I’ve been working on my family tree for about 20 years now and helping others find their roots, branches, or leaves in theirs somewhat less than that. My work, while it is something of a hobby, is quite intense. Now that I’m retired, I spend even more hours uncompensated than my previous 40-hour weeks in a computer-technical field. But it’s that knowledge and facility with computers and search engines that have helped me immeasurably in this “work.” To get a feel for external factors that surrounded and influenced our ancestors, we have to go beyond just a search for records. We sometimes have to look for resources that might explain how our ancestors lived.

The town of my primary research was the small town of Kežmarok, Slovakia, discovering that Jews were not allowed to settle there until the mid-19^th century, but before that, they could settle in the nearby town of , that eventually boasted a fine synagogue and yeshiva — second only to that of the Chatam Sofer’s Yeshiva in Pressburg, now called Bratislava, Slovakia’s capital. So after Kežmarok, I became interested in researching Huncovce and gathering information about that town. These towns are so small in comparison to the megalopolis that is Los Angeles that it is hard to find information about them. I scour the internet, using Google umpteen times a day for the smallest tidbit. Some people Miki[1] and I have been in contact with regarding their families, have also contributed material or where else to search. Daniel Polakovic with roots in Huncovce, is a researcher at the Jewish Museum in Prague, Czech Republic. In December 2007, he informed us about manuscripts that had somehow made their way to the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York. The provenance (a word used by folks involved with antiques) of these documents is supposed to prove how they got there, when, and through whom. Despite my request for this information, the JTS librarians have never been able to tell me. It’s one mystery among many leading me to wonder if they arrived there by some nefarious means. However, I did manage to acquire a black-and-white, poorly digitized copy (in PDF format) of one such manuscript, and with the help of my cousin Hagit Tsafriri in Israel, who is thankfully very competent in both Hebrew and English, we worked on deciphering the handwriting, transcribing it into electronic MS Word Hebrew format, then translating it as well. We even tried to preserve the original “look” of the manuscript. It was a long painful process, but we gained knowledge about the settlement of Jews in Kezmarok, thanks to Ferdinand I who in 1841 opened up the former “royal free cities” to Jews and how they came to build their first synagogue there in 1858. Prior to being able to settle in the town, they could do business there, but had to leave at night to sleep elsewhere, such as in the nearby town of Huncovce.

So Huncovce became interesting to me since I realized that many people who eventually settled in Kežmarok had actually come from that town. It was something like a see-saw. The Jewish population of Huncovce dropped down while that of Kežmarok rose with people’s migration.

So where would I learn more about that town? Among my father’s books was one he received from the author, Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Greenwald, better known as Rabbi Leopold Greenwald[2] after he immigrated to the USA, and became the Rabbi of Beth Jacob Congregation in Columbus, Ohio. Curiously, this was the same synagogue that the former librarian of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s (SWC) Library, Adaire Klein, attended when she was growing up in that city. Jack Greenwald, son of the late Rabbi Greenwald, lives in Denver Colorado, and over the past several years we have e-mailed each other. Information from his father’s books has been very informative for me for that part of the world. He has always given me permission to use his father’s material.

Rabbi Leopold Greenwald was born in Transylvania in 1888, but as a 14 year-old had been sent to study in the very same Huncovce Yeshiva. He took an interest in the town’s archives, its community’s protocols, rules and regulations. He even visited the cemeteries, reading and capturing what was engraved on its tombstones. He was very precocious and forward-thinking of his time. He wrote many books, mostly in Hebrew, including a few about the lives and culture of the Jewish people in parts of Slovakia, which was then considered part of Hungary. My luck, the one book my father had, was “A Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Hungary.” That this is its title in English is deceptive since it is written wholly in Yiddish[3] and was published in Columbus, Ohio, in 1945. I confess I have not read the entire book because I struggle with reading and understanding Yiddish. For that matter, while I read Hebrew better, I cannot say I ever read an entire book in Hebrew either. But Rabbi Greenwald referenced and quoted four times from a book written by Rabbi Armin Schnitzer, Jüdische Kulturbilder, aus meinem Leben” (Images of Jewish Culture from my Life). The paragraphs attributed to Rabbi Schnitzer sounded so descriptive and even amusing that I thought this might be a book worth pursuing.

