UK: GenPals Jewish Cemetery update

I returned from my extended trip to the US and found this email from Gaby Laws with a UK Genpals Cemetery Project update.

Tracing the Tribe is happy to cover this excellent project and has previously written about GenPals here and, more recently, here.

Genpals.com now features the following additions to the website:

London: Bancroft Road, Old Maiden Lane Synagogue Cemetery (48 stones)
This cemetery is in a sad state of decay. Many of the remaining stones are severely damaged and frequently offer scant clues as to whom they commemorate.

Yorkshire - Bradford Scholemoor Cemetery (34 stones) & Hartlepool Jewish Cemetery (19 stones)

Kent, Halfway (Queensborough) (8 stones)
There are now two sets of photos. The most recent is from this summer, while the other set was taken in January 2007, when a plastic flower was been placed in front of each grave. This occurred a few days following Holocaust Memorial Day, but extensive local research has failed to find the mystery visitor or the flower significance.

Hope Street, Old Burial Ground (11 stones)

Wales: Glamorgan (Merthyr Tydfil Cefn Coed - 12 stones), Swansea - 14 stones); Gwent (Brynmawr - 1 stone, Newport - 1 stone)
Dr. Helen Fry, co-author, "The Lost Jews of Cornwall": has generously made available her private collection of photographs. We cannot overestimate the value of this archive, nor sufficiently express our gratitude to her for making it available to the project. These are as yet incomplete and additional photos for these and other Welsh cemeteries are very welcome.

Devon: Plymouth Hoe Old Burial Ground (28 stones) & Exeter (25 stones) (more to come)
The project seeks additional pictures for these cemeteries.

Hampshire: Aldershot (31 stones).
This cemetery has now been fully recorded (pre-1927). Photographs were taken before the cemetery was desecrated and many stones irreparably damaged. Other photos, after that year, feature among those desecrated. Alder shot also includes a tragic story.

A visitor drew Laws and Shires' attention to some "lost burials" in a non-Jewish (municipal cemetery); click here

A short article in the local Evening News (1959), reporting on the ‘mystery’ of Jewish burials at Doughty Road, suggests that the 13 Jewish burials found were the result of disease striking a ship from Russia and that the bodies were landed at Grimsby. But it also concludes that this is more of a legend than fact..

However, a much earlier report in the Jewish Chronicle of 1874 seems to hold a more plausible answer as to why Jewish burials had taken place in a cemetery they describe as Christian.

In the 1870’s there was no Jewish burial ground in Grimsby, so burials took place in Hull. However, when small pox hit the area in early 1870’s, Health Officials refused permission for the bodies to be transported to Hull for fear of spreading the disease further. As a result, those who died of small pox were buried at Doughty Road.

An article in The Evening News 1959 reports that there were 5 women and 8 children buried there. It lists the names of three of the women: Rebecca Baranov, Deborah Baranov and Berthe Emily Hyman. The rest remain nameless.

and also here for background. "Our research into the above hit upon this which we felt we had to include even though we don't yet have photos of the tombstones. Immigrants from Russia traveling to America; click here:

‘In a lonely corner in the little Hebrew graveyard out in the country near Grimsby …’ is how the Jewish Chronicle begins their report on the burial of 5 immigrants from Russia who died on board a steamship in 1908.

The burials took place at Nunsthorpe Jewish Cemetery and the tragic incident that lead to their deaths is well reported in various newspapers of the time.

These reports give a small insight into the experiences of immigrants from Russia on their way to a new life.

At least 3 of the immigrants were from the same family: Miriam Woloff, the eldest was 19 years old, Blumah, 15 years and Michel, 11 years. The others 2 were Pesach Leib Ronin 35 years and Schije Kuperstein 32 years.

Gaby Laws and Angela Shire add:

Our thanks to all those who have contributed photographs and to all those who have taken the time to add their comments via our on-line contact facility. We value your support and welcome your input.

Take some time and visit GenPals' very interesting resources at the links above.

UK: JGSGB Conference, Oct. 26

Last year's Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain's annual conference - in London - was an excellence experience with a large interested audience.

The 15th annual event will be held Sunday, October 26, announced
JGSGB chair Laurence Harris, who added that three major experts will be:

- Dr. Nick Barratt, consultant genealogist and presenter of the BBC Who Do You Think You Are? series. He will speak on Family History and the Media.

- Sharon Hintze, director of the London Family History Centre, will cover Jewish Family History Resources on Exhibition Road (The London FHC) and through FamilySearch (including records such as the major London synagogues of the early-mid 19th century and the Knowles Anglo-Jewish Collection)

- Else Churchill, genealogical enquiries officer of the Society of
Genealogists will cover Resources for Jewish Family History at The Society of Genealogists.

