shemot - jgsgb

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shemot - jgsgb

SHEMOT
The Jewish Genealogical
Society of Great Britain
June 2006 Volume 14, No. 2
Mosse Mokke of
Norwich, 1233
THERE cannot be anyone who can trace their Jewish
family history in England back to the 13th century, but
from time to time, one hears people say, “My family
came over with Oliver Cromwell”. As this year is the
350th anniversary of the Resettlement of Jews in this
country, it would be splendid if members who can trace
their family’s arrival back to the 17th century could
produce articles for Shemot about Jewish life in Britain
in those early days. With more than 800 Society
members, surely this is not impossible?
Oliver Cromwell
CONTENTS
From the Chairman
by Martyn Woolf ................................
2
Rasputin and my great-uncle
Merseyside Jewish community archives
Back to the old country—
Lithuania 2005
Polish records unravelled
Presidential thoughts
London directories—
the place to look
Mediterranean merchant family
The JC archives
The Ba’al Shem—magician or prophet?
1656 and all that!
Successful trip to Łowicz
A man with a mystery
The Barders from Krakow
Grandpa’s school prize
My early days in Illuxt
Book reviews
Abstracts
by Alec Hasenson ................................. 3
by Helena Smart and Jo Robson ......... 6
by Harvey Kaplan .................................. 9
by Rieke Nash ........................................ 12
by Anthony Joseph ................................ 14
by Bryan Diamond ................................. 15
by Rosemary Eshel ................................ 16
by Gerald Josephs ................................ 18
by Joe Isaacs ......................................... 19
by Doreen Berger ................................. 20
by Bernard Bookey ............................... 22
by David Hyman ..................................... 24
by Jane Barder ...................................... 27
by Judith Samson .................................. 31
by Hyman Jacobson ............................... 32
.............................................................. 34
by Lydia Collins and Harriet Hodes ..... 36
Shemot, Volume 14,2—1
SHEMOT is published quarterly by the Jewish Genealogical
Society of Great Britain which was founded in March 1992.
The magazine is distributed free to members. Contributions
of articles on any relevant subject of interest to genealogists
worldwide are welcomed. Preference will be given to
previously unpublished material. Copyright is held by the
Society for the authors, and articles may only be reprinted
with the permission of Shemot.
Material should be sent by e-mail, or supplied on diskette
and/or typewritten clearly. Most word processor formats are
acceptable. Illustrations can be sent as attachments in formats
such as TIF and JPG. Photos should be 300 dpi resolution but
should not be sent to the Editor without prior notification.
Articles from other sources must have full attribution so that
reprint authorisation can be obtained where necessary.
References should be fully acknowledged. Views and opinions
expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily
express those of Shemot or the Society.
Articles should be sent to Shemot, JGSGB, PO Box 13288,
London N3 3WD or e-mailed to pushkin@waitrose.com.
Copy date for next issue: 19 August 2006
On matters relating to subscriptions or changes of name or
address please write to the Membership Secretary at: JGSGB,
PO Box 2508, Maidenhead SL6 8WS. For enquiries on family
research, please write to: Richard Cooper, 14 St Helens Road,
Alverstoke, Gosport, Hampshire PO12 2RN or e-mail Laurence
Harris at enquiries@ jgsgb.org.uk.
Shemot
Editor
Editorial Committee
Production
Judith Samson
Lydia Collins
Jacqueline Gill
Gerald Josephs
Sorrel Kerbel
Michael Gordon
Back numbers
These are available from 1994 from Shemot, JGSGB,
PO Box 13288, London N3 3WD at the following rates:
(including UK postage). One issue is £2.50, two issues
£5, three £7.50, four £9.75. Rates overseas are: £3,
£6, £9 and £11 respectively.
Cheques payable to:
The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain.
Other JGSGB publications
These are available from:
JGSGB Publications
PO Box 180
St. Albans, Hertfordshire
AL2 3WH.
Cheques payable to:
The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain.
26th IAJGS CONFERENCE
From the retiring Chairman
IT does not seem like three years since I took on the
Chairmanship of the JGSGB. Those three years have
been most enjoyable and we have been seen a
continuing increase in membership. Several of the
Society’s activities have expanded.
It has been a privilege to be Chairman of this
Society and I have had with me on Council a group of
colleagues whose hard work is often overlooked.
Without such people, the Society would soon grind to
a halt and disappear; as it is, their dedication allows
us to grow, to offer more to our members and ensure
that everything runs smoothly.
During the last year we held an informal
referendum on the advisability, or otherwise, of
moving the Library to a more central situation. By
about 4:1, members voted in favour of moving. The
lease is signed and within a short while we shall be
moving to 33 Seymour Place in Central London. There
we will be able to build a better structure for the
Society with the Library and a Genealogical Resource
Centre, which hopefully will be open for longer.
I think the biggest change during the past few years
has been in the website. We were able, with
JewishGen, to set up JCR-UK which was launched at
the London Metropolitan Archives on 8 May 2003. It
became an instant success. There may be some
members who have not looked at the website recently
—may I suggest you do. JCR-UK is accessed by a link
from the JGSGB website and is full of goodies. It is
kept up to date by a few dedicated volunteers who
ensure that there is almost always something new to
browse through. The main website is continually
updated and there is now so much available that if
you do not visit it regularly you might never catch up.
We still need more information for JCR-UK. If you
know of any congregation here that does not appear
on the site, please let us know. If you have access to
any old records of defunct synagogues please ensure
that you tell us. Records once lost cannot be replaced.
As you know, the United Synagogue has agreed to
work with us to make their archives more generally
available to all. It will still be a while before all the
details are resolved but we will keep you informed
about the progress.
Now I should like to ask you, as a Society member,
to consider taking on a more active role. We
continually need new people to service the various
committees. Could you help with the Library or with
one of the regional groups? If you have some spare
time, please consider devoting some of it to the Society.
Thank you all for the opportunity that you gave
me to lead this Society for the last three years. It has
been fun and I hope that my successor, Lorna Kay,
will enjoy it as much as I have.
MARTYN WOOLF
New York, August 13-18 2006
www.jgsny2006.org/
Website: www.jgsgb.org.uk.
2—Shemot, Volume 14,2
Published by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain
© 2006. ISSN 0969-2258. Registered Charity no. 1022738.
Designed and produced by M G & A Limited, 01895 822462.
Printed by The Print Shop, 020-8429 0020.
Rasputin and
my great-uncle
by Alec Hasenson
N tracing the story of my maternal grandfather’s older
brother Abram, I was fortunate enough to obtain many
details from his daughter Ekaterina (or Kitty, as she is
known in the family), now in her 90s. She is still very much
in command of her faculties. It was Kitty who wrote her
autobiography, spanning the first 25 years or so of her
eventful life. Not surprisingly, much of this had to do with
her father, her mother Valia and her brother Leo.
Abram, born in about 1877, was the eldest surviving
son of Aleksander Leibovitch and Ekaterina, née Mendler.
He was one of nine children, to which number were later
added some nine more, all adopted by Aleksander when
various relatives died. A family photo of those days could
hardly fit them all in.
Abram was a bright boy who did well enough at school
in St Petersburg to be awarded a gold medal on graduation.
He was Jewish and proud of it, and brooked no antiSemitism. It was a character trait, however, that was
eventually to lose him the precious gold medal, withdrawn
because of his attitude.
Worse, the loss made it far more difficult for him to enter
a Russian medical school. Fortunately, his father had certain
privileges and connections, because Aleksander’s own
father, Yudel-Ber, had been a Cantonist.1 He was lucky to
have survived 25 years’ army service, where many of his
young comrades had perished, even on their first march to a
military depot.
I
Grigori
Efimovich
Rasputin
1869-1917
On his release, still relatively young and fit, Yudel-Ber
was allowed to settle in an area other than the mandatory
Pale of Settlement. He built up a large fruit import business
and developed contacts in St Petersburg, where he had an
office in Apraxin Dvor. Contacts and connections, though
vague terms, are nevertheless understood well enough by
everyone. They often led to certain deals and agreements
being made that were satisfactory to both sides, and in
Abram’s case, by courtesy of a high official in the Ministry
of Education, they opened the door to a medical school in
Kharkov in the Ukraine. Again, young Abram did well, in
1903 qualifying as a paediatrician and specialist in internal
diseases. In those days, the two specialities were linked.
Not long after he qualified, Abram married Valentine
(Valia) Alsot, a girl of French descent from Kovno, who
spoke both fluent Russian and French, a great asset at the
time. They set up home in St Petersburg and in due course
their children were born there: Leo in 1906 and Ekaterina
in 1909. They grew up in the love and comfort of their
parents’ home on Zagorodny Prospekt, at numbers 10 and
13, one being the family home, the other where Abram had
his medical practice
A good and capable physician, Abram was called up on
the outbreak of war in 1914 and sent to serve in the Tsarist
Army Medical Service where, almost uniquely for a Jew,
he was given the honorary rank of colonel, complete with
uniform, boots and a sword. Later he was awarded the Orders
of St Stanislas, St Anne and St Vladimir.
From The Times, 6 January 1917
RASPUTIN’S DEATH
SHOT AT A SUPPER PARTY.
(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT)
PETROGRAD, JAN.3.—The further details of
the removal of Rasputin which appear in this
morning’s papers do not add much to what is
already known concerning the tragedy. The
Russkaya Volya states that six persons
participated in the supper to which Rasputin
was invited on Friday night. It further affirms
that the bullet wounds were apparently
produced by weapons of different calibre,
suggesting that the victim was shot by more
than one person. From the nature of the
bloodstains found in the neighbourhood it is
assumed that Rasputin made an effort to escape
and was laid low by a third bullet. His
executioners attached a weight to the body
before throwing it from Petrovsky Bridge, but
the body, in falling, struck one of the projecting
beams, the shock detached the weight, and the
body was carried some distance by the current
before sinking beneath the ice. It is reported
on good authority that the judicial proceedings
in connexion with Rasputin’s death will shortly
be discontinued, inasmuch as the killing was
done in self-defence. The persons hitherto
subjected to domiciliary arrest were released
on the morning of the 2nd.
Dr Abram Leibovitch
in his uniform as a
colonel in the
Tsarist Army
Medical Service,
c 1916
Abram’s duties in St Petersburg were related mainly to
attending the Elizabeth Hospital for Children in his capacity
as a paediatrician, and the Chesme Military Hospital in the
southern part of the city. It was the latter place that might
have led to his having a small footnote in history, but as it
turned out, this was never to be. The hospital where he
ministered was originally built as a palace in the late 18th
century by Alexis Orlov, known as the “Russian Nelson”
following his victory over the Turks at the Battle of Chesme
in the Aegean in 1770. It should be noted that it was the
English Admiral Elphinstone who was in command of the
Russian fleet at the time.
Old soldiers’ home
Some time in the 1830s, the Chesme Palace was turned
into a home for old and disabled soldiers, and by the early
part of the 20th century had expanded to house several
hundred people, including some 80 old soldiers and their
families, more than 400 single men and 15 sick or elderly
widows. The staff of 16 included a senior physician, all
serving under the auspices of the Ministry of War.
Before war began, Abram was already a well-established
physician, though not yet head doctor. That would not be
for another two or three years. In the meantime however, an
event occurred that would colour Abram’s life forever.
Towards the end of 1916 a certain priest and confidant of
the Romanov family, by the name of Rasputin, was murdered
by some Russian aristocrats, first by poisoning, then by shooting
and thereafter dumped into the frozen River Neva. Fished out
shortly after, entombed in a coating of ice, the body was taken
to the Chesme Military Hospital, well away from prying eyes,
where the doctor on duty happened to be Abram Leibovitch.
Before anything else could be done, the body had to be
defrosted in an oven. While this was taking place, a phone
call was received from the Winter Palace, announcing that
a nurse was coming over who should be left alone with the
body. Abram was present when she arrived, and related that
the “nurse” turned out to be none other than the Tsarina
herself, accompanied by a lady-in-waiting, and that there
and then she flung herself, crying, on the lifeless corpse,
not even waiting for Abram to retire from the room. It was a
story Abram would dine out on for years to come.
You might think that any subsequent life events would
pale by comparison, but in fact many more things occurred
than Abram could have dreamed of. Warned in 1917 by a
friend in revolutionary St Petersburg that he was now on a
blacklist as a wealthy bourgeois and a uniformed member
of the officer class, he, his wife and two children resolved
to flee the Revolution, to retire to the Crimea where they
would wait “until things settled down” and then perhaps go
back home. As it happened, things only got worse, and it
was decided they should leave Russia altogether and settle
in France, where Valia had relatives.
Leaving Sevastopol for France in a French troopship,
by special permission of the ship’s captain, granted only
after special pleading and because Abram’s wife was of
French descent, they sailed to Marseilles, then took the train
to Paris where they met Valia’s sisters and grandmother.
They did not stay long. Abram’s dream was to settle in
England. When he was offered a job as physician to a large
group of Russian émigrés, he quickly accepted, settling in
London to start a new life.
Not qualified to practice
It all sounded too good to be true, and so it proved.
The Russian patients were few and far between and Abram’s
Russian medical degree was not recognised in England,
placing a number of restrictions on him in his work. He
moved to Whitechapel, but there he found that not many
could afford to pay and so were treated free. It was time to
move again.
Abram’s younger brother Boris, my mother’s father, had
a large fruit import business in Hamburg, a branch of his
father’s in St Petersburg, which in time came to rival and
even overtake the Russian branch in importance. Boris
suggested to Abram that he should come to Hamburg and
work with him in the business. It was not a great success.
The Germans hated the French as much as the French hated
the Germans in the early 1920s, though there were cultural
compensations, and the youngsters would usefully become
fluent in French and German, as well as Russian. Still, it
was not enough and a further suggestion that Abram might
like to open a branch of the family business in London was
eagerly taken up. This too, turned out to be a failure but was
actually a blessing in disguise.
It was decided that Abram should go back into what he
did best, family medicine. With the help of a loan from the
Jewish community he took a course at the London Hospital
in Mile End where he obtained his English qualification.
Thereafter he was able to engage in general practice without
any of the previous restrictions and at last began to prosper.
From Goldhurst Terrace, West Hampstead, the family moved
to a large house nearby, 3 Cleve Road, where my parents and I
used to come for meals and family get-togethers, a house
enlivened by two maiden aunts who helped cook and sew.
All went well until the War, when tragedy struck. On
6 May 1940, Abram’s son Leo, by now a professional
photographer but engaged in confidential war work, was
killed one night in a road traffic accident near Bletchley
Park. Abram never fully recovered from this blow and for
Leibovitch/Hasenson tree
Yudel-Ber Leibovitch m ?
?1800-1907
Aleksander m Ekaterina Mendler
1852-1913
1854-1916
Six others
Abram m Valentine Alsot
1877-1957
1884-1971
Leo
1906-1942
Ekaterina
1909-
Boris m1 Eugenie Berge
1881-1957
1884-1953
Roda m Josef Hasenson
1909-1952
1895-1972
Eight others
Two others
Benjamin Alexander (Alec) m Patricia Phillips
1927-
many years visited his son’s grave in Willesden on an almost
daily basis. Kitty, a talented pianist, survived the trauma,
working as a monitor for United Press during World War II,
translating many foreign items.
In 1948 she left for Geneva, engaging in a full-time
career, first as a freelance interpreter, then for many years
as an interpreter with the International Labour Office. At
the time of writing she still lives in Geneva, an indomitable
woman showing talent also as an author.
Abram died on 31 March 1957, aged 80, with nothing
in his obituary in the British Medical Journal to suggest all
he had seen and done. Valia, the rock to which Abram clung
throughout his long and eventful life, died some years later,
in 1971. I am proud that I was able to continue his ideals of
a family medical practitioner.
● The author is a retired GP who is currently researching
the maritime history of Dover, Kent.
REFERENCE
1. Cantonists were sons of Russian private soldiers who from 1805
were educated in special schools for future military service. The
schools were known as garrison schools in the 18th century. After
1827 the term was applied also to Jewish boys who were drafted
to military service at the age of 12 and placed for their military
education in Cantonist schools of distant provinces.
Like other conscripts, they were forced to serve in the Russian
army for 25 years or more, according to the law signed by Tsar
Nicholas I in 1827. A disproportionate number of Jewish minors
less than 18 years of age, and sometimes much younger, were
placed in such preparatory military training establishments. Even
though boys as young as eight were frequently taken, the 25-year
term officially started at the age of 18.
The majority of Jews entered the Russian Empire as an unwelcome
side effect of the territories acquired as a result of the Partitions
of Poland of the 1790s; their civil rights were severely restricted
and most lacked knowledge of the Russian language. Before 1827,
Jews were doubly taxed in lieu of being obligated to serve in the
army, but the Cantonist law did not alleviate this burden. The
Cantonist institutions existed before 1827 in order to prepare
Christian boys whose fathers were in the army for prospective
service, but the new law redesigned them to affect Jews. One of
the goals behind compulsory military service was to strip Jewish
boys of their religious and national identity. An official policy was
to encourage their conversion to the state religion of Orthodox
Christianity and Jewish boys were frequently forcefully baptized.
As kosher food was unavailable, the boys were faced with the
choice of going against the halacha or starving. Since the
traditional Jewish society of the time was patriarchal, removing a
family backbone was designed to hit everyone. Strict quotas were
imposed on Jewish communities whose leaders were forced to
provide conscripts. As the wealthy and guild members were not
obligated, or bribed their way out, the policy deeply sharpened
social tensions.
