Genealogical methodology, combined with knowledge of the historical context in which a subject lived, are valuable tools when constructing biographies—especially when we know little about the personal lives of our (even otherwise well-known) subjects. Several approaches are useful in solving such problems.
In 2008, Sarah Kadosh, then director of the Jerusalem archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (commonly known as the “Joint” or JDC) asked me to undertake a research project for the archives, citing specifically the fact that I am a genealogist. Kadosh had received funds to research and write short biographies for 43 Joint staff members who had lost their lives in the service of the Jewish people. The research would be part of a computerized, interactive memorial to be located at the Jerusalem headquarters of the JDC.
I was acquainted with some of the names through my knowledge of Jewish history, but initially I was unfamiliar with most. First, I grouped the individuals according to cause of death, reasoning that the circumstances likely would shape the sources and types of available information. The majority, 23, were executed in or had died as a result of the Stalinist purges in the late 1930s; nine died in accidents; eight perished in the Holocaust and three were murdered.
Holocaust Victims
In its archives, Yad Vashem has Pages of Testimony (POTs) for some, but not all, Joint staff members who died in the Holocaust. These POTs often supplied names of spouses and children. One POT also included a fragment of a photograph of the deceased that we added to the computerized biography, thus incorporating another dimension to the memorialization of this person. The name of her son, who perished with her, also was added to her biography.
Since most of the POTs I used had been submitted in the 1950s, many of the submitters no longer were alive. The obvious next step would have been to trace their descendants, but time and budgetary limits precluded further research down this path.
Sometimes chance plays an unexpected and valuable role. One day, unexpectedly, I received a message from a woman who wrote that, according to family tradition, her grandmother’s brother, Isaac Bornstein, had worked for the Joint in Poland in the 1930s. She was looking for verification. In fact, Bornstein, who during World War II was referred to as one of the “Four Directors of the Joint,” was one of the individuals to be memorialized. This contact enabled me to add the names of his parents, spouse, children, and siblings, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust. My contact also corrected the date and place of birth.
Holocaust research can be frustrating since so much written material did not survive World War II. Sometimes while doing research, you engage in conversation with other researchers. In this way, I was fortunate to meet Larry Zuckerman of New York who was also researching this period of time. We agreed to share our findings. Isaac Giterman, another individual on the Joint’s list who fled to Vilna after the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, was an outspoken critic of the Nazis. Zuckerman forwarded to me a copy of a telegram he came across in his own research that Giterman had sent to the Joint’s Paris office in 1939 reporting that he had arrived in Vilna safely with his daughter. Up to then, neither Zuckerman nor I had seen any reference to a daughter. We knew that Giterman’s wife and son had been killed in Warsaw before the ghetto uprising, but we knew nothing about a daughter. Considering that none of the other information we had even mentioned a daughter, we concluded—logically, we thought—that the phrase “my daughter” must have been a code word for something else.
Chance—or maybe “assisted chance”—played a role one Shabbat. Walking with my rabbi and teacher, Professor David Halivni, I mentioned Giterman in another context (possibly he was on my mind because of the research project), and Professor Halivni asked if I remembered Giterman’s daughter(!) from the years when I studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York (1964–70). He told me that she lived near JTS and that her husband had been the noted scholar Zosa Szajkowski (aka Szajko Frydman, 1911–78). I still did not know the daughter’s given name, but I was confident that I would find it in the New York Times obituary for her husband.
My optimism was premature. I hit a brick wall instead. Between August and November 1978, the New York Times was on strike and no papers were published; Szajkowski died in September 1978. Examination of the obituaries in Israeli newspapers also was unsuccessful. When I mentioned my dilemma to Professor Halivni, he suggested that I order all 17 books authored by Szajkowski that were held in the National Library in Israel. Professor Halivni thought that I might find a dedication to Szajkowski’s wife and other important personal information.
The librarians in the Judaica Reading Room immediately filled my unusual request. Interestingly, I had already used Szajkowski’s The Mirage of American Jewish Aid in Soviet Russia, 1917–1939, in my research for this project. One book listed the address of the author on the Upper West Side of New York, not far from JTS; the twelfth book was dedicated to his son Isaac, probably named for his grandfather. In the next to last book I opened, published posthumously in 1980, I achieved success. It included a tribute to the author by the late Dr. Abraham Ducker, a former librarian at Yeshiva University and confidant of Zosa Szajkowski. Ducker mentioned all the members of the author’s family in his tribute.
