From Despair to Celebration

The origin of a major celebration was from the darkest time and the utmost of despair.

Hakafot Shniyot celebration in Tel Aviv (YouTube)

In Israel the Jewish holidays are celebrated slightly different than in other countries. The three pilgrimage holidays in which Jews would historically travel to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at the temple – Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (Pentecost) and Sukkot (Tabernacles) – are celebrated for two days outside of Israel (for Pesach and Sukkot, two days at the beginning and two days at the end), and only one day within Israel. The reason for this is a historical inability to be sure that the lunar months on which the Jewish calendar are based was accurate outside of Israel. While in today's modern world this is not a problem, the keeping of two days for each holiday outside of Israel (in the diaspora) has remained. In fact, many Jewish tourists who visit Israel during the holidays still keep the second day while in Israel. There are various reasons for this, but it's worth pointing out the disparity of some Jews keeping a holiday where they cannot drive a car or take a bus, where they are generally dressed in their fanciest clothes, and the rest of the country going about its business as normal.

The end of the week of the Sukkot holiday is actually a pair of different holidays called Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. In the diaspora these holidays take place on two sequential days at the end of the Sukkot holiday. On the eve of Simchat Torah, there is a celebration that includes dancing in a large circle holding Torahs and singing. This is called Hakafot.

In Israel, however, the two holidays of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah are merged into a single day. This means that while Jews in other countries celebrate Hakafot on the second night, in Israel the holiday is already over.

This has led to one of the most interesting celebrations in Israel, that of Hakafot Shniyot (Second Hakafot). There is amazingly little written online about this celebration, so let me explain. The holiday is over so there are no restrictions on things like playing musical instruments or using a loudspeaker. In cities across Israel celebrations are held that have the traditional Hakafot dancing with Torahs, and take advantage of the fact that music and lights not available on the holiday can be used. These celebrations are attended by politicians and other dignitaries, but are open to everyone. The largest celebrations are in the major cities like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but celebrations occur in many cities and small towns. These are very popular celebrations which bring in many groups of people, from religious to secular, Ashkenazi to Sephardi, etc.

In looking up what was written online, I found various explanations for the holiday. One person wrote it originated with the Arizal, a 16th-century rabbi who lived in Safed as a way of showing solidarity with the Jewish communities in the diaspora. Others wrote it is an attempt to offer Hakafot to non-religious Jews, who would be more willing to come celebrate with real music in a public square than in the traditional Hakafot carried out in synagogues and without music. There may be some truth to these statements. The Arizal may have celebrated a second night of Hakafot (although I have no evidence of this), and the current celebrations may be a way to bring religious and non-religious Jews together, but neither of these explain where the modern celebration in Israel originated, nor why.

Which brings me to the main point of this article. I recently finished reading an amazing memoir by the former (1993-2003) Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau. The book is called Out of the Depths: The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last and it is one of the most moving books I have ever read. I do not think it possible to read this book and not cry repeatedly. Rabbi Lau was only 2 years old when the second world war broke out. His parents were deported to death camps and murdered, and he was deported to two different concentration camps as a young child. Protected by his older brother who was enjoined by their father to protect the younger Lau and preserve the family's 37-generation rabbinic dynasty, the young Lau ended up surviving Buchenwald, where he was liberated by American forces just short of his eighth birthday. Making their way to France with other young Buchenwald survivors (including a young Elie Wiesel who would remain in France), the two brothers insisted on going to the one place Jews could call their own, Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). They received visas to then British-Mandate Palestine, and were among the first Holocaust survivors to arrive in what would become the State of Israel a few short years later (they were among the first because the British severely restricted Jewish immigration at that time – perhaps 150 Jewish children who survived Buchenwald were too hard even for the British to turn down).

'Lulek' Lau, the future Chief Rabbi, upon his arrival in Israel with a rifle provided by a US soldier (that was later confiscated by the British). (Yad Vashem)

One of the very interesting stories told by Lau, is that of his father-in-law Rabbi Yedidya Frenkel. During the war, Lau's future-father-in-law was the rabbi of the Florentin neighborhood in Tel Aviv. After services ended concluding the Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah holiday in October 1942, Rabbi Frenkel asked his congregants to remain in the synagogue for a few minutes. I'll quote from the book for the rest of the story:

The congregants wondered at his strange request, but they respected the rabbi's wishes. He removed a Torah scroll from the ark, and in a voice quivering with emotion, announced to the congregation, "In Poland and elsewhere throughout war-torn Europe, the telephones aren't working, the telegraph stations are closed, the mail no longer runs. Entire communities are cut off, and we do not know what has happened to their Jews. At this exact hour, in Warsaw, Kraków, and every other city in Poland, they should be beginning their Simchat Torah celebrations. But we do not know whether they are performing the traditional processions [Hakafot] holding the Torah scrolls. We are completely cut off from them, and despite our attempts to make contact, the communities do not answer. But all Jews are responsible for one another. Let us act in their stead and perform processions on their behalf, at least symbolically."

Thus started the tradition of Hakafot Shniyot celebrations in Israel, from a place of darkness and despair. Rabbi Lau relates that in the years following the foundation of the State of Israel, as long as his father-in-law was alive, the Hafakot Shniyot celebration in the Florentin neighborhood were visited by the current Prime Minister and IDF Chief of Staff (as well as many other dignitaries). The celebrations spread, first to cities like Jerusalem and to the main square in Tel Aviv, to towns like Kfar Chabad, to army bases, and eventually across the entire country.