Dr Leibovitch
in his surgery
in West
Hampstead,
taken by his
son Leo
in the
1930s
The practice of informers and kidnappers (Yiddish: khapers )
proliferated, as many potential conscripts preferred to run away
rather than voluntarily submit to the virtual death sentence to
which the long conscription period sometimes amounted. In the
case of unfulfilled quotas, younger boys were taken. The policy
was abolished in 1855, with the death of Nicholas I. It is estimated
that between 30,000 to 70,000 Jewish boys served as Cantonists;
most never returned to their homes. After the 25-year conscription
term, former Cantonists were allowed to live outside the Pale of
Settlement (areas in which Jews were forced to live).
Merseyside Jewish
community archives
by Helena Smart and Jo Robson
HE Liverpool Record Office holds the archives of
With an expanding population there was inevitably
the Merseyside Jewish community from the 18th diversification and dispute, which in turn led to the
century to the present day. The variety and wealth of establishment of the New Hebrew Congregation3 in the
material in the Jewish archive collection ensure that there is mid-19th century. The history of this congregation mirrors
an abundance of potential research topics.
changes in the Liverpool community, as the population
gradually moved away from the city centre. Greenbank Drive
Five main themes dominate
Synagogue, in the south of the
the collection: synagogues,
city, was consecrated in 1937 to
education, welfare, Zionism and
house the growing numbers.
personal papers. The archive also
shows the Jewish population
In 1888, Fountains Road
becoming part of the wider
Synagogue4 was established in
Liverpool community and its
the north of the city as a
contributions to the city.
response to the growing influx
of people outside the city
The Liverpool Record Office
centre, and was the third major
currently holds more than 250
place of worship acquired by
collections relating to the Jewish
the Jews of Liverpool.
community.
As well as the Old and New
This article aims to provide an
Hebrew
Congregations the
insight into the Jewish archive
archive
also
hold records of
collection and will hopefully
other
synagogues
in the city,
inspire further genealogical
The
Hessleberg
family,
including
the
Progressive
interest and research.
early 1860s
Synagogue 5 at Church Road
Synagogues
North, Wavertree. The
One of the most extensive collections in the archives is Progressive Synagogue, formed in 1928, was the first Liberal
the records of the Old Hebrew Congregation.1 The earliest synagogue in any provincial city.
archive of a Jewish organisation in Liverpool is found in
Education
this collection, namely the Register Book of the Jews in
The King David Primary School6 had its origins in 1841
Liverpool which records births, marriages and deaths from
1804 to 1816 and includes retrospective information on when the Liverpool Hebrews’ Educational Institution and
Endowed Schools was established. The primary objective
members of the community from as early as 1722.2
of the School Committee was to “afford a good plain English
The records of the Old Hebrew Congregation capture
education as well as Hebrew and religious instruction” to
the development of the community from the 18th century
its pupils. The school opened to pupils on 21 June 1841. In
and give an insight into the life of many of its early members.
February 1844 a girls’ department was established and in
1857 an infants’ department was founded.
A lack of space at the Hope Place site and the movement
of the community out of the city centre led to the
establishment of the King David High School7 in Childwall in
1957. In 1964 the primary school moved to the
Childwall site. The admission and discharge registers of the
school are of particular interest and cover the years 1866-1960.
Many organisations were established in association with
the schools. In November 1854 permission was granted to
the Ladies’ Soup Committee to provide food to the poorer
children of the schools in winter, and from this the Liverpool
Hebrew Schools’ Children’s Soup Fund8 was founded. July
1867 saw the establishment of the Jewish Boys’ Clothing
Society 9 for poor boys of the schools. In 1903 the
Association of Old Boys10 was founded as an alma mater
society. The Association of Old Girls11 and the Junior
Association of Old Boys12 followed.
T
Infants’ class of the Liverpool Hebrews’ Educational Institute and Endowed School, 1880
Welfare
The relief of the Jewish poor was originally carried out
by the principal synagogues, the Old and New Hebrew
Congregations. Charitable organisations based outside the
synagogues began with the Liverpool Hebrew Philanthropic
Society13 established in 1811. The Society aimed to “afford
relief to poor inhabitants . . . of the Jewish persuasion during
the inclement season of weather”.
After this time the role of the synagogues as distributors
of charity declined, but they continued to collect money at
special services.
To fill the gap left by the decline in synagogue-based
aid, independent Jewish charities developed. One of these
was the Jewish Ladies’ Benevolent Fund, founded in 1849,
“for the relief of poor married women during sickness and
confinement”. It later became the Merseyside Jewish
Women’s Aid Society.14
In 1875 the Board of Guardians for the Relief of the
Jewish Poor15 was founded to co-ordinate the charitable
activities of individual members of the community,
especially when these fell outside the scope of the existing
organisations. It had many roles in the community beyond
granting relief, including the apprenticeship of boys to
suitable trades.
The board also set up the Visitation Committee and the
Passover Relief Sub-Committee. Increasing attention was
also given to the granting of loans in conjunction with the
Jewish Loan Society and to providing pensions.
Members of the Board of Guardians went to hospitals
and lunatic asylums and supplied kosher food to Jewish
inmates but their work became especially difficult when
immigrants flooded into Liverpool seeking refuge from the
Russian pogroms. A Liverpool branch of the Mansion House
Fund was established to provide care for the immigrants
and aid their emigration and resettlement.
Personal papers
The personal papers in our archives provide insight into
the process of emigration, as well as its relationship with
the wider community. The largest collection of papers is
that of Bertram B Benas,16 one of the most highly esteemed
members of the Liverpool Jewish community, who rendered
outstanding and continued service for more than 70 years.
The Benas Collection is a valuable research tool about
the life of the man himself, and because of the number of
roles he played in the Jewish and wider community, the
collection also documents Jewish life in Liverpool in the
20th century.
The organisations which are recorded include the
Literary and Philosophical Society, the Athenaeum and the
Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire.
Access arrangements
l THE Merseyside Jewish community archives and
many other collections can be viewed at Liverpool
Record Office, Central library, William Brown Street,
Liverpool L3 8EW, tel. 0151-233 5817. The Record
Office is located on the fourth floor.
Catalogues are currently available electronically
at www.liverpool.gov.uk/archives. Select “Online
Catalogue”, then “Search the Online Catalogues”,
then enter “Jewish” in the search engine. Papers are
also held at the Liverpool Record Office.
Due to the sensitive nature of some of the records,
closures have been applied in line with the Data
Protection Act 1998 and at the request of the
depositor. These restrictions are noted in the
catalogues. To view the archives a reader’s ticket is
essential: visitors should bring proof of name and
address to obtain a ticket.
Musical score of Hatikvah—A Song of Hope
arranged by B B Benas, 1919
first Zionist Congress in 1897 there was intense Zionist
activity in Liverpool. The younger generation formed the
Liverpool Young Men’s Zionist Association in 1898, better
known as Shivat Zion (Return to Zion) with members calling
themselves Shivvies. Shivat Zion amalgamated with the
Agudat Zion (Zionist Association) to form the Liverpool
Zionist Society18 in 1935.
Mr Benas was involved in musical societies in
Merseyside and devised a composition of Hatikvah (A Song
of Hope), the present-day Israeli national anthem, which
was performed at St George’s Hall in 1919. As well as his
own personal interests in literature and music, Benas was
involved in the integration of Jews in Britain and in the Board
of Deputies of British Jews and organisations dealing with
German Jewry.
Mr Benas was also a pioneer Zionist, and the collection
provides a useful insight into Zionist organisations and the
development of Zionism. In particular, the collection
contains a number of articles by Mr Benas and others on
the Zionist cause.
● Both authors are Archivists at the Liverpool Record
Office.
The collection of Benas papers is incomplete. The records
held at the Liverpool Record Office were salvaged from
destruction and mainly relate to two time periods, the 1930s
and the 1960s, with major gaps pre-1930 and 1940-1960.
The above codes refer to the archive documents.
Zionism
Childwall Synagogue: 296 CHI
One of the earliest Zionist societies in Liverpool was
the provincial “tent” (branch) of Chovovei Zion (Lovers of
Zion) 17 in July 1891. This society received the support of
prominent members of the community including Samuel
Friedberg (later Frampton), Minister of the Old Hebrew
Congregation from 1891-1932.
It was essentially a philanthropic organisation whose aim
was to support financially Eastern European pioneers who
settled in Palestine. We hold the first Minute Book of the
society covering 1891-1898.
The support for gradual colonisation was replaced with
the commitment to the idea of a Jewish state. Following the
REFERENCES
1. 296 OHC
10. 296 AOB
2. 296 OHC/29/1
11. 296 AOG
3. 296 NHC
12. 296 JAO
4. 296 FOU
13. 296 PHI
5. 296 PRO
14. 296 MJW
6. 296 KDS
15. 296 BOG
7. 296 KDH
16. 296 BEN
8. 296 CSF
17. 296 CHO
9. 296 BCS
18. 296 LZS
Other synagogue records include:
Allerton Synagogue: 296 ALL
Central Synagogue, Islington: 296 CEN
Crosby and Waterloo Hebrew Congregation: 296 CRO
Fairfield Synagogue: 296 FAI
Great Synagogue, Grove Street: 296 GRE
Nusach Ari Synagogue: 296 NUS
Pride of Israel Congregation: Ullet Road Synagogue: 296 PRI
Wallasey Synagogue: 296 WAL
Other educational records include:
Conference on Hebrew and Religious Education: 296 HRE
Liverpool Hebrew Higher Grade School: 296 HGS
Liverpool Hebrew Schools Jewish History Circle: 296 JHC
Merseyside Amalgamated Talmud Torah: 296 ATT
Provisional Committee for Hebrew Education in Liverpool: 296 PCE
Back to the old country—
Lithuania 2005
by Harvey Kaplan
N September 2005, I fulfilled a lifelong ambition when I
spent eight days in Lithuania, together with my friends,
Fiona and Howard Brodie. Howard and I have ancestral
links to Lithuania and we wanted to see the places where
our families had originated.
To get most out of this kind of trip, it is essential to
prepare in advance. We read books on Lithuanian Jewish
history,1 consulted accounts written by others and arranged
for the services of a guide.2
Tragically, 95 per cent of Lithuanian Jewry perished in
the Holocaust, often murdered by the local Lithuanians and
today there are only between 4,000 to 5,000 Jews left. The
country seems to be coming to terms with its role in Jewish
history, and Holocaust killing sites are being properly
signposted. Such sites are frequently in the forest just beyond
the dwellings. In Soviet times, such markers as there were
referred to Soviet citizens killed by the fascists, without
giving the dead the recognition of being remembered as
Jews. However, most places now have plaques: in
Lithuanian, Yiddish and often English and perhaps Hebrew,
putting the record straight.
I
We visited the former shulhoyf—a large square once
surrounded by synagogues, prayer halls and yeshivas
(religious schools), from a time when the city boasted more
than 100 synagogues and prayer halls. It was dominated by
the Great Synagogue—begun in medieval times, but
reconstructed in the 19th century—which could house 2,000
worshippers. It was damaged during World War II and
demolished in the 1950s by the communists. Today, a
kindergarten stands on the site, but an explanatory sign
outside recounts its history.
Baroque capital
Our first stop was the capital, Vilnius, where we stayed
in the spectacularly baroque Old Town, close to many places
of Jewish interest, such as the former wartime Jewish ghetto.
In recent years, many plaques have been erected to
commemorate the ghetto itself, and also Jews who were
killed during the war, or Lithuanians who tried to save
individual Jews. A map is prominently displayed showing
all the points of interest.
Paneriai memorial
The Vilna Gaon has become a “favourite son” in presentday Lithuania, with plaques to his memory, a bust, and a
street named after him. The Vilna Gaon Jewish State
Museum is located on four sites, although we only had time
for one. This building was constructed 100 years ago as a
Jewish cultural centre, became a cinema under the
communists, but is now under Jewish ownership once more.
It houses a display on the history of Jews in Lithuania,
illustrated on a series of around 30 panels.
Our guide took us to the Jewish cemetery in Suderves
Road, where many of the more recent communist-era stones
have photographs inlaid and flowers on the graves. Graves
have been relocated here from destroyed cemeteries, most
significantly an ohel (room) covering the remains of the
Vilna Gaon, removed from the cemetery in Snipiskes.
The Paneriai memorials are located in a forest outside
the city where 70,000 Jews and 30,000 others were murdered
during the period of 1941-1944, and buried in a series of
pits prepared as fuel stores. A number of memorial plaques
are dotted around the area.
We also visited Kaunas (Kovno), the country’s second
city and wartime capital. Once home to around 37,000 Jews
and 37 synagogues, now fewer than 1,000 Jews live here,
and only one synagogue is in use. We stopped at the grim
IX (Ninth) Fort Museum and Memorial in a complex
dedicated to those killed under the communists and the
Nazis. The fort itself is a former prison, where thousands
were murdered and it contains harrowing displays of Nazi
and Lithuanian persecution of Jews and others.
We passed the site of the gates of the Kaunas Ghetto
(1941-1944), and a derelict building from 1939, once
(briefly) home to the renowned Slobodka Yeshiva, and later
a clothing factory. A number of other former Jewish buildings
remain in Kaunas, many now derelict, such as a 19th-century
building which was the Jewish hospital. The former
Butchers’ Synagogue is now the Textiles and Ceramics
Department of the Kaunas Art Institute.
I recommend a visit to Sugihara House, a memorial to
Chiune Sugihara, the wartime Japanese consul in Kaunas
who issued 6,000 visas to Jews, allowing them to go to Japan,
and then on to Shanghai. The former consulate building is
now a museum devoted to this man’s heroic efforts and also
incorporates a Japanese language teaching centre.
The Choral Synagogue, opened in 1871, is the only
surviving synagogue and still holds services. As in Vilnius,
it was kept open under the communists as a showpiece, with
the KGB monitoring all who entered. At the back of the
synagogue is a memorial to Jewish children who died in the
Holocaust. It was erected in 1994, 50 years after the
destruction of the wartime ghetto. Tablets record the dates
and number of deaths of children from different towns
without listing any names.
Ancestral towns
We spent much of our week visiting ancestral towns and
shtetls. Small communities exist in Vilnius and Kaunas, as
well as in Klaipeda and Siauliai, and although Jews were
once in the majority and provided the lifeblood of the
economy, today there are none in many towns and villages.
Ukmerge, once known as Vilkomir, is 42 miles from
Vilnius, and is now a substantial town on the banks of the
Sventoji River, with more than 30,000 inhabitants. In the
autumn rain, it was cheerless and miserable. Howard’s greatgrandparents, Joseph ben Yerucham Fischel Jacobson and
Rivka Lanson, were married in Ukmerge in March 1889,
and his grandfather Joseph was born there c 1866. Jacobson
appears to have been originally Yankelzon, and the Ukmerge
records mention a number of people with that name.
We were taken to two adjacent former synagogues.
Howard wondered which building was the venue for his
great-grandparents’ marriage. Proudly holding his ancestors’
ketubah in his hand, he decided that the larger one, the former
Merchants’ Synagogue, was more likely. It is now a sports
hall and the other, smaller building is now a bakery.
Josvainiai (Yiddish, Yasven) lies in a valley bounded
on three sides by the Shoshava River, about 10 miles from
Kedainiai and 15 miles from Ariogala. Currently home to
some 1,500 people, it resembles a leafy suburb around an
imposing twin-spired 19th-century church. Traditional old
wooden houses mingle with more modern bungalows, some
Neglected cemetery at Josvainiai
quite smart and bedecked with flowers. My greatgrandmother’s Fayn family were registered in this town in
the 1874 Revision List. I was elated to be in my first-ever
visit to an ancestral town, and felt as though I wanted to tell
the children riding past on their bicycles that my ancestors
had once lived there!
Today the only clue to Josvainiai’s Jewish past is the
cemetery outside the town which, like many others, is
densely overgrown, but now clearly marked and not
vandalised. It covers about a hectare (2.47 acres) and
approximately 60 stones remain and the inscriptions are
often quite clear.
Kedainiai (Yiddish, Keidan) is one of the oldest towns
in Lithuania and lies on the River Nevezis, 27 miles to the
north of Kaunas. My great-grandparents said they were
married here in 1885, when there was a substantial Jewish
community. Our tour of the former Jewish area started with
a yellow-walled former synagogue (Kloyz Shul on Smilga
Street, begun mid-18th century) which has a plaque stating
that the Vilna Gaon once lived in the town. The building
has been returned to the Lithuanian Jewish community,
which unfortunately cannot afford to maintain it, so it is
currently rented out as a wood store
We walked along Zydu (Jew) Street, which still has
some typical wooden houses, towards the old centre of
Jewish Kedainiai—Senoji Rinka—or Jewish Market Square,
once the spiritual, economic and social centre of Jewish
life in the town (known in Yiddish as the shulhoyf).
Here, fronting on to a large open space, are two restored
synagogue buildings.
Kedainiai, exterior of two synagogues
on former Synagogue Square
One is the mid-19th century former Winter (or Small)
Synagogue (the Besmedrash), now beautifully restored as a
“multicultural centre” (2002) where concerts, conferences
and educational activities are held. In the
15-roomed Kedainiai Museum, the history of the 2,000-yearold town is explained but, sadly, the Jewish contribution is
summed up in half a room.