Brian Godfrey of JGSGB will also speak on how - with nothing but a 1944 birth certificate, adoption papers and a vague East End address - he was approached by a stranger who had been adopted by non-Jewish parents, to help unravel her Jewish past. With nothing other than her 1944 birth certificate, adoption papers and some vague notion of an address in the East End, Brian will explain the techniques he used to solve this mystery. An emotional story with lots of surprises along the way.

Other sessions include Q&A sessions with a panel of experts on the future of genealogical research; lunch with experts (discuss research with an expert genealogist at your table).

Lunch will be fish or vegetarian, with morning and afternoon refreshments.

A genealogical fair and the JGSGB Library access will round out the day. Early registration (by October 7) costs 30 pounds; afterward, 35 pounds),

Because this event often sells out very early, it is strongly recommended to reserve now (at least by October 7) or face possible disappointment. Until that date, the cost is 30 Pounds, and the price will increase to 35 Pounds for later reservations.

For more information, click here for The Conference Newsletter and registration. All other queries: 2008conferenceATjgsgbDOTorgDOTuk - replace uppercase words with appropriate symbols, please).

Back now in Tel Aviv

Hello, readers!

New York was lovely and relatively cool last week. I managed to see some friends and cousins in the city and on Long Island - at times, it seems that everyone in Great Neck and environs is related to our family.

My flight into Geneva, Switzerland was delightful with a ground temperature of 50F and sunny. With only a very short connecting flight to Tel Aviv, I didn't even have time to call our Dardashti cousins who live in Geneva. Both flights were smooth and comfortable.

However, Tel Aviv was a nearly unbearable 30C when I got outside the terminal at about 6pm tonight. That's hot! Think sticky, humid and the rest of it.

Fortunately, I'm back now in air conditioning, unopened suitcases all over the place and just doing a quick email scan and blog comment check before tackling the aftermath of this summer's trip.

Look for numerous postings in the next few days.

Italy: One family's roots in a new film

An excellent article by Susan Zuccotti in The Forward focuses on Hava Volterra's documentary, "The Tree of Life," which investigates her father's Italian Jewish roots.

The film opens September 12 in New York (Pioneer Theater) and on October 24 in Los Angeles (Laemmle’s Music Hall).

After surviving the German occupation of Italy during the Second World War by hiding with his parents and brother and sister in the home of non-Jews, Vittorio Volterra immigrated to Israel in 1952, when he was 20 years old, and never looked back. He met his wife in Israel, and his daughter, Hava, was born there. After what his daughter calls a “near-death experience” with tuberculosis, Volterra enrolled at the Hebrew University to study physics. He went on to become one of the great physicists of his time. In 1998, while still in his prime, he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Thirty days later he died in Israel.

Hava Volterra, an engineer by profession, left Israel to live in the United States when she was 21. She had loved her father deeply, but when he died prematurely, she realized that she had scarcely known him and was left with scores of unanswered questions. Vittorio was, she says, totally, utterly Italian in his mannerisms, language, culture and heritage. But why had he never talked to her about his family’s roots? Why had he never talked about his feelings for Italy? Who were his ancestors, and what had it meant to him to be an Italian Jew? And what might it come to mean to his daughter? To answer these questions, Hava set out to research her father’s family tree and make a documentary. The result is “The Tree of Life,” a remarkable 76-minute film of great beauty and substance.

With a professional genealogist's help, as well as her father's brother, she managed to trace her paternal grandfather’s family back to the early 15th century: a money lender granted the right to live among Christians because his professional services were needed. His descendants included money lenders, merchants and bankers; one was close to Lorenzo de Medici in Florence, Italy.

Her father's mother's family was traced to the 13th century Venice ghetto, to a brilliant Kabbalah scholar known as the Ramhal. The Jews themselves exiled him from the city, fearing his mystical claims would provoke Christians and divide the community. The scholar, his wife and children died of the plague in Israel in 1747.

Other ancestors include Venetian economist Luigi Luzzatti, who became the first Jewish prime minister in the Western world in 1910. A physicist and mathematician Vito Volterra lost everything in 1931 when he was one of only 12 university professors who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Mussolini.

She interviews her father's wife, sister, a cousin, teachers, students, colleagues and friends, as well as experts in Italian-Jewish history, physics and even Kabbalah. With an aunt, she travels to a mountain village to visit the Catholic family that saved her father's life.

