Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Israel Through Photographs

A recent article in the recently-launched Times of Israel website covers, briefly, the story of Nadav Mann, who has been spending many years criss-crossing Israel to scan private collections of photographs from the early years of the State of Israel (and the years leading up to its foundation). This collection is incredibly important and offers a unique view of the growth of communities within pre-state Israel.

The article is written by Matti Friedman and is titled A lost world in black and white. The article includes a selection of the more than 100,000 photographs that Nadav Mann has collected over the years, but also helpfully links to a series of online albums [these now seem to be gone, sorry] that Nadav Mann has published via Google (which include thousands of photos, but certainly not all of them).

While the descriptions of the photos in the Google albums are all in Hebrew, just browsing through them without being able to read the captions is still incredibly powerful. Of course, if you find a photograph with someone you know, you should leave a comment on the photo - as not everyone in each photo is known, and you might be able to help improve the collection by pointing out who someone is in a photo.

An easier look in English at many of the photos can be found in Nadav Mann's regular articles highlighting photos from his collection on Ynet's English site (Ynet is the online publication of Israel's largest newspaper, Yediot Achranot).

A few photos from the collection:
[UPDATE: Sorry, but it seems Nadav Mann has removed the photo albums he had posted online, and the photos in this article were from that album so are also now gone. Check out the article A lost world in black and white and Nadav Mann's other articles in Ynet.]
Maccabi Girls Trip in 1930 in Poland
1936 Class Photo from Herzaliya Gymnasium
Building an irrigation system connect to the Yarmouk River in 1940
Kibbutz Dalia Dance Festival, during holiday of Shavuot in 1944

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Researching people born in Israel, but who moved

I was reading Todd Knowles' The Knowles Collection blog, where he discusses the recently introduced Brazil, Immigration Cards, 1900-1965 collection on the FamilySearch.org web site. He uses as an example the record of Esther Abraham Precher, who immigrated to Brazil in 1957:

1957 Brazil Immigration Card for Esther Abraham Precher
My grandmother's brother spent some time in Brazil during WWII, and although he probably didn't immigrate officially, I figured I would take a look. I didn't find a record (although looking at the collection it looks like only half of the images are indexed so far), but looking at the record Todd Knowles had used as an example, I saw something very interesting. Her record shows she was born in Jerusalem. Why was a woman born in Jerusalem moving to Brazil in 1957?

Of course, I can't be certain as to why she moved, but I can make an educated guess. If you look closer at the immigration card, you can see that she was born in 1898 in Jerusalem, but that her passport had recently been issued in Cairo. It would seem that while she was born in Jerusalem during the Ottoman period, she at some point (perhaps when she got married) moved to Egypt. Her immigration occurred just a few months after the 1956 Sinai War, where Egypt fought a war against Israel (along with Great Britain and France). While being Jewish in most Arab countries was difficult after Israel was founded, it was probably particularly dangerous to be in Egypt after they had just fought another war with Israel. Over half the Jewish population of Egypt were forced out of the country in this period, and were forced to leave all their asset behind. Even if she had wanted to go back to Israel where she was born, it probably was not possible given the political situation, so she probably went wherever she could get a visa for, which in this case was Brazil. Interestingly enough coming after my last article on Food as Genealogy – Iraqi Kubbe, this was much the same motivation for the many Iraqi Jews and Jews from all Arab countries that were forced to flee their homes for Israel, the United States or elsewhere. This was not a good time to be Jewish in any Arab country (and unfortunately the situation has not improved since – Egypt and Iraq both had flourishing Jewish communities dating back to the 2nd Temple period, and both have less than 100 Jews each today).