The Jewish cemetery in Kedainiai, on the edge of town,
is surrounded by some quite smart houses and gardens, and
dogs and chickens still run around. Just as the municipality
has restored two of the synagogues, it has also looked after
the cemetery and the gravestones are mostly standing with
still-legible inscriptions.
No Jews left
Although Krakes had three synagogues and 450 Jews
by the 1890s, this is another town which has lost its Jews
and its sparkle. When we arrived in late afternoon, it seemed
like a ghost town: the one-time market square was deserted,
and it was hard to imagine what it would have been like on
market day 100 years ago, bustling with Jewish traders.
There is a fairly sizeable church, a few shops and a fair
number of one-storey wooden houses in varying states of
repair. Geese, chickens and goats roam around the gardens.
We saw no surviving Jewish buildings, although our guide
was able to point out where at least one of the synagogues
once stood; a small overgrown Jewish cemetery survives
on the outskirts of the town.
In the nearby village of Betygala (Betigola), Howard’s
great-uncle Aaron Itzikovitch had married Rachel Gold in
1899. In 1923, 85 Jews formed one-quarter of the total
population. In June 1941, the 11 Jewish families of the
village were murdered . Today, 500 people live in the village,
which is dominated by the white-painted local church and
contains mostly wooden houses. As there had never been a
Jewish cemetery here, Jews had been buried in nearby
Paliepiai and Masevitai.
Conclusion
People have asked me if I learnt a lot about my family
while I was in Lithuania, and in fact I learnt more before my
trip when I obtained details from the Lithuanian records,
via JewishGen or directly from the archives. However, what
I did gain from my trip was a greater knowledge of
Lithuanian history and walking the streets of the ancestral
towns and shtetls also gave me a greater understanding of
the lives and experiences of my Lithuanian ancestors.
I realised that Vilnius and Kaunas would be large modern
cities, but I had expected the ancestral towns and villages
to be rural shtetls, images frozen in time, with horses and
carts, dirt roads, and chickens running wild. Some of the
villages are still rural, and we saw ramshackle wooden
buildings and rickety horses and carts, as well as livestock;
storks had built their nests high on wooden poles.
I do feel that it is important for Jews to visit places where
their ancestors died, such as the Holocaust killing sites and
Jewish cemeteries, as well as towns like Vilnius and Kaunas
and the hundreds of small places where they lived, all of
which once had vibrant Jewish communities. It is also
important to remind the Lithuanians about their lost Jews,
many of whom perished at the hands of the Lithuanians
themselves.
● The author is Director of the Scottish Jewish Archives
Centre in Glasgow.
REFERENCES
1. Books include: The Jews of Lithuania: A History of a Remarkable
Community, 1316-1945 , Masha Greenbaum. Jerusalem/
Hewlett, NY, Gefen Publishing House Ltd., 1995.
Lithuanian Jewish Communities , Nancy Schoenburg and Stuart
Schoenburg. New York/London, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991.
Reprinted by Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, NJ/London.
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust,
by Shmuel Spector, ed. New York University Press, 2001.
Bradt’s Guide to Lithuania is strong on general information, but
does not mention many of our ancestral towns.
Former rabbi’s house, Ariogola
In the 1870s, my Kaplan family was among the 3,000
Jews in Ariogala (Yiddish, Ragola) as were Howard’s
Itzikovich ancestors. We had been in advance contact with
Agne Globiene, a Lithuanian teacher and we were invited
to speak to about 30 teenagers, who had no difficulty
understanding our Scottish-accented English. This was one
of our most memorable experiences in Lithuania. We saw
the location of former synagogues, as well as the typical
low wooden houses once occupied by the rabbi and other
Jews. We visited the Holocaust killing site and the cemetery
outside town, which has few legible stones.
In Your Pocket travel guides for the main cities and towns are
available online at www.inyourpocket.com/lithuania/en/.
2. A number of specialist Jewish guides in Lithuania are available,
but we were recommended Simon Davidovitch, Executive
Director of the Sugihara House museum in Kaunas, who is
Jewish, knowledgeable and strong on local Jewish contacts.
Further information about him available from the author,
harvey@hkaplan.freeserve.co.uk.
FLYING AWAY THIS SUMMER?
The following airlines currently go to Lithuania: Air
Baltic, British Airways, Estonian Air and LAL fly from
Gatwick; Ryanair flies from Stansted to Kaunas and Wizz
Air flies from Liverpool and Luton to Kaunas, but check!
Polish records
unravelled
by Rieke Nash
N 1994 at the Jerusalem Conference I met Stanley
Diamond with whom I have a mutual interest in the small
town of Wyszkow, Poland. As a result of his research
into his family’s ß-thalassemia trait, he had just found a
cousin through Hadassah Hospital in Israel,who shares with
him a previously undocumented mutation of this genetic
trait generally unknown to Ashkenazi families.
At that time we were not to know that this interest of his
would eventually lead to a database which, through the
efforts of a dedicated team of volunteers, has currently close
to three million entries for towns and shtetls in present-day
Poland and is still growing. To trace others who might be
affected by this genetic mutation, Stanley gained the cooperation of the Polish State Archives (PSA) and was
allowed access to the birth, death and marriage records held
in the Pultusk Archives, 45 miles from Warsaw. The
experience was so successful that the Jewish Records
Indexing—Poland (JRI-Poland) Project gained permission
to access the Jewish records in all the PSAs.
As I was a contributor to the project of indexing the
Wyszkow records, I received an Excel file with all the
entries. I was then able to search carefully through and make
some unexpected connections. With minimal information I
discovered the previously unknown married name of my
grandfather’s sister, Zelasnicki, and that the original surname
of her son-in-law, Gold, was actually Jagoda. None of her
family had known these original names.
I
After indexing the 1929 W¢oc¢awek marriages I decided
that the birth, marriage and death records for Izbica
Kujawska might be of interest to one of my cousins. Despite
the fact there was nothing about my family in the 3,827
records that I indexed, I found that I was now able to read
most handwritten names in Polish and was even able to
translate the ages of the people listed.
These were records from 1826 to 1865, the years when
separate Jewish records in Polish were kept. From 1866
until World War I the records were kept in Russian which
presents a much more difficult transcription task. Where
these records are available in a PSA, the pooling of funds
by researchers with an interest in a town enables these
Cyrillic records to be transcribed and indexed by a JRIPoland team in Poland. It is an efficient and cost-effective
way of gaining access to the information.
I was now the JRI-Poland Archive Co-ordinator for the
W¢oc¢awek Archive and team leader for towns with records
in this archive. My task was to encourage others to donate
funds towards the indexing so that the results could be added
to our database.
W¢oc¢awek archives
I always knew that I was named after my greatgrandmother, Rekla, but nobody knew her maiden name.
She was married to Paltiel Templinski and they lived in
Sluzewo. As each town in the W¢oc¢awek archives was
indexed, I received the file and I would then quickly scan
for Templinskis without success. When the Nieszawa file
arrived there were, as usual, no Templinskis so I started
scanning the entries and noticed an entry for a Rekla. The
surname, Pinkus, meant nothing to me.
Rescued records
When the indexing of the neighbouring town of Brok
was complete, there was my grandfather’s brother,
remembered only as Srubinon by the family. It was the
marriage of Srul Binem Ajzenberg.1 My other family
research concerned an area of Poland where there were few
records. According to the archivist at the W¢oc¢awek branch
of the PSA, the Nazis had collected the volumes of Jewish
records for the area and loaded them on a train for Berlin
but the train was bombed and the records destroyed.
In the Family History Library Catalogue2 there was only
one year of marriages for W¢oc¢awek (1929). When I
examined this film at our local LDS Mormon Family History
Centre I discovered that it had been microfilmed in 1949 in
Berlin so this time the story was probably accurate.
Another JRI-Poland strategy for documenting existing
Polish records, the Shtetl Co-Op Project, guides volunteers
with an interest in a town to help them create a database
from LDS microfilms and make the results available on the
JRI-Poland website for all to search. Through Stan’s
encouragement I became involved in indexing other towns
from this area of north-west Poland whose records had been
microfilmed by the Mormons. There was a chance that I
might discover some family records in these nearby towns.
TRANSLATION: It happened in the town of Sluzewo on
the 17th day of October, 1855 at 11 am. Came the Jew,
Leyb Templinski, labourer, aged 43, residing in
Sluzewo in the presence of the witnesses, the Jew,
Icek Jakubowski, cantor, aged 74, and Hersz Jelonek,
merchant, aged 62, living in Sluzewo and they stated
that on the 16th day of the current month and year at
4 pm, Marye Templinska, died aged 40, leaving behind
her widowed husband and four children and no estate.
After visually confirming the death of Marye, this
document was read out to the declarants and signed.
the 1850s. His wife was Phoebe and they
were married in Poland around 1846. A
search of the years failed to find a
Markowicz or Markowski so I looked for
a promising Fayge (Yiddish for Phoebe)
and came up with a marriage for a Markus
Jacobowski! Further evidence from the
marriage record and tombstone
inscriptions confirmed the parents’ names
and that it was the right record.
With additional types of resources
being accessed, the project has become a
powerful tool increasing the possibility of
success for tracing original names, maiden
names, previously unknown siblings and
additional towns of origin. Indices from
Books of Residents, census records and
The Szulman family, the author’s grandparents, in Włocławek c 1924.
Rieke’s mother is in the centre
other non-vital records are being
continually added to the collection.
Participation
in
the
project has given a large team of
Further down the list I found the death of an Ester Pinkus.
volunteers
the
knowledge
and skills that are being used to
Now, Rekla’s mother was Ester and around 1879 she named
help
and
teach
others,
expanding
the expertise of our
her daughter, my grandmother, Ester. Looking back at the
research
community.
Personally
I
know
that my family, my
original entry, I found it was a marriage, with the groom’s
descendants
and
many
members
of
the
Australian Jewish
first name a question mark and his surname Peltyn! When
Genealogical
Society
will
be
forever
grateful
for Stanley’s
the certificate arrived I transcribed Templinski into Cyrillic
vision,
initiative,
persistence
and
all
his
hard
work.
characters and searched each line and found Peltin was
Templinski! Without having access to the total file, I am
sure I would not have made the connection. Another side of
my family has Szulmans and Kwiats, both common names
in Poland. There are few records for their two known towns,
Lipno and Lubien Kujawski.
When I received the file for Dobrzyn-nad-Wisla, finding
Hebrew
my great-great-grandparents’ marriage record there was
quite a surprise. Other towns in the area being indexed
include Kowal, Piotrkow Kujawski and Rypin.
Jewish clues
The 1808-1825 records were another challenge. For
some towns there are valuable Jewish records in the registers
together with the Roman Catholic civil transcripts, some of
which were microfilmed by the Mormons. Towns around
W¢oc¢awek, unlike other Polish towns, have only a few
names listed by patronymic3 and most have surnames. To
identify the Jewish records, there are a number of clues.
Some are signed using Hebrew script and occasionally the
signature is “ooo” rather than crosses for illiterate
informants. The record itself may have Zyd (Jewish) next to
the town name but mostly the informant is described as
Starozakonny (literally “old law” and used to denote a Jew).
Over the years I had found a few Templinski families
around the globe but had been unable to connect them. Many
had migrated to Britain from this part of Poland as early as
1870, settling in Sheffield, Glasgow and London. From these
early records I was finally able to rationalise my tree. The
difficulty of finding the original surname of ancestors who
migrated to England is a common experience.
Recently a researcher from Brisbane found me on Google
as I was listed there as Town Leader for Sluzewo. He had
documents to show that his great-grandfather, Jackson
Marks, came from Sluzewo before migrating to London in
Above, a Jewish record with the signatures in Hebrew
(on the right) and ‘ooo’ for illiterate witnesses; below a
Catholic record with ‘xxx’ used by non-Jewish witnesses
● The author is President of the Australian Jewish
Genealogical Society.
REFERENCES
1. For just $US10 I was able to order a copy of this certificate through
JRI-Poland, www.jewishgen.org/jri-pl/ or www.jri-poland.org/.
2. Family History Library Catalogue, www.familysearch.org/Eng/
Library/FHLC/frameset_fhlc.asp
3. A patronymic is your father’s first name.
Presidential
thoughts
by Anthony Joseph
NE of the grudges that anti-semites hold against
Jews, and use as part of their justification for their
hostility to us, is that we are an international
conspiracy, seeking world domination and having no
national loyalties. The argument can be turned on its head
by suggesting that internationalism represents a
supranational concern for all mankind rather than supporting
factionalism that might unfairly favour only one sector of
the world’s population.
Since anti-Semitism has no rational grounding, it makes
little difference as to how the argument is bounced about
because the prejudiced will not alter their views, come what
may. In any case, there are many examples, and World War
I is probably the most spectacular of them, of Jews who
have given their lives fighting for their country,
notwithstanding it brought them into conflict with their coreligionists.
Early into that conflict, the Jewish Chronicle ran a
regular masthead: “England has been all it can for Jews and
now Jews will be all they can for England”. Meanwhile, in
Germany, the call to Jews (and others) was to fight “Für
Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland”.
O
Helpful archivists
Jewish genealogy is certainly international in scope.
American and British (and its Commonwealth) Jewish
research leads quickly to European antecedents and we are
becoming amazingly more successful at pushing our roots
back well beyond the time of arrival at a British port. For
this to have happened, the work being undertaken in Eastern
and Central European countries in uncovering Jewish
databases has been crucial.
We owe an enormous debt to archivists and the like,
mostly non-Jewish people in those countries, for their skill
and enthusiasm in helping us to locate material of Jewish
genealogical interest; and then making it available either
locally or through websites and the Internet.
One of the pioneers in this field is Juergen Sielemann
with whom I came into contact for the first time at the First
International Jewish Genealogical Conference held in
Jerusalem in May 1984. Juergen was then a young worker
in the Hamburg Staatsarchiv and he had been impressed
with the quantity of records referring to Jewish families he
was able to locate in shipping records. Hamburg was, and
still is, a major port and thousands of Jews passed through
it, travelling from many parts of Europe to make new lives
for themselves in North America. Juergen and his team have
given the Jewish genealogical world an enormous fillip with
their work on the Hamburg port records.
In 1996, he also founded a Hamburg Jewish
Genealogical Society, which has flourished under his
leadership and recently (2 March 2006) it held a Festschrift
Anthony speaking recently at the conference
in Hamburg
(n. collection of essays or articles published in honour of a
distinguished scholar) to mark the society’s 10th anniversary.
I was invited to deliver a brief paper to the gathering to
describe the work of our Society in Great Britain and to
emphasise the important links the two societies have with
each other.
This was a great privilege and it was a personal
pleasure to thank Juergen for all his efforts to help us. The
evening was a resounding success, attended by some 90
people, and several entertaining and thought provoking
papers were presented.
It was necessary for me to use the services of the
excellent veteran Swiss Jewish genealogist, Rene Loeb, to
help with the translation of them from German since my
command of that language is embarrassingly poor. I was
also allowed to offer my own presentation in English: I was
the only non-German speaker, but the audience had no
problems in following me for which I was both grateful and
again embarrassed.
Invariably, my rare visits to Germany always cause me
to speculate on the German past and its unspeakable record
of 20th-century Jewish persecution. It is impossible for
someone of my age group or older not to reflect on this
matter— hence my musings in the first paragraph of this
piece—but this recent visit left me with only positive
impressions and memories. I look forward to continuing cooperation and data sharing with our Hamburg colleagues
and I wish their enterprise continuing success.
Perhaps, as a postscript, I noted with interest, as we
flew in and departed from Lübeck/Hamburg airport, that
the area was called Blankensee. I have distant cousins,
mostly now based in or near Bristol, Birmingham and
London whose surname is Blanckensee; and I suspect I know
now their township of origin. It is a frequent Jewish custom
to adopt a place name as an English-style surname. One of
the genealogical tools we employ in researching Jewish name
origins is an awareness of this phenomenon and I was
intrigued to have had an opportunity of speculating on this
matter in my brief trip overseas.
London directories—
the place to look
by Bryan Diamond
OST genealogists who have researched addresses
in London will know of Kelly’s Post Office
Directories which appear in three versions—
private residents, commercial and street names, all entries
being listed alphabetically. The title page reads: “The Post
Office London Directory for 18.. comprising, among other
information, official, street, commercial, trades, law, court,
parliamentary, postal, city & clerical, conveyance & banking
directories” [publ] Frederic Kelly].1
Less well-known are two other publications which have
trade or commercial entries, namely:
London Directory: (commercial trades only) London.
London Directory Co. This was published for 34 years, from
1894-1927. 2
The Business Directory of the Manufacturing and
Commercial Cities of England. London. 1862-1863 until
1910 published by J C S Morris.3 The 1886 and 1906
editions are in the Bishopsgate Institute Library, 4 and are
conveniently on open access.
M
Business to business
Prefaces to early editions say their the aim was to publish
at a price that enabled the directory to circulate among
businessmen throughout Britain; addresses of all principal
businesses being selected, free. Later editions, however, show
the receipt form, presumably for the fee for an entry.
Occasional entries were expanded with additional
information beyond the bare trade description; thus for my
great-grandfather Isaac Diamond, I found him (listed in
Morris 1879-1880) not just as “wood turner” but “wood
turner & twister; Toilet, washstands, table legs, looking glass
pillars”, which was useful extra information.
Morris’ 1884 edition has been scanned and is available
on www.historicaldirectories.org, a website which has many
directories covering England and Wales, from which I quote:
“Another important development was the emergence of
larger-scale directories during the late 18th century.
