| On the surface, Jerusalem seemed relatively calm the first week in December. It was unseasonably warm; flowers were blooming, and the rebuilding of the famous Hurva Synagogue in the Old City (destroyed by the Jordanians during the War of Independence) looked to be almost finished. Below the surface, people expressed anxiety about possible nuclear attack from Iran and/or serious, heavy, renewed rocket attacks from both Lebanon and Gaza. Merchants complained that the economic slowdown in the U.S. was hurting their business as tourists were spending less. As always, however, Israelis seemed to carry on normally in spite of everything. |
Business related to the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) occupied much of my time—an interview with a journalist preparing a story for Hadassah Magazine and multiple meetings with Institute director Ambassador Neville Lamdan and members of our board. Rabbi Shalom Bronstein is heading the meticulous cataloging of the huge rabbinic genealogy collection of the late Paul Jacobi. Not only has he mastered Jacobi’s nearly illegible handwriting, but Bronstein reports that his job is nearly complete. The result will be easier and more effective access to Jacobi’s manuscripts. In addition, long-time genealogist Chava Agmon has agreed to donate her extensive, well-indexed Caro genealogy to the Institute. Chicago genealogist Professor George Sackheim will do the same with his huge Zak/Zakheim genealogy.
Following the Institute’s “Research and Teaching Priorities” symposium in September 2006, Gary Mokotoff volunteered to head the Institute’s effort to create a standard format for genealogists to use when entering names, dates and places into a database. After extensive work and consultation with other leading Jewish and non-Jewish genealogists, Mokotoff has now submitted his “Proposed Standard for Names, Dates and Places in a Genealogical Database.” The full text appears in this issue.
News from Yad Vashem
Dr. Haim Gertner has served as head archivist at Yad Vashem for about a year. A recent visit to Jerusalem allowed me to renew our acquaintance and to catch up on his vision and plans for the future. Gertner holds a PhD in Jewish history from Hebrew University, where he taught for ten years. His dissertation was on the 19th-century Galician rabbinate. Before taking his current job, Gertner served for six years as head of Yad Vashem’s Education Department. It’s clear that the outreach orientation of that department is going to infuse his approach to his current job. A friendly, open man, Gertner greeted me at his conference room table rather than in his modest-sized office; his preference for the more expansive space mirrors his personality and his proclivity for joint projects with other groups.
As custodian of the largest online Jewish database, Gertner has plans to make the data ever more useful. He emphasizes the fact that data on the same individual may appear in numerous documents from different archival collections. The plan is to merge all known data about a single individual into that person’s record in the Central Database of Names. Gertner also wants to begin to cluster information by geographical location as well, hoping to identify all Holocaust victims by town of residence as well as by name. With this in mind, we agreed to explore possible areas of common interest between the IIJG’s Project to Reconstitute the Destroyed Communities and Yad Vashem’s geographical interests.
Emphasis also is being placed on survivors, and Yad Vashem has recently completed a template for information that will appear on its website. Currently, the form is written only in Hebrew, although plans call for an English-language version as well. Under the terms of the agreement with the International Tracing Service (ITS), Yad Vashem may not incorporate ITS information into the web version of its Central Database of Names. The ITS material has been integrated with Yad Vashem’s intranet, however, so that onsite researchers may access all known data about a single individual—with impressive results.
Gertner and Alex Avraham, head of Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, note that with the acquisition of the ITS material, Holocaust researchers have basically exhausted the known major sources of information about Shoah victims and survivors. Because the ITS collection becomes less informative the further east one moves, many victims from Poland and the former Soviet Union still are uncounted and unnamed. In an “any and all ways possible” effort to glean as many new names as possible, Yad Vashem has undertaken a variety of projects focused largely on the former Soviet Union. One Yad Vashem representative travels throughout Ukraine and Belarus, meeting with all existing Jewish organizations—such as the Joint, the Jewish Agency and the Jewish Museum in Minsk—in a grassroots effort to reach individuals who may be able to supply additional Pages of Testimony. More than 100,000 new names have been added within the past two years. In addition, the effort has now moved to the United States, where volunteers are working among recent Russian immigrants who may have victim information. To date, committees have been established within the Russian communities in Boston and New York, and Avraham is looking for volunteers to work in additional cities.
Within Israel, Boris Mafstir, former head of the Absorption Ministry, heads a Russian Jewish outreach program that includes a regular Russian radio broadcast. Yad Vashem’s Cynthia Wroclawski leads an effort that is scouring Israeli synagogues and cemeteries for Holocaust memorial tablets erected by survivors in memory of murdered relatives. Other efforts focus on the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, on rabbinical books held in the Jewish National and University Library and (with help from JewishGen) on yizkor (memorial) books. Avraham notes that two-thirds of the known 1,200 yizkor books have been indexed.
Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
Hadassah Assouline, director of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), says that her new sunny, clean quarters in the high-tech section of Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus are the best facilities she ever has had, and it is easy to agree. Even more pleasing is the list of new acquisitions—some (though not all) of which are listed on the CAHJP website at <www.sites. huji.ac.il/cahjp>. Describing some of her new acquisitions, Assouline commented on a handbill from the Galician rabbinate of the late 19th century urging Jews to register their marriages with the civil authorities in addition to their religious ceremonies. Failure to do so, the rabbis warned, could mean that a widow would have no rights to her husband’s property—it would go instead to his family. (Hence the many marriage registers that record the marriages of middle-aged couples with grown children.)
More interesting to this author, however, was news that Assouline has been filming 18th-century Jewish censuses from the Commonwealth of Lithuania and Poland. In the Lithuanian State Archives (Vilnius), Assouline filmed a 1783/84 census of the Jews of Indura—the original residence of my Amdur relatives. A check for Indura in the CAHJP catalogue (not yet online) showed several other censuses and tax registers for Indura, each filmed in a different archive (Grodno and Minsk in addition to Vilnius)—a great boon to the researcher. In some parts of the former Soviet Union, CAHJP also has acquired vital record registers.
A Tidbit
Some delightful aspects of a trip to Israel have nothing whatsoever to do with genealogy. On a Sunday visit to Yad Vashem, this author found herself remembering the early 20th-century Yiddish expression “Only in America,” except that it was rephrased “Only in Israel.” The plaza outside the entrance to Yad Vashem’s research room was jammed with young soldiers, all of whom seemed to have large, packed duffle bags and/or similarly filled backpacks. A query to the receptionist outside the reference room produced the following explanation:
“As part of their army experience, Israeli soldiers spend some days studying Jewish and Israeli history and culture. Hence the visit to Yad Vashem.”
“Sure, but why the luggage?”
“Because it’s Sunday.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Yesterday was Shabbat. The soldiers were home and they brought their dirty laundry for their mothers to wash. The duffle bags have the clean clothes.”
Israel must be the only army in the world whose laundry is washed by soldiers’ mothers!
