Do Concord grapes have an anti-Semitic past?

Jewish family history covers an increasing number of topics. And what could be more Jewish than the over-sweetened Concord grape wine on which we grew up?

"Squeeze a Concord grape, and it practically screams kosher wine. Jelly sweet, the much maligned Concord has been the traditional kosher wine of choice at American Passover Seders for what seems like forever. So brace yourself for irony: The Concord has a suspected antisemitic horticultural past."

Here's the story of Ephraim Wales Bull of Concord, Massachusetts, whose gang included Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne.

According to the article, the author of a book about American agriculture claims that Bull sought to commercially develop a local wild grape out of a belief that foreign grapes were genetically and morally corrupt. Bull was part of a group, called nativists, who were anti-immigration. In 1844, Lewis Levin was the first Jew elected to Congress. He was a founding member of the American Party, based on nativism.

Eastern European Jews arrived in masses at the end of the 19th century, and Galizianer Sam Schapiro was among them. In 1899, he opened a Lower East Side winery: Schapiro’s House of Kosher Wine, the first kosher winery in North America.

Next year in NYC: Downtown Seder

If you could invite anyone you wanted to your seder, who would it be? Would it inspire your creative juices?

I'm sorry I missed this star-studded seder on March 28 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The event's audience of 400 were treated to appearances by some 25 comedians, musicians, politicians, artists, celebrities and writers who offered interpretations of the story of Passover.

On the performer list for the city's seventh annual Downtown Seder were Neil Sedaka, Frank London, Debbie Friedman, Rob Kutner, Golem, Y-Love, DJ Handler and Metropolitan Klezmer.

Perhaps I'll be there "Next year in New York City" for the event.

Matza art: Better than eating it?

OK, we've finally found a better use for matzah.

Start a new tradition in your family with your own art contest modeled on the first-ever Manischewitz Matzah Sculpture Competition.

The winner was NYU freshman studio art major James Donovan, who built the Washington Square Arch from the cardboard-like stuff. He received the $1,000 grand prize.

Other entries included:

"Passover and New Orleans: Exodus and Empathy Revisited," a series of sukkot from matzah, foam board and photographs, by Erica Dobin.

"Home as an idealized construct," souvenir photograph photograph projector keychains with old family photos, by NYU grad student Daniel Rosenberg.

Chana Langman recreated the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and Leia Weil and Erica Frankel built a model of the Western Wall, complete with worshippers.

Twelve entries were received; eight were chosen for display at the university.

A reading about Cuban Jews

Achy Obejas, Cuban Jewish author of Days of Awe, Memory Mambo and We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?, will be doing a special bilingual reading that may be of genealogical interest.

In Days of Awe, Obejas, who is also an award-winning journalist, focuses on a family's Jewish roots, Cuban Jewish history and the more contemporary community.

The reading, which Obejas will share with poet Jose Kozer, will be held at 7 p.m., April 26 during an all-Cuban-Jewish event at the Americas Society in New York.

For more on Obejas, click here

Shanghai: new info on Jews and genealogy

Israeli Dvir Bar-Gal, 41, is scouring old Shanghai neighborhoods for Jewish tombstones, which are lost remnants of the city's once-thriving Jewish community.

"His efforts have unearthed 85 gravestones from the 1870s to the 1950s. There's Solomon Kapel's marble slab, dredged from a stream, bearing the Hebrew epitaph a "great student of the Bible," who died in 1946 at 28 "of tragic events."

In a pavement, a book-shaped stone betrayed the Yiddish- etched grave marker of a Polish refugee author. The broken, 1958 white marble stone of Leeds-born optometrist Charles Percival Rakusen, a ladies' man and member of the family that started British matzo-bakers Rakusen Ltd., covered a sewage drain.

In the late 1940s, Shanghai had a Jewish population of about 25,000 and four Jewish cemeteries with 3,700 graves. Sephardim from Baghdad and Bombay had arrived in the 1840s, building business dynasties on opium, tea and property, including landmarks such as the Peace Hotel."

To read more about his quest and Shanghai's Jewish history, click here

In a new genealogy blog by Tom Kemp, I learned about a Shanghai Daily article about a master index to the Shanghai Library's massive genealogy collection, the largest in China. The index contains millions of names and will be published in a series of books later this year. There are plans to put the index online.