By the early 19th century, methods of compilation had
become more organised. In part, this reflected the growing
links between directories and the Post Office. Many postal
officials, such as Frederick Kelly, turned their hand to
directory publishing as a means
of both aiding their work and
making some extra money.
Information was collected by
letter carriers, who circulated
forms during their postal rounds, and also delivered the
finished directory on commission.
From around 1870 many more directories started to be
published again, with particularly rapid growth after 1880.
The heyday of the trade directory was the early 20th century,
when more than 250 were published each year, apart from a
dip during the World War I. The peak year for directory
publications was 1936.”
The directories also have display adverts, often with
pictures of equipment supplied. I was surprised to find in
Morris in 1906 one for the “Society for Relief of Persecuted
Jews (Syrian Colonisation Fund)” which gave relief in
Jerusalem; presumably the directory had a circulation among
Jewish business people or Christian well-wishers.
Other directories may be encountered occasionally, e.g.
Bishopgate has Watkins’s Commercial & General London
Directory for 1852, the preface to which declares it is greatly
superior to Kelly. I do not know if this continued; the British
Library catalogue lists only the street map from 1851.
● The author is the Society’s Archivist.
REFERENCES
1. In the British Library catalogue: The Post-Office London Directory
for 1817-1819 (for 1821-1827, by Critchett and Woods; for 18281836, by B Critchett; for 1837-1839, by F Kelly; for 1840, etc.
Supplement . . . for 1851, 1853-1857).
2. British Library classmark, P.P.2505.y/17.
3. Pub. J S C Morris: London. British Library classmark P.P.2505.y/5.
4. The Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate , London EC2M 4QH.
Library, 020-7392 9270, www.bishopsgate.org.uk.
Two directories are in the JGSGB Library: The Jewish Directory for
1874 (all United Kingdom), Asher Myers; A Commercial Directory
of the Jews of the United Kingdom—1893, Eugene Harfield.
The Historical Directories website, shown below, is a digital library of
local and trade directories for England and Wales from 1750 to
1919. It contains high-quality reproductions of comparatively rare
books, essential tools for research into local and genealogical
history. www.historicaldirectories.org.
Historical
Directories: a
project of the
University of
Leicester
Mediterranean
merchant family
by Rosemary Eshel
ROM Tripoli in Libya the descendants of Joseph Arbib
branched out in different directions over
the last couple of hundred years. Whether they were
indigenous to Libya or arrived with the wave of Jews expelled
from Spain is a subject for more research. Jewish communities
had existed for centuries in port cities along the Mediterranean
coast and in towns and villages inland and included troglodyte
Jews living in caves in the Garian area.
From the mid-19th through the 20th century the Jewish
community in the coastal port of Tripoli grew rapidly. It
was a cultural and ethnic mosaic, a polyglot mix comprising
Jews living in the hara, the old Jewish town, and those living
in European areas whose native tongues included Italian,
English, French, Greek, Ladino, Maltese and Arabic, all
providing a rich cultural tapestry. Other Jews included
Sephardim from Turkey, Spain and Gibraltar as well as the
occasional Ashkenazi.
The Arbibs were in the main, merchants, Italian subjects,
a cosmopolitan clan, with a network of commercial and
family ties spread throughout Europe and Africa. Our branch
is descended from Joseph Arbib (born c. 1800), one of whose
children was Angelo (Bibi), my great-great-grandfather and
father of Diamantina, my great-grandmother. Angelo’s
siblings included Simon, Eugenio, Massuda, Buba, Giora,
Sarah and Rubino (Reuben), many of whose descendants
have been traced.1
Arbib business interests in Tripoli were centred around
the export of esparto grass, primarily to England for the
production of paper.2 They were instrumental in setting up
the first hydraulic press in 1881 for processing esparto.3
Caravans laden with ostrich feathers, ivory, buffalo skins,
gum arabic and other goods travelled overland throughout
Africa, and onwards, in Arbib ships to and from
Mediterranean ports and beyond. These interests were
further developed and extended abroad by Eugenio and
Enrico Arbib who were cousins and settled in London.
F
Branches of various businesses were run by other family
members in Europe, the United States and elsewhere.
In the 19th century some of the Arbib business interests
in Egypt included: Fratelli Arbib and J Arbib e figli,
managed by Angelo and his son, Simon, in Cairo, while in
Alexandria, the business was managed by another of
Angelo’s sons, Benjamin Arbib.4
Camel caravans
The Arbibs had a trading post in Omdurman in Khartoum
from where a network of camel caravans journeyed
throughout Africa. The company also had a ginning (cotton)
factory and warehouses on the Suez Canal. By the middle
of the 20th century the esparto trade had dwindled as other
sources of material for paper became available, while ostrich
feathers and ivory were no longer sought after.
The Arbibs were also engaged in maritime trade but early
records are sparse. British consular records from 1660 onwards
mention ships from England and Livorno (Leghorn) carrying
the goods of Jews to Tripoli. By the 18th century, extensive
trading was reported between Leghorn and Tripoli handled by
three Leghorn-based Jewish firms and agents in Tripoli.5 Several
Arbib ships trading between Tripoli, Leghorn, Europe, the Far
East and the Americas have been traced.6
Joseph Arbib & Co. shipping note for goods
Arbib esparto packing house, Tripoli
In Tripoli, Angelo (Bibi) Arbib7 established a family
synagogue Dar Bibi and Beth Midrash with an extensive
library attached to their home in the Jewish quarter of Hara
el Kebira, the old city. When the Arbibs moved out, they
donated the house and synagogue to the Jewish community
but still maintained contact with their former home. Over a
period of many years, it remained a family tradition to come
and pray in the synagogue every year on Yom Kippur. A
sefer torah (Torah scroll) from Tripoli, probably from the
Arbib synagogue, inscribed with Angelo Arbib’s name, is
currently in use in a synagogue attended by Tripolitanian
Jews in Rome.8
Angelo Arbib m Sarah
The Arbib family tree
(partial)
Joseph Arbib
?1800-?
Moshe (Moscé)
?-1878
Angelo Bibi Arbib Eugenio Joseph Arbib m Annie Henry
c 1831-1899
1847-1915
Others
Vittorio Arbib
1817-1887
Enrico Arbib
1846-1932
Simon
?-1907
Benjamin
1859-1913
Diamantina m Clemente Hassan
1863-1923
1861-1935
Victor Hassan
1889-1972
Others
David Arbib
Mordechai Arbib
Others
Others
Others
Eileen Esther Hassan m Alfred Disraeli Webber
19251905-1983
Others
Rosemary Webber m Itzhak Eshel (Unterman)
Others
Angelo Arbib lived for some time in Cairo prior to his
death in 1899. His name, together with that of his son Simon,
appears among the benefactors of the
monumental Sha’ar Hashamayim (Gateway to
the Heavens) Synagogue in Adly Street, Cairo.9
In Egypt, Angelo’s daughter Diamantina married
Clemente Hassan from Benghazi.
Their first child, my grandfather Victor
Hassan, was born in Cairo in 1889 and
subsequently the family moved to England
settling in Manchester, then the centre of the
cotton and textile trade.
According to Eugenio Arbib’s obituary published in the
Jewish Chronicle (JC) on 5 February 1915, the company
had acted as agents for General Gordon in
Khartoum. Eugenio was acknowledged as one
of the pioneers of English trade with Egypt and
the Sudan and was fluent in three languages—
English, Arabic and Hebrew.
Eugenio and Annie were active members of
the London Sephardi community and the JC
obituary noted that Eugenio Arbib was “an
extraordinarily generous and charitable man, a
wise counsellor and a large benefactor to both
general and communal institutions. He did a vast
First arrival in England
amount of good unostentatiously and
anonymously”.
The first member of the Arbib family to settle
in England in 1865 seems to have been Angelo’s
By coincidence, 29 January 1915 had been
brother, Eugenio, when he was 18. Other Arbibs
the 50th anniversary of Eugenio’s arrival in
followed, judging from entries in various English
England. He was an active member of many
trade directories towards the end of the 19th
committees of the Spanish and Portuguese
century. In his last years, Eugenio lived with his
Community Sha’are Shamayim Synagogue and
wife Annie (née Henry) in a large country estate,
a portrait of him still hangs in the synagogue
Martens Grove, near Crayford in Kent, with
rooms at Lauderdale Road, West London.
Angelo Arbib
magnificent flower gardens and hothouses where
sefer torah, Rome
The couple had no children and in his will
he grew many types of fruit.
Eugenio left detailed bequests to various
A British Ordnance Survey map dated 1933 showed it members of the family all over the world, detailing their
to have been an extensive property with a lake and much relationship to him, which started off my researches many
land. When visited in the 1970s the house no longer existed years ago. He bequeathed a large sum of money in trust “for
and the grounds had by then become neglected and formed the benefit of poor Jews in his native place of Tripoli in
part of a municipal park.
Barbary”. This trust is still in existence and today helps Jews
Today, descendants of those one-time merchant traders
are extremely numerous. A cursory search of foreign
telephone directories or the Internet reveals Arbibs scattered
all over the world involved in a wide range of activities and
professions.
● The author works in the Judaica and Jewish
Ethnography Wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
REFERENCES
1. Joseph’s siblings included Meborah and Rahamim (Clemente) who
went to live in Livorno c. 1840, Moscé (Moshe), Mazaltobe
(Fortunata), Ephraim (Yehuda), Haim and David. Joseph’s parents
were Angelo and Sarah Arbib. (Anne Webber 1997, Lydia Collins
2005.) Descendants of Moscé, David and Joseph have been traced.
2. For esparto, see The Gateway to the Sahara, Charles Wellington
Furlong, Chapman & Hall, London, 1909. The book contains
observations and experiences in Tripoli; p182 and Chapter 8 on
esparto grass trade mentions the Arbib and Nahum families and
other leading merchants.
3. Jews in an Arab Land 1835-1970, R De Felice, University of Texas
Press, Austin, USA, 1985, p299, note 9.
4. Several 19th-century Arbib letters, accounts and papers referring
to business transactions and shipments between London,
Manchester and Tripoli written in Italian and Hebrew were found
in the Urbach Archive P118/12 and the Gabriele Raccah Collection
P58/4 in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
(CAHJP), Jerusalem. Personal communication: Gino Arbib, a son
of Benjamin Arbib, London, 1973.
Eugenio Arbib, in Crayford, Kent c. 1905
of Libyan origin living in Israel, and from time to time a
Jew of Libyan extraction will be in touch enquiring about
the funds.
By the end of the 20th century, the Arbibs had dispersed
all over the world and had moved in search of new lives to
towns and cities in America, Australia, Europe and the
Middle East, also being caught up in the general upheavals
of that century.
GERALD JOSEPHS writes: A new
research facility, the JC Archives,
was launched at the beginning of
March. A full page advertisement in the newspaper stated:
“165 years of Jewish community history was released to
the public” and “the archives will be a valuable tool for
community members to discover their family history and
pass on precious memories to the next generation”.
Judging by the many letters which appeared on the
JGSGB discussion page, members rushed to the website
and were quick to pass on their impressions. Some
experienced the positive thrill of having discovered distant
relatives and our overseas members found it a boon. There
were, however, many who expressed disappointment at the
poor quality of the results and the numerous errors.
Strongest criticisms were reserved for the costs. Even
the promotion, where access is linked to the annual United
Kingdom subscription for the weekly newspaper, does not
appear to be attractive because of the limitation in the
number of permitted downloads. For overseas researchers
or those without a JC subscription, data access is extremely
expensive when compared with the cost of accessing such
databases as Ancestry.com.
5. Ibid, ref. 3, p8.
6. Arbib ships included Joseph Arbib, Cousins Arbib, Umberto Arbib
and the Poonah . Mercantile Navy List & Maritime Directories,
Public Records Office, Kew.
7. Written and personal communication from Jack Arbib, Jaffa, Israel,
1999, and others including Penina Khalfon, Netanya, Israel, 2003,
who made a plan of the synagogue and wrote a poem in Hebrew:
Dar Bibi Synagogue, 1985. Details appear in Lunario per l’anno
5709 1948-1949, Gabriele Raccah Collection P58/4 at CAHJP.
8. Pedatzur Ben Atiyah, Or Shalom, Bat Yam, Israel and Daniel
Hayoun, Rome, 2005 (personal informants).
9. Gates of Heaven, Samir Rifaat,Cairo Times, 2 September 1999.
Navigating the site was easy and the search engine worked
quickly and effectively. However, once an reference has been
traced, without a subscription, that is as far as one can go
because the relevant page has been efficiently blanked out to
make it completely illegible. Serious researchers have no
alternative but to take out a subscription in order to get that
important piece of information.
Only prepaid annual postal or newsagent subscribers may
open pages. Archive access costs £25 for 24 hours and
includes five downloads. A year’s subscription for the JC costs
£30 and includes five downloads. It does not appear that the
charges being levied can, by any stretch of the imagination,
be considered as anything other than expensive.
Laurence Harris, the Society’s IT expert, said: “The
availability of the JC Archives online is one of the most
important advances in access to Anglo-Jewish research in
the last decade”. It would be a tragedy if these valuable
facilities were denied to the community for whom it is
intended on account of cost.
✡ Additional charges (as at 16 May): one download costs £5;
five, £15; 10, £25; 25, £50; 50, £75 and 100 downloads, £100.
These charges are subject to change at any time!
The Ba’al Shem
—magician or prophet?
ROM a family tree in the Hyamson Collection1 I found
that I was distantly related to Samuel Jacob Hayyim
Falk, who was known as the Ba’al Shem of London.
His step-daughter Sarah was the grandmother of my greatgreat-grandmother Elizabeth Harris sometimes described as
his attendant or chaplain.
During the 17th and 18th centuries there were a number
of Ba’lai Shem who were not all Talmud scholars, who
dabbled in magic and Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism).
Falk was probably born in Poland about 1710 but may
have been of Sephardi origin. He travelled in Europe and at
one time was in Fuerth, Bavaria,
where his mother is buried.
Reputed to have been a follower
of the kabbalistic school of
Rabbi Judah Chasid and a
magical operator, he claimed to
be an alchemist.
When in Westphalia, the
authorities were incensed by his
pretensions to discover hidden
treasures and sentenced him to
be burnt alive.
He fled to London where he
arrived in 1742. His claims
included the ability to make a
small taper burn for several
weeks and when short of coal, to
pronounce a kabbalistic
incantation to make the coal
magically appear in his cellar.
F
A miracle?
When a fire occurred at the Great Synagogue, he wrote
four Hebrew letters on the pillars of the door and the fire
went out. He used a pawnbroker when he needed money
and apparently sometimes items in pawn would suddenly
and mysteriously reappear when he needed them. When he
first arrived in England he probably made a living by playing
on the credulity of the superstitious.
His house in Wellclose Square, Whitechapel, contained
a synagogue to which two readers were attached. He also
built a succah in the public garden of the square. Apparently
he also had a room on London Bridge where he
experimented with alchemy and magic arts. He made
mysterious journeys to Epping Forest, where he used a tent
and is supposed to have had a chest of buried treasure in
which he may have kept his crucibles and other equipment.
On one journey to the Forest, a rear wheel came off his
coach in the Whitechapel Road, so he told the coachman to
drive on and the wheel followed the coach for the whole journey.
He may have had some knowledge of electro-plating and
probably knew how to coat base metals with precious ones.
by Joe Isaacs
He became known for his magical powers: European
notables used to visit him, including the Duke of Orleans,
to whom he is said to have given a magic ring. It is said that
his room was lit by silver wall candlesticks and a central
eight-branched lamp made of pure silver. Although it
contained oil to burn for a day and a night, it remained alight
for three weeks.
Rags to riches
From being in the position of having to pawn his
possessions, he appears to have accrued a small fortune and
became friendly with the banker, Aaron Goldsmid.2
Falk died in 1782 and in
his will, left two sifrei torah
(scrolls of the Law) in silver
cases and a payment of £100
annually to the Great
Synagogue, payments of 10
guineas (£10.50) yearly to
the bethei midrash (Hebrew
schools) of both the
Ashkenazi and Sephardi
congregations and payments
of £15 annually to the
Hambro, New and Sephardi
Synagogues. There were
also a number of other
Samuel Falk:
contributions to various
The Ba’al Shem
of London
charities.
Irene Roth, the late
widow of Cecil Roth, the Oxford historian of Jewish history,
claimed that she was the last descendent of the Ba’al Shem of
London. She wrote a historical novel, Master of the Name,
based on the life of Falk and in the epilogue, she tells of members
of the family who anglicized the name Kalisch to Collins.
● The author, English-born in Slough, now lives in
Netanya where he chairs that branch of the Israel
Genealogical Society.
REFERENCES
1. A directory of pedigrees. A copy exists on in our JGSGB Library
2. Aaron F. Goldsmid: London merchant and founder of the Goldsmid
family of England; born at Amsterdam; died June 1782. He was
the son of Benedict Goldsmid, a Hamburg merchant. In 1765 he
left Holland with his family to settle in London, where he founded
the firm of Aaron Goldsmid & Son. The firm experienced serious
reverses through the failure of Clifford & Sayer, one of the principal
houses in Holland.
Samuel Falk:The Baal Shem of London, Michal Oron, Bialik Institute,
2002, 296p, Hebrew. ISBN: 9653428500. $50.
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, Volume V,
“The Ba’al Shem of London” lecture given to the Society by Chief Rabbi
Dr H Adler 29 November 1903.