The result is not only a portrait of a man, but also a personal glimpse of the history of Italian Jewry and its complex, delicate, often fraught but equally often intimate relationship with Italian culture. Hava never directly answers the question of why her father did not talk about Italy to her. But the answer is there for us to see. It involves love of country, passion, devotion, commitment and, ultimately, profound disillusionment and betrayal. It involves painful emotions perhaps better conveyed visually than through the written word.

The article's author, Susan Zuccotti, has written “The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival” (University of Nebraska Press, 1996) and “Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy” (Yale University Press, 2000).

Read the complete article at the link above.

Cuba: The Pedro Pan exodus, replanting roots

Nearly 400 Jewish children, among thousands of Catholic youngsters, were sent secretly to Miami during the Catholic-sponsored Pedro Pan (Peter Pan) 1960s program at the time of the Castro Revolution in Cuba. There are also photos and a video with the The Miami Herald story.

The youngsters left in small groups, flying to Miami to live in Jewish foster homes until their parents could join them.

The story also quotes good friend HIAS historian, Valery Bazarov, who was at the recent Chicago conference with his wife and son.

It was April 1961, Havana, Cuba. Lilian Brinberg, 15-year-old daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, had just been told some stunning news.

She and her younger sister, Silvia, would be leaving their parents, their friends and the only home they had ever known to fly to Miami, unaccompanied, and live with strangers in a foster home.

And so, the Brinberg sisters became part of a little-known chapter of Cuba's history: the Jewish kids of Pedro Pan -- the Catholic Church-sponsored effort to spirit unaccompanied Cuban kids to the United States under the noses of the Castro government.

Because it was run by the archdiocese in Florida and most children were cared for by Catholic social services, it has been assumed that the 14,048 who made the journey through Pedro Pan were Catholic.

In fact, 396 Jewish kids joined the exodus. For many - the children of families decimated and divided by the Holocaust and that thought they had found paradise in pre-Castro Havana -- the journey culminated a double diaspora.

Like immigrants elsewhere, problems included language, family separation and a lower status from their familiar homes. However, as young people usually do, they adapted, their families arrived, the community matured and prospered and built the Cuban Hebrew Congregation of Miami, "The Circle." They even had a band called The Bagels, which played Cuban-oldies.

El Patronato, the main Havana synagogue, noticed missing children at the bar-mitzvah club. The kids met every Sunday followed by the ritual of going to a restaurant and a movie. No one knew why more young people were missing each time.

As families gathered and told their children about the planned exodus, they were naturally upset.

Pedro Pan - a name coined by Miami Herald reporter Gene Miller and inspired by the fairy tale about a boy who could fly - was well under way, having started the day after Christmas, 1960.

The secretive airlift was initiated amid fears that Cuba, under Fidel Castro, would strip parental rights away and send children to work and study under the regime's control. Those fears may have been more acute among Cuban Jews, a community estimated at 15,000 by the late 1950s.

Although a significant number had come from the Middle East, many were Holocaust survivors who traveled alone to the island after seeing their families ripped apart by the Nazis.

To the Jews of Cuba, especially those who had fled the Holocaust, the United States was the ultimate destination -- or at least that's what they hoped. But immigration restrictions kept them out, at least in the short term.

Anthropologist Ruth Behar, who researches the Jews of Cuba, says they found more than a refuge on the island, "they found a paradise."

To those who had been through WWII, the Cuban revolution seemed familiar, according to Valery Bazarov. HIAS monitored the situation and would play an important role, helping the Cuban Jews to travel, providing documents and sometimes paying for transportation.

Why has this exodus been largely unrecognized outside of Jewish circles?

Marcos Kerbel, president of the Cuban Hebrew Congregation and a Pedro Pan Cuban himself, attributes the silence to the low profile the Jewish community in Cuba had traditionally maintained for fear of reprisals.

Documents from the archives of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York, dusted off as a result of a recent El Nuevo Herald request, tell the story of the Pedro Pan Jews and establish that 396 made the journey.

What's clear is that the experience of the Pedro Pan Jews was a bit different from that of the Catholics who made up the bulk of the group.

While Catholic children without friends or family in the United States were sent to provisional campgrounds, the Jewish children were placed directly with Jewish foster families in South Florida and elsewhere. The resettlement was supervised by Jewish Family and Children's Services, which met them at Miami International Airport.

The children were individually visited monthly by the JFCS; living expenses were reimbursed by the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

The article talks about re-establishing the sense of community and how hard it was in the beginning to feel accepted, but they overcame the hardships.

Read the complete article at the link above; view the photos and video.

Germany: Ancestry.de price drop

Grace at the Genealogy Insider blog has posted here about a great price break for those researching Germany.