If you search for records in the Brazil collection, you would find there are actually 243 records that list a birthplace for the person as Israel. You could widen your search to all mentions of Israel in all databases on FamilySearch, and you'd find that there are 8728 records (as I write this article) which list Israel as a location in the record. Of course, if you were trying to find someone in a record that was created before the State of Israel came into being, it would not list Israel. You could therefore search for Palestine which was used as a place name by some (although people would also say Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Turkey or Turkish Empire), where you would find 13,892 records (as I write this). You could also search for specific cities, such as Jerusalem (5650 records), Tel Aviv (434 records) or Haifa (337 records). Some of the Jerusalem results will probably be records from other towns called Jerusalem (did you know there was a Jerusalem, Ohio?). Jaffa, for example, came back with over a million records, which doesn't make much sense. If you search for Jaffa, Palestine, however, you get 9489 results which at first glance seem mostly Jewish.

Anyways, the Brazil Immigration Cards database is a very interesting collection for those with connection to Brazil, but for anyone who knows they had family in Israel at some point in the past but may have moved elsewhere, this is an interesting way to search for records that may help you in your research.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Food as Genealogy – Iraqi Kubbe

Kubbe Selek (Beet)Kubbe Dlaat (Pumpkin)

When one thinks of family, invariable thoughts run to family meals – celebrations with family over holidays or other special events. Many times one serves certain family recipes at these meals, and sometimes a specific recipe is associated with a specific holiday every year. However, it seems to me that recipes also have a way of getting lost over the years. How many of us make the exact same recipes that our families made in previous generations? Sure, many of us make 'ethnic' recipes from the countries our families came from, but how many are actual family recipes and how many came from cookbooks or web sites? In many cases those original recipes were lost not because they were forgotten, but because modern conveniences like microwaves and food processors, as well as a desire to fit in to their new communities, changed the way our families cooked, and simpler recipes replaced more complex 'authentic' recipes they had made when they first arrived on new shores. Convenience played another role in changing recipes, as sometimes the ingredients available one place were not available in one's new home, and ingredients were substituted, forever changing the recipes.

With all of this in mind, it was interesting when my mother-in-law came to visit us in Israel recently and decided to teach my wife how to make Kubbe. My mother-in-law was born in Iraq, and moved to Israel as a child due to the increasing violence and discrimination against Jews in Iraq in the early 1950s. As a teenager she went to college in the United States, where my wife grew up. When my wife was growing up, her grandmother used to come and visit and make authentic foods she learned to make in Iraq. One of the spotlights of her culinary repertoire was Kubbe. When her grandmother passed away, the Kubbe stopped as her mother never made it when my wife was growing up.

Kubbe comes in many forms, and varies from country to country in the Middle East. The spelling also varies greatly in English – Kubbe, Kube, Kubba, Kibbe, etc.

When I was growing up, the only Kubbe I was aware of was the football-shaped fried Syrian variety. Iraq also has a fried variety, but it's generally larger and rounder. Iraq is also home to a boiled form, that is cooked in a soup and served over a bed of rice. The boiled form is sold across Israel as a soup in a number of different flavorings - Kubbe Selek (Beet) is a very popular one due to its sweetness and bright color, and other flavoring such as lemon and tomato exist in restaurants across Israel, brought here by the large population of Jews from across the Middle East. My wife's family from Iraq made three specific flavors of this Kubbe – Beet, Pumpkin and Okra. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, her mother let us in on a little secret – she knew how to make Kubbe, and she knew how to do it really well. She hadn't wanted to get into the stereotype of the Sephardi wife making all of these specialty foods when she was a young wife, but now she decided to make us a batch of Kubbe. My wife was in shock. That was nearly five years ago, and over the years she made it a few more times, but on this trip she decided to teach my wife the ins and outs of making Kubbe. On this trip, she made Kubbe with Beets, Kubbe with Pumpkin, and fried Kubbe, and showed my wife how to do all of them.

The genealogist in me saw this is as passing down an oral tradition, and decided to document it. Researching Jewish genealogy in Iraq may be close to impossible, but at least there is this family hisotry in the form of food that was passed down and we can continue to share. My nerdiness is your gain, as the remainder of this article is a photo-rich step-by-step guide in making Iraqi Kubbe, with either Beets or Pumpkin. If you like Okra, sorry, we don't, so we never asked how to make that one...