Encyclopaedia Judaica. Falk, Samuel Jacob Hayyim, Cecil Roth.
Encyclopaedia Judaica. Ba’al Shem, Gershon Scholem.
1656 and
all that!
by Doreen Berger
O what really did happen in 1656, the official date
given for the resettlement of the Jews in this country?
The two schools of thought that have now appeared
on this subject are in agreement. They both say that the
answer is nothing.
Yet the conservative school will tell you that 1656 was
the date of the Resettlement, while the new revisionist
school, which has just emerged among a group of academic
historians, will tell you that we should not be celebrating a
date at all, and that the resettlement theory was a fabrication
of the Victorians. Genealogy is so closely akin to history,
and the history of the Jewish community in England is so
important in understanding how and why we were enabled
to find a peaceful sanctuary here, that I make no excuses for
looking at this subject more closely.
S
On 18 July 290, Edward I passed an Act in Council
stipulating that the Jews in his realm must be gone by the
first day of November, which was All Saints’ Day. Curiously,
(or was it intentionally?) that date in July coincided with
the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem,
which to this day is kept by orthodox Jews as a fasting day.
It is believed that the community numbered approximately
16,000 people. They fled to the Continent and officially there
was now no Jewish presence in England.
Jews still present
Unofficially, it was probably a different story. There are
mentions of individual Jews in England throughout the
intervening years and the Domus Conversorum, founded
by Henry III for the sole purpose of looking after Jewish
converts, was seldom empty. Both Edward II and Henry IV
had need of Jewish doctors, and Richard Whittington, Mayor
of London, was given permission to consult a Jewish
physician on behalf of his wife.
Henry VIII consulted Hebrew scholars regarding his
divorce and Elizabeth I’s own Jewish doctor was executed
for allegedly attempting to kill her. The Queen, however,
was notably friendly to his family after his death, and went
out of her way to show kindness to a beautiful Portuguese
Jewess when her ship was captured by the English.
By the middle of the 17th century, England had been
through a turbulent civil war, executed their king, and settled
down under the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Pamphlets
now appeared, advocating the return of the Jews to England,
and the climate of opinion was moving in that direction. In
1650, Mennasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam, wrote a treatise
called Hope of Israel, dedicated to the English Parliament.
He argued that the coming of the Messiah and the ingathering
of Israel must be preceded by the general dispersion of the
Jews, and, as this had already happened everywhere else,
they should no longer be excluded from England.
Oliver Cromwell,
Lord Protector
of the
Commonwealth
of England,
Scotland and
Ireland
Menasseh arrived in England in October 1655, with some
prominent Jewish merchants, and presented a humble
address on behalf of the Jewish nation to the Lord Protector.
Cromwell convened the Whitehall Conference in December
consisting of judges, lawyers, clergymen and representative
citizens to discuss the matter. There is no doubt that
Cromwell wanted a favourable decision.
The Chief Justice of the Upper Bench and the Chief
Baron of the Exchequer agreed that there was no law
prohibiting Jews from living in England. There was no Act
of Parliament either authorising or forbidding the
resettlement. In addition, the expulsion would have applied
only to those expelled in the year 1290. There was no
agreement, and the Conference ended abruptly with no clearcut decision, although most historians agree that the result
was favourable.
There were, of course, secret Jews known as Marranos,
living and trading in England, hoping against hope for a
favourable outcome. They were Spanish citizens and when,
early in 1656, war broke out between England and Spain,
they threw themselves on Cromwell’s mercy and requested
his protection. Their main spokesman was Antonio
Rodrigues Robles, a wealthy merchant living in Duke’s Place
in London.
Inquisition
He explained how his family had been driven from place
to place by the Inquisition, that his father had lost his life,
his mother had been injured, his family burned alive and he
hoped to find peace in England. It now transpired that there
were 20 such families with similar stories to his. Robles
was given safe conduct as a Jewish refugee from the Spanish
and the Marranos felt able to live openly as Jews.
The Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell died, and the
restoration of King Charles II to the throne of England
followed. The Jewish community felt themselves vulnerable.
The wardens of the synagogue at Creechurch Lane were
subjected to a blackmail attempt. The Earl of Berkshire and
a Mr Ricaut said that Jews had no right to remain in
the country.
The wardens were informed that unless they came to
terms, a verbal order by King Charles II to expel them and
seize their estates would be enforced. The wardens decided
to petition the King. Emanuel Martines Dormido (David
Abarbanel), Elisa de Lima and Moses Baruch (Lusada) said
that, in the words of Judges Glyn and Steel at the Whitehall
Conference of 1655, they knew of no law prohibiting their
right of residence. They asked that in the event of His
Majesty adhering to this order, facilities might be given them
for removing themselves, their families and fortunes to
another country.
Tolerant king
Charles II was a notably tolerant monarch. The following
decision is registered in the Entry Book of the Privy Council
Records of 22 August 1664, in the fourth year of his
monarchy, and is the first evidence in writing of official
authorisation for the Jewish community to continue their
residence in England:
“His Majesty having considered this petition hath been
graciously pleased to declare that he hath not given any
particular order for y’ molesting of disquieting ye Pet” either
in their Persons or Estates, but that they may promise
themselves y’ effects y’ same favour as formerly they had
so long as they demeune themselves peacefully and quietly
with due obedience to the Maties Laws, etcetera without
scandal to his Government.”
The historian, Lucien Wolf, considered that the word
“formerly” was a clear confirmation of the privilege granted
by Oliver Cromwell. The question had been thoroughly
discussed at the Privy Council, and it was found that the
legal opinion of the judges in 1655, which was the real
charter of Jewish residence, was beyond dispute.
Cecil Roth was of the opinion that official permission
had been finally given at a Privy Council meeting on the 25
June 1656. The pages from the Council Book of
Deliberations on that day were found to be torn out,
possibly deliberately.
When James II ascended the throne for his short reign,
he, too, was favourably disposed towards the small Jewish
community. In 1685, the Jews again felt themselves under
threat, and the wardens once again appealed to their
monarch. On 13 November, an Order in Council was issued:
“His Majesty’s Intention being that they should not be
troubled upon this account, but quietly enjoy the free
exercise of their Religion, whist they behave themselves
dutifully and obediently to his Government.”
When William of Orange came to the throne in 1688 the
community felt safe. Dutch Jews helped to finance his
successful expedition to England and there was a long history
of friendship between the House of Orange and the Jewish
community.
Whatever conflicting views historians now take, it is
undeniable that in 1656 the Jews living in England felt able,
for the first time since the expulsion, to live openly and
freely in the practise of their religion.
● The author was one of the founding members of the
Society and is now Convener of the Anglo-Jewish S.I.G.
REFERENCES
Cecil Roth. A History of the Jews in England, Oxford University Press,
1964.
Lucien Wolf. “A Final Note on the Resettlement”, Jewish Chronicle,
15 November 1889.
James Picciotto. Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History, The Soncino Press
Ltd., 1956.
Paul Emden, A Series of Biographies. London, 1943.
D’Blossiers Tovey, Anglia Judaica. 1738.
Council members 2005-2006
Back row, l to r, Elaine Paradise, Judith Samson, Laurence Harris, Maurice Hoffman, Annette Pearlman,
Rosemary Wenzerul, Don Glazer. Front row, Marion Kaye, Shirley Collier, Martyn Woolf, Lorna Kay.
Picture taken at Council meeting by Louise Messik in March 2006
Successful trip
to Lowicz
19th-century Lowicz panorama, showing the synagogue
✡
by Bernard Bookey
Y great-great-great-grandfather, Josef Ber Buki,
was rabbi of ·owicz, a small town some miles from
Warsaw. With a bit of luck I might have borne his
name, but my older cousin Joe got in first and I became
John Bernard Bookey. Presumably we were named after our
deceased grandfather, also Josef Ber Bookey.
About 15 years ago, I saw a Freedom of the City of
London certificate belonging to my maternal greatgrandfather and this started my interest in family history.
I only started on the Bookeys after a second cousin once
removed, Seth Bookey, from New York, made contact with
me. At that stage my father and his three siblings had died
and I knew little of their background. Cousin Seth told me
the names of my grandfather’s three siblings who had
emigrated to New York via London, and also told me they
had been staunch members of the Independent Drobiner
Benevolent Society (founded 1907).1
My grandfather’s tombstone in the Federation Cemetery
in Edmonton gave Tovye Leb as his father’s name, and using
the JRI-Poland project of JewishGen2 and then the relevant
Mormon films, I found that he and his threee siblings who
went to America had all been born in Wyszogrod.3
M
DESCENT FROM RABBI YOSEF BER BUKI
to JOHN BERNARD BOOKEY
Rabbi Yosef Ber Buki
c1785-1846
m Maria Nelkin
Shlomo Meyer Buki
1806-1880
m Golda Rozen
Tovye Leb Buki
1836-c1905
m Tsiril Goldberg
Yosef Ber Buki
1861-1922
m Devorah Rosenstein
Aaron Bookey
1899-1949
m Hilda Bernstein
John Bernard Bookey
1927-
m Beryl Nathan
This birth record confirmed Tovye Leb as my greatgrandfather and disclosed his wife’s name as Tsiril (after
whom several cousins are called Cissie, Cynthia and
Cecilia). We had assumed that Tsiril had died in Poland,
but in Edmonton Cemetery Seth looked at an all-Hebrew
stone, which I had ignored because the name in the records
and on the death certificate was Sarah. On the back of the
stone, written in English was the name Dora! Translation
soon showed that she was the wife of Tovye Buki. According
to Kolatch’s Dictionary,4 Tsiril is one of the Yiddish variants
for Sarah. Probably she stayed on in Poland after her children
had emigrated (c. 1896)5 but joined them in London after
her husband had died. To add to the complications, Tsiril’s
husband is called Charles on her death certificate.
Tovye Leb’s father was Shlomo Meyer Buki, and in turn
his marriage details6 (1824, Wyszogrod) recorded that his
father’s name was Josef Ber Buki and that they came from
·owicz, near Warsaw. Tovye Leb’s mother was Golda
Rozen, a name which recurs later in our family, notably my
Aunt Golda, born 1891.
Looking through the ·owicz Jewish records and the
·owicz church records7 for the early 1800s I saw the birth
of Josef Ber’s many children, although Shlomo Meyer’s
birth was in 1806 before records started. I was mostly
looking at specific Buki entries as noted in the annual
indices, but I noticed that Josef Ber Buki’s signature was at
the bottom of many marriage certificates, and he was the
officiant. In the text of these marriages and in the witnesses’
signatures, he is described as Rabin (but as Rabin in only one
of his children’s births). So we had a rabbi in the family, whose
name was commemorated after his death in 1846 in my
grandfather’s name and also in several Buki births not in my
direct line.
Liquor licence
The Pinkas Hakehillot8 has the following paragraphs
translated from the Hebrew: “It is generally accepted that
R Yosef Ber Buki, who is mentioned in a number of formal
non-Jewish sources as the Rabbi of ·owicz (in 1830) was
only a dayan (judge) and may not even have had a permanent
position, because in 1815 he received a licence to sell strong
liquor, and in 1833 he is included in a list of wealthy
shopkeepers.”
I am not sure how to interpret this because in 1830
·owicz did not have many Jews, although during his time
the number went up to about 800. This work on my Buki
line had whetted my appetite to go to Poland to visit the
towns where my Bukis had lived, although I knew from the
JewishGen Cemetery project9 that I could expect to find next
to nothing in the towns specific to my family’s interest.
However, I was presented recently with a fortuitous set
of circumstances. My son-in-law had been visiting Warsaw
and had met a camp survivor, Frank Dobia, now resident in
Australia. Frank was in staying in Warsaw and was willing
to act as my guide; he introduced me to a professional state
archivist10 who carried out some useful background work
and translations from Polish and Russian.
After showing me the Jewish memorials in Warsaw,
Frank took me to meet Yale Reisner11 of the Ronald Lauder
Foundation, Genealogy Project. He listened to my field of
interest and within minutes produced much information.
● Extracts from the 1929 Polish Business Directory12
for ·owicz, Wyszogrod and Drobin with the names and
addresses of Buki businesses therein—no certainties, but a
good chance that they were related.
● A copy of the page from the Pinkas Hakehillot.8
● A sheet containing four addresses in ·owicz where
Bukis had lived just before the Holocaust. These were from
a larger list compiled from memory by a survivor.
● A document relating to a relative called Elimelech
Buki, a second cousin once removed, whom I already knew
as a survivor of Auschwitz. Before his deportation he was a
member of the Judenrat (Jewish Organising Committee) in
the Drobin Ghetto and had later given evidence about war
crimes. In this capacity he had signed a document relating
to canteen expenses, and the extraordinary thing is that
I recognised this signature as being exactly the same shape
as all the other Buki signatures from 1824 onwards!
On the tourist trail
The next day Frank and I set off for ·owicz, about an
hour’s drive from Warsaw. ·owicz has a long history,
including an expulsion of its Jews in 1515. With a population
of 32,000, it has a tourist office which had already sent me
a plan with the Jewish cemetery clearly marked. I dropped
in to thank them and was introduced to the curator of the
local museum who gave me a copy of a drawing of ·owicz
(late 19th-century, I would guess) which shows the
synagogue as one of the most imposing buildings in the town.
One of the
Buki family
homes
Our first task was to find the four properties where the
Bukis had lived. We found three in shopping streets, the
fourth might have been a farmhouse before the War, and we
photographed them.13 We easily found the large, well-kept
cemetery. The stone wall and gate were in good condition—
too good, as the key-holder had to climb over walls to get
inside to shovel away a mound of frozen snow before the
gate could be opened.
Surprisingly, a few large stones still stand in their original
position: elsewhere are large fragments which have been
re-erected in one area, with no reference to the actual graves.
I photographed all those with names, but the writing was
not easy to read because of erosion. Sadly, no Buki stones
were found, but I must have been surrounded by many
ancestors and relatives.
We next went to Wyszogrod, a small town whose long
history of independence attracted many Jews. The synagogue
was built in the second half of the 18th century and it lasted
until demolished by the Nazis. Out of a pre-war population
of 5,000, over half were Jews. Today, the only Jewish
presence is a large memorial column on the site of the Jewish
cemetery, plus a single standing stone.
Jewish memorial
in Wyszgorod
Cemetery
Drobin is even smaller, with a pre-war population of
2,000, of whom 50 percent were Jews and the 300 families
had seven synagogues. I did not find any records of close
family in Drobin. The small cemetery area, which may have
been encroached on, contains no original stones, and the
small memorial stone is almost hidden by bushes.
Was it worth going all that way to see a few houses where
Bukis had lived, people who almost certainly were related
but were not my ancestors and to visit cemeteries where
there was almost nothing to see? I suppose the answer is
that I did not make the trip to see anything, but to feel, to
make a connexion with past generations, to understand where
I came from and to wonder at Jewish continuity.
After this immersion in history, I returned to the real
world and spent Erev Shabbat (Friday evening) in Warsaw
enjoying Lubavitch hospitality at their Chabad house14 and
then, on Saturday morning, I visited the Nozyc Synagogue,
the only one which has survived in Warsaw where a Bat
Chayil (ceremony for girls aged 12 years) was taking place—
how is that for continuity?
● The author is a retired executive in the chemical
industry who also worked in venture capital.
REFERENCES
1. This is a Landsman association in New York, founded in 1907.
2. www.jewishgen.org/jri-pl/.
3. Wyszogrod Jewish Records, 1859-1865, Mormon microfilm
730210.
4. Complete Dictionary of English and Hebrew First Names, Alfred
Kolatch, pub. Jonathan David.
5. Details in Sarah’s Aliens’ Registration Book.
6. Wyszogrod Church Records, 1808-1885, Mormon microfilm
730007.
7. Łowitz civil transcripts of church registers, 1808-1870.
8. Encylopedia of Jewish Communities, Vol. 1, pub by Yad Vashem
in 1976.
9. www.jewishgen.org/Cemetery/.
10. Anna Bieniaszewska, Anchrus@poczta.onet.pl. Anna prefers to
work from her local state archive in the Westpreussen area,
covering the following towns: Brodnica/Strasburg, Chelmno/
Culm, Golub-Dobrzyn, Kowalewo/Schoensee, Nowe Miasto/
Neumark, Wabrzezno/Briesen, Torun/Thorn.
11. Yale Reisner, The Ronald S Lauder Foundation, Genealogy
Research, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw. Tel: 0048 22 828
5962. Laudergen@jewish.org.pl.
12. Ksiega Adresowa Polski, 1929, bilingual Polish/French.
www.jewishgen.org/jri-pl/bizdir/lang.pl/bd1929.htm.
13. Seth Bookey has organised photos taken on the trip on http://
homepage.mac.com/sethbook/poland/Menu205.html. It
includes all the pictures of stones in Lowicz cemetery and the
section on the Plock area contains useful maps.
14. Lubavitch, Warsaw. Tel: 0048 22 637 5352/5752.
A man with
a mystery
by David Hyman
E all start with eight great-grandparents, and
because my late parents were interested in family
history, I am lucky enough to know something
about each of mine. On my father’s side they lived all or
most of their lives in England while on my mother’s side
they were in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Hungary.
I am currently concentrating my researches on the
paternal side, specifically on my great-grandfather Abraham
Barnett, my grandmother’s father. He lived a long life which
could be well described as full of incident. He had more
than 30 grandchildren, about 70 great-grandchildren and at
least 150 great-great-grandchildren. He is thought to have
married either three or four ladies, possibly more than one
W
Jane, aged eight, and Sarah, six, who all lived a few hundred
yards away from Abraham.
