“Do you speak Yiddish?” my newfound cousin queried on behalf of her father, a Holocaust survivor who had settled in Paris after the war. I had located him through research at Bad Arolsen in the International Tracing Service records. His memoir, published by the Shoah Foundation, had led me to his daughter. Reluctantly I confessed that I didn’t speak Yiddish and realized that I was closing off a line of communication that could have enriched my knowledge of family.
That conversation lingered in my mind, and when a genealogy friend mentioned the Vilnius Yiddish Institute to me, I seized the opportunity to attend with her in the summer of 2009. Based in Vilnius, Lithuania, the program offered a month of Yiddish lessons as well as a cultural program. Vilnius was of additional interest to me, since my grandmother had always spoken of being from Vilna. Immigration records revealed that the shtetl from which she came actually was Dunilowicz, now Dunilovichi in Belarus, and 75 miles from Vilnius. Once the shtetl had been part of Vilna guberniya (province). In addition, the Lithuanian State Archives located in Vilnius houses the revision lists (censuses) for Dunilovichi and nearby Glebokie, the ancestral home of my great-grandmother. The proximity to Dunilovichi and Glebokie led me also to plan a visit to the family shtetls in Belarus. All that, together with the opportunity to learn the Yiddish language and culture, presented a rich opportunity to further my family research on multiple layers.
Obtaining a Belarus visa was not simple or inexpensive. A single entry visa costs $131. In order to obtain the visa, one must secure a $25 voucher from a Belarussian travel agency or hotel. An additional delivery cost of $70 is incurred if this is sent from Belarus, but we were fortunate that our contact sent it when he was visiting the United States. My telephone calls and e-mails to the Belarus Embassy in Washington went unanswered, so I opted for using a service to secure the visa. With that charge and passport photographs, the visa ended up costing more than $200.
Using the Vilnius Archives
I organized my own journey to the Vilnius archives to research the revision lists from my shtetls. After two community education courses in Russian, I hoped that my meager grasp of the language would assist me in translation. Knowing that the handwritten Russian was far more difficult to decipher than the printed version, I visited the <steve morse.org> website to create a list of family names written in both Russian and Hebrew, text and cursive, anticipating that the same reference document would be helpful in my shtetl cemetery visits.
Before leaving home, I spoke with others who had done research at the Vilnius Archives, trying to learn the “archive rules of the road.” Although I had ordered records from archives in the past, this would be my first foray into doing research in an archive on my own. I had secured the name of the one English-speaking archivist, head archivist Galina Baranova, ahead of time. By e-mail she had agreed to pull the initial files for me, since requests needed to be submitted by 10 a.m. (when I would still be in Yiddish class).
Upon entering the archives, a rather uninviting building with bars across the windows, I asked for Galina and was directed down the hall, where I arrived at her closed door. Knocking on the door, I realized that it was padded, and my knock was muffled. When I tried to open the door, it was locked. As I anxiously waited, wondering if my visit were in vain, Galina opened the door and I introduced myself. She escorted me down the hall where I was given a locker in which to put my coat and carry case. Then she directed me to the reading room where people sat at small tables as they reviewed documents. Galina explained that the archives had the original of one of the documents I requested, the 1875 revision list from Glebokie, but the rest of the documents were on microfilm. Before providing me with the documents, archive staff completed an information card on me and gave me a researcher card. This card would serve as my identification on future visits.
The 1875 revision list was quite crumbly, and sections had been cut out. As I learned later, the cut-out portions had been receipts given to each provider of information. The revision list was in columnar format, the Russian script was fairly legible, and I was able to recognize a number of first names. I had printed the surnames I was researching in handwritten Cyrillic so I could look for names that might resemble them. Both names—Sher and Gold—are short, so I thought they would be easy to locate, but after reviewing the revision list I had not found any obvious matches.
Having exhausted the revision list, I found my way to the microfilm room down the hall where I was given a tray of microfilm, only one of which was on a reel. Apparently films without reels had to be wound by hand. Staff set me up on a machine that didn’t seem to allow for enlargement of the image. Each time I rotated the reel, it blurred for a minute until it came into sharper focus. That made for a slow and unwieldy process. The first document I tackled was the revision list from 1834, and, unlike the columnar form I had reviewed for 1875, it appeared to contain paragraphs, a format I had not expected for a revision list. The name of each town was difficult to decipher, and I was uncertain that I was looking at the information from my shtetls. After winding through one film, I concluded with disappointment that this was not going to be a fruitful path. I needed reinforcements.
