AUSTRALIA (Caplan)

Australian Jewish Genealogical Society (Sydney) e-Report, October 2010. On October 31, 2010, as part of the Day of Jewish Culture and Heritage organized by B’nai B’rith, the society displayed books and CDs documenting the history of Jewish communities at the North Shore Synagogue in Lindfield. Members were present to help with research.

Member Barbara Ford asks, “Does Fate Direct Our Lives?” as she describes how she met previously unknown cousin Stephen Falk of Pittsburgh. For many years Ford has had custody of a family heirloom, a silver wedding cup passed down for generations in her paternal family. In preparation for a family-cum-genealogical research trip overseas, Ford dug out the cup and read the inscription, noticing the surname Latz for the first time. A posting on JewishGen reached Falk and led to a rapid exchange of excited communications and a visit to Pittsburgh. When Ford returned home and sent Falk a copy of the latest AJGS e-Report. Within the hour, Falk sent a note saying that he found his mother’s father’s name in a Swiss database published in that report, a name he had been seeking for a long time. This database of more than 25,000 persons who fled to Switzerland during World War II is available at http://etat.geneve.ch/dt/archives/a_votre_service-liste_refugies 1700.html.

Ford emphasizes the need to prepare before leaving on a research trip and to know what questions need answers before visiting a research center or cemetery. She comments that her visits to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and in Berlin were “overwhelming,” adding “Had I not had a plan I would have been in trouble.” In a folder, Ford took copies of family trees and documents that she wanted help with translating. She listed the research centers and cemeteries together with addresses, telephone numbers, and the times they are open to the public. She forgot to check for public holidays and lost a few research days as a result. She adds that Jewish cemeteries, particularly in Germany, are locked, and “you cannot say ‘Hi’ to your relations on Shabbat.”

Member Dani Haski recently traveled to ten countries to research her family history, starting in London and going on to Riga, Warsaw, Golub-Dobrzyn, Krakow, L’viv, Ternopil, Odessa, Turkey, Egypt, and Israel. She took 431 photographs and wrote 54 entries. See Dani’s blog with picture, maps, interesting local information, and more on www. travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slice_n_dice/1/12832056 65/tpod.html.

Ancestry.com has added to its collection indexes to the vital records of Australia, a total of nearly 15 million entries. Some of these indexes are available at no charge at various Australian government sites. For a complete list of records available at these sites see www.coraweb.com.au/ bdmindex.htm#online. The collection includes the following items:

• Birth records that supply name, birth year, father’s name, mother’s name and birth place: New South Wales, 1788–1909; Northern Territory, 1870–1909; Queensland, 1829–1909; South Australia, 1907–22; Tasmania, 1803–09; Victoria, 1836–1909
• Marriages include maiden name, spouse’s name, year and place of marriage: New South Wales, 1788–1945; Northern Territory, 1870–1913; Queensland, 1829–1929; South Australia, 1917–37; Tasmania,1803–1919; Victoria, 1836–1920; Western Australia, 1906–49
• Death records note name, death year, estimated birth year, father’s name, mother’s name and death place: New South Wales, 1788–1945; Northern Territory, 1870–1913; Queensland, 1929–59; South Australia, 1916–70; Tasmania, 1803–1919; Victoria, 1836–1985; Western Australia, 1906–80

Following are new acquisitions for the society’s library:

• Jewish Eastenders, by Aumie and Michael Shapiro, 1992. This book is part of a series on the East End of London.
• A Translation Guide to 19th-Century Polish Language Civil Registration Documents, by Judith Frazin, 3rd edition, 2009.
• Genealogical Gazetteer of Galicia by, Brian J. Lenius.

AUSTRALIA (Sharpe)

Jewish Genealogy Downunder, quarterly publication of the Jewish Genealogical Society (Victoria), Vol. 12, Nos. 1 and 2, March/June 2010.

Highlights of the Second Australian National Conference on Jewish Genealogy held over three days, March 8–10, 2010, include a brief summary of the keynote address presented by Dr. Sallyann Amdur Sack-Pikus. Sallyann outlined the historical development of organized Jewish genealogy worldwide. In addition there is a summary of an address by Israeli Ambassador to Australia, Yuval Rotem, who spoke about the emotional journey he and his family experienced in 2006 on discovering and meeting a lost branch of his family living in Melbourne. Schelly Talalay Dardashti wrote a summary of his talk which can be found on Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog, March 8, 2010.