Later the same year, on 8 July 1861, Abraham Barnett
applied to be naturalised. He described himself in his
affidavit as Abraham Barnett, alias Abraham Bear
Zewybaum, a Russian Pole from the Warsaw District who
had resided in England for more then six years, putting his
entry to the United Kingdom as 1854-1855. This ties in with
a story in the family that he was conscripted into the Russian
Army as a baker and decided he could do better elsewhere.
It also makes the alleged Swiss birth given to the census
enumerator about two months earlier look doubtful.
He stated in the affidavit that he had four children and
was a glazier. Obviously two of his children were not living
with him or his current wife. From information which we
have from other sources, it is thought he married three or
four times in his long life. According to the late Dr Jack
Snowman, mohel1 to the high and mighty and, incidentally,
to me, Abraham was married “to my aunt, whose maiden
name was ‘Singer’ and who came from Janova, a village
near Biota in the Warsaw district”.2
Abraham Barnett and
his children Pisa,
my grandmother Menorah
and Morris.
In the front row,
Elizabeth and Miriam.
London, c 1900
at a time and, among other things, he seems to be about the
only person to have been naturalized British twice in less
than 10 years!
Abraham first appears in British documents in the mid1850s when he is shown in Kelly’s Directories as living in
11 Commercial Place, Whitechapel and working as a glazier.
In 1857 his daughter, Miriam, shown as “Mirzam” on the
birth certificate, was born. The mother’s name was given as
Rosa Hyams. In 1858 they moved to either 26 or 27 Dorset
Street, Spitalfields, where he worked as a “glass cutter”.
In early 1861, Abraham’s oldest son Pesach, always
known as Pisa, was born. In the census of that year Abraham
appears at the Dorset Street address with wife and two
children, the son now called Peasa. Husband and wife’s place
of birth is shown as Switzerland, a fairly unlikely story,
particularly as other documents show that Abraham could
not write English. In the same census, is an entry of a Rosie
Barnett, describing herself as a “nurse” with two daughters,
Various elderly relatives, when tackled on the subject
by my father 50 or 60 years ago, were most evasive about
the matter but all suggested that he had “three or four wives”.
Whether, as I now believe, he had more than one at a time,
no one can prove, but there is overwhelming evidence that
Jane and Sarah Barnett mentioned above were his daughters
and he is described as their father on their later marriage
certificates. Children of their marriages regarded my father
and his eight siblings, as cousins. All the family seemed to
have been rather frightened of him.
Having acquired British nationality, the next interesting
historic event in Abraham Barnett’s life, apart from the
regular birth of more children, occurred in 18643 when he
was adjudged bankrupt. By this time he was living at 149
Houndsditch and was “a glass merchant, Looking Glass
manufacturer, dealer in Gilt Mouldings, Print and Picture
Dealer and Picture Frame Maker, formerly of 28 Grays Inn
Road and previously of 26 Dorset Street, Spitalfields, always
Abraham Barnett m1 Rosa Singer
?1831-1918
Jane
1852-?
Sarah
1853-?
m2 Hinda Rosetta Hyams
?1826-1894
Miriam Pesach (Pisa)
Moses
1857-1930 1861-1931 1863-?1940
Leonard Albert
1895-1964
m Helen
Josephine
Mautner
1900-1991
Note: Abraham had three wives
1. Rosa Singer
2. Hinde Rosetta Hyams
3. Esther Davis 1850-?
Tree of Abraham Barnett
Menorah
Elizabeth
Harris
1864-1940 1868-1915 1871-1882
m Albert Edward
Hyman
1868-1918
David
1930m
+ two
generations
carrying on the same businesses”. He was adjudged bankrupt
under a petition filed in London on 26 March 1864 and a
public sitting for the said bankrupt to pass his last
examination and make application for his discharge was to
be arranged. Mr Edward Levy of 29 Henrietta Street, Covent
Garden was the solicitor acting in the case.
It is not revealed which of his multifarious businesses
he was, allegedly, undertaking, brought him down . He was
operating half a dozen businesses from two addresses, one
much smarter than the other and he still, at this time, could
only put his mark rather than a signature, on documents.
Nefarious deeds?
He later obtained his discharge and moved to 130
Cambridge Heath Road, Mile End, where he operated as a
glazier and picture-frame maker but the other pre-bankruptcy
businesses appear to have been dropped. It was alleged by
one of my late uncles that he sent out a few lads at night to
break windows in the Poplar district and then showed up
the following morning offering to reinstall them, although
there is no evidence at all for this monstrous allegation.
In 1868 he again applied for naturalisation: the only
person that I know who did so successfully twice in seven
years. He described himself as Abraham Barnett, alias
Abraham Bear Zweigbaum (slightly different from the 1861
version) as a Russian Pole, a glass merchant with seven
children, living at 130 Cambridge Heath Road, owning a
freehold and intending to live here permanently.
The seven children comprised five by Rosetta Hyams,
including my maternal grandmother, Menorah “Minnie”
Barnett, and the earlier two by “Rosie Barnett”, possibly
née Singer, who lived a few hundred yards away. When, in
1870, Jane Barnett was married to Emmanuel Isaacs and
in 1874 her sister Sarah Rachel was married to Morris
Eight others
Robin
1931m
+ two
generations
Abraham Cohen, both at the Great Synagogue, Dukes Place
by the then Chief Rabbi, Dr Adler the father’s name was
given as “Abraham Barnett (Out of business)”.
In 1871 Rosie Barnett was living in Partridge Court,
just off Houndsditch as was her daughter Sarah Rachel, not
yet married. On the census form she had originally described
herself as a “Widow” but this was crossed out. Abraham
Barnett, his wife Hinda Rosetta and, by now, six children
were living in nearby Houndsditch. Sarah Rachel married
Morris Cohen in 1874 when both were living in Partridge
Court, as was Rosie Barnett now acting as a nurse to a Mr
Jacobs, a man in his 70s.
In 1875, Abraham Barnett’s oldest daughter Miriam, aged
18, married Herman Van Staveren, a general dealer, this
ceremony also being performed by the Chief Rabbi. Abraham
Barnett was shown as the father and described as “Out of
Herman Van Staveren and his wife Miriam, with their
13 children, Wellington, c. 1896
business”. From 1876 to 1879 he was living in White Horse
Lane, close to all his other East End addresses but was shown
as a picture-frame maker and then as “of independent means”.
Suddenly in 1880 and in the 1881 census, he has a
freehold house in Portsdown Road, Maida Vale, and is shown
as “a house and land owner of Independent Means”. Perhaps
he won the lottery? For the first time he shows his birthplace
as Tresboli, which I am informed should be Teresbol,
adjacent to Warsaw.
Abraham’s life became much less eventful after this. In
turn his children, including my grandmother, married, and
in 1894 his “wife” Hinda Rosetta Hyams died. About four
years later he married once more: his new wife was Esther
Davis, known to my father’s generation as “Ma Dirty” since
she could not pronounce the number 30.
Both on the marriage certificate and in the 1901 census
Abraham gave his age as 50 although, by this time, his eldest
daughter Jane was either 48 or 49! He now lived in Clifton
Gardens, Maida Vale where he died in 1918. He is buried at
Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery. He is mentioned in
the history of the Bayswater Synagogue as being one of the
very few members who stayed in shul all night on Yom Kippur.
Unequal legacies
In his will he left about £900 and gave gifts or legacies
to all the children of Rosetta Hyams except for two of his
daughters, my grandmother Menorah and Miriam. Miriam
and her husband Herman Van Staveren had emigrated to
New Zealand with one child in 1877. Herman was offered
the post as rabbi to the Wellington congregation and stayed
in this post until his death in 1930.
He produced a further 12 children in a house behind the
synagogue which was then in The Terrace, one of the
Wellington’s main streets. My wife and I are still friendly
with our Kiwi cousins and visit them about every 10 years.
Sadly, my grandmother, Menorah Barnett died of
appendicitis in 1915 and my grandfather died in 1918 while
my late father was fighting on the Somme. Nevertheless,
Abraham Barnett left nothing to them or their nine children.
Strangely he and Albert Edward Hyman, his son-in-law, lie
two graves apart in Willesden Cemetery.
What became of Abraham’s many descendants? The largest
branch, probably the New Zealanders, are flourishing.
Abraham’s second daughter, Elizabeth, married Kalman
Goitein in the 1890s. Abraham thought that his future son-inlaw was sickly so insisted that if he were to marry Elizabeth he
would have to take out life assurance for £10,000. Kalman did
so and died 10 years later. Their children mostly settled in Israel
where one, David Goitein, became a Supreme Court judge.
Serious money
The most financially successful of Abraham Barnett’s
children was Pisa Barnett who became involved in property
and left nearly £65,000, a serious sum when he died in 1931.
Ellis Isaacs, a son of Abraham’s oldest child, Jane, was a wellknown communal leader of the Glasgow Jewish community.
From my own generation, my cousin, Martin Hyman is
a British Olympic athlete; my brother Robin Hyman is a
president of the Publisher’s Association and several cousins
are directors of the Gestetner company. One of my New
York Barnett cousins was, for many years, a director of Great
Universal Stores, a company chaired by his uncle, Isaac
Wolfson. This is a typical story of upward mobility from
modest beginnings.
There remain puzzles.
■ Was Abraham Barnett married to two women at the same
time?
■ Was there a get4 but not a civil divorce?
■ How did he combine so many different jobs simultaneously
when, in his early days here, his command of English,
was limited?
■ How did he recover from his bankruptcy sufficiently well to
move to the relative affluence of Maida Vale as a property
owner of independent means?
■ When he died he was described as a retired jeweller. Why did
he suggest to the census enumerator that he had been born
in Switzerland in 1861?
■ Why did he persistently give a false age when asked the
Rabbi Herman
Van Staveren
in the grounds
of Terrace
Synagogue,
Wellington,
1923
question?
We shall never know but he was certainly rewarded with a
long and healthy life.
● The author is a retired stockbroker who was also a
Governor of Moorfields Eye Hospital.
REFERENCES
Abraham Barnett had not approved of the marriage of
his daughter Menorah’s to Albert Edward Hyman, born in
Chatham in 1868, although Albert’s father was a much more
sober citizen. He was a warden of the Chatham Synagogue
for many years, treasurer of the local Liberal Party, a keen
freemason and a gifted watchmaker and silversmith.
1. The mohel is a person of the Jewish faith who is ordained to do
circumcision under the guidelines of the Jewish religion.
2. This information was in a letter written to my late father in 1950
by Dr Snowman.
3. The London Gazette.
4. Get is the Hebrew word for a divorce document. To “get a get” is
to go through the religious procedure to obtain a religious divorce.
The Barders
from Krakow
by Jane Barder
RIAN Barder, my husband, always knew that his
father, Harry, had been born in 1883 into a Jewish
family which had migrated to England some time in
the 19th century.
Harry was already in his 50s when Brian, his only child,
was born, and it seemed that he knew little or nothing about
the Barder family’s origins somewhere in Eastern or Central
Europe. Harry did know his grandparents’ names, Louis and
Annie (Hannah) née Hamburger, and also that Hannah had
a brother who had also migrated to England.
He knew that a number of Hamburger and Barder cousins
had married each other: indeed Harry’s first wife was his
cousin, Rachel Hamburger. Brian’s mother, however, was
neither a Hamburger nor Jewish.
B
Barder, one of Louis and Hannah’s British-born sons, who
followed up Sophie’s belief about the Barders’ origins and
approached the Krakow archives for help.
He was rewarded with the following (in translation): “In
July 1852, at 10 o’clock in the morning, Leibel Hamburger,
factor 3/2, 68 years old, lived at number 189, the grandfather
of the baby (he showed the baby: “sex—male”) who was
born on 14 July 1852 at 6 o’clock in the afternoon at his
parents’ flat, who was the fruit of love of Lazar Barder (23
years old) and Hala Hamburger (22 years old) and they gave
the child the name Izrael.”
The unusual phrase “fruit of love” and the fact that the
child was presented by his maternal grandfather might mean
that Izrael was born before his parents, known to us as Louis
and Hannah, were married, but the baby was registered as
Bader. Perhaps it was the reason why Louis and Hannah
left so soon after his birth, because we know that they were
in England around 1854 for the birth of their second son,
Levy Bader, who would later be Brian’s grandfather. But, if
so, there was no long-term family rift: we know that they
made at least one, possibly two, return visits to Krakow and
the family home.
There is a surprising number of surviving records for
Jewish Krakow families1, many of them microfilmed by
Mormons.2 In recent years it has become possible to do a
lot of research on the Internet, largely because of the
goodwill of devoted Jewish researchers who have produced
indexes and translations freely available to all.
Initially, however, I paid frequent visits to the Mormon
Family History Library in Exhibition Road, Kensington,
peered at endless records on microfilm, photocopied any
which seemed to contain the name Bader or Hamburger and
then paid for a translation. The Krakow births deaths and
marriage certificates contain a huge amount of useful
information. Today many more indexed records can be found
on the web. It is from these searches that I found some of
the following information.
Tombstone of Louis Barder, Willesen Cemetery
My inspiration to research the Barder family background
was a family tree commissioned by a Barder relative in the
1980s. This document named all 10 of Louis’s and Hannah’s
children and most of their children’s spouses, children and
grandchildren. Much of it was based on the amazing memory
of Sophie, one of Louis’s granddaughters, who lived from
1894 to 1976. She was almost certainly the source of the
tree’s assertion that Louis Barder “came to London from
Alsace about 1848. His family originated in Krakow,
Poland.” The trouble was that the tree went no further back
than Louis and Hannah.
I joined the JGSGB and set to work to track the family
down. As so often happens in family history research, I soon
came across a Barder cousin who was also trying to put
more leaves on the tree. It was this great-grandson of Arnold
Ritual bath house (mikvah) in Krakow
From 1787, Jews living in the then Austrian Empire were
either allocated surnames by their new rulers or were
required to adopt them. Occupations were often the source
as was the case with the Baders. Jacob, the earliest identified
Bader and Louis Barder’s grandfather, was a barber and
attendant at the ritual bath house (mikvah). As in many
societies, he combined his skills as a barber with a role in
minor surgery.
The first sight of him is in the 1790 census,3 where he is
listed as Jokel, barber and surgeon, aged 26, living in house
No. 85 Judenstadt with his 24-year-old wife, Leja. According
to the 1790 and 1795 censuses, 40-year-old Filip Bonde, a
doctor, lived there too. Like Jokel, Filip was one of a select
few in the later census who were not identified by their father’s
name in the patronymic column, but rather by their occupation,
which in time led on to their surname. However, unlike Jokel,
Filip already had his surname in 1790. An explanation is perhaps
provided by the 1795 census where Filip, now spelt Feibel, is
shown to have been born in Prag (Prague).
Large family
Jokel, now identified as Jacob Bader, was still living at
No. 85 for the 1795 census. The word “house” seems an
inadequate translation for the dwellings, which varied
enormously in size. In 1790 there were three families,
comprising 15 people, living in number 85. By 1795, the
numbers of families had risen to five and the bodies to 18:
Filip Bonde’s family, a wife, two sons and two servants,
accounted for five people and Jacob and his wife, Leja, with
their one infant, made an additional three.
Presumably Jacob drew rent from these tenants,
supplementing his income as barber-surgeon. Filip Bonde
is listed as the owner of No. 85 in successive lists of houseowners in 1797 and 1807. It was obviously a substantial
dwelling, described as a “stone house in Hauptplatz”,
comprising 337 square fathoms;4 some of the other houses
were as small as 12 fathoms. Jacob himself appears as a
house-owner in both those lists.5
Many of the above facts came from a site of enormous
value to Krakow researchers.6 As well as the two censuses
and the 1807 house-owners list (I cannot trace where I found
the 1797 list), Dan Hirschberg7 has collected a number of
other records which include three articles by George
Alexander.8 These articles portray the evocative history and
culture of a large, settled and even prosperous Jewish
population which was destroyed in a few short years. George
Alexander had translated sections of a book by Mayer
Balaban9 in which Jacob Bader was described as a felczer,
or in modern terms, a “barefoot doctor”.
There are a number of other references to Jacob in
Balaban’s work. For example, in 1832 during a cholera
epidemic, Jacob, a surgeon assistant in the isolation hospital,
was paid 400 zlotys for his help in cupping and applying
leeches to the sick. There is a reference in 1809 to Jacob
giving vaccinations against smallpox. Filip Bonde is also
mentioned and seems to have been a considerable figure in
the medical world of Krakow. It is possible that Jacob’s
career as a barber-surgeon started as an assistant to his
landlord, the Prague-born Dr. Bonde.
With his various sources of income, Jacob was presumably
quite well-to-do in local terms, despite living in a wooden house
in bad condition. Since he and Leah Lewkowicz seem to have
had about 15 children, most of whom survived infancy, this
was just as well. Leah, who died in 1836, had been born around
1766. Jacob Bader’s son Hirsch was born in March 1799 and
married Zelda Golbergowna, the daughter of Aron Goldberg,
a sub-inspector policeman, and Kreindla Herzlowna, in
November 1817.
In the 1828 birth certificate of Nachem Lazar Bader,
later to become known as Louis Barder, their address was
No. 44 and Hirsch’s occupation was peddler (perhaps the
same as stall-keeper). Aron Goldberg, the maternal
grandfather, was one witness to Hirsch’s report of Nachem’s
birth and was described as a money-lender. The second
witness was Kolburg, a hospital servant: perhaps a colleague
of Jacob the felczer.