German genealogy blog Abenteuer Ahnenforschung pointed out today that the price of Ancestry.de's basic membership has been lowered to 9.95 euros a year—about $14.65.

(For comparison's sake, Ancestry.com's US-only membership package costs $155.40 a year.)

If your family history research focuses on Germany—and you've got a good grasp on the language—this is a total steal.

The records available to Ancestry.de subscribers (as well as Ancestry.com users with a World Deluxe Membership) include German city directories from 1797-1945 containing 32 million names, and soon 100 years of Deutsche Telekom phone books with an estimated 70 million names. Time to brush up on your Deutsch...

Thanks, Grace, for the head's-up!

New York: Museum genealogy project, Sept. 7

The Holocaust Museum and Study Center in Spring Valley (Rockland County) NY will launch a new genealogy center with a program at 1pm, Sunday, September 7, according to the museum's website.

Join us as we embark on our journey to discover our Eastern European roots. We’ll teach you how to find your family in the shtetl, document their travels and find unknown family around the world. We’ll give you the tools, teach you about the resources available and point you in the right direction.

On November 2, an exhibit on hidden children will open, while work continues on a multimedia project featuring recorded testimonies of area Holocaust survivors.

The museum reaches about 10,000 people every year, and takes educational programs to schools in Rockland and Orange counties and Bergen County, N.J., as well as to area churches, colleges, adult groups and private organizations.

This article in the Lower Hudson Journal News provides more detail about the museum's new director Michael Bierman and planned outreach.

Bierman intends to further the museum's mission of teaching the lessons of the Holocaust to the wider community as well as reaching out to various religious and ethnic groups in Rockland to combat discrimination and build "bridges of understanding."

The museum's mission is to provide Holocaust-related educational programs, lectures, exhibits, teacher-training seminars and commemoration ceremonies in the Lower Hudson Valley area.

The Holocaust Museum & Study Center
17 South Madison Avenue
Spring Valley, NY 10977
Phone: 845-356-2700
Hours: noon-4pm Sunday-Thursday, free admission
Closed major national and Jewish holidays.

Gesher Galicia: Cadastral Map Project

Today I had lunch in New York with Gesher Galicia research coordinator Pamela Weisberger, before she flew back to Los Angeles. Our discussion ranged over the Los Angeles conference (set for July 2010) and Gesher Galicia's second phase of the Cadastral Map and Landowner Records Project.

The project began in 2007, and I'm interested in this initiative as my mother's paternal roots are in a town listed below, Sukhostav.

The objective is to create inventories for maps and landowner records for Galician towns held by the Lviv archive and obtain copies of the maps and record books.

Indexing of landowner records will provide an easily searchable snapshot of where Galician ancestors once lived and the type of property they owned, during the years the land surveys were taken.

Nineteenth century maps will show the house and/or parcel numbers, along with the town's synagogue(s) and Jewish cemeteries, in many cases.

Genealogists and researchers will certainly benefit from this information as they match information in land record books to the available maps and then compare maps to house numbers on vital records. We may be able to see exactly in town our ancestors once lived. Other connections will be made to additional relatives, as many houses were handed down through the generations.

In some cases, said Pamela, inventories also show books on German-Jewish schools, a list of poor Christians and Jews in a town, and other information relating to the Jewish community.

The project includes finding the inventory for a town in the Lviv Archive card catalog, photographing/copying the maps, landowner record books and other documentation of interest.

In May 2007, Gesher Galicia obtained inventories of cadastral maps and landowner records for the following towns:

Chervonohrad (Krystynopol), Dobromil, Dora, Hrymaliv (Grzymalow), Halych (Halicz), Kamyanka / Kamyanky (Kamionki), Khodoriv (Chodorow), Konopkivka, Kopychyntsi (Kopyczynce), Kropivnik (Kropiwnik), Kulykiv (Kulikow), Lanchyn, Lisok, Mykolayiv (Mikolajow), Mykulyntsi (Mikulyince), Nyzhniv, Pavshivka, Pidhaisti (Podahajce), Pistyn, Polupanowka, Rozdil (Rozdol), Skala, Sniatyn (Snyatyn), Sukhostav (Suchostaw), Ustechko (Uscieczko)

The cadastral map inventories for these towns is here.

The landowner records for these towns is here.

In 2008, town projects included Kalush, Nadworna, Drohobycz, Boryslaw, Sambor/Stary Sambor, Rohatyn, and Zaleszczyki

For more information, click here or contact Pamela, pweisbergerAThotmailDOTcom (replace AT and DOT with the appropriate symbols).