David Solly Sandler of Australia is seeking South African descendants of 60 Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian war and pogrom orphans known as the Ochberg Orphans. In 1921, Isaac Ochberg traveled to Poland and the Ukraine and brought back 167 orphans, attendants, and nurses, mainly older siblings with him to Cape Town. The article lists the names of these so-called Ochberg orphans.

The Broken Hill Historical Society, in association with the Australian Jewish Historical Society, is organizing a number of events for November 27–29, 2010, to mark the centenary of the synagogue which was consecrated in 1910. The building has been restored by the local historical society with government funding. Today, no Jewish residents are left in this remote outback mining town of 25,000 inhabitants in the State of New South Wales. Readers are requested to contact known descendants of early inhabitants and invite them to the event. Further information can be found at www.brokenhillsynagogue.org.

Jewish Genealogy Downunder, Vol. 12, No. 3, September 2010. Jewish Genealogy Downunder announces that it is offering an online PDF version of the newsletter to members. A hard copy will still be distributed to those that prefer that option.

A panel of Australia Jewish Genealogical Society (AJGS) (Vic) members, who had attended the 2010 IAJGS international conference in Los Angeles in July, spoke about their experiences and research at a meeting of the Society in September. Some 14 registrants made the long flight from Australia and New Zealand to attend the Los Angeles event.

Melbourne resident and Holocaust survivor, Frank Dobia, who was born in Dobrzyn, Poland, traveled to the ITS in Bad Arolsen, Germany, this year to view original documents on his incarceration in the Buchenwald concentration camp. A report on his visit can also be found on the ITS website, www.its-arolsen.org, April 15, 2010.

AJGS member Daniela Torsh from Sydney will speak at the National Jewish Memorial Centre in Canberra, on November 4, 2010, about an exciting breakthrough in her recent research at the Czech National Archives. She found about seven generations of her mother’s Pollak family in Bohemia, one of whom was a rabbi in Prague. The article in this issue gives the background to her research.

Vaughan Duggan, a member of the AJGS (Vic), has just published a high quality, richly illustrated, 315-page family history, The “Lost” Shamrock—The Duggan (O’Dub­hagain) of Ireland and Its Global Descendents and Related Families. He devotes one long chapter to his wife’s family, Speier-Rosenberg, with origins in Burghaun and Oberaula, Germany. In a talk to the society in August, Duggan outlined the issues he encountered in preparing his material for publication.

Louise Shostak, the granddaughter of a German Jewish refugee who fled to Australia in 1939, is seeking assistance in having translated some 100, mostly handwritten, letters in German. They consist of correspondence between her grandmother and her grandfather, who spent the war years in Switzerland until they were reunited in 1946 in Australia. Titled “The Quilted Box,” she writes about the background of the letters which have held their secret in a quilted box for 64 years.

The committee of the Broken Hill Synagogue Centenary celebration, which will be held on November 27–29, 2010, has announced that a new book, Jews of the Outback: The Centenary of the Broken Hill Synagogue 1910–-2010, will be launched at the coming event. The book has been coedited by Suzanne Rutland, Leon Mann, and Margaret Price. More than 200 people are expected to attend the celebration, the majority coming from Melbourne and Sydney.

CANADA (Lederer)

Shem Tov, publication of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) (25th Year), Vol. XXVI, No. 3, September 2010/Tishrei-Cheshvan 5771.

Wellington County Historical Research Society includes two items of Jewish interest in “Wellington County History,” Vol. 23, 2010. Wellington County is situated in southwestern Ontario. The two items are reminiscences of three Jewish peddlers of Polish descent who visited Wellington County towns with their wares in the late 19th century (Mark/Max Simonsky) and early 20th century (Barney Levinsky and Jacob Ciglen; the latter was located in Drayton, Ontario).

A comprehensive (Abridged Facsimile Edition) of The Jew in Canada from 1926, edited by Arthur D. Hart, is now available for $40 (Can.). Details at: www.Nowand thenbooksToronto.com.

Marla Waltman Daschko explains that attending the Ontario Genealogical Society Annual Conference, “Essential Innovations and Delights,” has helped her immensely in her research. She claims that a set of three sessions given by Thomas W. Jones, emphasized basic research identifying common surnames.