This experience reminded me again that a researcher must track down even the most remote clues. Many articles have appeared in AVOTAYNIU over the years that remind researchers to follow every possible lead; I reiterate the advice here. We also were delighted to learn that the family was not wiped out by the Holocaust.
Stalinist Purges
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mischa Mistel of the Joint’s New York archives retrieved the KGB files on the 23 staff members who either were executed or died in forced labor camps as a result of the Stalinist purges in 1938–39. (Some of the people in the gulags died in the early 1940s.) The challenge was to locate more information.
These people were involved with Jewish agricultural colonies in Ukraine and Crimea. Google lists some 19,500 references to Jewish agricultural colonies in Russia. They enabled me to fill in more background information and, more importantly, supplied a large number of references to books and articles on these colonies. At the Jewish National and University Library, I perused numerous volumes searching for references to any of the 23 victims and, in fact, did glean some additional facts. Some books, especially yizkor (memorial) books, lacked indexes—a major frustration.
One Google result referred to an obscure, privately printed book by someone who had visited colonies sponsored by the JDC’s affiliate, Agro-Joint. Fortunately, the National Library possessed a copy and provided a more complete picture of the time. The late Dr. Paul Jacobi used to bemoan what he called “Mormon Genealogy”—that is, listing just names and dates. In our genealogical research, we also want to know how people lived and what they did.
In one case, the obscure book describes the author’s visit with an idyllic family. The father was a physician who had returned to the Soviet Union after completing medical school in Switzerland, eager to help build the new Russia. His wife was a bacteriologist; one son was a university student and the other a grade school pupil. The KGB records record the extreme cruelty shown as such families were destroyed during the Stalinist purges. The physician, Boris Chanis, director of a medical department in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, was executed as an “enemy of the people”; his college-age son Alexandr was shot as “the son of an enemy of the people”; his wife was sentenced to a forced labor camp and their younger son was placed in an orphanage.
Death by Accident
In some cases, I was able to make use of newspaper articles written about staff members who died in accidents. One case was especially productive. The young woman, a much respected and beloved social worker in a post-World War II displaced persons camp in Germany, died as a result of a malfunctioning gas heater. Numerous tributes, including a memorial booklet, appeared afterward, and New York Times articles listed family members. Often newspaper articles on the deceased include helpful background information.
Murders
When researching the life of a murder victim, one of the first things to do is to obtain a copy of the police report. Two murders took place together in Ukraine in 1920, and one occurred in Prague in 1967—securing police reports was not an option here. In such cases, I turned to newspapers and other reports. In the case of the murder in Prague, the Joint archives held a large scrapbook with dozens of newspaper articles reporting the high-profile murder. A letter to the editor of the Jerusalem Post disproved the claim of the Communist government of Czechoslovakia—the writer said that he used to swim in the Charles River every day in the summer and the current was too strong for a body to remain in one place for days. He said that the body had to be planted by the authorities in the river shortly before it was found, otherwise, the current would have carried it much further downstream. A researcher always should read more than just the report on the murder; follow-up comments may have great value.
The 1920 murders required an entirely different approach. Considerable literature, including newspaper articles, was available, but the newspaper articles were both inaccurate and contradictory. A scholarly article in the American Jewish Archives Journal was most helpful. I used some of my personal books, including a biography of one of the 43 individuals to be memorialized, Professor Israel Friedlaender of the Jewish Theological Seminary. In addition, I had numerous conversations with Professor Israel Agranat, Friedlaender’s grandson, a retired professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Some details of the grandfather’s life were incomplete. We knew that he had been a student at the Rabbiner Seminar für das Orthodoxe Judenthum in Berlin. More commonly known as the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary, it was founded in 1873 to train Orthodox rabbis. Did Professor Friedlaender complete his studies and receive rabbinical ordination before he assumed a professorship in Strasbourg (then in Germany)? His grandson did not know. At the suggestion of Professor Daniel Schwartz of the Hebrew University, I checked the National Library’s collection of yearbooks of the Hildesheimer Seminary. There I found and photocopied the three mentions of him as a student in the late 19th century. School yearbooks are an often overlooked source. Although difficult to obtain, some Jews in the 19th century acquired a university education. Genealogists should not overlook the annual reports of these institutions when researching relatives.
Summary
Beginning my research by grouping the names by the different causes of death, I was able to directly focus on the individuals. The cause of death determined the nature of my research. There would be one approach for those who perished in the Holocaust while the victims of the Stalinist purges would require another direction to obtain information. I then tried to fill in the details. When possible to locate family members or descendants, I interviewed them, thus adding additional value to the project. The result is accessible on the Internet at http://212.150.243.194/ ~jointgra/index.php.