Records of births, deaths and marriages, once located
and translated, provide much information because every
must surely be the Barder family. Louis Barder, a mid-19thcentury furrier, had seven sons who all became furriers.
Instead of working in their father’s business, each one set
up on his own. Thus they all became deadly rivals in
business, although it was a devoted family
in every other way. All the brothers chose
grand titles for their companies. The one
which is still known today is the National
Fur Company, which Arnold Barder
established in Sloane Street in 1878, and
moved to Brompton Road shortly
afterwards.
By the mid-1920s, only two other Barder
brothers were still in the fur trade, their
companies being the London Fur Company
and one trading in Bristol. In 1926, the
London Fur Company was bought by
Swears and Wells, and by 1945 the Bristol
company was also sold. But the National
Fur Company went from strength to
Izrael (Isaac) Barder
strength, and expanded into a concern with
seven branches, four of them in Wales.”
statement seems to have required the presence of named
witnesses. Hirsch was living with his parents at house No.
11 when he married in 1817 and he and Zelda were living
there in 1823 when one of their sons, Chil Elias, was born.
Hirsch and Zelda produced about nine
children of whom seven survived infancy.
(It is impossible to be exact about such
facts when so much depends on matching
records and keeping track of name
variations.) Of these, only Nachem and a
younger brother, Aron Samuel, born
around 1836, migrated from Krakow.
It is possible that the circumstances of
Izrael’s birth in 1852 prompted Nachem and
Haile Hamburger to leave Krakow, perhaps
inspired by her brother Marcus (Menasses),
who by then had been living in Paris for some
years. They were certainly in London by
1854 when Levy, their first English-born
child and Harry Barder’s father, was born.
Although much of our early information
about Levy is found in Manchester records,
we know he was born in Spitalfields, London around 1854.
Bit of a muddle
He is not listed in the civil register of births, deaths and
marriages, but this is the information he gave in successive
censuses. We have a General Register Office certificate for
the 1856 Whitechapel birth of Jacob and for the first time
the Baders are officially documented in England. From the
birth of Jacob onwards, a succession of birth, death, marriage
certificates and census entries gives us an idea of the
numerous enterprises undertaken by Louis and his sons as
they worked to establish themselves and their families in
Victorian England.
Louis and Hannah were survived by 10 children in
England. Hannah Barder did not have to endure the repeated
tragedies of infant deaths. Just two of her many pregnancies
are recorded as ending in death. Synagogue records show
that a daughter, Leah, was born in July 1860 but died and
was buried on 4 September 1860. The death of another Leah,
aged only two, daughter of her father Louis, a trimming
weaver of 4 Turk Street, was registered in February 1865.
Albert’s 1864 birth at 6 Fashion Street, Spitalfields, seems
to have been the cause of a muddle between Louis and the
registrar. Albert was registered as a girl named Alice: only
Tassel-maker
28 years later, in March 1892, was his certificate changed
When Izrael Bader was born in Krakow in 1852, Louis following a statutory declaration by Louis and Jacob Barder.
was described as a haberdasher, but his first recorded
The steady growth of this large family not only helps to
occupation in England, as the father of his
chart the progress of the Barders in England
new-born son, Jacob, was that of a tasselbut also hints at the circumstances of their
maker. “Master tassel-maker”, “trimming
Polish background. Their son, Philip,
weaver”, “fancy trimming manufacturer”
applied for naturalisation in 1902. His
are his various descriptions on a series of
naturalisation papers showed that he was
birth certificates in the 1850s-1860s. Both
born to Louis and Hannah in Krakow in
prayer shawls (tallith) and fringed garments
August 1861, five years after the birth of
(tzitzit) are worn as an undergarment by
Jacob in Whitechapel. Sophie, Jacob’s
devout Jews, are finished with long tassels
daughter, was eight in 1902, which probably
at each corner so perhaps Louis’s tassels
explains why she remembered the Krakow
were made for these items.
connection, but it does not explain her
The first census appearance in England
theory about Alsace.
of Louis Barder’s family was in 1871 when
The Krakow archives duly produced a
they were living at 3 Wilkes Street,
record of the birth of Fischel to Lazar and
Spitalfields, then the centre of London Jewry,
Chaje Bader in 1861. Moreover, an 1857
now the heart of Banglatown. Louis and Isaac
Harry Barder
Krakow register of inhabitants11 listed Lasar
(the anglicized version of Krakow-born
(Louis), born 1827, and Aron Samuel, born
Izrael’s name) were described as silk weavers, although silk 1836, among the sons living with their father Hirsch Bader
weaving was a dying industry. From the 1870s onwards Louis [sic], a factor. A later, possibly 1880, Krakow register lists
was listed as a furrier: when he died in 1906 he was living at Samuel, but not Louis, in Hirsch’s household. It might be
111 Brondesbury Villas, with his son, Levy, also a furrier.
that Louis and Hannah returned to Krakow for family
Alison Adburgham in her book Shops and Shopping comfort after the sadness of Leah’s birth and death in 1860.
1800-191410 wrote: “The most prolific family in the fur trade Perhaps Louis’s visit in 1857, between the births of Jacob
Harry Barder’s
parents,
Rebecca
née Waxman,
and Levy Barder
and Betsy, was to encourage his younger brother, Samuel,
to come to England.
In the 1861 English census, Samuel Bardo, a 24-yearold fancy trimming manufacturer, born in Krakow, Austria,
was living at 6 Pelham Street, Mile End. It was at this address
that baby Leah was born and died in 1860 but Louis and
Hannah were not there for the census and we now know
that they were back in Krakow in 1861. In 1867, Samuel
Bardo, of 3 Victoria Park Square, son of Hirsch Bardo,
married Lydia Cohen, daughter of Isaac, a metals dealer.
We lose sight of Samuel after his marriage in 1867,
except for the mention of him in the undated Krakow list of
inhabitants, back with his parents in Krakow. For some time,
however, he was certainly in London, sharing an occupation
and, in Pelham Street, accommodation, with his older
brother. The links maintained with family in Krakow suggest
that Louis and Hannah had more resources and more choice
in their place of residence than most 19th-century Jewish
migrants to Britain and America, or than impoverished
migrants such as Abraham Waxman, Harry’s maternal
grandfather, escaping the repressive regime of Tsarist Russia.
Whatever her comparative prosperity, however, Hannah
had to cope with at least 12 full-term pregnancies in 18 years,
and constant moves with an increasing number of small
children: and, above all, she had to adapt herself to a new
country and a new culture. In the Barder saga it is inevitable
that the story of the men, who carried a traceable name,
should predominate, but it was Hannah who reared them.
Harry Barder was the Bristol furrier who sold his
business in 1945 on his retirement. Brian Barder, his son,
joined the British Diplomatic Service. In 1986 Brian, later
Sir Brian, was appointed British Ambassador to Poland. We
did not know until a few weeks before we left Warsaw in
July 1988 about Sophie’s recollections of a Krakow heritage.
We hope that Hirsch Bader and Leibel Hamburger would
have been proud, if mystified, about their descendant’s
position in Poland.
● The author was born in Brixton; most of her ancestors
have lived in London from time immemorial.
REFERENCES
1. www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp.
2. Since 1995, information is increasingly available on
www.jewishgen.org/.
3. See reference seven below for probable source.
4. 1 square fathom = 4 sq yd.
5. Jacob owned No. 11 which covered 106 square fathoms, but was
described, like many others, as a “wooden building in bad
condition” and in the 1795 census six families, comprising 18
people, were living there. Jacob himself did not live in No. 11 in
those years. His son, Herschel, or Hirsch, (later Louis’s father),
was born in 1799 No. 21, a brick house of 145 square fathoms,
owned by Schachno Ascher.
By as early as 1797 it seems that, all the house-owners had
surnames, presumably for bureaucratic reasons. In 1805 a
daughter, Malke, was born in house No. 7, an old wooden building
in bad condition” owned by Esaias Bleimann: also living in that
building was a Joseph Bader, presumably a relation, a tax
collector. However, Jacob and his family were living in No. 11 in
1817, when Hirsch married Zelda Goldbergowna.
6. www.jewishgen.org/jri-pl/krakow.htm.
7. www.ics.uci.edu/~dan/genealogy/Krakow/index.html.
8. He lived in Krakow until 1925 and is a Holocaust survivor; he is
now a professor in the United States.
Vivien and Harry Barder, President of The Bristol Yorkshire
Society, seated on either side of the Lord Mayor of Bristol
(centre), c. 1935
9. George Alexander kindly sent me information he had translated
from a book Historia Zydow w Krakowie ina Kazimerzu 1304-1868
by Mayer Balaban, published in Krakow, 1936. Available in the
New York Public Library:
10. Pub. Allen and Unwin, 1964.
11. Information in a letter from Krakow archives.
Grandpa’s
school prize
by Judith Samson
MONG the books which I have inherited are a few
which were prizes from school or Hebrew classes.
Each has a label stuck inside the front cover and only
recently have I realized how informative that label can be.
Children who won prizes were probably proud to have done
so, even if the prize was for no particular achievement and
it was a book which they would never read.
My grandfather Alfred Sampson (sic) was awarded a
copy of The Works of William Shakespeare in June 1895 for
“Regular attendance and general improvement” at Stepney
Jewish Schools. His younger brother Reuben Samson
received a copy of Peter Simple for “Reg Atten at Sab
School” from Old Ford and North Bow Hebrew and Religion
Classes in 1896.
A few months ago I
attended a lecture on
London education records
at the London Metropolitan
Archives (LMA). I took
with me the addresses of all
my ancestors who had lived
in London so that I could
find out where they were
educated, but I need not
have bothered as I learned
that it was only after the
1870 Education Act that
children had, by law, to
attend school.
Initially, there were
more girl pupils than boys. Apparently 70 schools were built
in
London
by
1874
and
a School Board for London was set up. In those days,
children walked to school, and usually went to the one
nearest their home.
A
Types of school
Apart from these London County Council (LCC) schools,
there were private and religious schools, ragged (charity)
schools and also independent ones. Poor law schools had
originally been run by the parish for families on poor relief
and they operated under a Board of Guardians. At industrial
schools, teaching focused on skills and trades.
The LMA keeps a list of schools which operated under
the auspices of the LCC and also maps and photos.1 As
frequently happens, not all records have survived. There was
no legal requirement for schools to keep their records longer
than seven years. Middlesex County Council, which
succeeded the LCC had no policy about retaining records.
There are also log books complied by the head of the
school which might include the general level of pupil
absence, sickness, discipline and outings. You might find a
record of children being sent home because they were dirty.
Reward cards were given for good attendance and good
work, and sometimes certificates and medals 2 were
distributed instead of prizes.
By 1900, half the Jewish children living in London
attended the Jewish Free School. My grandfather, however,
did not. It was quite difficult to find any information about
the history of the Stepney Jewish schools. It seems to have
started in 1874 although its first records date from 1869.
The East London Advertiser of 22 December 1874 reported
details of a ball held at the Hotel Metropole to attain funds
“to enlarge the (Stepney) School which since it was built in
1871 for 250 children was wholly inadequate for the 650
children now on the school register”.3
Part of the Admissions Register showing pupil’s number,
admission date, surname, forename, address and birth date
Although the microfiche4 gave me a lot of information,
researchers are totally dependant on the teachers’
handwriting. On the Admissions page, every pupil has a
number, and then follow the date of admission, surname,
first name, address, date of birth, previous school, progress
and date of withdrawal. Some columns may not be
completed. My grandfather, Alfred, was eight when he
started school in 1890 and seems to have left the following
year, although he received his prize in 1895, aged 13.
Something strange
One oddity is that his previous infants’ school was a
church school. The microfiche is difficult to read: it may
have been St James’ School (Myopic) Stepney, which was
for “myopic and partially sighted children” and opened as a
temporary School for the Mentally Deficient in 1898. There
was no political correctness in those days!
My grandfather’s two younger brothers also attended
Stepney Jewish School, Reuben (1894-1898) and Ephraim
(1897-1899), both having been to Lauriston Road Board School
first. Ephraim’s entry is in a later volume and now the father’s
name is given (albeit wrongly!). Sometimes the father’s
occupation is stated; girls are listed separately.
This is a good source for genealogists, especially where
birth dates are given, saving the cost of a birth certificate,
currently £7. Remember, though, that the information may
be inaccurate!
● The author is the current Editor of Shemot who rarely
has any time to do her own research!
REFERENCES
1. Photos: www.eva-eu.org are indexed by school name in
alphabetical order.
2. LMA Information Leaflet 8, London School Attendance Medals is
helpful.
3. East End 1888, W J Fishman, Duckworth, pub. 1988.
4. LMA Microfiche XO95/023.
See also An index of London schools and their records, Cliff Webb,
2nd ed. 1999. This is in the JGSGB Library.
My early days
in Illuxt
by Hyman Jacobson (see overleaf)
The town was laid out with a market square in the centre
from which broad cobbled streets radiated. Though there
was no particular quarter where Jews lived exclusively, there
were streets on the outskirts of the town where Jews did not
live. In the market square churches of the main Christian
sects dominated the scene, each with its own style of
architecture. The Greek Orthodox with its typical onionshaped domes, the Lutheran with its austere lines, and the
Catholic Church—the most imposing, with its gothic spire
and its immense size.
Practically all the houses of the rich, as well as of the
poor were built of wood, except for one huge double-storey
building that was the shopping centre on one side of the
square. The ground floor was let to Jewish store-keepers
who paid a rental to the Federal Polish Count, commonly
known as The Count or Der Graaf.
was born in a townlet called Illuxt in the year 1886. I
have never seen a birth certificate to that effect, but
calculate it from the year I left Russia, at the age of 16,
which was in the autumn of 1902. For convenience, I fixed
the birth date as 14 October, as my mother only knew the
date according to the Hebrew calendar, which was 14 days
in Chesvan.
While the exact date is really of no importance, the year
is significant and was calculated to affect the whole course
of my existence. It was in 1886 that gold was discovered on Jewish minority
It was a pleasant enough town, as towns in Russia went,
the Rand. Thus, many seemingly totally unrelated events,
un-noticed at the time, shape the lives of thousands and with life flowing peacefully except when an occasional fire,
inexorably, as if by an unseen hand, drive them to their or death or a wedding formed a topic of conversation for a
few days. Though the Jews formed a minority of the
destiny for good or ill.
In that year Illuxt was a district town of the government inhabitants, they dominated the economic life of the town,
(Gubernia) of Kurland or Courland. The latter was itself and Sabbath day could be felt in the whole town. No peasant
part of the Tzar’s domain of the Baltic province. This would come to town and no drunks were seen as all the
province) though inhabited mostly by Latvians (and shops and drinking places were closed. Jews and non-Jews
lived their separate
subsequent to the First World
communal and religious
War granted independence
life, taking each other
by Lenin under the name of
for granted and with
Latvia), had been governed
little hostility among the
for centuries by Germans,
grown-ups, not so
dating back to the invasion of
among the young, who
that province by Teutonic
sometimes, but not too
knights in the Middle Ages.
frequently, clashed,
This German influence
There were few rich
left a permanent mark upon
but the terrible poverty
the province. The roads were
that I observed in other
better, the cities better
towns among the Jewish
planned and paved) than
population was, except
those of the neighbouring
for a few cases, also
Lithuania.
absent. But with no
The German language
industry, there was no
was more widespread too, so
outlet for the young
that my first introduction to
boys and girls, who
a secular alphabet was the
Left to right, sister Rochel, mother Yenta,
when they grew up left
gothic German, and I could
brother Israel, father Abraham Isaac, sister Emma, c. 1910
for the bigger towns.
read German before I learned
The more venturesome
to read Russian. The Jews of
Kurland were also more privileged in that, while they could but less well-to-do left also for America and England.
reside and move freely in Lithuania and White Russia, the
Thursday, being fair day, when the peasants came to town
Jews of Lithuania could not live in Kurland. Hence the to sell their produce and buy their requirements, stood out
“superior” attitude ascribed to the Kurland Jews by the as different from all the days of the week. Most Jews were
Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks, and much resented by the latter. in the streets earlier than usual and there was generally more
However, to return to Illuxt. It was situate amid pleasant bustle and noise. The whole market place was occupied by
natural surroundings. Forests girdled the town all round, the four-wheel carts with shaggy ponies, and drunk peasants
and a gently flowing river encircled it on two sides. I don’t were seen loitering in the streets. Towards the afternoon,
know the name of the river, or whether it even had a name. when the peasants left for home, the town resumed its normal
But it was for us children an endless source of delight and a quietude and here and there a shopkeeper was heard
wonderful outlet for our animal spirits during the summer discussing with his neighbour the happenings of the day,
months. I will return to this river at a later stage.
and whether he had a “good day” or otherwise.
I
I remember, too, when I was taken to cheder for the first
time. This was a big event in the life of a Jewish male child
(girls did not go to cheder). He was wrapped in a big talith
and the rebbe spread out before him a big sheet of paper
with Aleph-Beth printed in very heavy type. As the aleph
and the beth was pointed out, small copper coins were
dropped on the paper by his father and he was told that an
angel was dropping it to him as a present. In my own case
my mother brought me, without a talith, but the kopecks
were there nonetheless. Of my life at cheder at that period I
remember very little except for one occasion.