A fascinating article which appeared in the Canadian Jewish News, July 29, 2010, by Daniel Held, is reprinted, entitled “A Fateful Choice of Software.” After much deliberation, Held bought Family Tree Maker with a gift-certificate he had received for his bar mitzvah. Unbeknownst to him at the time, it “shaped my personal and professional identity.” He describes being “excited to see my name and that of my parents, sister, and cousins on the family tree.” The software became his and his parents’ obsession, and, over the next few years, the family traveled to Germany, where they found tombstones and searched archives in Tel Aviv and New York. “Lost” branches of the branches were discovered in Australia, Argentina, and South Africa, contributing to 2,100 individuals in his database, the results of the dispersion of the family members, after leaving Europe in the 1930s. Now a teacher, Held involves his students in projects to construct their own family trees and interview members of their family for relevant information and anecdotes.

Reports of the 2010 IAJGS Los Angeles conference are given by two Society members. Evelyn Steinberg regales us with her methodological quest to obtain as much information as possible about research in Ukraine (her mother’s ancestry). Steinberg found that by focusing on this project, she spent her time usefully. In addition, she enjoyed mingling with and meeting other conference attendees either during meals or informal chats.

Henry Bloomberg is very upbeat about his experience at the conference: The salient points he focuses on are meeting other attendees to whom he is related [always exuberating—R.L.], participating in the large Canadian Birds of a Feather meeting [a far cry from the 1980s and early 90s, when I was the sole Canadian at the conference—R.L.], and attending the South African SIG meeting where Saul Issroff discussed Jewish servicemen on the Boer side (Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902). The first Jew who lost his life in that conflict was Harry Spanier who hailed from Columbus, Ohio. Henry attended many film viewings and was enthusiastic about the first SIGs coordinators’ meeting.

Recent inquiries to Shem Tov come from:

1. E.B. who was born in a DP camp, developed tuberculosis for which he was treated in a tuberculosis hospital in Kempten im Allgau, Bavaria. He would like to find the hospital records or any documentation regarding this facility. He says that the hospital was run by International Refugee Organization (IRO) branch of the United Nations.
2. Michael Glotsman, living in Russia, requests information about his two great-uncles, who reportedly went to Toronto pre-World War I from Radom, Poland. Glotsman’s grandfather was Jacob Goltsman, son of Abraham, born in Lipsko, Ischetsky district, Radom province in 1900. The brothers may have been known as Holtsman, or Holtzman; they operated a weaving mill.
3. George Salzman, of New York, is seeking his brother Manek Saltzman born in Tycyn, Poland, a survivor of the Rzeszow ghetto.

Replies to these three inquiries should be sent to ShemTov@JGSToronto.ca.

David Horowitz and Warren Blatt announced that family trees built with a special version of myheritage.com—available at www.myheritage.com/Jewishgen—periodic­ally will be transferred to Family Tree of the Jewish People (FTJP) unless requested by the tree creator not to do so. FTJP is a project of JewishGen to bring together family historians worldwide. Myheritage.com is a genealogical social network with 50 million members and 590 million profiles worldwide.

A successful tour for society members of the Ontario Archives, now housed at 134 Ian Macdonald Blvd., York University campus, was held recently. The Archives is a repository for birth, marriage, death, and divorce records as well as land title and land use records, including maps. Contact via www.archives.gov.on.ca or telephone: 416-327-1600 or (in Ontario, 1-800-668-9933).

Writer Craig Silverman investigated the story behind his grandfather’s photograph album from 1945. He discovered that his grandfather had accompanied 11 female instrumentalists from Canada to entertain Canadian army troops abroad, soon after the termination of World War II in the summer of 1945. His grandfather, a violinist, was the only Jewish member. The troupe performed in front of survivors of Bergen-Belsen Camp where many starving children were in the audience.

“Spotlight on Members” highlights librarian Elaine Cheskes, who in her retirement has reorganized the society’s holdings at the Canadian Room, North York Central Library (6th floor), 5120 Yonge Street, Toronto.

LATVIA (Feigmanis)

Unlike many other countries, not many Latvian Jews spend hours in archives searching for their roots. Thus, I was both surprised and pleased to meet Marc Joffe in the Latvian historical archives when I was researching my book on pre-World War II Latvian Jewish intelligensia. Joffe was searching for his Abramson, Joffe, Meler, and Slovin relatives, some of whom immigrated to the United States. In 1925, his grandmother, Doba Slovin (born Doba Baum in Sebezh in 1859), moved to Philadelphia to be with her son, Leizer (born 1901). Other Slovin siblings who also immigrated to the United States were Samuel, Hanna-Edlya (married Gurevitch), and Elka who married Livshitz. Joffe is trying to locate these American relatives; his e-mail is jo.mar@apollo.lv, but he speaks only Latvian, Russian, and some German. He asks anyone who can help but wants to write in English to send the letter to him via this contributor at aleksgen@balticgen.com.