As we begin the commemoration of Yom HaShoa tonight here in Israel, it is worth remembering that one of Israel's most popular and happiest celebrations, came from a time when Jews across the globe did not know the fate of their family members in Europe. When his future-father-in-law was starting this tradition, the young Lau was likely hiding in an attic with his soon-to-be murdered mother, being fed cookies to keep him quiet in case Gestapo soldiers might hear him when searching the building. It's hard to conceive such events, not having experienced them, but we must remember, and I hope everyone will remember tonight that even out of despair can come celebration, and with the State of Israel hopefully no such event will ever be able to happen again.

Some celebrations of Hakafot Shniyot from this past year:

Tel Aviv:


Kfar Chabad:


Ponevitch Yeshiva:

Bring It Home

Today was Yom HaShoa (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in Israel. While there are many ways to commemorate the Holocaust, and those family members we lost, I wanted to bring to people's attention a very interesting attempt at remembering those who were lost.

Menorah rescued from Budapest flea market, now being used in Israel.

We know the Nazis stole an incredible amount of artwork from Jewish families during the Holocaust, from valuable paintings, to even Judaica. While the Nazis were known to steal expensive Judaica such as gold menorahs or silver candlesticks, what happened to the everyday ritual items that most Jewish families used? Certainly the Nazis didn't bother to collect cheap Judaica and send it by train somewhere – so where did it go?

Kiddush cup rescued from flea market.

Some of the Judaica might have been taken with Jews when being sent by trains to death camps, some may have been sold cheaply in an attempt to raise some money before fleeing, but most of it was likely left behind in their homes. What happened to the Judaica left behind? Either it was looted following the mass deportations, or the people who moved into the homes left behind by the Jews just took it when they moved in. Maybe they sold it, maybe they stuck it in a box and stuck it in the attic, maybe they just threw it in the garbage. No one knows exactly what happened to all of that Judaica, but we do know that there are likely millions of such ritual objects from candlesticks to menorahs to spice boxes to seder plates that once existed and many of them may still exist.

Which brings me to Bill Frankel. On a trip to to Budapest, he stopped by the very large Esceri flea market in that city. While wandering around looking at the various wares for sale, he started noticing things like kiddush cups, menorahs, Torah yads, spice boxes, etc. Hundreds of them. When he would show interest in a Jewish piece, the dealers would inevitably pull ut a box from under their table with more Jewish objects. The supply was endless.

A strange mixture of items for sale in the Esceri flea market.

On the trip Bill Frankel bought several objects, but determined that more of these Jewish ritual objects needed to 'come home'. Moreover, he didn't want these objects to end up in museums or on display somewhere in some exhibit – he wanted them to be used again by Jewish families. With this idea he founded Bring It Home, a charity with exactly that goal.

Bring It Home was founded to facilitate finding these items, purchasing or otherwise acquiring Jewish ritual objects in Europe, distributing them to new Jewish homes, and creating an educational experience for those who get involved in the process.

Bring It Home is brand new, and are still putting together their marketing materials, organizing their first buying trip, etc., and need funds to get off the ground. To that end, the charity has started a fundraising campaign through crowdfunding site indiegogo. They're looking to raise $10,000, and they have two weeks left in the campaign. To see the current status, go to the campaign website, or check the widget below (and then go to the web site).

There are many ways to memorialize those killed in the Holocaust, but I think this is one of the more interesting and personal ways that one can commemorate those killed – by facilitating the return of these lost ritual objects, and putting them back into use by Jewish families worldwide.

Database of Polish Victims of the Nazis

There's an interesting database listing Polish victims of the Nazis, organized by a group of Polish government and non-government organizations, and sponsored mainly by Polish media organizations.

The site is connected to three Polish organizations: the Institute of National Remembrance, the Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation, and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. It is also sponsored by a number of Polish media organizations, including the Polish Press Agency and several Polish TV stations.

The site, Straty.pl, is unfortunately only available in Polish. Luckily, it's not too hard to use without knowledge of Polish, especially if you use Google Chrome and the built-in Translate feature. Even without Translate, you can get around the site. This is what the search page looks like:

Straty.pl Search Page

A quick translation of the fields:

Nazwisko (Surname)

Imię (Given name)

Imię ojca (Father's name)

Imię matki (Mother's name)

Miejsce urodzenia (Place of birth)

Data urodzenia (Day of birth)

Data śmierci (Day of death)

dzień (day)

miesiąc (month)

rok (year)

SZUKAJ is Search, and CZYSC is Clear.

You can search for a surname alone, but apparently not a town alone. If a surname has too many hits, it will force you to fill in additional search fields to help pare down the umber of results.

Victims listed in the database include Polish soldiers who were killed, prisoners of war, resistance fighters, concentration camp prisoners, those persecuted for reasons of race (aka Jews and Gypsies), those executed by the Nazis, those sentenced to death by German courts, slave laborers, displaced persons, children, civilian casualties (such as from bombing raids), etc.

This list is not exclusively, nor even predominately, Jewish. The site was not set up as a memorial to Jewish victims of the Nazis, but rather as a database of Polish victims of the Nazis, some of which happened to be Jewish. In fact, one looking at the site might wonder if Jewish names in the database are more of an afterthought than a primary section of the database.

There are many sources of data in the database, and each listing will tell you which source they came from, which can help you track down further information. Data sources I've noticed include:

International Tracing Service (Bad Arolsen) (http://www.its-arolsen.org/)

Jewish Historical Institute (http://www.jhi.pl/)

Polish Red Cross (http://www.pck.pl/)

State Archive in Krakow (http://www.ank.gov.pl/)

Obviously this database is not complete, and it's not going to be 100% accurate (and certainly not complete when it comes to Jewish names). It is still useful to supplement the other existing databases out there, and to give you some direction on possible research routes. For example, if you see records from the International Tracing Service, you can contact them to get more information on the person you find.

