx
B’nai B’rith International:
http://bit.ly/5YJX2N
Chabad Lubavitch:
http://bit.ly/7MSiUj
MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger:
http://bit.ly/7OaNco
Orthodox Union:
http://bit.ly/8aVXIZ
Union for Reform Judaism:
http://bit.ly/6HxQQN
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism: http://bit.ly/6bFXms
ZAKA Jewish rescue organization, with personnel onsite:
http://bit.ly/4YEd9D

Lyn Payne is associate editor of the Heritage Florida Jewish News in Orlando. We've known each other through various connections for quite a few years. She prepared the following piece for her column in this Friday's edition and gave permission for Tracing the Tribe to reprint it:

Jewish hearts around the world open for Haiti
By Lyn Payne
Heritage Florida Jewish News

Thus said the Lord:
A cry is heard in Ramah—
Wailing, bitter weeping—
Rachel weeping for her children.
She refuses to be comforted
For her children, who are gone.
—Jeremiah 31:15

It was the footage of the woman kneeling in the dust, her voice one long contralto keen of agony, that personalized it for me. And the man praying that the voice the rescue team heard under the stones came from his wife. The fawn-eyed gaze of the two-year-old girl who emerged physically unhurt from the debris that covered her dead parents. And the baby boy, born with the help of Israeli doctor Shir Dar of Hadassah Hospital in the IDF field hospital on Port-au-Prince’s soccer field, whose mother named him “Israel.” [photo, right]

We’re into the second week after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti’s people and crushed its feeble infrastructure.

Bodies lie scattered over streets, and people smear toothpaste under their nostrils to dull the stench of rotting flesh. International aid, from governments and organizations, has mobilized on a massive scale, but until this week, much of it languished in the capital’s airport, because the means of delivering it had collapsed. Only a few days ago, doctors begged for antibiotics to treat limbs infected with gangrene, as they pleaded with parents to allow their children to have their legs amputated to give them a chance to survive.

If such a thing as a shining light can even be said to exist in this hell on earth, Israel is a major part of the reason. On Jan. 18, CNN reported that the Israelis were running the only fully functioning field hospital; other countries’ teams were sending patients there, and the Israelis had treated hundreds. ZAKA search and rescue teams, whose members are observant Jews, worked through Shabbat to free victims from the wreckage, keeping the holiest commandment of saving lives.

A surreal news clip shows a group of Haitians thanking their rescuers with a chorus of “Heiveinu Shalom Aleichem.” Even the BBC, often criticized for anti-Zionist bias, reported the Israelis’ efforts.

The 220-person Israeli team set up their MASH unit as soon as they arrived, and plan to keep it in place for at least a few weeks. When a tiny, impoverished and brutalized country—one with no obvious historical or ethnic connection to their own—needed them, the Israelis, helped by the Jewish Diaspora’s alphabet soup of aid agencies, synagogues and individuals—flew thousands of miles to say, “Hineinu.” We are here.

Why?

Jews are certainly not alone in caring or in the ability to raise funds and deliver aid: The U.S. government, along with nations like Turkey, Mexico and China, and religious and secular groups of all persuasions, have raced to help. Yet the instant and unstinting—and highly effective—response of the worldwide Jewish community has me pondering the particular map of the Jewish heart, as it has historically opened to aid the afflicted of every race, nation and creed.

Judaism continually insists that helping those less fortunate is not simply a generous option, but rather a religious obligation. Contrast that with right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh’s belittling diatribe against the Obama administration for aiding Haiti, saying the President wanted only to gain favor with “the black community, with the light-skinned and the dark-skinned community” of African-Americans. Fortunately, Limbaugh’s is the position of only a tiny minority of unsophisticated and emotionally stunted Americans. His disgusting bigotry was disavowed by former President George W. Bush, and aid efforts have been embraced by people across the political landscape. But extreme as it is, Limbaugh’s rhetoric offers a clear opposite against which to better see the power of Jewish ethics. To this puerile, spiteful, hateful voice gleefully chortling, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” into the face of the universe, Judaism replies, Yes, you are.

As Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks describes in his book “To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility,” Judaism is alone among religions in proclaiming that human beings are given the power by God to become partners in perfecting the world. Sacks points out just how radical that concept is, and how it confers responsibility to act with justice and righteousness. It’s as if he were saying that Judaism is a continual dialogue between the reality of what exists now, and the possible futures, good and bad, which will only be brought about by our own actions—or lack of action.

“Each religious act we do has an effect on the ecology of creation,” Sacks writes in explaining the kabbalistic concept of tikkun olam. [repairing the world]

This holistic view is not only humane, although, dayenu, that would have been enough; it also fits the emerging reality of life in the 21st century—in a world Thomas Friedman calls “hot, flat and crowded,” where a political upheaval, climate change or natural disaster in one place increasingly and directly affects economics, infrastructure and lifestyles everywhere else. A butterfly’s wing moving in China can now truly be said to set off a revolution on the other side of the globe. To deny this reality is to join the likes of Rush Limbaugh, not only in bigotry, but in self-destructive ignorance.

In this ultra-connected world, it is not just our moral duty as Jews, but in our enlightened self-interest as human beings, to say, with the same passion as we view ourselves at Passover as having been personally redeemed from slavery in Egypt: I personally was pulled from the rubble in Haiti.

For more, read the JTA story by Jacob Berkman on additional efforts being made within the Jewish community.