Marc Joffe’s life story is typical of 20th-century Latvian Jewry. Joffe was born in March 1940, and on July 1, 1941, German troops entered Riga where they were greeted as liberators by ethnic Latvians. Fortunately, a few days earlier, Joffe`s parents had managed to escape to Russia. His father perished in the winter of 1941 defending Moscow from the Germans, and his mother died soon after returning to Riga in 1945. Joffe was raised in an orphanage. Only after 60 years, working in the reading room of the Latvian state historical archives, did he read information about his parents and grandparents and see their photographs. Joffe created his own computer person-search database, which is not similar to any existing databases, because he used many lesser-known resources: Latvian University files, residence books, Latvian Ministry of Interior files, and passports of 1920–40.

Joffe has a car large enough to hold five tourists comfortably, and the two of us frequently guide tourists from abroad who want to visit their ancestral towns in Latvia and Lithuania. He drives and I guide. Simultaneously, I can search for ancestral graves, while he opens his laptop and often can retrieve brief genealogical information right on the spot.

In May 2010, I led research in the national historical archives of Belarus in Minsk. My research was concentrated on Berezino, Kadino, Polotzk, and Vitebsk. The archives has a rich collections of resources for Polotzk, e.g., “List of Jews of male sex, drawn up in 1875” (fond 1430-

opis 1- file 54041) and an 1863 list of Polotsk Jews (fond 2523–1–file 4). The collection of records about Jews from Vitebsk is sparser. No vital records exist; the main resource is 1874 family lists held in fond 2496.

Until 1917, Kadino was a small shtetl in Mogilev province. Because of boundary changes, the town now belongs to Smolensk province in the Russian Federation. Not far from Kadino is another shtetl, Puhovitchi, the birth place of the famous American science fiction writer Isaac Azimov. In Kadino, I searched for the Beilin and Stukalin families. Some Beilins and Stukalins from Kadino immigrated to the United States in 1910, and I am searching now—with no success yet—for their descendants. In the 1930s, one of the Beilins was prominent in the American Communist Party. The main records from Kadino are a census from 1858 and a list of trade and industrial businesses in Mstislav district of Mogilev province, dated 1911–15

Berezino is a small town about 100 km from Minsk on the road to Mogilev. The Belarus national archives has a 1858 census of Berezino and 1874 family lists. I visited Berezino where the site of an old Jewish cemetery near the firehouse may still be seen. The cemetery was destroyed circa 1960 and only two tombstones still remain; the fate of the other tombstones is unknown. I asked many local inhabitants, including some who are Jewish, but nobody knows where they might be. Berezino still has two synagogue buildings, the area of the ghetto in Nazi times along Proletarskaya Street and a Holocaust memorial. My guide in Berezino was a local Jewish inhabitant, Semyon Lazarevitch Fridland, who lives at Pobedy Place 17-51.

In October 2010, I conducted research in the Kaunas regional archives and Lithuanian state historical archives in Vilnius where I looked for records from Aniksciai, Krazaiai, and Vilnius. Most surprising (and disturbing) is the fact that I was not given many of the files I had ordered in Vilnius (1262-1-16, 17, 58, 82; 525-25-383; 728-4-344,345,354, 364). All these files—censuses and indexes to births and marriages that occurred in Vilnius—were extremely important for my research. Archivists explained that those files cannot to be given to researchers, because they are suplystas (fragile, in bad condition), a truly puzzling statement, since I saw some of those files several years ago, and they were in perfect condition. In addition, it is hard to understand why such important files are not microfilmed if they are fragile. For these reasons, I have concluded that somebody among the archivists has simply decided not to make these files available to researchers. Why, I do not know.

THE NETHERLANDS (Snel)

    Misjpoge, Vol. 23, no. 1, 2010, publication of the Vereniging Nederlandse Kring voor Joodse Genealogie (Netherlands Society for Jewish Genealogy).

This issue opens with an important article by Miriam Keesing about children who fled the Third Reich and lived in orphanages and with foster parents in the Netherlands. She describes how these children ended up in the Netherlands and how and why they were relocated throughout the country. Keesing also recounts how the children’s situation changed abruptly after the German invasion in May 1940. She interviewed some of the children who survived, or in some cases, their relatives. This first- or second-hand information, together with official documents and correspondence, allowed Keesing to enrich her article with personal stories of some of the children involved. The total number of refugee children is unknown. At least 1,115 were registered by various authorities, and it is about this group that Keesing writes her fascinating story, a story that has been little known until now.