You can also contribute data to the database, although I have not tried to do this. They have a questionnaire that you can fill out on individuals, listing their name, parents' names, birth date and location, nationality, religion, place of residence before the war, education, occupation, political organization membership, social activities, etc. This is, unfortunately like the rest of the site, only available in Polish. I'm not sure what would happen if you filled out the form in English.

Of course, when searching for information on Jewish victims of the Nazis, the most important database is the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names. One important distinction between these databases, beside Straty.pl's focus on Poles and Yad Vashem's focus on Jews (with obvious overlap), is that Straty.pl's database contains victims who are not necessarily people who were killed. Prisoners of camps, etc. even if they were not murdered, are contained in their database.

For example, the database includes two people with the surname Trauring, the couple Ferdynand and Stefania Trauring, who I know to appear on Shindler's lists. They show up in the Straty.pl database as prisoners of the Gross-Rosen sub-camp in Brunnlitz, which happens to be where prisoners working in Oskar Schindler's factory were interned. Whether this couple survived the war or not, they are listed in the Straty.pl database as having been prisoners. That's an important distinction.

The Fate of the Sabbatarians

I don't often link to other articles online, but I read an article today that struck me as fascinating, well-researched, well-written, and which has many implications for those interested in Jewish genealogy.

The article, by Shay Fogelman in Haaretz, is titled Discovering Europe's non-Jews who kept the faith and it discusses the fascinating history of the Sabbatarian community of Transylvania (Szekler Sabbatarians). The Sabbatarians were a community founded in the late 1500s by a Christian nobleman who, fascinated by the Bible and other Jewish writings, adopted many customs of Jews such as keeping the Sabbath (thus the name Sabbatarians) and keeping kosher, etc. He spread his beliefs to his court, which slowly adopted his beliefs, but it was his adopted son and successor who really spread this new belief-system by translating Jewish prayerbooks into Hungarian for the use of his followers. They were not Jews, they were not Christians, and that created no shortage of problems for them.

Bozodujfalu, center of the Sabbatarian community

In many ways they were persecuted even more than the Jewish community in the same region, because the Christian churches which dominated the region viewed Sabbatarians not as Jews, but as Christian heretics. By 1635 when they were forced to convert to one of the four major Christian sects in the region by the government, they counted their members at 20,000 people. Driven underground the religion persisted in hiding for hundreds of years, pretending to be Christian but intermarrying either amongst themselves or occasionally with the local Jewish community. In the mid-1800s with the emancipation of the Jews, the Sabbatarian community came out of hiding (although they were still persecuted as heretics) and half of the community converted en-masse to Judaism. The community, now half Jewish, continued to pray together in the same Synagogue as before.

When WWII started and the Nuremberg laws came into force, the Hungarians who controlled the region, and the Germans who eventually took over, were not sure what to do with the Sabbatarians. At first they considered them Jews, but after protests (including by local Christian clergy) some were exempted from the racial laws that sent the Jews into ghettos and eventually to the death camps. Some who were given the opportunity to leave the ghetto remained there as they decided they would rather share the fate of the Jews (if that was what God willed). Very little of the community seems to have survived the war, although some descendants of the community still live in the area, and even in Israel.

The story is interesting from a genealogical point of view because of the history of the community. While the mass-conversion of half the community occurred within a time-period that is well documented, the previous two centuries of the community is not well-documented, and the interaction between the Sabbatarians and the Jewish community is not well known. If members of the community intermarried into the Jewish community (presumably converting to Judaism beforehand), then that is in many ways reverse intermarriage compared to the much-more-common-at-the-time marrying out of the community. It would be extremely rare at that time to find large numbers of a non-Jewish community marrying into the Jewish community.

How is this influx of the local population into the Jewish population reflected the DNA of the Jewish population? If intermarriage really started in the 16th century, the number of descendants could in fact make up a large minority segment of the Jewish population from that area. What are the predominant haplogroups of Sabbatarians? Do those haplogroups exist in any large percentage in the Ashkenazi Jewish community? Some haplogroups such as Q1b1, which is a minority among Ashkenazi Jews (5%), but which is almost all Jewish, have been theorized by some to be a remnant of the Khazarian mass-conversion (the only other large-scale conversion since biblical times that I can think of), but perhaps the Q1b1 haplogroup derives from the Sabbatarian community? or another mass-conversion which we don't know about?

It would also be interesting to document the connections between the two halves of the Sabbatarian community after the mass conversion in the 19th century – presumably there was intermingling between the two halves after the conversion (they still prayed together after all).

From the article in Haaretz it seems those Jewish descendants of the Sabbatarians identified by the author may not be interested in researching this history. We may therefore never know the full story of the Sabbatarians, and what their influence on the make-up of the Jewish people today is (perhaps significant, perhaps inconsequential).

In any case, I recommend reading Shay Fogelman's excellent article and learning about this little-known non-Jewish sect which followed many Jewish laws (although not circumcision among others).

Out of curiosity, how many of you had heard of these Sabbatarians (Szekler Sabbatarians) before this post? If so, where did you hear about them?