I learned that Rabbi Dr. Armin Schnitzer was born 8 December 1836 in the town of Huncovce, but later served as chief rabbi for the town of Komarno (in the Nitra region of Slovakia) for 52 years until his death in 1914. Miki’s good friend who lives in Huncovce, Jan Gurnik, somehow had obtained images of just a few pages from this book, written in German Fraktur (German Gothic printed script), and he was glad to e-mail them to me a few years ago. Again the content that I managed to decipher in my poor knowledge of German, provided good insights into what life was like in Slovakia more than 100 years ago and I wanted to read more – as difficult as it was. But the 224 page book was printed in 1904 and copies were hard to come by. I left the search for a couple of years.

 

Figure 1. Armin Schnitzer and family, estimated date 1900

 

Figure 2 Enlargement of Rabbi Armin SCHNITZER

It was more than a year later, sometime in early 2014 I decided to try once more to locate that rare and elusive book written by Rabbi Dr. Schnitzer. All I could discover on-line in the World Catalog was that only two libraries in the USA had this book, making it truly rare. One copy was in Ohio State University Library, the other in the University of Florida. I actually also found yet another copy in YIVO’s Institute for Jewish Research (http://yivo.org/index.php), in New York City. But going cross-country to borrow a book from their stacks was really just too far to go…Whenever I would turn up for my Tuesday afternoon writing class at the SWC Library, Adaire Klein welcomed one and all with a smile. Once in a while I’d tell her of some book I was trying to find and she would go to her computer and try to see if our local libraries, such as UCLA, AJU, or HUC[4], had it. If not, she offered to arrange an interlibrary loan for me. I never needed to go that extreme, but it was good to have that information in my back pocket. At the end of 2012, coinciding with my mother’s passing from this world, Adaire Klein retired from the SWC Library and made plans to make “aliyah” to Israel.

Figure 3 Trying to Locate Existing Copies of Schnitzer’s Book
When Jerry and I were in Jerusalem, Israel in January 2014, we happened to visit the National Library, so I could try searching again for elusive photographs of the Huncovce Yeshiva and/or find a photo of Rabbi Samuel Rosenberg, who was responsible for bringing that yeshiva to its venerated status. You would imagine someone somewhere would have had a photo of that yeshiva in its heyday! I contacted descendants of Rabbi Rosenberg and they also sadly claimed no photograph of him exists but that didn’t mean I couldn’t try. I had no luck with the National Library’s resources, but the young librarian, Tali Shlomo, who tried to help, gave me her card for future use if necessary.

Figure 4 Rabbi Armin SCHNITZER, courtesy of Mr. Labuda, Huncovce

So now months later back in Los Angeles, I thought, “Why not try contacting her? Maybe they have a copy there?” I checked on line and found that they had the book but this one was in a microfilm version. I had hoped they might have a PDF which would have been more useful. So I e-mailed Tali. She was very kind and advised me that, Yes, they could scan the entire roll and make a PDF out of it — all for about $350. Well, I thanked her, but I didn’t need the book that much! (For that amount I could have flown to New York and back.)

At the SWC Library, I tried to see if the acting librarian could help me with the inter-library loan of the type Adaire had offered me in the past. Alas, not only had no one done this in 15 years, I later also learned from another librarian-friend at one of our public libraries, that this process could also turn out to be very costly.

I was not happy but I was also reluctant to give up this quest. There just had to be another solution. Jerry and I had an errand to do on Sunday, March 23, 2014. I got into the driver’s seat and we drove north to Wilshire and made a right turn. A driver on our right cut me off and we were stopped behind a car at the red light. I looked at the white car in front of me and commented to Jerry at how cute it was that the new technology, 100% electric car Nissan Leaf had a vanity plate that said, “A FOLION.” I assumed that this was some form of a Latin word that reiterated the notion of “Leaf.” Word games like that amuse me. But at the time I didn’t realize that this earthly object must have been a hint from Above!