Nechamah Mayer-Hirsch takes the reader to Jewish cemeteries of Arnhem, a city on the Rhine near the German border. The oldest of Arnhem’s four cemeteries was De Sandberg, founded in 1755. The author describes the oldest Jewish population of Arnhem and gives examples of people buried in one of the four graveyards.

Jona Schellekens highlights the Dutch Jewish merchants who visited the Leipziger Messe (Leipzig Fair) between 1675 and 1764. This market was held three times yearly and attracted thousands of visitors. In 1928, Rabbi Dr. Max Freudenthal (1868–1937) wrote a book about all the Jewish visitors to the Messe. Schellekens focuses on the Dutch Jewish visitors and offers examples of families who visited Leipzig over the years. The Kring website, www.nljewgen. org, includes a list of all the Dutch visitors.

On August 18, 1811, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered that all subjects of his empire must bear fixed, hereditary surnames. Of the approximate 18,000 Ashkenazic inhabitants of Amsterdam at that time, only a small minority used fixed surnames. Harmen Snel explains that those with no surnames were required to present themselves at the town hall and adopt a surname there for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren. Snel calculates that only slightly more than 60 percent of the people who did not use official surnames actually showed up at the town hall in 1811 and consecutive years. Snel wonders in which segments of the population we must look for this group—the more than one-third of the Amsterdam Ashkenazic population that refused to adopt a surname. Were they rich Jews? Or perhaps poor? Did they live in certain areas? This does not imply that this group did not use surnames at all after 1811. After that date, everyone needed to use a surname; this one-third simply used a name that was not officially adopted.

Daniël Metz digs deep in this episode of Monumentjes (small monuments), showing how people left signs of their lives behind in books, either by an ex libris or handwritten notes. Girls had little books in which their girlfriends wrote some poems or a “life lesson”—advice for later in life, such as, “treat everyone nicely and you will be treated nicely.” Metz provides some nice examples and illustrations of this kind. Denise Citroen reviews Ik ben er nog. Het verhaal van mijn moeder Hélène Egger (I am still here; the story of my mother, Helene Egger) by Debby Petter about her mother’s life. R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld is enthusiastic about Huis van de levenden (House of the living) by Ton Hokken, about the Jewish cemetery on the Oostzeedijk in Rotterdam, and Victor Brilleman reviews Maçons met mededogen (Compassionate masons) by I. Erdtsieck, about the role Jews played in freemasonry in the city of Kampen.

    Vol. 23, No. 2. The second issue of 2010 starts with an article by Peter Tammes about the married couple Else Berg and Samuel “Mommy” Schwarz. Both were painters and worked in the period between the two world wars. They were in contact with important members of the Dutch art scene, such as Leo Gestel and Piet Boendermaker. Berg was seen as a member of the Bergen School, which had nothing to do with her surname, but with the village of Bergen where the artists met.

Harmen Snel continues his series with a second article on the adoption of surnames in Amsterdam. This episode deals with only one surname, Berg, not derived from a town ending with –berg or the German county Berg. The founder of this family, Moses Simon, was born in Cronheim in Bavaria and settled in Amsterdam in the 1740s. He was a wine merchant while at the same time running a lodging house in Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter. A sign on the house, probably showing an old man on a mountain slope with some clay tablets, gave the inn its name: Mozes op den berg (Moses on the mountain). Later, the family adopted the name of the inn as its surname. Snel writes about the inn’s financial circumstances (Moses went bankrupt) and about Moses’ four marriages and 19 children. After Moses’ death, his fourth wife and some of his children continued the business until 1817. Some of Moses’ children had moved to London and Edinburgh before 1817 and had offspring in the UK.

In his last episode of Monumentjes, Daniël Metz describes the situation of the lodging houses and private rest homes owned by Jews in Amsterdam in 1941. In 1939, Amsterdam had almost 200 of these institutions where (primarily) old people lived and were cared for.

Victor Brilleman reviews two books: Klein en groot zijn daar gelijk (Big and small are equal there), by H. Lettinck, about the Jewish cemeteries in the province of Groningen, and Van Rapenburgerstraat naar Amerika (From Rapenburgerstraat to America), by R. van der Wiel, about the life of diamond worker and art collector Andries van Wezel. The title of the book refers to the United States, where van Wezel visited several times.