World Memory Project: USHMM and Ancestry.com Team Up

The US Holocaust Memory Museum (USHMM) has teamed up with Ancestry.com to digitize and index the millions of documents from the USHHM's archives. This partnership is leveraging the indexing software that Ancestry.com build for its existing community project, the World Archives Project. Basically, this software allows people to register on Ancestry.com (this is free) and select a document in the queue, view a document, and then transcribe it so it will become searchable. The software knows the structure of the document you are transcribing and helps you through the process. Usually the way this kind of system works is that more than one person ends up transcribing each document, and then if there are any differences between the multiple transcriptions, an expert reviewer will check the transcription and correct any mistakes. This redundant system allows non-expert transcribers to help in a massive indexing projects like this one.

I wrote awhile back about the concept of giving back to genealogy through indexing projects like this one. In that article I explained how the process works at FamilySearch.org, whose indexing program is very similar. If you have been researching family members that were killed in the Holocaust then this is a great way to give back to the community. The millions of records being indexed from the USHMM archive will increase our knowledge about millions of people whose lives are recorded in these documents. Many of these documents will hold the key to families discovering what happened to their relatives during the war.

At the beginning, the project has started out indexing the following ten document collections:

• USHMM Ain, France, Selected Holocaust Records
• USHMM Czech Republic, Jews Deported to Terezin and Poland
• USHMM Czech Republic, Selected Jewish Holocaust Records, 1939-1941
• USHMM Eure-et-Loir, France, Selected Holocaust Records
• USHMM Munich, Germany, Displaced Jewish Orphans at the Ulm Children's Home, 1945-1948
• USHMM Palestine, Illegal Immigration from Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1938-1946
• USHMM Poland, Jewish Holocaust Survivors Registered in Warsaw, 1945-1946
• USHMM Poland, Jewish Prisoners of War in Lublin, 1939-1941
• USHMM Poland, Jews Displaced from Biała Podlaska to Mie̜dzyrzecz Podlaski, 1942
• USHMM Romania, Family Questionnaires for Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Victims, 1945

The languages vary per collection, but the system is designed to allow even those without knowledge of the specific language to help transcribe the documents. Of course, if you do know one of the languages from these collections, that can only help. As the Palestine collection was generated by the British Mandate government, that collection is largely in English.

The project expects the first documents to be made available by this summer or early fall. As more document collections are completed they will be added to the web site. Like other collections that are indexed by the public (through the World Archives Project), these collections will be free to search, even though it is being hosted by Ancestry.com.

To get an idea of how indexing a document works, you can view a video guide the project has posted for one of the Polish collections:


The video should give you a good idea of how the process works.

[Update: Ancestry seems to have removed the video from their site and made it private on Youtube. I don't know why this is case, but you can go to their written explanation of the same data collection to see pictures of the records and what information is extracted from them.]

One important note, especially since I am a Mac user myself, is that the Ancestry.com software being used for this project does not support the Mac. You can only currently join this project if you are running Windows. Hopefully Ancestry.com will remedy this problem in the near future.

It seems this week has had two intertwined themes running through it, the Holocaust and the digitization of archives. This project certainly borrows from both themes and it is great that there is a way for everyone to help in bringing these very important archival materials online.

Project HEART: Database of Stolen Holocaust-Era Assets

Continuing this week's Holocaust focus, the NY Times has reported in an article Property Lost in Holocaust Is Cataloged Online about a project initiated by the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental organization in Israel headed by Natan Sharansky, to catalog assets belonging to Jews that were killed during the Holocaust.

The project, titled Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce, or Project HEART, has a website that includes a database of assets that they have collected from various resources across Europe. The database contains over 650,000 records currently, and is expected to grow to over a million records in the future.

This project is intended to help heirs of Jews murdered during the Holocaust to claim property, whether real estate, art, bank accounts, insurance policies, etc. that has sat unclaimed until now due in many cases to people not knowing that these assets existed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu introduces the project in a short video on Youtube:



I've discussed in the past some of the ways one can research family members that were killed during the Holocaust, including searching Yad Vashem's Shoah Names Database and utilizing Yizkor Books. If you know of relatives killed during the Holocaust you should search through Project HEART's database and see if perhaps they left behind something which I'm sure they would rather a family member claim then be left in the possession of some bank or insurance company in Europe.

Update: The Forward yesterday published a look at  the political implications of the Project HEART initiative.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency Archives Go Online

 

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), a news agency that has been covering news of the Jewish community worldwide since 1917 has released a searchable archive, dubbed the JTA Jewish News Archive, of their news releases going back to 1923. This archive is free to use.

The archive is really an amazing snapshot of the modern history of the Jewish community in the United States and worldwide. The archive can be browsed by date or topic, or searched.

A look at the earliest date in the archive, January 2, 1923, shows 9 stories covering mostly not-so-nice topics including restrictions on Jewish admission to universities in Hungary and Romania, a false blood libel in Poland (the police search house-to-house and found the alleged victim alive), the banning of a Jewish sports club in Poland, banning of private synagogues in the Ukraine, a note of two Jewish leaders elected to the Council of People's Commissaries of Soviet Russia, announced Jewish immigration to Palestine (802 in November 1922), a new pogrom in Kishineff, and a dinner honoring the fifth anniversary of Colonel Ronald Storrs as Governor of Jerusalem.

It should be noted that the JTA covered the Holocaust as no other news wire at the time. It was more willing to detail what was going on in Europe than the mainstream news wires. It also covered in detail the plight of Soviet Jewry and the Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement in the US.

