This article first appeared in French in the Revue of the Cercle de Genealogie Juive—Ed.

Jewish genealogists have become a worldwide community: Worldwide because, although Jews forever have been migrating, the events of the 20th century have dispersed us over the five continents as never before. Community because of the development of advanced communications media. Personal computers and the Internet have permitted easy and fast interpersonal communication, as well as the collection and dissemination of documents and databases. These factors also permit genealogists to build friendly personal relationships.

As members of this community, we tend to feel that we share the same concepts, the same values, the same Weltanschauung,¹ and this allows us to exchange ideas and information in full confidence. This feeling is sometimes misleading, however, especially between genealogists in the United States and in Europe, and may generate some frustration. The two topics discussed below illustrate differences in understanding often noted between Americans and Europeans about questions relating to the Shoah and the confidentiality of data, both topics frequently addressed in Jewish genealogy. This may be considered a real divide, a basic difference in understandings held on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Holocaust Survivors

One might be tempted to translate the word “survivors,” as used in America to the French “survivants de la Shoah,”² but, if so, this usage would be grossly inappropriate, at least in Europe. The American definition of a survivor, as expressed by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, is “a person who was displaced, persecuted and/or discriminated against by the racial, religious, ethnic, social, and political policies of the Nazis and their allies. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps and ghettos, this includes, among others, refugees and people in hiding.”

We, in Europe, call the survivors of the concentration/extermination camps “survivants de la Shoah,” while those who escaped the Nazi-controlled area or survived in hiding are described as “ayant échappé à la Shoah,” meaning that they were not found, arrested, and subsequently deported. The number of European Jews (especially Western Europeans) who could leave Europe before the Holocaust, while pertaining to those in the USHMM definition above, is very large. In many countries, a significant proportion was hidden by the population and saved.³

The difference in experiences between the two concept groups is significant with regard to the horrors they may have endured and to the numbers at stake. For example, in France, the pre-war Jewish population was approximately 300, 000, and “only” 75,000 were deported.

Privacy Rules and Personal Data

Genealogists tend to follow the rule: don’t publish personal data of living individuals. In Europe, this rule meshes with laws on the privacy protections of private life. In most Western European countries, including the United Kingdom, it is illegal to publish any personal data about a living person without his or her prior permission. Often, a person has a legal right to have what has been published on her/him corrected or deleted.

In genealogy, either the living descendants do not appear in a published history or tree, or the last deceased ancestor carries the note “has descendants.” I have tried to adhere to this principle and limit sending complete family trees or files to relatives. Nevertheless, this seemingly prudent practice has generated undesirable results. I have discovered my personal data on a Family Tree Maker CD, on the JewishGen Family Tree of the Jewish People (FTJP),⁴ and even on the website Les Fleurs de l’Orient.⁵ I have been put in contact with the distinguished genealogist Alain Farhi, well-known to the readers of AVOTAYNU, who created and manages Les Fleurs de l’Orient, and we have conducted an Internet debate that has proven very instructive to me. Les Fleurs de l’Orient, thus, is given below in the following example, but I could have used any other genealogy database as well.

What Is Private Data?

The debate centers on the very notion of “private data.” For Europeans, it is any data revealing our existence, such as our given and family names. In Europe, any publication of private data is subject to prior permission. Alain Farhi notes, “the U.S. has no state or federal privacy laws, but generally accepted practice prohibits the publication of anything about a living person except first name and family name.”⁶ Although Farhi does not say so explicitly, it seems that there is no restriction in publishing additionally the spouse’s, parents’, and children’s given and family names. This finding applies to other U.S.-based databases, such as the FTJP (viz. an excerpt of its rules to submitters of family trees).⁷ Consequently, one may find one’s living children, children-in-law, and grandchildren with their given and family names on Les Fleurs de l’Orient and the FTJP.⁸

How Does Private Information Appear on Websites or Databases Without Individual Consent?

Visitors to genealogical sites or data bases, such as those exemplified above, are generally invited to provide their own family trees in order to enrich the content and multiply the opportunities for contacts among researchers. Thus, you might find yourself, for example, on Les Fleurs de l’Orient, a website dedicated to the Farhis, a famous Levantine family, simply because a relative of a relative of a Farhi and a relative of a relative of yours are the same individual.⁹ I have not spent my nights trying to find who that person is in my personal case, because screening a database with more than 20,000 entries in order to find a complete stranger holds no interest for me, either genealogically or generally speaking.

