Correct Article

In my article “Age Makes a Difference,” (AVOTAYNU, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, Winter 2007), a clarification is necessary. BL, the woman who made herself five years younger to remain with her sister, has informed me that the change in her age took place when she and her sister arrived at Bergen-Belsen and not in order to get permission to enter Sweden. She said that there were absolutely no restrictions for Holocaust survivors to enter Sweden at that time. My interpretation derived from the fact that the Bergen-Belsen card lists her birth year as 1920, while the post-war card issued in Koln lists her birth year as 1925. I apologize to BL for any misunderstanding.

Rabbi Shalom Bronstein

Jerusalem, Israel

Salonika Records Yield Results

Since AVOTAYNU’s publication of my article about the Ladino archives of the Jewish community of Salonika, I have received several inquiries from excited readers hoping to learn more about their families. The most recent and rewarding example is a woman from northern California. She made the two-hour drive to Palo Alto one morning to meet with me and go over some of the records I had collected from the various repositories of Salonika archives.

After reviewing the handwritten Solitreo censuses of the Jewish community, we were actually able to identify a large number of her ancestors and other relatives, going as far back as the beginning of the 19th century. She was thrilled; now she knows the dates of birth of her grandparents (unknown before) as well as of her great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. We also located another branch of her family that she had not even known existed.

She is now studying handwritten Solitreo in the hope of being able to read the records on her own.

Devin Naar

Palo Alto, California

Misconception About
Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex System

A misconception about the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex System is that it is “a soundex system optimized for Eastern European names,” as stated in the article on page 12 about the new Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching system. This is not true. Like BMPM, DM is a table-driven algorithm for which only one table has ever been created; the one for Slavic and Germanic names. The major improvements of DM over the American Soundex system are:

• Names are coded to six digits rather than four
• The initial letter of the name is coded
• If a combination of letters yields a single sound, then they are treated like a single letter
• If the sound of a certain letter is ambiguous, then the letter is coded in more than one way.

The difference between the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex System and the Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching System is that the former is based on merging letters (or combination of letters) of the alphabet that sound the same. The latter is based on “two words written in a different way actually can be phonetically equivalent.”

Gary Mokotoff

Bergenfield, New Jersey