Daniël Metz reviews Spartacus, the name of a sporting club, written by Erik Brouwer about two young Jewish sportsmen who attended the 1908 London Olympics. Harmen Snel reviews Ko Sturkop’s Genealogie van de geslachten Sturkop and Sturhoofd (Genealogy of the Sturkop and Sturhoofd families). This book, a first volume, deals only with the first four generations of the Sturkop family (1740–1850).

NEW ZEALAND (Bruell)

New Zealand never has been home to more than the 7,000 Jews it now has (out of a total population of 4.3 million), but since the first Jewish congregation was established in 1840, Jews have always played a significant role in many fields. Ann Gluckman is an example. Gluckman has held many positions in education and in community organizations. She was the foundation Jewish co-president of the Auckland Council for Christians and Jews and was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1993 for her services to education and the community. In addition, she was one of the first four girls to be bat mitzvahed in New Zealand (in 1939); and was the first woman in the country to be appointed principal of a public co-educational high school. Gluckman and her late husband, Laurie, conceived of and edited the books Identity and Involvement, and The History of the Auckland Jewish Communities, published in 1990 and 1993 by Tandem Press. Now out-of-print, the two have become major reference books.

Postcards from Tukums: A Family Detective Story, by Ann Gluckman (Auckland N.Z.: David Ling Publishing, 2010. ISBN 978-1-877378-45-4. Available at www.thenile.co.nz.

Now, with the publication of her book, Postcards from Tukums: A Family Detective Story, Gluckman closes more than two decades of searching for her family’s roots—a personal history that was shrouded in mystery, veiled references, and walls of silence. The book sources information held in many pages of letters written by Gluckman’s mother, Augusta Klippel, between 1917 and 1934; an oral history tape recorded by Augusta at the age of 90 in 1987; and, lastly, the 90 postcards of the title, from Tukums in Latvia. No letters from Tukums are known to exist.

The postcards were written by family and friends in Latvia to the Manoy family in a remote corner of New Zealand, those two small islands in the Pacific colonized by the British by The Treaty of Waitangi with the indigenous Maori in 1840. Something of a “wild west” culture still prevailed in the early years of the 20th century. England was the Mother Country or “home” to most who were of Anglo-Saxon origin. Foreigners were largely regarded with suspicion until personal contact and common experiences gave way over time to warmth and shared friendship.

The book sets out to answer the question, “Who were these people, my grandparents, aunts, and mother, and what was life like for them settling in small-town New Zealand, at the far end of the earth, 100 years ago?” Ann knew a good deal about her mother’s life from the time she left school until her marriage, but very little about the family’s background before then. As with so many others who grow up as a new generation in a country of refuge, she and her brother, Geoffrey, intuitively knew not to ask their elders about their previous lives. Yet without this knowledge, she felt increasingly rootless. Ann and Geoffrey were the only two grandchildren born to Adolph and Yetta Manoy.

Aaron (Adolph) Yeruchmanov, the author’s grandfather, was born in 1860 in Talsen, Latvia, 60 kms from Tukums. He moved from Talsen to Tukums when he married Yetta Gerson, a young local woman from a well-off Jewish family. In 1904, possibly as a result of worsening economic conditions, business problems, and increasing anti-Semitism, Adolph left Latvia and, after a short stop in England, arrived in New Zealand to join an uncle. Others in his family who had immigrated to English-speaking countries had Anglicized the family name to Manoy and Adolph did the same. He left behind his wife Yetta and their four children setting out to find his family a new home far from the troubles of Tukums where he must have felt there was no future for them as Jews.

Historically, the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, were all part of the Imperial Russian Empire from 1795 until 1918. Briefly independent between the two world wars, after 1945 they were annexed into the Soviet Union and became independent once more after 1991. Tukums and Talsen, the places the Yeruchmanov/Manoy family had come from, were in Courland, that part of Latvia which was influenced by German culture and ideas and German was spoken in the home. This area was north of East Prussia and its capital in Königsberg (Kaliningrad).

In 2004, Gluckman found in the attic of the old Klippel family home in Auckland letters stored in fragile envelopes written by her mother, Augusta. Gluckman arranged them by date and began to transcribe. Augusta’s letters revealed much about her life in Stratford as a young teenager, later studying at New Zealand’s only medical school in Dunedin. They also describe her professional life as the first Jewish woman in New Zealand to graduate from medical school.