Right To Have One’s Information Corrected or Deleted

In European law and practice, each operator of a database with third parties’ personal data has an obligation to correct or delete an individual’s data upon first request. How is the same situation handled in the U.S.? Alan Farhi specifies that he deletes upon first request the “cards” of those who wish not to appear on his website. I have made the corresponding request for my wife and me and have noted that apparently nothing had changed. I write “apparently,” because the link to a family tree supplied by a relative of ours had been severed. After having informed Alain Farhi, he cut the link with a second family tree for which I could find no obvious relationship with us. At this point, my wife and I no longer were visible on Les Fleurs de l’Orient, but my children and grandchildren still were listed. Asked to remove their names, Farhi replied:

If your adult daughter also wants to be removed, please ask her to write to me. I cannot eliminate third parties without their explicit request. I did it once and received remonstrance from the young generations that had been eliminated.

I insisted, and Farhi yielded in a gesture of appeasement.

How can an individual learn that his or her family appears on Les Fleurs de l’Orient, especially if that individual is not interested in genealogy, if he or she is not connected to the Internet, or not even an adult? How can he or she ask to be removed?

Obviously all correspondents (particularly the Europeans) submitting family trees are not sufficiently informed in advance about the subsequent use of their files and more specifically, about the great difference in the right to publish information about living individuals between the U.S. and Europe. As proof, Alain Farhi’s reply to my question whether suppliers of family GEDCOMs are informed that it is their own business to sort out those individuals whose data he has not the permission to publish: “Les apporteurs suivent les mêmes règles Américaines, donc pas de tri” (The suppliers adhere to the same American rules, thus no sorting). As concerns the FTJP, the JewishGen website publishes, among other caveats, the following one:

The GEDCOM you are submitting represents your personal research efforts into your own family connections. If your submission includes data that is the work of another person, you must have their permission to put it online.

I have never received any request for such permission from the three persons who have posted my data cited below. One of them, whom I did not know before finding her identity through the FTJP, and who is not related to me, wrote that she probably had received a GEDCOM file from one of my remote cousins, and it must have contained the data about my family.

Independent sources may put information into a database and discrepancies may appear. The following example comes from the FTJP, because my traces are gone from Les Fleurs de l’Orient. A search for Kallmann, Ernest, on the FTJP yields one entry, submitted by #3967. Using the German spelling of my given name, Ernst, two additional corresponding inputs show up, one submitted by #8994 and the other by #29322. These entries were made on different dates and copied from different, undisclosed sources. How can a user rely on, or even correct, the accuracy of such data? If one wants his or her personal data erased from the FTJP, the provider must be contacted by e-mail in the hopes that he or she will abide with the request.

Les Fleurs de l’Orient must be credited for having a single “card” per individual listed on the tree and citing the originator of the trees. The process by which diverging data for one individual is “normalized” remains unknown.

What are the consequences of such different approaches to privacy? What actions can we take to avoid misgivings between genealogists of Europe and America while continuing to benefit from the magnificent research tools developed by the international genealogical community?

Consequences may be various and contradictory. From my recent experience, I offer two examples:

• At a meeting of the Cercle de Généalogie Juive, I told my colleagues how I had discovered relatives in Germany whom I had ignored until lately. They had survived the Nazi era because they were half- and quarter-Jews. This story was published in AVOTAYNU.¹⁰ I had refrained from citing names in the article (as I had in the oral report), including those of the deceased parents and grandparents. This was done to avoid living family members being confronted inadvertently with the Jewish heritage they have tried to conceal since the end of the Nazi era. I hope everybody agrees with my refraining from publishing the information.
• Recently, an Israeli researcher contacted me after discovering on the FTJP that I had a great-grandfather, Moses Levi (1829–1902) from Buchau in Swabia. He had discovered a German-language Bible in which Moses Levi had put handwritten notes. I was spontaneously presented with this 1837 book, which not only provides me with the handwritten notes of my great-grandfather recalling the major events of his family; it even bears the name of its initial owner, my great-great-grandfather David Levi. Moreover, I have discovered another unknown relative whom I have not yet met, my great-uncle Eugen Levi, whose life I have retraced. Here, without the FTJP, I would never have had this windfall.

I am quite concerned about personal data that are “copy-glued” from one tree to another without any check on accuracy. This practice leads to errors being multiplied indefinitely and possibly misleading researchers when they conduct their research starting from erroneous assumptions.

Thus, the various ways of publishing personal data can be the best and the worst things.

Actions for improvement are difficult to define, given the conceptual differences between the two sides of the Atlantic, but some suggestions are possible.