More or less, there are no secret ingredients used to make this dish. There are a few specialty ingredients, but these are easy to find these days. In Israel any gourmet food store or spice store will carry what you need, and in the US you can order most of this online (except maybe the Noomi Basra - more on that later). However, even without these few special ingredients, you can make this recipe and it will be pretty good, if not as tart. If you don't like tart foods, then you might want to skip some of these ingredients anyways. In general it's good to think of this as a sweet and sour dish, and if you don't have one of the sweet or sour ingredients, just substitute them with something you do have.

There are three main components to making this Kubbe – the dough, the meat and the soup. The best part about this recipe is that the two versions you see photos of at the top only differ in one ingredient – you either add pumpkin or you add beets when you get to that stage. The rest of the recipe is exactly the same.

With a little practice, from beginning to having the soup cooking should take between an hour and and hour and a half. Once it's cooking you need to stir occasionally, but basically you leave it alone for at least half an hour. So, making this can range from an hour and a half to two hours or thereabouts.

Dough

Let's start with the dough. It's a good place to start because it's easy and it needs to sit for 20-30 minutes after you first knead it, so you might as well get it over with first. The recipe is just three ingredients:

Dough
3 CupsFarina/Cream of Wheat/Solet
2 tspSalt
1 1/2 CupWater

The main ingredient is Cream of Wheat (in the US). In the UK it's known as Farina. In Israel it's Solet. Basically a coarsely ground wheat product.

Originally in Iraq they used to grind rice for this purpose instead of using Farina. This is a change made after leaving Iraq, but is fairly universal. If I had to guess, this switch was due to the shortage of rice in Israel during the same period when most Jewish immigrants from Arab countries arrived.

This problem also led to the creation of Ptitim, known outside of Israel as Israeli Couscous, as a substitute for rice. The origin of Ptitim is quite amazing – David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, asked Osem, a major food company in Israel, to develop a wheat-based replacement for rice, since rice was a major staple of the diet of Jews from the surrounding countries. Anyways...

You mix the ingredients together in a bowl and knead until it's slightly elastic.

Knead until slightly elasticDough after waiting 20-30 minutes

After kneading the dough, you need to let it sit for 20-30 minutes, so set it aside and start on the next step.

The Meat

The meat is pretty simple. Basically it's chopped meat, onions, parsley, with rice and some spices.

Chopping ParsleyFinished Meat Mixture

Here's the ingredient list:

Meat Mixture
1 lbGround Beef
1/2 CupRinsed, Uncooked Rice (Basmati is good)
1 CupParsely, Finely Chopped
2Onions (Medium), Finely Chopped
2 tspBaharat Spice Mixture (see notes below)
2 tspSalt
1 tspCinnamon
1 tspBlack Pepper, ground

Chop the onions and parsley very fine. Rinse the rice, then drain the water. Add the everything together in a bowl and mix together. You can do this step in advance if you want, and store for up to a day. However, it takes so little time you can do it in between the dough and the soup without much problem.

What, you might be asking, is Baharat? Baharat is one of the three specialty ingredients in this recipe, and it's used in both the meat mixture and in the soup. In Arabic, Baharat simply means spices. Baharat is a common spice mixture that is used across the middle east, but it varies by region. Thus Baharat in Iraq is not the same as that in Lebanon, which is not the same as that in Turkey. Indeed, the exact mixtures probably vary by family.

In Israel almost any spice store (and there are many of them) will carry Baharat – just ask for it. In the US, speciality food stores will carry some form of it, or you can look on Amazon, which has several varieties of it, even kosher-certified organic mixtures. If you don't want to, or can't, buy Baharat where you live, you can make you own with the following recipe:

Baharat (All ground)
2 TbspBlack Pepper
2 TbspCumin
2 TbspPaprika
1 TbspCloves
1 TbspCoriander
1 tspCinnamon
1 tspNutmeg
1/2 tspCarnomon
 
Starting the Soup

We're just going to put a few ingredients in a stock pot to get started, as they also need time. Here's what you need:

Soup Starter
2Onions, coarsely chopped
2 TbspOlive Oil
2 CupsBeets or Pumpkin

Start out by adding the olive oil and onions to the stock pot and brown the onions. Peel and cut the Pumpkin or Beets into bite-size cubes. When the onions are browned, add the Pumpkin or Beets and let that cook too. You can leave it cooking for 10-15 minutes until you're ready to add the flavoring and water.