In 2007, Gluckman’s attention was diverted to a collection of postcards found by one of her sons in the family home. The cards were dated between 1909 and 1916, mostly written in old German, some in Russian, and one in Hebrew. Four appeared to have been written in an amalgam of four languages. Ann knew that these postcards held the key to the family’s life in Latvia and early life in New Zealand. This, she surmised, would lead her to an assessment of the history and culture of the Jews of Courland and would enable her to understand the background of her family. The postcards have been beautifully reproduced throughout the book to provide a continuing thread linking the lives of Adolph, Yetta, and their children with Latvia. Scenery and figures from history and literature and travel spots were pictured on the commercially produced postcards. Some, issued by the Jewish National Fund, showed beautiful etchings of Biblical sites in Palestine. Gluckman likens the postcards to having snapshots of a lost world. The correspondence stopped in 1916. Within a few short years the correspondents and their families were almost totally destroyed or had immigrated elsewhere.

Adolph appears to have fallen out with his uncle’s family and to have struck out on his own. He was naturalized in 1907 and set out as a salesman traveling over the lower part of the North Island. Advertisements in local newspapers of the time confirm this. Considerable research in Taranaki has yielded much information of interest. By 1909, Adolph had settled in Stratford, opening a drapery shop there and also a smaller store in Whangamomona, a major workmen’s camp on the railway line, thinking that the town had a future. This was a gross miscalculation; now only the historic hotel remains as a focus of the remnants of the town on the windy, mountainous road over five saddles with corresponding steep gorges, known as the Forgotten World Highway. Even today it is not a journey to be undertaken lightly.

In 1910, Yetta and Adolph’s only son died of scarlet fever in Tukums. Shortly after, Yetta and the three daughters aged 17, 15, and 12 came to New Zealand to join Adolph in the remote area of Stratford, Taranaki, in the central North Island of New Zealand. Perhaps the death of the son, Josef, influenced the decision to hasten the reunion of the family.

Yetta and her daughters left Tukums in July 1910, stopped over in London, and arrived in New Zealand three months later. They had left Latvia without documents. The New Zealand government provided papers for them in London. From the translated postcards, we learn that Yetta, Sarah, Rebecca, and Augusta had left behind a large and loving extended family leading an observant Jewish life. Household help would have been a given in their social circle. Social life revolved around the festivals and gatherings, balls, and outings. In Stratford, their lives were as different as they could possibly have been. Conforming to the strictures of orthodox Jewish life was almost impossible in Stratford, where there were few other Jewish families. No kosher food was available, and when they arrived, none of them would have even spoken English. They must have been very lonely and isolated. For many years, conditions were spartan until they moved into the relative comfort of their own home on Pembroke Road around 1920 when Augusta was already in medical school. In her 1989 oral history interview, Augusta says, “For us to get a card from home, we all sat down and wept and then the fighting spirit came up, and we said, We are going to make a proper go of it.”

By the time his family joined him in Stratford, Adolph Manoy had established a business as a draper. He wanted to be able to provide for his family before sending for them, and he also wanted the children to have finished their education, since he felt that the European schools would have been superior to those in the new colony. The most striking geographical feature of Stratford was snowcapped Mt. Egmont/Taranaki; the climate in winter was cold, bitter, and unforgiving. In the early years of the 20th century, it was being cleared for the fertile farmland it was to become. The town became a service town for the dairy farming district, and it is recorded that, by 1909, Adolph had established a clothing-drapery store on the main street. Stratford was more than 200 miles from Auckland and a similar distance from Wellington in the opposite direction—the two established Jewish communities on the North Island. It is hard to imagine what Adolph intended or thought in terms of his son studying for bar mitzvah or any of the Manoy daughters finding marriageable Jewish men. None of the women spoke English, and the two older girls did not attend school.

Rebecca helped her father with his business and became a canny businesswoman, developing relationships with the local rural womenfolk and understanding their needs. Sarah stayed at home with her mother and helped with domestic duties for a family of five, which would have included koshering their own chickens. Augusta, at 12, was sent to school to learn English, which she would teach the others. At that time, there was only a single school in the town, serving all ages. Augusta’s small peer group at school consisted of intelligent and motivated young people who all succeeded in getting to study at a university which was quite an achievement from a district high school.

When the Manoys left Russia, they hated Russians and all things Russian, having experienced several cruel pogroms and constant anti-Semitism. They admired Germany for its advances in science, literature, the arts, and more liberal attitude to Jews. In New Zealand there was a great fear of the Russians. The Manoys were advised to speak German so that local people might gain the impression that they were German in origin. Of course, in hindsight this was ill advised. When World War I began, they suffered some discrimination, until Reg Manoy, a cousin from Motueka, was killed in action on the Somme. Thus was their patriotism established.