With such weighty topics it is perhaps easy to overlook the fact that the JTA archives also cover the day-to-day details of what was going on in Jewish communities over the years. I've discussed the use of historical newspapers to research one's family before (it's a good article, read it), including pointing to several local Jewish community newspapers that have archives online, but many towns either didn't have local Jewish papers, those papers were not archived, or those archives are not yet available online. The JTA archive fills in part of that gap for people who want to understand what the communities their families lived in were like over the years. These articles will not, of course, have the birth announcements and obituaries of everyone in every community like the local papers, although obituaries of famous Jews are present.

A random sampling of towns shows I searched shows wide coverage, with 145 articles on Savannah, GA, 46 articles mentioning Palo Alto, CA, 46 articles mentioning Knoxville, TN, 22 articles mentioning Tarrytown, NY, and and 180 articles that mention Brookline, MA.

The coverage of communities outside the US is also extensive, with articles on what was going on in communities across Europe as well as detailed coverage of life in Israel even before it was the modern State of Israel. As a sampling, there are over 9000 articles that mention Paris, 10,000 that mention London, 1000 articles that mention Baghdad, 500 that mention Antwerp, 900 that mention Cologne, 1000 that mention Krakow, etc.

As an interesting experiment I searched for the organization whose archive was put online earlier this week, the JDC, and there are over 7000 articles that mention the JDC in the JTA archives. If you wanted a better understanding of what the JDC has done over the years, searching this new JTA archive will give you a detailed look at all the different programs the JDC carried out.

In summary, the JTA Jewish News Archive is a welcome addition to the online resources available to the Jewish researcher, or anyone interested in Jewish history over the past century.

Footnote.com Holocaust Records Free for May

Continuing the Holocaust records theme from yesterday, I noticed that Footnote.com has announced that for the month of May they will be making their entire Holocaust Collection available for free. Footnote, for those who don't know, has a partnership with the US National Archives where they make many of the archival records from the National Archives available online. As I've mentioned on the Naturalizations page, this includes holding like Naturalization papers, but also records from the Civil War, US Census, and even records captured by the US military during WWII relevant to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Collection includes records related to assets looted by the Nazis, German war crime records, pre-trial Nuremberg interrogation transcripts, captured German records including from concentration camps, and more.

While not all of these records are relevant to genealogy, many are, especially the registers from various concentration camps. As the records are free for the rest of May, it's  good way to take a loot at these incredible historical documents if you're not a Footnote.com subscriber.

UPDATE: If you are coming to this post from a search or some other way, note that Footnote.com is now Fold3.com and has changing its focus to military records only. While the older records are still on the site, they will not be expanding their non-military collections.

JDC archives with over 500,000 names now online

Today is Yom HaShoah in Israel, Israel's Holocaust remembrance day. Coinciding with this fact, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (usually just called the JDC or the Joint) has released a new section of their website called Our Shared Legacy which contains two large databases of interest to Jewish genealogists.

Child Refugees in Bolivia helped by the JDC

The first database is their Photo Galleries, which contains photographs from all the countries where the Joint operated when helping Jewish refugees from the Nazis to flee, and to resettle after the war. The Joint also assisted Jews to flee Eastern European countries affected by the Communist takeover in the post-war years. Countries which have photo galleries include, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Uruguay.

If you spot someone in one of the photos that you know the identity of, you can click on a link to submit their identity.

The second, and much larger, database is their Names Index. The Names Index contains 500,000 names from a series of files which document the JDC's assistance programs worldwide. For every name in the database, they have a scanned version of the original document which you can view online in high resolution. This is truly an amazing resource.

Two of the larger card files which have been scanned and indexed on the site include what they called the Jewish Displaced Persons and Refugee Cards, 1943-1959, and the Transmigration Bureau. On site they describe these two resources as follows:

Jewish Displaced Persons and Refugee Cards, 1943-1959

After the fall of France, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees seeking to flee Nazi Europe streamed into Spain from France. JDC set up an office in Barcelona and provided support, housing and emigration assistance to these refugees. JDC also assisted refugees waiting for emigration papers and passage on transatlantic vessels. This collection contains index cards from 1943-1945 for 8220 refugees supported by JDC.

and

This is a collection of registration cards of Jewish survivors who registered with the Emigration Department of JDC in Munich and Vienna after World War II for help in emigrating to countries other than Israel. The database includes individual cards from 1945-mid 1950s for 51,554 Displaced Persons in Munich and 25,374 Displaced Persons in Vienna.

Transmigration Bureau

The Transmigration Bureau was established by JDC in New York to help refugees emigrate from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, primarily to the U.S. Its primary role was to accept deposits from friends or family overseas towards the travel costs of Jews emigrating from Europe. Included are deposit cards for 37,732 individuals who emigrated from 1940-1956, with the bulk from 1940-1942.

In addition to these large card files which make up the bulk of the entries in the database, there are many smaller lists. Interestingly, in addition to viewing the single page that your database hit shows up on, they also allow you to download the entire list from which your hit came from (only for the lists, not for the large card files), even though these files can be hundreds of megabytes.

Some of the lists I've come across include:

• Aid to Rabbis in the Russian Empire and Palestine, 1916
• Beneficiaries of JDC’s Free Parcel Service in the Soviet Union, 1943-1945
• CARE Packages to DP (Displaced Persons) Camps I, 1946-1948
• European Jewish Refugee Arrivals from Havana to Miami, 1944-1945
• Ezras Torah Fund, 1948
• JDC Shanghai Refugee Client List, 1950
• Jewish Refugees in Italy Receiving Aid, 1946
• Polish Jewish Repatriates Following World War II, 1948
• Rabbinical Students in Shanghai II, 1947
• Refugees in Zbaszyn, Poland, 1938-1939
• Shanghai Clients Registering for Emigration to Canada, 1948
• Vilna Refugees, 1940

I haven't seen a way to jump directly these lists, but if you search for someone and they show up on one of the lists, you will be able to view the page they show up on, or download the whole list. In some cases they also have explanatory documents connected to the lists, such as letters written at the time related to the lists. For example, in the case of the CARE package sent to DP camps after the war, they have scanned the original brochure they used to raise money to send those packages.