I contacted Regina Kopilevich, who had been recommended to me as a guide, and luckily for me, she responded quickly and was available to accompany me to the archives. At the archives on my return visit, I traded my researcher card for a locker key and brought my computer, papers, and camera into the reading room. I was permitted to photograph, but did not use flash. We began with the 1875 revision list that I had reviewed for Glebokie. In addition to my own family names, I also was looking for names for others researching the region. Regina went through each page, reading the names quietly as we rapidly flipped pages. She soon paused at a name that I had considered on my earlier visit. It looked as if it might be Sher, my great-grandmother’s maiden name. The first letter was the Cyrillic letter (С) that resembles the English “C,” which has an “es” sound. We expected the Cyrillic letter (Ш) that resembles the Hebrew shin and sounds like sh. Regina studied the name and then solicited a friend’s opinion. She proceeded to ask three other people in the room who were proficient in Russian and returned to report that they all believed the name was Sher and noted that people from that region sometimes wrote Sher with the Cyrillic letter that resembles a C.
The revision list listed the names of two brothers, Leyzor and Fishel, sons of Yankel, as well as their ages. The youngest son was reported to be 16, but in another column, it noted that he appeared to be 12. The revision list also reported that the elder brother had a house in Glebokie. I asked Regina if the revision list provided an address, and we flipped to the beginning of the section to locate the street name. We continued through the book and, although I found no more of my own family names, there were several lucky strikes for other researchers as well as many Shapiros, who seemed to have dominated the town. It took us about an hour to get through the book with a fluent researcher reading every name as we sought six surnames.
We reviewed one other book that stood at least two feet tall, with fraying parchment, that contained the 1834 revision list for Dunilovichi. Due to its fragility this was often not available to researchers, but Regina’s history at the archives allowed us access. Although we determined that the revision list did not list my family names, I took photographs of each page of that section with the hope that I may find someone to translate it more thoroughly later. Then we moved to the microfilm room, where we again tackled the “reelless” rolls of film. I asked Regina why they weren’t on reels, and she noted that they were quite old. “Couldn’t they put them on reels?” I queried. “We are not looking for the easy ways,” she replied with a chuckle.
We reviewed the filmed index for the 1858 Dunilovichi revision list. Only the index is available, along with many files of supplemental revision list data. While we found several names for my fellow researchers, I had no success with my family names. Nonetheless, I think it is likely, as I try to map relationships across the shtetl, that I will find relationships with other families that may make some of these discoveries personally meaningful.
Shtetl Visit Preparation
The European branches of my family that remained in Dunilovichi and Glebokie in some ways were the least known on my family tree. My great-grandfather had emigrated in 1904, and over the next 20 years brought each of his children and finally his wife to the United States. If there were cousins who remained behind, I had no knowledge of them.
In preparation for the trip, I posted a question on JewishGen’s Belarus SIG: “Has anyone ever traveled to Dunilovichi or Glebokie and, if so, what was your experience?” In a flurry of responses, many sent the names they were researching in those towns and asked me to tell them if I saw those names. Others told of travels in that region and offered travel tips. One post in particular caught my interest as the writer reported that she had been to Dunilovichi and had the tombstones in the cemetery transcribed and photographed. She offered me the spreadsheet, but could no longer locate the photographs.
Only two-thirds of the 369 tombstones listed on the spreadsheet were legible. The earliest tombstone dated back to 1761, and the first surname appeared only in 1887. Not until 1901 did surnames begin to appear with some frequency. Altogether, only 60 tombstones had surnames. Most had the given name, father’s name, and date of death, but only a few had birth dates. No tombstones were later than 1938 until one burial in 1944 and another in 1950. I assumed the 1950 burial was of the last Jew of Dunilovichi and was curious about him. Later we discovered his tombstone at the top of the cemetery hill, inscribed in Russian. Probably no one was left who knew how to inscribe Hebrew.
In reviewing the spreadsheet, I looked first at surnames that might resemble my family name of Raichel. Two Rayhels, possibly relatives, had died in 1919 and 1936. I reviewed my files and located my photograph of the tombstone for my great-grandfather buried in the Baron Hirsch Cemetery in New York. The tombstone recorded his father’s name—either Peish or Feish Mordechai. Deciding to ignore surnames, I checked the spreadsheet for anything that resembled the names on the stone. One name jumped out—Pesach Mordechay, father of Eska Zinger, who had died in 1938. Might this have been my great-great-grandfather? The name wasn’t Rayhel or Raichel, but something gave me pause. I knew of Singers from Dunilovichi. My parents had told me of a relationship to an Abraham and Sadie Singer, contemporaries of my grandparents, but they did not know whether the relationship was to Abraham or Sadie. Some years ago, I had found the grandson of these Singers. Might this tombstone prove the link between our families?
Research showed that Eska was a female name. I now had a working hypothesis that Eska was born a Rayhel and had married a Singer. My great-grandfather Schloime had died in 1932, so he would have been a contemporary of Eska. Perhaps she was a sister. I then looked in the cemetery spreadsheet for a record of the death of Pesach Mordechay. I found one in 1907—but without a surname. It gave his father’s name as Moshe. If my hypothesis proved correct, I have identified my great-great-grandfather (Pesach Mordechai), my great-great-great-grandfather (Moshe), a sibling of my great-grandfather (Eska) and the linkage between the Singers and the Raichels.
