One Hundred Years in Canada: The Rubinoff-Naftolin Family Tree, by Bill Gladstone, 2008. $40 (U.S. or Canada) Available at http://rubnaft.com/. http://www.billgladstone.ca Some books invite exploration from the minute you first set eyes on them. One Hundred Years in Canada […]
Book Review: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider.
Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider. Avotaynu, 2008. $118.00. To order: http://www.avotaynu.com/books/DJSRE2.htm When the first edition of Alexander Beider’s massive Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire came out in […]
Not Just an Old Piece of Paper
One evening in 1992, while sorting through some papers that had belonged to my late father, I came across an old and fragile Hebrew document that I could not recall seeing before. Because of the old-fashioned printing style, I suspected […]
A 180th Birthday Celebration
In 1828, in the small South Bohemian town of Ckyne, a businessman offered to build a new synagogue for the Jewish community if they would sell him the land on which their shul (synagogue) stood. The community agreed, and the […]
Personal Journeys: The Isenberg Family Comes Alive
The year was 1970. One morning that summer, I was exiting, quite unexpectedly, the railway station in Hamburg, Germany. It was the last place I wanted to be. I had misread the train schedule, leading me to believe I could […]
The Berliner/Berkenstat Connection
I am a second-generation Holocaust survivor. My mother, Lea, was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1925. Luckily, she spent the war years with her parents and brother hiding as a Catholic in Chateauneuf-les-Bains, France. My dad, Murray (Mordkhe, Motek) Berliner […]
Twenty-five Years and Five Name Changes Later: How I Found My Great-Grandmother
I was discouraged that the 84-year-old man for whom I recently discovered a paper trail had not called me back after two voice messages and a two-page letter with a photograph that I mailed. He might not be alive, or […]
Uniting Siblings—From a Distance
In the early 1990s, I began to research my Veffer family from Holland. It was before online telephone listings and before everyone had e-mail. While it could now be done in seconds online, I spent hours and hours tediously searching […]
How My Friend Paul and I Are Not Related by Steve Stein
Paul Bloom and I have been friends for more than 30 years. We attend the same synagogue, sit on the same bench every Friday night, and have attended each other’s children’s bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings. For a time, […]
Lessons Learned in Finding the Chajkielson Family of Suwalki
Many Jewish genealogists have wondered what happened to relatives who did not emigrate from Europe during the 20th century. Older family members typically report that “all communication was lost after World War II. They must have been killed in the […]
How I Obtained Photographs Of All My Great-Grandparents
Every Thanksgiving my family sat around the dinner table and repeated exactly the same questions as the previous year: Where did our family come from and when? We believed that our great-grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 1890s, […]
Joseph’s Journey
My cousin said that there was something wrong with Joseph—he did not know what, but thought that he might have been retarded—and that he had been placed in an institution. When I was 49 years old, an […]
Another Brother in My Family
On a visit to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1999, I telephoned my cousin, Ronnie Levinsohn, whom I last had seen as a child. I was telling him of our visit to Latvia the year before and that we had […]
My Father Had a Secret
“I wonder?” That’s the question that strolled through my mind when I started my journey to my family’s past. How did they live? What were they like? How did what they did and didn’t do lead to me? Every time […]
Identifying Benjamin W. Cohen Of New York and New Orleans
Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern, FASG, built his classic book on Jewish families in America on a foundation of thorough understanding of Hebrew customs, skilled use of records and correspondence with descendants.[1] Decades later, omitted lines require specialized research to tell […]
Holocaust Records – The Search Goes On
During the past 30 years, I have spent considerable time locating records that indicate the fate in the Holocaust—death or survival—of Jews and non-Jews. I recognize that, even more than 60 years after the end of World War II, while […]
Publish or Perish: How I Got the Rubinoff-Naftolin Family Saga into Print
“Zhhlobin–Market Street” reads the caption of this rare postcard photograph, circa 1900, of the Belarussian shtetl where my great-grandparents lived before bringing their children to Canada around 1910. The postcard is part of an incredible collection of more than 100 […]
Genealogical Sources for the Jews of Southern Germany During the Pre-Emancipation Period
Before 1806, southern Germany consisted of hundreds of independent territories of varying sizes. Some were owned and ruled by noble and princely families, others by bishops (and called bishoprics). The largest realms with a Jewish population were the Electoral Palatinate […]
Jewish Labor Committee’s Holocaust-Era Archives
Unknown to most genealogists, Jewish Labor Committee documents in the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives in New York University’s Tamimet Library represent a remarkable cache of genealogically rich Holocaust-era records. Estelle Guzik devotes two lines to the collection in her […]
From Our Mailbox, Fall 2008
Comments on Rosenstein Article Neil Rosenstein’s article, “JRI-Poland Database and Rabbinic Data Merging,” discusses a topic that has interested me considerably. When JRI-Poland made available on its database indexes for records of three of the Gerer Rebbes, I ordered copies […]
Book Review: The Life and Times of Congregation Kesher Israel, by Harry D. Boonin
The Life and Times of Congregation Kesher Israel, by Harry D. Boonin. 192 pages. $29.95. Self-published, 2008. Society Hill, a picturesque area of colonial Philadelphia, was home to this old synagogue, around which grew a lively community of Eastern European […]
Book Review: The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History, by Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain
The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History, by Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain. Jonathan Ball: Johannesburg and Cape Town, 2008; telephone (+27) 11 601 8088. $31.95 Order here: http://www.jonathanball.co.za/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=productdetails&virtuemart_product_id=1097&virtuemart_category_id=1 This is the first comprehensive history of South African Jewry […]
Book Review: My Future Is In America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. Edited and translated by Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer
My Future Is In America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. Edited and translated by Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer. Softcover, 330 pages. Published by New York University Press in conjunction with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. $25.00 In 1942, […]
Book Review: Google Your Family Tree, by Daniel M. Lynch
Google Your Family Tree, by Daniel M. Lynch. Softcover, xii + 340 pp. FamilyLink.com, Inc. $34.95. Available through Avotaynu, <www.avotaynu.com/books/ Google Your-Family-Tree.htm> I rarely get excited about new things. The last time that happened was when a man named Stephen […]
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census was the first and only census conducted in the Russian Empire prior to World War II. Its major interest and value both for personal genealogy and for the history of Jewish communities is that the […]
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