Another interesting thing about the lists is that some of them list relatives in the US when they were known. This is presumably to help the JDC contact the relative to work out their immigration to the US. For example, in the Refugees in Zbaszyn list, there are different sections of the list, including a section listing the addresses of US relatives which lists the following information on each refugee:

• Given Name
• Surname
• Date Born
• Town Born
• Occupation
• Last Town Lived in Germany (since these were refugees from Germany)
• Present Address in Zbaszyn (street address)
• Address of Relatives (in US)
• Degree of Relationship (i.e. cousin, sister, brother, aunt, etc.)

Obviously this is a treasure trove of information for people who find their relatives on this list, but there are some other interesting aspects to this list. For example, I've noticed that when listing the name of a brother as the relative in the US, the surname is not always the same. This means this list can be used to find out name changes between Europe and the US. Some quick examples include:

• Grobulska, brother's surname is Godwin
• Fuhrman, brother's surname is Blatter
• Loszak, brother's surname is Wachtel
• Mazur, brother's surname is Maltzer
• Glaser, brother's surname is Glass
• Schueterman, brother's surname is Brand

Some of might be predictable (somewhat) but in general the ones I've listed are not logical where you could easily guess such a name change.

Also, you might actually want to search this list not for the refugees but for your relatives from the US, as it can show you relatives you may not have known about in Europe (especially if you didn't know what the surname was in Europe).

For the Zabaszyn list in particular, I should add that there are actually several lists, mostly from Zabaszyn, but there is also a list of refugees in Kolomyja (Stanislawow) from 1939. Looking at the date stamped on this list, it was created just weeks before the Nazis invaded Poland.

Overall, this is a truly amazing new resource that the JDC has provided Jewish researchers, and I hope they will continue to add to this resource over time, making the rest of their archives accessible to the public in this fashion.

Yad Vashem teams up with Google

In advance of Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow, Yad Vashem has announced a new partnership with Google to digitize and put online large portions of Yad Vashem's archival holdings. As of today, they have made over 130,000 photographs from their archives available online and searchable using Google technology. Google says they are using experimental OCR technology to make all the information on the photos searchable.

I've tested out the site and it is a little buggy right now. When searching from the main page you sometimes get a blank page, but if you search again from the blank page, searching works. Also, when you search and get a list of results, they don't tell you how many photos have been found. In addition, if you choose a photo you expect the previous and next buttons to take you to the previous and next photos within your result set, but instead they take you to the previous and next photos within the entire archive, which is irrelevant to your search results. Hopefully they'll fix these issues quickly.

You can of course search for the names of relatives using the search engine, but keep in mind that you can also search for locations like your ancestral towns. Even if none of the photos are directly relevant to your family, you might still be able to see photographs from the town your family came from, and learn about how your family lived in Europe.

[Update 1/27/2011: A Google blog entry explaining the partnership.]

Jewish Genealogy Basics: Yizkor Books

It is a bit sad to have to include Yizkor Books under my 'Jewish Genealogy Basics' category on this blog, but unfortunately most Jewish people have relatives who perished in the Holocaust, and there is no getting past that fact. Yizkor Books are an important resource for those people whose relatives came from the towns and regions covered by these books, mainly because these towns don't exist anymore or have no Jewish remnants in any case. These books are the last memories of the people who lived in these communities.

Yizkor Books were generally books put together by survivors of a specific community, usually a town or city, although sometimes books were put together for larger regions. These were Holocaust survivors who wanted to share what their community had been like before the Holocaust, and what happened to it during the Holocaust. In most cases the Jewish communities described in these books completely ceased to exist after the war, and the survivors made their way to different countries including the US, Israel and various South American countries. Thus these books were published in the years following the war, in the 50s, 60s and 70s mostly (although some were published even in the 80s and 90s), in a mix of languages that may include Hebrew, Yiddish, English and more. Many of the books list the names of those people from the town that were killed during the war (these are called necrologies).

It's important to remember that Yizkor Books were put together by members of the destroyed community, usually only for members of that community. They were generally printed privately in small quantities, and thus most of these books are not widely available. Some libraries have made an effort to build collections of Yizkor books, to preserve them and to make them available to the public. JewishGen keeps a list of libraries with Yizkor Book collections, and lets you search for specific towns and see which libraries hold their Yizkor Books. I don't know if any library has every Yizkor book published, although it's a good bet that Yad Vashem (which lists 1040 Yizkor Books in their collection) is about as comprehensive a collection as you will find. I suspect the publishers of these books all donated copies to Yad Vashem to insure there was at least one copy available there.

In the US, one of the largest collections of Yizkor Books is at the NY Public Library, in their Dorot Jewish Division. The library has over 750 Yizkor Books available for viewing, but more interestingly for those who do not live in NY (or even for those who do), is that they have digitized some 650 of those books and made them available for viewing online. On the web site you can choose a book and browse through the pages of each book, but they are not searchable. Keep in mind most of these books are in either Hebrew (if published in Israel) or Yiddish (if published in the US). Some of the books have small English sections, but usually the majority of the books are in either Hebrew or Yiddish.