Adding Beets to the potOnions and Beets cooking

While the onions and the Pumpkin or Beets are cooking, move on to the next step...

The Soup Flavor

As mentioned earlier, the basis of both the Pumpkin and Beet soups is identical. Here's how to flavor the soup that you'll be boiling the Kubbe in.

Soup Flavoring
3Lemons (Juice of)
1/2 CupTamarind Concentrate
1/2 CupBrown Sugar
1/2 CupOlive Oil
2 tspBaharat Spice Mixture (see notes above)
1 tspCinnamon
2 tspSalt
1Noomi Basra (Black Lemon) - see notes below
14 CupsWater, approximate

Mix the ingredients of the soup flavoring together in a bowl with 2 Cups of Water, and whisk together. Make sure the Tamarind concentrate gets fully mixed together with the other ingredients.

Tamarind is the second specialty ingredient used in this recipe. It adds a lot of tart tangy flavor to the final dish, and is highly recommended. You'll probably find other uses for Tamarind once you start using it. Like Baharat, this is fairly easy to find in Israel, and in the US you can find it in specialty stores and yes, even on Amazon. For those worried about it being kosher, the one here comes with kosher certification and the same brand is sold on Amazon, but I don't know if it kosher certified or not.

Juicing LemonsTamarind Concentrate

Taste the mixture for future reference – if you find the flavor of the final product is not tart enough, or not salty enough, etc. then this is a good point to check and to adjust it in the future.

Add this to the stock pot with the additional 12 cups of water. Basically you want to add enough water to have room for all the Kubbe you're going to add soon. Make sure you don't add too much water, however, or the pot can overflow when you add the Kubbe.

If you can find a Noomi Basra (literally a Basra Lemon, but it's actually a dried Lime) add this as well – it will add more tart citrus flavor. In English it's called a Black Lime. You can pierce the Noomi Basra a couple of times before adding it, or crush it and add the pieces to the soup. This is the third and last specialty ingredient in the recipe, and the hardest to find. In much of the Arab world, this is called Loomi. In Iraq, they are called Noomi Basra (Basra Lemon), after the town of Basra in Iraq. As I found out about them from my mother-in-law, I refer to them by their Iraqi name. In Israel, they're called Persian Lemons. In Persia (Iran), it's called Omani, after the country of Oman. Basically, it's a lime that is boiled in salt water, then dried out in the sun. It gives a very unique tart citrus flavor to the dish, more complex than the lemon or the tamarind concentrate by themselves.

Noomi Basra in the MarketA Noomi Basra Cracked Open

Bring to a rapid boil. The soup needs to be boiling strongly when you add the Kubbe.

Making the Kubbe (a trick that makes it easy)

For many people, Kubbe seems daunting because the idea of forming all the Kubbe balls and having them come out right seems impossible. Indeed, I don't think my wife ever expected to make Kubbe because of this fact. However, while she was learning to make Kubbe from her mother, she ran into an unexpected stroke of luck. Her cousin came to visit and her cousin, who has made Kubbe before, learned a trick for making a type of cookie that she applied to making Kubbe, making it much simpler, and the result much better. Basically, you oil a cutting board and your hands, and you take a piece of dough and make a circle about 3 inches across. Since the board and your hands are oiled, the dough doesn't stick to the board. Add the meat, pull the dough up around the meat, and roll it in your oiled hands. Perfect thin-walled Kubbe, better than many old Iraqi women who have been making Kubbe for decades can make.