I reviewed my earlier research on the Singers who had immigrated to the United States. Perhaps I had missed a clue that might make sense in light of this new information. On the passenger manifest of Itze Singer from Dunilovichi, in faded writing next to his name, was recorded the name “Abraham.” Itze gave his father’s name as Benes Singer. When he immigrated in 1913, he said that he was going to his cousin Abraham Schwartz at 613 Rockaway. Suddenly I had an “aha!” moment. The name Schwartz had meant nothing to me when I first found the passenger manifest. I had assumed he was a relative from Dunilovichi whom I had not yet encountered. This time the address seemed familiar. I went back to my family immigration database and confirmed that was the same address given for my great-grandfather when his son immigrated in 1911. Abraham Schwartz clicked into focus. My great-grandfather’s eldest daughter had married an Abraham Schwartz. By marriage he would be a cousin to Abraham Singer even though they had not yet met.
I also had a passenger manifest for a Schie Singer from Dunilovichi whose father was Pines Singer going to join his uncle, Schloime Raichel, my great-grandfather. Unsure what the name Schie became once Americanized, I had never been able to trace Schie in the United States. Now I wondered if Benes, the father of Abraham Singer, was the same person as Pines, the father of Schie. I could imagine the names sounding similar to the clerk recording the ship’s passage information.
The family tree was sprouting mental leaves linking the Dunilovichi graveyard to my New York immigrant relatives. If my great-grandfather was Abraham Singer’s uncle, then perhaps Eska and Benes (Pines) Zinger were his parents and Schie was his brother. There was one more record of a Zinger, Benyamin–Binush Zinger, son of Nachum, who died in 1934.
The father of Benyamin-Binish was given as Nachum, so I looked through the spreadsheet for a tombstone for Nachum and found his death in 1921. His father, in turn, had been named Benjamin leading me to believe this was the correct person; it fit the Ashkenazic naming pattern of naming a child after a deceased grandparent.
The table below illustrates the relationships. The tombstone data is framed in bold; other names represent immigrants to the United States.
Visiting My Family Shtetls
Several months after compiling this analysis, I departed for Dunilovichi and Glebokie after completing the Vilnius Yiddish Institute program. I arranged the Belarus visit with the assistance of Yuri Dorn of the Jewish Heritage Research Group in Belarus. I had located the group online at <www.jhrgbelarus.org> and then talked with other travelers who had used the service. Yuri had been very helpful in offering guidance, and I appreciated his ability to anticipate my questions in our e-mail correspondence.
We took an early morning train from Vilnius towards Minsk, but exited at Ashmyany (Oshmyany), the first stop after the border, a trip of about two hours.. There we met our guide, driver, and transcriber and headed to the shtetls by car. When we had purchased our tickets at the train station, we had also purchased the required Belarus insurance coverage of 5000 Euros. We had been warned that this was very important if we wanted to enter the country. It was fortunate that we had purchased the insurance several days earlier, because the sales office was not open at the early departure time.
When we arrived in Dunilovichi, our guide left to find the mayor who then took us to the monument to the Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. The mayor proudly reported that to preserve the memory of the Jewish community, the town had fenced in the Jewish cemetery at the same time that it fenced the Christian cemetery,. After reciting Kaddish at the memorial, we drove to the nearby cemetery.
The cemetery, on a hill across the road from the Christian cemetery, had not been tended for some time. Grass was several feet high and to maneuver around it was treacherous. After I had first acquired the cemetery spreadsheet, I had obtained photographs of the Dunilovichi gravestones from the Jewish Heritage Research Group of Belarus. Even with photographs, it was difficult to locate specific stones. I had hired a transcriber in addition to the guide to accompany us and was glad that I had done so. As we began our search, I handed him my computer with the spreadsheet and photographs of the tombstones that I had identified. I also had brought materials to do gravestone rubbings: interfacing (for sewing), oil pastels, scissors, and painter’s tape. As the transcriber identified each of my tombstones, I made a rubbing. The final tombstone my transcriber located was that of Pesach Mordechai. When he shouted out his discovery, I worked my way to the top of the hill. Once again I recited Kaddish, doubtful that my great-great-grandfather could ever have imagined that a great-great-granddaughter from America would one day stand before his grave.
Susan Weinberg is an artist and genealogist who in addition to researching her family history also paints it. She provides genealogy consulting and presents genealogy workshops nationally. Having made her career in finance, she uses the analytic skills she’s honed in her genealogy research which covers Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine. Weinberg lives in Edina, Minnesota.