Returning home that evening, I tried Googling for this book once again and turned up an unlikely source that didn’t make much sense to me. It gave me a link in Googlebooks (https://books.google.com/) to something called, “New Era Illustrated Magazine, Volume 4[5]” that included copies of its issues published from December 1903 through June 1904. The last article in each of these issues has something called “A Review of Jewish Reviews.” Basically, this is an index of Jewish related articles that had appeared in various publications such as newspapers, magazines, and anything else that might be considered a “review” and was not restricted to just publications in English. The name of Armin Schnitzer appeared several times consecutively in the “Oesterreichissche Wochenschrift, Vienna.” (Meaning, the Austrian Weekly, published in Vienna)

It just so happens that for the last couple of years, I have actually gone to websites that have PDFs of various old newspapers[6], and specifically European newspapers, and even Jewish newspapers in German-speaking areas of Europe. So I was not at all surprised to realize that Armin Schnitzer’s work might have appeared in such a newspaper. But the next question was whether this particular newspaper was available on-line. The website for these types of publications is http://www.compactmemory.de/, with the “.de” suffix meaning Deutsch, and thereby letting everyone know that these publications are in German. This website has more than 100 Jewish periodicals, published from 1806-1938. Each of these has its own set of issues, whether weekly, monthly, quarterly, and each of these has its set of pages, so tons of information could be found if one knows what to look for and where. Sure enough, with a little searching I found the issues as listed in the Review of Jewish Reviews, and issue by issue I located where Schnitzer’s pages were to be found. But it was the section of each issue that had my eyes popping: It was under something called “Feuilleton[7].” This word, related to the Latin word of folio, is derived from a French word, but used even here in German newspapers. It means[8], “a part of a European newspaper or magazine devoted to material designed to entertain the general reader; …printed in installments.” So what I had ultimately found was Armin Schnitzer’s book serialized in this newspaper in the period from Feb 19, 1904 through July 22, 1904 – 23 issues worth!

So here I am two weeks after that find, having downloaded all 23 issues. It’s been exhausting and someday soon, I’ll actually have to try to read them, or at least get the gist of what is written that will enlighten me more about what Jewish life and culture was about 150 years ago. Now that I have them I can read them in small doses. I only hope that after all this I actually do have the equivalent of 224 pages that appeared in the book!

Oh, and if anyone is interested, among the birth, marriage, and death records I have collected and maintain for the Spis Region of Slovakia, I actually have the birth record of Armin (or Herman) Hirschel Schnitzer (son of Moses Schnitzer and Scharne Duneitz, born 8 December 1836) if anyone ever comes looking for it.

Figure 5 Birth record of Armin Hirschel SCHNITZER, 8 December 1836

Figure 6 Reference to First Installment of Armin Schnitzer’s book, February 19th, Left Column, in “Review of Jewish Reviews.”

Figure 7 Front Page of Ostereichische Wochenschrift, 19 Feb 1904, the last entry has „Feuilleton: Jüdische Kulturbilder.“

Figure 8 First page of Armin Schnitzer’s Book, in Feuilleton

Notes

 

[1] Mikulas Liptak, of ViVit, Ltd. Publishing House. He is a non-Jewish resident of Kežmarok, Slovakia.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Greenwald,

[3] טויזנט יאר אידיש לעבן אין אונגארן

[4] University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), American Jewish University (AJU), Hebrew Union College (HUC)

[5]http://books.google.com/books?id=n3spAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

[6] For example, a website I use for Kežmarok and surrounding towns is the Karpathen Post, which is mostly in German, but parts are in Hungarian which I cannot read. Its issues are from 1880-1942. http://www.difmoe.eu/archiv/year?content=Periodika&kalender=0&name=Karpathen+Post&title=Karpathen+Post

[7] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/feuilleton; also , mid 19th century: French, from feuillet, diminutive of feuille ‘leaf’.

[8] Other definitions, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ :

1 a part of a European newspaper or magazine devoted to material designed to entertain the general reader

2 something (as an installment of a novel) printed in a feuilleton

3 a novel printed in installments