Proposed Guidelines

As I see it, not-for-profit databases such as Les Fleurs de l’Orient and the FTJP are directed at genealogists working on their own family and not on “data collectors” trying to set up the largest possible database. Genealogists also would benefit from some sort of quality check in order to avoid discrepancies between the names, dates, and places corresponding to the same individual in different family trees. Practically, this impossible target could be approached as follows:

• After uploading a GEDCOM file to the database, the genealogist can receive an automatic message asking a number of questions about personal research, compliance with the privacy rules, etc. The answer could be given in a box to be checked for each question. The gedcom is uploaded only if all boxes are checked.
• The term “personal research” should be described more clearly and exclude any copying of trees or branches imported by the researcher from a third party, if such third party has not formally agreed to their publication on the database.
• The databases might have a caveat clearly visible to the visitors of their site declaring the publisher of the database does not endorse the data posted by the submitters.
• Since genealogy now has its academic base at the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in Jerusalem, the problems raised in this article could well be analyzed more in depth and guidelines elaborated there.

A paper by Richard Sobel in AVOTAYNU¹¹ elaborates on my initial article in AVOTAYNU. Sobel suggests an elaborate, 15-step screening procedure. Before initiating this procedure, I would recommend a common-sense test for each individual: If I publish data about that person, does it risk harming him or her or the family?

I invite readers to express their views on this issue.

Notes

1. It is not possible to translate Weltanschauung, a German word, in any non-Germanic language, without using a paraphrase that does not reflect its full meaning. An approach could be : “The way in which we consider the world and the situation of Man in the World.” This is the reason why philosophers all over the world always use Weltanschauung in its German expression.
2. In France, we use Shoah, rather than Holocaust, which is used by the Germans, among others. The meaning is the same: the organized elimination of the Jews perpetrated by the Nazi regime.
3. Take my family as an example. My parents and I fled Germany on April 5, 1933, two days before the first anti-Jewish laws were issued. On that very day, April 7, my paternal grandfather died at age 80. In August 1939, my paternal grandmother, living in Stuttgart, obtained a 3-week visa for France to pay us a visit. During this visit, World War II began and she was blocked in France. She survived, thanks to help from acquaintances and strangers, until 1946. My father’s sister and her family immigrated to the U.S. in 1938.

My maternal grandparents were deported from Mannheim to the camp of Gurs in the south of France in October 1940 and rescued by my father who had just been dismissed by the Foreign Legion where he had volunteered. The French police, wondering what to do with Germans, illegal immigrants, and Jews to boot, decided to place them in a small village where they also survived unscathed. The only victim on my maternal side was my dear uncle who fled to Belgium, then France, but too late, and never returned from Auschwitz. His older brother, with whom he had been interned in Dachau in 1938, immigrated to the U.S. shortly after his liberation.

4. <www.jewishgen.org>
5. <www.farhi.org>
6. Lecture at the IAJGS Conference, Jerusalem 2004, reproduced in AVOTAYNU, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Spring 2005.
7. “For security purposes, FTJP will be invoking the ‘100-year rule’ on all persons in your database who are living or who may still be living. All dates and places of birth and/or marriage for anyone born within the last 100 years for whom no death is indicated will be removed from the GEDCOM at the time of submission. Their names will still appear and family links will be maintained.”
8. Farhi notes that the French are the most sensitive country with respect to privacy questions. Germany and France were the largest Jewish continental Western European pre-World War II communities. Practically no Jews of German origin remain in Germany. Thus, the largest population of European Jews who escaped the Holocaust and their descendants now live in France. The fact that France has been politically slow to deal with its 1940–45 history comforts the national and especially Jewish sensitivity to “filing” people. In addition to Farhi’s remark above, Germany, nevertheless, has the most restrictive privacy laws (Datenschutz), which it has begun slowly to soften recently.
9. Is this not in line with the Jewish tradition of expanding the family horizontally ad infinitum? Jews have a singular term to designate the relation between the parents of a married couple: machutan with Ashkenazim, cosuegro with Sephardim, while nothing of the kind exists among European non-Jews. This is the visible difference between mishpacha as opposed to the usual family.
10. AVOTAYNU, Vol. XXII, No. 3, Fall 2006.
11. AVOTAYNU, Vol. XXIII No. 1, Spring 2007.

Ernest Kallmann is AVOTAYNU Contributing Editor for France and member of Cercle de Généalogie Juive where he moderates the German SIG. He belongs to the jury of the Obermayer German-Jewish History Award. Before retiring, he was an electronic engineer.