Some of the Yizkor books can be searched via the GenealogyIndexer.org web site, which indexes many books and makes them searchable online, including directories and Yizkor Books. Keep in mind that this search is based on computer software which tries to automatically transcribe each page, so it is not perfect, and although it indexes Hebrew and Yiddish, you will need to search in Hebrew or Yiddish to find those words in the index. If you're searching for a last name, you can search in both English and Hebrew, for example, by including both the name in Hebrew and English and eparating them with the Boolean OR, for example:

Traurig OR טראוריג

Keep in mind that even if you know the spelling of a name in Hebrew, it may have been different in Yiddish.

In addition to the NYPL and GenealogyIndexer.org, JewishGen has an ongoing project to transcribe (English sections) and translate all (non-English sections) of Yizkor Books and place the text online. In addition, as books are transcribed and translated, all the names listed in the books are added to their Necrology Database which is searchable on their web site. Keep in mind that not all books have been fully translated, so even if your relative is mentioned in one of the books on their site, their name may not yet show up in the database. You can see which parts of each book have been translated so far, and which are still let to be translated. If you have a lot of family from a particular town that has a Yizkor Book, you might consider donating to the translation expenses for that Yizkor Book to help get it translated faster.

Lastly, I should mention that although many of the books are hard to find, it is possible to buy many of these books, either in used book stores or as reprints. Some specialist booksellers like Dan Wyman Books in Brooklyn, NY, Broder Books in Waterbury, CT, Henry Hollander Books in San Francisco, CA and Book Gallery in Jerusalem carry Yizkor Books, or can help you find them. The Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst, MA, which saves Yiddish books of all kinds has, with the help of Steven Spielberg, created on online library of 11,000 scanned Yiddish books, and also offers a specific service that sells reprints of the Yizkor Books in their collection for $48 each.

Yad Vashem's Quest

An article in the Ha'aretz newspaper in Israel reports that Yad Vashem has collected the names of four million Jewish Holocaust victims, two thirds of the estimated total. While no one expects them to complete the list (due to lack of records or lack of witnesses), they have made some impressive progress in the past decade. Yad Vashem says that fully one and a half million names were added in just the past ten years. Many of those names were added by Russian Jews, perhaps due either to the many Russian immigrants to Israel in the past two decades, or due to the opening of communications with Russia during the same time period.

Vad Vashem has always had a kind of quest to complete the list of victims. It's not just a technical issue, but an issue of remembrance. Some people perished along with their entire families. Who will remember that they existed once?

I wrote previously about Yad Vashem's Pages of Testimony and how important it is to fill out Pages of relatives you know perished in the Holocaust and also know are not in the Shoah Names Database. If we don't tell the stories of those family members of ours that died in the Holocaust, who will tell their stories? I've never surveyed my family tree about this, but certainly among the information I've collected from other family members it is not uncommon to find relatives that died during the Holocaust. It's always interesting to see how this is recorded in genealogy records, as some people just list the death as taking place during the war, while others write 'Murdered by the Nazis,' or simply 'Holocaust'. In other peoples' records, there is no reference at all to the person having been killed in the Holocaust, and if it was an elderly person who died in the early 1940s, who would necessarily think that they were murdered? Sometimes you jump to conclusions based on where they lived, how old they were, etc. but it may or may not be true.

I'm the last person to tell someone to write something without sources. Sources are another topic I hope to cover in this blog in the future, but for now let me just say that it's important to provide evidence for everything you do in genealogy. I do think that if you know your relatives perished in the Holocaust, you should make an effort to go through your records, fill out a Page of Testimony for each relative, and then submit them all to Yad Vashem. No one should be forgotten.

Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony and ShoahConnect.org

A major project of Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust museum, since its founding, has been to try to collect information on every victim of the Holocaust. This has taken a number of forms, but for many it is best represented by their Pages of Testimony project, which allows anyone to submit a page of information on someone they knew to have perished in the Holocaust. In many cases, these Pages of Testimony are the only record of existence of someone who died, as many primary records were destroyed in the war. Yad Vashem has made efforts over the years to collect these Pages from survivors and relatives of victims, including a big push in Israel in the 1950s to collect information. I remember over the years when visiting Yad Vashem, part of the visit would include searching their database for names of relatives, and being offered to submit names of people not in the database. In 2004 Yad Vashem finished digitizing all the Pages of Testimony and made the entire database available on the web (with some additional sources of information like transport lists - creating the Shoah Names Database), a major breakthrough for those researching their families, and also enabled a new push from Yad Vashem to gather information on victims not yet in the database. As the number of survivors dwindle, those with memories of relatives and friends who were murdered in the Holocaust, and if Pages of Testimony are not filled out soon, knowledge of some peoples very existence may be forgotten forever.

For the Jewish genealogist, searching the Pages of Testimony has long been a very powerful tool. While not every form was completely filled out, many forms include the name of the person, maiden name for women, the name of the person's parents, where and when they were born, where they lived during the war, what their profession was, etc. All very important information for someone researching their family. To get the full impact of searching the database, it helps to learn how best to use the Advanced Search interface, which allows you to search by specific fields like town of birth, or maiden name. Searching by town alone is something I highly recommend if you know where someone was born, or where your family was primarily from in Europe, as it may show people that you either didn't think of, or might show spellings that are different than you are used to seeing. The spelling issue is important since many of the forms were submitted in Hebrew, and had the English spellings transliterated automatically. Thus the spelling may be computer-generated, and not necessarily the same spelling you think it will be.