Oil your workspace......and your hands

To make the Kubbe balls, you want to start by taking the dough that you made earlier. Knead it a little and test it out by taking a piece off and seeing if it is easy to work with. If you find it too liquidy or otherwise falling apart, you can add some plain flour to the dough to get the consistency better. If you do that, make sure to knead it all together and wait a few more minutes. If you want, you can separate the dough into pieces in advance, or you can just take pieces from the dough as you go.

Separating the doughSpreading the dough and adding meat

As mentioned before, you now take a piece of dough, and spread it out into a circle. Add some meat. Pull the dough up around the meat and push it together. Once it's sticking, roll it in your hands to make it round. If there's hole in the dough, you can patch it with more dough.

Two more recommendations. Add additional oil the board and your hands as necessary during the process. Also, keep a bowl with some water it in nearby so you can rinse off pieces of meat or other debris from you hands as you go, otherwise you might end up with pieces of meat on the outside of the Kubbe balls. It's not a big deal, but if you're a perfectionist, having the water nearby is handy.

Pulling up the doughFinished Kubbe balls

Repeat the process until all the Kubbe balls are done. In our case this recipe made 34 Kubbe balls.

Put It All Together

Make sure the soup is up to a rapid boil. Add the Kubbe balls one at a time into the boiling soup. Make sure the soup is boiling when you add each ball, as adding the Kubbe balls will bring down the temperature each time. So add them quickly, but wait before adding each one if the soup is not boiling yet.

Adding a Kubbe to the soup (Pumpkin)Kubbe balls rise during cooking (Beet)

Stir the pot occasionally, and cook for about half an hour. Taste one kubbe ball to make sure it's cooked properly.

Serve over a bed of rice, or in a bowl as soup.

I'll repeat those pictures of the finished product from above:

Kubbe Selek (Beet)Kubbe Dlaat (Pumpkin)

So special thanks to my mother-in-law for teaching my wife how to make Iraqi Kubbe. Thank you as well to my wife who put up with me taking photos with my phone while she made the Kubbe.

If you like this recipe, let me know in the comments. If you make this recipe, I definitely want to hear about it (send a picture too). Know any other interesting Iraqi recipes, please share. If anything isn't clear, let me know and I'll try to fix it.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Genealogy standards, another look

Over a year ago I took a look at genealogy data standards and where they were headed in my article The Future of Sharing (Genealogical Data). In some ways a lot has changed since I wrote the article, but in some ways we're really at the same point we were then, with no clear picture of the future. This past week's 2nd annual Rootstech conference (my last article mentioned the then-upcoming 1st Rootstech) has brought some of the questions asked into focus, so I thought it was worth reviewing what has happened.

GEDCOM X

On the face of it, the biggest news to come out of the conference was the release of long-awaited successor to GEDCOM, GEDCOM X. FamilySearch, the online presence of the LDS church which was the creator and maintainer of the original GEDCOM standard, released this new standard at the conference a few days ago. FamilySearch hits a lot of the right keywords in the release – the format can be XML or JSON based, is released under an Creative Commons license, supports metadata including Dublin Core and FOAF, the development is hosted on Github, it offers both a file format (like tradition GEDCOM) and an API, and more. Yet there are also some strange decisions that seem to have been made, and no explanation seems to be given. One that stands out is the decision to base the file format MIME, a format created for sending e-mail attachements (MIME is an acronym of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). So far the logic behind many of the decisions that have been made seem very opaque. The entire development of GEDCOM X seems to have been done up to this point without any input from the industry at large, or even the well know efforts to improve GEDCOM, such as the Better GEDCOM group. Indeed, the answer in their FAQ about these efforts seems largely patronizing:
Have you heard about FHISO (BetterGEDCOM), OpenGen, ?
Of course. We've heard about them and many others who are making efforts to standardize genealogical technologies. We applaud the work of everybody willing to contribute to the standardization effort, and we hope they will continue to contribute their voices.
In other words, at least to my ears, it's saying they know other people want to improve GEDCOM, but they are going to do their own thing and maybe they'll listen occassionally (but no promises). In short, while it's great that FamilySearch has come out with a new standard, their approach to doing so does not seem geared towards gaining widespread adoption from the industry at large, or at least not in such a friendly manner.