Although he was a liberal man for his time, in many ways Adolph did not easily accept higher education for women. He did, however, become immensely proud of Augusta’s achievement as New Zealand’s first Jewish woman doctor. Augusta’s letters reveal much about the tribulations of a young woman living away from home in New Zealand and studying in an environment that was not encouraging to young women. Her few close friends were women, and even after five years of study, the men in her year were referred to as “Mr.” Women had to struggle for professional recognition and for jobs. From Augusta’s letters and oral history tape, Gluckman was able to piece together much of her parents’ early life together.

Sam and Augusta met in Sydney when Augusta was on her way to Europe. Although they fell in love, she sent him to New Zealand to gain family approval before agreeing to marriage. Augusta continued on to Vienna to study obstetrics and gynecology and met some of Sam’s family living in Vienna and Trieste. Sam and Augusta were married in Wellington in 1926. They traveled in England and Europe together—but never to Latvia, out of reach behind the Iron Curtain after 1945. Gluckman describes her own recollections of her grandparents’ lives in Stratford, experienced when she and her brother made school holiday visits. Parents Sam and Augusta came to live in Auckland from Sydney in 1934 and the letters ceased.

Adolph died at home in Stratford at 74. Rebecca’s life centered around her staff members at the Stratford store until, as a mature woman, she married Harry Berman who was from a respected Auckland Jewish family. Then Yetta and Sarah moved to Auckland. Yetta was the keeper of tradition in the family and maintained this role until her death past 80 years of age. Rebecca died in 1972, Augusta in 1989, and Sarah in 1990 at 96 years of age.

Gluckman visited Tukums in 2000 and tried to get her bearings from her mother’s descriptions. She found much of the cemetery overgrown, so she was not able to locate the grave of her small brother, Josef, although his name was on the cemetery list. Emigration from Latvia had already been proceeding apace when Adolph left and probably increased after the Russian Revolution of 1905. Any Jews who remained were overtaken by the catastrophic dislocation and destruction of the 1917 revolution. The Nazi regime and Soviet era ensured that no Jew remained in Latvia. In 1941, the Germans took over the Baltic States, and the remaining Jewish population was murdered.

The book is enlivened with photographs of various family members, as well as the reproductions of the gorgeous postcards scattered throughout with their translations and analyses. Gluckman has completed a work of scholarship in a readable style that will mean her book is accessible and relevant to all who immerse themselves in it—whether her own family, genealogists, scholars, or those looking for a good detective story. Members of the New Zealand and wider Jewish communities whose early lives touched or were mirrored in the Manoy family experiences will also find much to fascinate them here.

Ann has painted with a broad brush of ideas and information. Sometimes her conclusions are conjectural, but they are always thought provoking and based on carefully analyzed suppositions. Her expressed hope is that she has made the history of the past 130 years come alive to root future generations in the past. The book is the gift by the way she achieves this.

SWITZERLAND (Arnstein)

Maajan, publication of the Swiss Jewish Genealogical Society and the Hamburg Society for Jewish Genealogy, no. 95 June 2010.

Since the resignation of Daniel Teichman as editor, appeals for a successor have been unsuccessful and this joint publication of the Swiss and Hamburg Genealogical societies is in jeopardy, according to the minutes of the 2010 annual meeting. On the other hand, Peter Stein seeks input for a major project to publish an 1833 register of citizens of Endingen, a historic Jewish village in the Swiss confederation. Stein also has issued addenda for the book on the Cimetiere juif de Hegenheim (Jewish cemetery in Hegenheim) in Alsace. Rene Loeb offers several book reviews, especially Reise in die Vergangenheit (Biographical memories), by Hanna Meyer-Moses, now living in Bremgarten, Switzerland; they include her stay in the Gurs concentration camp. Loeb also has a helpful report on his genealogical research in Paris. Yes, he had results, but—and he focuses on what he wishes he had known earlier, such as the importance of knowing which arrondissement, or the fact that Paris also includes several suburbs he and we would assume to be separate jurisdictions with separate registers. The awardees of the Legion d’honneur are partially available on the Internet, others require two months to get an answer. These and other lessons Loeb describes with candor and in an attempt to help others to avoid similar disappointments.

In addition to the usual features, there are reports from Hamburg with focus on Altona, today part of the city-state of Hamburg, but for a couple of centuries under Danish rule, documented in two major articles in this issue of Maajan, followed by a major extract of the Hamburg marriage register.