Another important technique for getting the most out of searching the Pages, is that once you find a Page about someone in your family, you should look to see who submitted the information. That person is likely related to you as well. Depending on when the Page was submitted, you may even be able to track down the person who submitted the Page and find out more, or in some cases track down their descendants. When you find a Page, note that there is a menu called Related Searches. The most important search is 'Pages of Testimony by submitter(s) with the same name'. Most people who submitted Pages, submitted multiple Pages. By seeing which other Pages were submitted by the same person who submitted a Page on a family member of yours, you will likely find Pages of other family members (although some may be of friends or family members from the other side of their family). This search can also be replicated in the Advanced Search form by entering the name of the submitter, and then you can refine the search by adding other fields.

Some people who first find a record of a family member who died in the Holocaust by searching the Pages are frustrated when they realize that person who submitted the Page of Testimony is a relative that they were not aware of, yet the Page was submitted so long ago that they cannot track down the person (and many submitters are now deceased). In some cases, if the record was submitted by someone who lived in Israel, it is possible to track down the person or their descendant through a database kept by Magen David Adom (Israel's Red Cross). There are individuals who have access to this same database and can probably search it quicker than going through the normal channels. Some of these people are professional genealogists who charge for this service, but I recommend joining the mailing list of the Israel Genealogical Society (which recently merged with the Jewish Family Research Association) and posting questions about people, as there are people on the list who can and probably will look up people for you for free.

There are other resources for tracking down survivors, or information on victims, such as the International Tracing Service, and connected services run through the American Red Cross and the USHMM. That is a whole different topic, however, perhaps for a later post.

So what happens if you find a Page of Testimony submitted by a relative you can't track down, and may never be able to find, but through which you think you can reconnect to extended family? Here technology offers an interesting solution. Logan Kleinwaks, who also operates the genealogyindexer.org site, runs a site called ShoahConnect.org which is directly relevant. ShoahConnect does something very powerful – it allows anyone to connect themselves to a Page of Testimony, and if someone else uses the site to connect to the same Page, it will notify each person connected to the same Page that there are other people interested in the person on that Page of Testimony. This allows distant relatives to reconnect through their shared relation to a person recorded on a Page of Testimony on Yad Vashem's site. As of this writing, there are 744 users of the site, with 10,978 connections. This uses a similar technique to the LostCousins.com web site which connects people through common relatives in census records in the US, Canada and the UK.

ShoahConnect utilizes the Google Toolbar to pull off it's work, so it's not quite a simple as selecting a name on a web site. However, once you have Google Toolbar installed (in Firefox for Mac and Windows, or Internet Explorer for Windows), clicking a link on the site adds a C-shaped button to the toolbar. The next time you are viewing a Page of Testimony you just click on the new button to link to that Page of Testimony. Follow the instructions on ShoahConnect to get everything set up, and then head over to Yad Vashem's site and start adding connections.

One last point to make about Pages of Testimony and ShoahConnect – if you want to make connections to other relatives but can't find relatives on Yad Vashem that you know perished in the Holocaust, you should submit Pages of Testimony for your relatives to the Yad Vashem site, and then link to the Pages you submitted using ShoahConnect. Another thing to remember is that you can provide your own contact information to the Page of Testimony so that if even if someone is not using ShoahConnect, but finds the Page of Testimony that you submitted, they will still be able to reach you based on the contact information you provided as the submitter of the Page of Testimony. If you have photos of the people you are submitting a Page of Testimony for, make sure to also submit the photos, as your branch of the family may be the only branch to have photos of that relative.

The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust

It's hard to do Jewish genealogy and not run into Avotaynu, the long-time and as far as I can tell only publisher dedicated to publishing books on the topic of Jewish genealogy. They also publish a self-titled quarterly journal, Avotaynu, on Jewish genealogy and an e-mail newsletter called Nu, What's New?.

Avotaynu mostly sells their own books, but occassionally sells other books as well. On set of books they've been selling for years is NYU Press and Yad Vashem's The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust. It's a three-volume set that provides details on many of the Jewish communities that existed before the Holocaust. It is essentially an abridgment and translation of Yad Vashem's much larger Hebrew set called Pinkas HaKehilot, published over many years which covers in much greater detail each of the Jewish communities that existed before the Holocaust and what happened to them during and after the war. I highly recommend this set for anyone researching their families in Europe before the war, as it provides a lot of information on many communities that are hard to find out about elsewhere.

In this weeks' Nu, What's New? e-mail, Avotaynu mentions that while the set costs $199 on Amazon, they are currently selling it for only $99 plus shipping, per arrangement with the publisher. Shipping from Avotaynu is $20 in the US. So $119 for the books plus shipping.

NYU Press, the publisher, is also selling it for $99 plus shipping on their own site, with the use of a coupon code (see their site for the code). Oddly they show the $99 price as a discount from $350, yet if you go to the regular page for the set, it sells for $199. In any event, it's currently $99 plus shipping. I don't know what the shipping costs are from NYU Press, as you need to become a member of their site to find out.

Interestingly enough, Yad Vashem also sells this set directly from their web site. However, Yad Vashem sells it for only $55. Shipping within Israel is free from Yad Vashem, so if you live in Israel it would seem to be a no-brainer where to order it from. If you live outside of Israel, shipping costs $55 which while high, still brings the total cost in the US to $110 instead of the $119 from Avotaynu.

In short, if you live in Israel, definitely order it from Yad Vashem directly. If you live in the US, perhaps check out how much NYU Press is charging for shipping before deciding where to order from. I highly recommend this set for anyone researching their family in Europe.