The original story in the Shanghai Daily is here, and says the resource includes some 50,000 family trees. The library's genealogy reading room opened in 1996 and holds more than 18,000 genealogical charts.

Perhaps there's now hope for the remnants of the Kaifeng Jewish community's seven clans to find their ancestors.

U.S.-Canadian border crossings online

I was delighted to learn that details of U.S.-Canadian border crossings from 1895-1956 are now online through Ancestry.com.

Unfortunately, I still cannot find my great-grandfather - Aaron Peretz TALALAY - in the records for 1904-05, although I have found other TALALAY relatives. I hope you have better luck among the 4 million names!

To check these, you will need Ancestry access via a subscription, unless your public library has a public subscription. Also note that, from time to time, Ancestry offers free 14-day access. Check their Web site.

Attendees of the 2007 IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy will have complete and unlimited database access at the Ancestry-sponsored resource center.

This free access is important because, as of April, the Family History Library and its many satellite Family History Centers will only provide very limited onsite access to these valuable Ancestry databases - previously access was unlimited.

Here's Ancestry.com's blurb about the new database:

"Ancestry.com, the world's largest online resource for family history, today announced the addition of the first and only online collection of more than 4 million names of individuals who crossed the U.S.-Canadian border between 1895 and 1956. These historical records are the latest addition to Ancestry.com's Immigration Records Collection, which also includes more than 100 million names from the largest online collection of U.S. passenger lists, spanning 1820 to 1960."

Conference call for papers on concentration camps

Joy Rich of New York shares the information that a workshop about concentration camps, "The Memory of the Camps: Actors, Topics, Strategies," has put out a call for papers.

The workshop (in German and English) will be held in Hamburg, Germany, Oct. 31-Nov. 4. Submitters must be doctoral candidates or recently-graduated researchers. The deadline for submission is April 30.

The committee is looking for topics such as the history of the concentration camps after liberation and the cultures of memory related to these camps; the conception, organization and development of concentration camp memorials (specifically of Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen); methodological reflexions on interdisciplinary approaches in concentration camp research (specifically concerning the use of testimonies as a source).

Overall, the organizers are asking which individuals, groups, associations, states and national organizations have produced, interpreted, organized, appropriated, transmitted or exploited the memory of the camps?

For more information, click here.

Passover isn't easy in Hawaii

Hawaii is home to a growing number of members of our tribe, including Anne Feder Lee - president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies - as well as many Jewish visitors from the mainland each year.

The Jewish holidays present unique problems there, as detailed in this story

It isn't easy to prepare the menu made in heaven, not for Jews in Hawaii where the supply of kosher food is hit and miss.

Chabad of Hawaii ordered 3,000 pounds of food from the mainland for Passover meals next week. Besides the two large communal Seder meals Monday and Tuesday, Pearl Krasnjansky will be preparing lunches and dinners for her family and people who gather for services at the Ala Moana Hotel during the eight-day observance.

Dina Yoshimi of Pearl City was delighted to see the load of luggage her parents brought when they arrived Thursday from the mainland. They brought "suitcases full" of kosher food for the family holiday celebration.

Carolann Biederman of Kaneohe made a circuit of four supermarkets in Honolulu and Windward Oahu to gather the essentials for a family Seder and meals through the week.

This year, in Tel Aviv, where you'd think everything Jewish would be available all the time, my three local markets combined had only six boxes of that nice garlic and onion matzo. I managed to get potato starch and matzo meal, but haven't found ANY cake meal yet to make my Passover apple cake. I'll just throw regular matzo meal in my food processor and grind it down!

In Teheran, we rarely ate dairy because nothing was kosher for Passover; some families had a goat brought to their home to be milked. One year, however, I visited a small store near my in-laws and was shocked to find an entire refrigerator case filled with imported Passover dairy products (butter, cream cheese, sliced cheeses, feta and more). I used every bit of my cash (no credit cards were accepted in those days), then went back to my in-laws' house (no cellphones, either!) to call my friends to come and get what they could. By the end of the day, the case was empty. We feasted on many nostalgic dishes that year.

The Hawaii article ends with:

The scarcity is not news. Congregation Sof Ma'arav published a collection of members' recipes in 1989. Its title: "The When You Live in Hawaii You Get Very Creative During Passover Cookbook." The book is still available.

I may just send for it.