Of course, the huge advantage FamilySearch has over just about anyone else is the very large developer network they've cultivated for accessing familysearch.org. They are essentially a non-profit organization which has many commercial companies using their current API. To the extent that they transition these existing companies from their legacy API to GEDCOM X, they will certainly have a major advantage over other efforts to replace GEDCOM.

Progress On Other Fronts

So what happened to the other efforts mentioned in my last article?

The most visible effort has been the BetterGEDCOM wiki, which is moving from an informal group to a formal organization called the Family History Information Standards Organisation (FHISO) which will now sponsor the wiki. While they have been the most active effort to create a replacement for GEDCOM, they seem to have been overtaken by the too-many-cooks problem and how they plan on coming to a consensus remains to be seen, let alone how they convince industry organizations and companies to agree with them. It will be interesting to see FHISO's response to GEDCOM X, and if they will focus their efforts on trying to implement their ideas within the GEDCOM X framework, or if they will continue to try to go it alone.

The OpenGen International Alliance, started by the people at AppleTree.com, doesn't seem to have taken off. Either for the matter has AppleTree, which may explain the why the OpenGen site hasn't been updated in the past year (and refers to an upcoming webinar last March).

APIs

One of the most interesting developments last year was the introduction of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for genealogy web sites. Indeed, the rumors around what would become GEDCOM X was that it was only an API, and not a file format, but luckily that turned out not to be true and it is both. The only APIs that had been released before my last article were Geni.com's API and OneWorldTree.com's GenealogyCloud API.

Geni seems to at least gotten some traction with their API, with future support for syncing data coming from AncestorSync. Presumably this uses Geni's API. I haven't heard of other uses of the Geni API, however. If you know of other developers using the Geni API, let me know in the comment.

I have not heard of anyone using the GenealogyCloud API. If you know any anyone using GenealogyCloud, let me know in the comments.

As I predicted in the last article, MyHeritage introduced their own API, smartly named Family Graph. I say smartly because it is clearly mimicking Facebooks' Social Graph API. They're not comparing themselves to Geni, but to Facebook, which is smart. The other very smart thing they did was introduce a contest to develop applications that use the Family Graph API. If no one uses your API, what's the point right? The winner receives $10,000. The deadline for that contest is actually in about a week from now, with judging by a panel taking place in the first half of March and the results announced on March 15th. The real test will be the quality of the applications submitted, and whether the applications were submitted by individual developers or by larger companies. If the contest results are published next month with no major applications, then this will in my estimation be a setback for MyHeritage, not an achievement.

Conclusion

It will be very interesting to see how the introduction of GEDCOM X is accepted by the genealogy companies at large that are needed to make a new format successful. FamilySearch has some key advantages in that they are a non-profit organization (even though in many ways they compete with the large commercial companies like Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com) and that they already have a large developer network. While many of the largest genealogy companies are not currently part of that developer network, if all of the ones who are start adopting GEDCOM X as their export format of choice, I think it will be hard for other companies to not adopt it. GEDCOM X's dual format/API functionality also gives it a major edge, especially if FamilySearch's legacy API is replaced by the API functionality in GEDCOM X.

Some have predicted there would never be a true replacement for GEDCOM, and others have said that technology such as AncestorSync's upcoming products would make the need for a file format unnecessary. I think both of these assertions are incorrect. There will be a replacement for GEDCOM, and it is necessary. Whether or not GEDCOM X is the ideal replacement seems to me to be a moot point. They will get the traction they need to push GEDCOM X into the mainstream. The real question is will they truly make it an open standard, or will they continue to hold it close to the chest? The real test will be when other groups insist on various features, and how they handle those demands. FamilySearch has put in all the trappings of an open and transparent development process, so let's hope they keep in that direction.