In July 2007, I attended the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Salt Lake City, Utah. After returning home, I received a message from Carol Rombro Rider, who also had attended the conference. During her visit to the LDS (Mormon) Family History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City, Carol spent time looking at some of its books. Copies of microfilmed FHL records may be sent to local Family History Centers, but the Library’s books may be seen only in Salt Lake City.
One of the books Carol consulted included a list of 1,200 Jewish leaders of the 1940 Vilnius Jewish community killed during the period 1941–45. Written in English, the book had 101 pages—and Carol had copied every page. After telling me about the book, Carol asked what might be done with the list of murdered Jews. She was concerned about a possible copyright violation if we did anything with the list. I suggested she send me a copy of a page and, after looking at it, I would try and come up with some ideas.
A Surprise
The page Carol sent held great interest. Scribbled in English in the corner of the page was “translated into English by R. Bieliauskiene.” This I knew had to be Roza Bieliauskiene of Vilnius, Lithuania, whom I know quite well. Roza is an extremely nice Jewish woman who was the curator at the Jewish Museum in Vilnius for many years. She currently teaches Yiddish at the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Day School in that city. I have also used her as a guide for members of my group trips to Lithuania.
When I contacted Roza, I learned the following about the book. After the Soviets liberated Vilnius in 1944, Jewish survivors began to return there. One of the survivors, Shmerke Kaczerginski, invited other survivors to come to his house and tell him what they knew about the fate of the former leaders of the Vilnius Jewish community. Kaczerginski ended up writing a book listing the fate of 1,200 Jewish leaders who were killed. The book was written in Yiddish and published in Paris, France, in 1949.
In 1999, two Mormon missionaries brought a copy of the book to Roza in Vilnius and asked her to translate it into English for them. They told her they wanted to read the names out “in the Temple.” Roza thought “Temple” was the same as “synagogue.” Roza translated 100 names for them, and they evidently got the remainder of the names translated elsewhere. That is how a copy of the book, in English, ended up on the shelf in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Since 1999, Roza has done some research on the 1,200 names and has additional information about most of them. Some of the 1,200 leaders were born in Vilnius, but many were from other parts of Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus. Excited by this, I asked Roza if she could send me the information; I would be glad to pay her for it. Unfortunately, Roza had written all of the information on 3 by 5 index cards, one for each person, all in Yiddish. Copying the cards and sending the information to me was not feasible, because I would then need to have it translated.
Roza agreed to translate all of her notes into English and e-mail the information to me. The job took several months—since Roza sent me the information on about 100 individuals at a time. Each time I received an e-mail message from Roza, I would have to laboriously key the data into the Excel spreadsheet I had created containing the 1,200 names and the information about them. After about nine months, it was completed, and I was only too happy to send Roza a check for her time and effort. Not content to consider this the final version of the list, I decided to pursue other avenues of research in a further effort to learn more about the lives of the Vilnius Jewish leaders. An opportunity to do just that soon presented itself.
Research Trip
In May 2008, a group of 37 Jewish genealogists, led by Gary Mokotoff and Sallyann Sack, spent a week researching the Holocaust records at the International Tracing Service (ITS) archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany. As a member of that group, I saw a golden opportunity to try and find more information about the fate of the 1,200 Vilnius leaders, and I was not disappointed—even though ITS has little information from Eastern Europe.
Many Jews from Vilnius were sent to various camps in Latvia and Estonia and, unfortunately, ITS has no records from those camps. Treblinka records also do not exist. On the other hand, about 100 of the Jewish leaders of Vilnius were sent to Dachau, Dautmergen, and Stutthof concentration camps in Germany, and I found those records. Even though I was able to find records for only about 100 of the names in the book, it was all very worthwhile, to say nothing about the wonderful experience of viewing the records in the archive.
Many of the Jewish leaders were in the Vilnius ghetto, and the 1942 census of the ghetto is available on JewishGen. I also own the two-volume book published by the Vilnius Jewish Museum of that same 1942 census. As my time permits, I plan to refer to that 1942 census and add additional information from that source. The census gives the leaders’ addresses in the ghetto and, in many cases, their age or date of birth.
Unfortunately, many of the Jewish leaders were murdered prior to the recording of the census, so information about their fate either is unknown or they were murdered in the Ponar pits outside of Vilnius. Yad Vashem is another possible source of valuable information, and I hope to learn additional facts from the records held in that facility.
Final Step
When my efforts to find additional information are exhausted and my research is completed, the information about the fate of the 1,200 leaders of the Vilnius Jewish community will greatly exceed the information listed in the book. I hope to finalize the list by the fall of 2009 and plan to donate the results to LitvakSIG to be added to the All
Lithuania Database (ALD), to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and to Yad Vashem.
Howard Margol of Atlanta, Georgia, is past president of IAJGS, the JGS of Georgia, and the LitvakSIG. He is the 2008 recipient of the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement Award. Howard travels regularly to Lithuania for research and humanitarian purposes and has organized and led fifteen group trips there. He is presently organizing his next group trip for July 2009.