Typical cheder scene in the 1880s
On a Sabbath afternoon (we did not attend on Sabbath
morning) while waiting in the yard to be admitted —the
rebbe always took a nap on that afternoon—we children
indulged in a game resembling “ring-a-roses”. We were all
called in and a fierce whipping with a strap was administered
to teach us not to be naughty. Shortly afterwards we moved
to another town, this time in Lithuania. It was a much bigger
town than Illuxt, which meant that I had to walk a much
longer distance to cheder. We were living on the outskirts
of the town in a wholly non-Jewish neighbourhood. It was
there that I first encountered hostility from non-Jewish
children, who used to waylay me on my way to cheder.
I had to pass a church—from whose yard, two boys,
approximately my age, used to dart out, chase me and beat
me up, if they caught me. I told my, older brother Abe about
it and the problem of cheder-going consistent with security
was solved. He lifted the aggressors into the air and knocked
their heads together for a time—apparently sufficiently long
to leave an indelible impression, for I was never again
bothered by them.
The contrast between living conditions in Kurland and
Lithuania was strikingly apparent, even to the observation
of one of my age, though I did not appraise it in these terms.
I remember distinctly that the bread was much blacker, and
that the rebbe’s wife would once a week pile a load of wet
washing on her shoulders and go down to the lake, which
was frozen hard, and wash it there. To this day, when I think
of it, I am amazed at the endurance of that woman.
My brother Israel was born there, and I brought boys of
the cheder to recite certain psalms. This was the custom at
houses where there was a confinement. In return for their
efforts, they were regaled with cooked broad beans. The
reciting of the psalms was in addition to printed text of
psalms being hung on the walls.
We lived there for a year or slightly more, and upon my
father leaving for South Africa, we returned to Illuxt. The
reason why my father chose South Africa, instead of the
more common destination for emigrants, America, is worth
recording. A nephew of my father (Leopold Snider’s elder
brother) happened to visit us, and he told a tale of “a new
land called Africa” where black people live. They had lots
of bricks made of gold, and furniture of gold; and when
offered things such as scarves, knives or beads, they gave
gold bricks in return. I sat fascinated listening to the story. I
had a very confused idea of the romance and adventure
awaiting people going to the new land.
Illuxt was known as a Chasidic townlet. The Chasidim
were a sect that, besides being pious at the name denotes,
were also regarded, not without justification, as heavy
drinkers— by Jewish standards, of course. They had the
habit of sending for a bottle of brandy on the slightest pretext,
including yahrzeit. The rejoicing of the Torah provided a
golden opportunity, and those who witnessed the dancing
during the week of Succoth can never forget it. There were
long tables crudely but sturdily made from heavy timber.
These were quickly cleared and a pair of elderly Jews
holding their coat-tails in their hands danced in truly graceful
rhythm, sometimes chanting plaintive tunes while the others
clapped their hands in chorus. Others, again, in another part
of the shul were seen dancing in pairs, their right hands on
each other’s shoulders, facing one another with their eyes
half-closed, turning round and round until half-exhausted.
Then they would sit down to have “another drop”! Purim,
too, was an occasion for true rejoicing for us children.
Noisy festivities
The Fast of Esther did not apply to us, so our part was
the happy though turbulent one of creating as much noise
as possible whenever the name of Haman was mentioned
during the reading of the Megillah. We let loose a great
quantity of rattles, which sent up a roar that drowned the
voice of the reader. The greater the noise, the greater our
delight and not infrequently the rattles were supplemented
by the stamping of our feet. The older ones, though they
themselves did not participate, for once indulged in our
merry-making with an benevolent tolerance.
There was also the custom of sending presents to friends.
This took the form among the older children of sending,
sweets and cakes, and the wealthier grown-ups took the
opportunity of sending things to the poor under the guise of
“presents” for Purim. Another custom was that some poor
men, who had fairly good voices, used to visit the homes in
the fashion of strolling players. Dressed up in tinsel crowns,
with gilded wooden swords dangling at their sides, they used
to walk from house to house and sing ditties relating to the
story of Esther, for which they received a few kopeks.
Looking at these shows in retrospect, I can see it now as
a form of ill-concealed begging. The tinsel, the tawdry
garments, the singing of doggerel, would all have presented
a depressing spectacle to a modern person—fortunately there
were no “moderns” to criticise.
● This is an edited extract from the memoirs of
Hyman Michael Jacobson (?1886 - 1975), written for his
children in 1950, entitled My Early Days.
BOOK REVIEWS
What’s in a GermanJewish surname?
NSPIRED by the dictionaries of surnames by Alexander
Beider, Berlin-based Lars Menk has produced a similar
book for German Jewry which took him 10 years to
produce and, according to its comprehensive bibliography,
he used more than 300 separate reference sources during its
compilation. A weighty tome indeed, the book is in hard
cover and measures 8½ by 11 inches.
Those who have also used Beider’s work will, I consider,
notice a significant improvement in this one. Where Beider’s
book shows districts where a surname
appears, Menk gives the actual town
name and time period involved.
Avotaynu asked Beider to review
Menk’s book when it was first
published and the former pronounced
it to be a valuable contribution to
German-Jewish history. “The results of
(Menk’s) efforts are excellent.
The quality of (the) book is much
better than any other book written on Jewish names in
Central and Western Europe. It is done in exactly the same
manner I would have compiled it myself.”
Menk has carefully identified the first occurrences of
Jewish family names in the various villages and small towns
where most Jews lived prior to mass emigration from
Germany during the mid-19th century.
This feature provides valuable clues to an ancestral place
of residence, which those of us researching today are already
finding to be invaluable since, paradoxically, Jews whose
families came from Germany, the country known as the
paragon of efficient record-keeping, often have more trouble
locating an ancestral home than do Jews with roots further
east in Europe.
Indeed, typical British or American immigration
manifests and naturalisation applications of the period
simply record areas such as Germany, Bavaria or Alsace
for place of birth.
Menk’s dictionary identifies many more than 13,000
German-Jewish surnames from the area that comprised the
German Empire in 1871 excluding the Alsace and Lorraine
territories—the area some readers of this review will know
better as pre-World War I Germany. When we tried using it
for searches at the German SIG meeting in early March, it
came up trumps in most cases!
For the purists, the more precise geography covered
includes the territories which belonged to the former Federal
Republic of Germany, plus the former Prussian territories
east of the Rivers Oder and Neisse which today belong to
Poland, Russia and Lithuania, such as Neumark, Pomerania,
Silesia, Posen province, West Prussia, and East Prussia.
I
Coverage extends from Baden-Wuerttemburg in the south
to Schleswig-Holstein in the north, and from Westfalen in
the west to East Prussia in the east.
Although the author provides the etymology and variants
of each name, the book does not give individuals’ first names,
nor does it contain a transcription of any naturalisation or
name adoption list, although the sources for these exist.
A separate chapter usefully provides the Jewish population
in many towns in the 19th century, and a 500 kilobyte list of
all the surnames covered in the book can be downloaded
using Acrobat Reader from the Avotaynu.com website.
This book has rapidly become one of my most frequently
recommended reference sources in our library, and
I commend it to you.
JEANETTE ROSENBERG
CONVENOR JGSGB GERMAN SIG
A Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames, Lars Menk Avotaynu
Inc. USA, 2005, 824 p. ISBN 1-886223-20-3, $89 plus p&p.
The publisher’s website is www. avotaynu.com and includes
pages from the book and its table of contents.
Hebrew abbreviations
THIS publication from the Jewish Museum in Prague
is a most welcome source book for anybody doing
research into family history and needing to read
tombstones, official documents and other Hebrew texts.
Though based on the Hebrew inscriptions on
textiles (Ark curtains, Torah covers, etc.) in the
museum collection, there are long lists of Hebrew
abbreviations commonly used in many historic
artefacts. The meaning of the abbreviation is given
in Hebrew, Czech and English and there are
fascinating articles on the subject in Czech and
English, with many full colour illustrations.
ANDREW GOLDSTEIN
Hebrejské zkratky: Hebrew Abbreviations, Iveta
Cermanová and Michaela Scheibová, pub. Jewish
Museum in Prague, 2005, 167 p. ISBN 80-86889-122. ¤15, p. and p. ¤7. Available directly from the
museum, U Stare školy 1,110, 1 Prague, Czech
Republic. E-mail: office@jewishmuseum.cz.
French families
THIS excellent little guide provides a
bird’s-eye view of the highlights of Jewish
genealogical research in France. The
author Laurence Abensur-Hazan was
organiser of the 1997 International
Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Paris
and is the publisher of the journal Etsi.
Much of French Jewry originated in Alsace-Lorraine with
a large Sephardi element coming from North Africa. All
were affected after France fell to the Germans in World War
II. The book starts with an overview of Jewish marriages
and divorces, circumcisions, burials, and deportations,
followed by a description of general French records where
Jews, along with the rest of the population, are to be found.
The author then comes to the specifically Jewish sources,
such as the Consistoire (the approximate French equivalent
of the Chief Rabbinate’s office); archives of the
Alliance Israelite Universelle which established schools in
the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere, and kept detailed lists
of its pupils; the Archives nationales; the Jewish press;
and Sephardi records, some of which are now to be found
in Israel, and which are of general relevance not only
to the French.
Lists of further reading and useful address are provided.
The book is nicely laid out and there are some interesting
illustrations and marginal notes giving snippets of
information and helpful tips. Anyone embarking on French
research will find it an invaluable introduction.
LYDIA COLLINS
Rechercher ses ancêtres juifs, Laurence Abensur-Hazan,
Editions Autrement, 77 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, 75011
Paris, 80p, 2006. ISBN 2-747-0790-X. ¤10.
Fact or fiction?
ONE of our members, Hilary Rudick,
has written a novel which makes spellbinding reading. This is particularly true
about the central part of the book, which
plots the course of the major illness that
besets the family.
The author is not, however, a
seasoned writer, and this shows through with constant
grammatical and typographical errors and linguistic
inaccuracies. I can only assume that this book is selfpublished, and has not been through a rigorous editorial
process. There is often a naivety of style, which contrasts
with the central section referred to above.
A further problem is the fact that it claims, on the one
hand, to be a novel and completely fictitious: “This is
presented as a work of fiction and any resemblance to
persons living or not is purely coincidental” but, on the other
hand, it reads as a biographical and genealogical history.
Since the books tracks a family and its descendants from
Lithuania to South Africa and then to London, and has a
photograph of the patriarch and matriarch of the family on
the back cover, I treated it as based on fact. Frankly, there
was no other way to read it.
Having mentioned the faults, one must remember that a
good story is an entertainment—and in this realm Hilary
Rudick excels. Few will fail to enjoy or, indeed, be swept
along by her tale. While I struggled as a reviewer, my wife
could not put it down and thoroughly enjoyed it. In summary,
if you are not reviewing the book it is a good read.
CYRIL FOX
Linking the Threads, a tribute to a Litvak tailor, Hilary Rudick,
White River Books, 312p, 2005. ISBN 1-4196-0998-X.
A short guide to deciphering Hebrew
A decade ago, Rabbi Dr Bernard Susser produced
a basic, 12-page booklet entitled How to read and
record a Jewish tombstone. Although this was
helpful and useful for basic Hebrew strugglers at
that time, an update has now been produced which
covers a wider field.
This latest guide is meant to assist not only
non-Jewish researchers, but also Jewish folk whose
Hebrew knowledge has lapsed over the years. It
is a well-produced and concise book which will
help readers understand about Jewish cemetery
practices, religious customs and various documents. This is
a “need-to-own” book for cemetery trekkers.
Explained in detail are the spelling, pronunciation and
transliterations of Hebrew names, together with examples
of birth, marriage, death, circumcision and wedding
certificates. Other types of document are shown and
explained, such as divorce, Hebrew dates and their
conversions into years of the Gregorian calendar and most
importantly, the reading of inscriptions.
Photographs and sketches illustrate the text. I found the
book contained easily absorbed information. The guide
closes with the customary memorial prayer,
Kaddish, its pronunciation and translation.
RAYMOND MONTANJEES
Jewish Ancestors? A Guide to Reading Hebrew
Inscriptions and Documents, Rosemary Wenzerul,
JGSGB, 2005, 56p, ISBN 0 953 7669 6 9, £4.50 +
50p postage and packing (UK). Available from
JGSGB Publications, PO Box 180, St. Albans,
Herts, AL2 3WH and may also be purchased by
Paypal via our website.
HAVE YOU CHECKED OUT
THE SOCIETY’S ONLINE
BOOKSHOP RECENTLY?
Pay a visit to www.jgsgb.org.uk/shopping.shtml
and see what useful little gem you may pick up
which will make your genealogical research
just that little bit easier!
Abstracts
by Lydia Collins and Harriet Hodes
FRANCE
Etsi, Vol 8 No. 31, dec 2005
Les noms de famille juifs à Rhodes analyses the surnames of 1,167
Jewish burials, 1843-1965, listed on Rhodes Jewish Museum’s
website www.rhodesjewishmuseum.org. The East in Rome describes
Tuscan consular records from Egypt and Aleppo now in the archives
of the Italian Department of Foreign Affairs in Rome with a partial list
of surnames.
Israélites assassinés à Tetouan et dans les environs entre 1866 et
1880 lists 16 people killed 1866-1880 with notes on their widows
and children.
GenAmi No. 34, dec 2005
Une enquête passionnante à Londres: Families Joseph et Cohen.
Samuel and Aron Joseph came to London from Amsterdam and were
founders of the Jews’ Free School.
Le dernier ministre du culte d’Einville: Leib Wolfovitch Sandalowski
traces the family of the last Jewish minister in Einville whose daughter
Esther Leah (b. 1879) was the wife of Simon Harris of Glasgow.
Le Grand rabbin Jacob Kaplan (1895-1994) has a chart of his family.
Revue du Cercle de Généalogie Juive, No. 82, avril-juin 2005
Les Allatini is the first part of an account of the Allatini family from
Salonika.
Families Spire et Spire Levy de Metz searches for the link between
Spire and Levy in 17th- century Metz.
Archives municipales de Tours (Indre-et-Loire) lists 28 Jewish names
in the 1850 census of Tours from the city’s archives.
Revue du Cercle de Généalogie Juive, No. 83, juillet-sept 2005
La famille de Charles Valentin Morhange, dit Alkan traces the ancestry
of the French pianist and composer Charles Valentin Alkan.
Les families Lahnstein et Bernkastel gives information from the Metz
archives and the Koblenz Memorbuch.
Juifs français du Brésil identifies 16 Jews in Pernambouc (Brazil) in
1871 originally from Alsace-Lorraine.
Jacques Taieb reviews Le Livre d’Or des Israélites Algeriens by M J M.
Haddey on Jewish merchants in Algeria, originally published in 1871
and reprinted 2005 by the CGJ.
GREAT BRITAIN
Genealogists’ Magazine Vol 28 No. 9, March 2006
NETHERLANDS
Misjpoge
(2005)
19e jaargang /2006-1 and the Index for jaargang 18
Joodse leerlingen op een openbare school in Amsterdam (7) is a
continuation of the study of Jewish pupils in 1823.
Joodse marskramers en veehandelaars describes the life of Jewish
peddlers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
SWITZERLAND and HAMBURG
Maajan- die Quelle No. 78 March 2006
Der Judenfriedhof von Ihringen in Baden-Wuerttemberg lists all the
burials in this cemetery from the mid-19th century to the 1930s.
Juedische Vergangenheit in der franzoesischen Provence details
Jewish places of interest in Provence.
Die Vorfahren der Elisabeth Goldschmidt aus Kassel und Mannheim
is the final part about the author’s Jewish grandmother.
Zur Geschichte der Hamburger Familie Drucker is the last part of the
history of the Drucker family.
UNITED STATES
Avotaynu Vol XXI, No. 4, Winter 2005
International Institute for Jewish Genealogy opens its doors at the
Jewish National and Hebrew University Library in Jerusalem. It also
houses the Paul Jacobi Center for Jewish Genealogy.
Israel Genealogy Society posts databases on its website which have
been translated from Hebrew, at www.isragen.org.il.
Cemetery Gateposts: a neglected resource, stresses the importance
of a knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish names.
Evelyne reclaims her identity. Gary Mokotoff relates his research in
helping Evelyne, who was a “hidden child”, to find her relatives and
to reclaim her Jewish identity.
Finding a Holocaust survivor after 63 years is a moving story of family
members reunited.
Jews of Valasske Mezirici in Moravia, Czech Republic: the author has
been researching there for 20 years.
ILLINOIS
Morasha Vol XXI, No. 4, Winter 2005
Researching Irish Jewish roots provides some useful information and
several websites.
NEW YORK
Dorot Vol 27, No 2, Winter 2005-2006
The Redgraves and Connected Families illustrates how widespread
and influential this theatrical family have become in six generations.
Online News includes helpful hints for searching burial societies in
the New York Metro area; updated free New York City death database
which includes 1943-1945 and Historic Brooklyn Photos, 1893-1990.
Ancestors Issue 43, March 2006
WASHINGTON
A Grave Matter by Rosemary Wenzerul explains how to find Jewish
burials in the London area.
Mishpacha Vol 25, No.1, Winter 2006
ISRAEL
Sharsheret Hadorot Vol 20 no. 1, February 2006
New material at www.Jewishdata.com has tombstone images from
Jewish cemeteries in New York State; and Frankfurt, Germany.
New York City Census Update on the Morse One step site:
www.stevemorse.org/nyc/nyc.php.
The Rossi, De Rossi Family , also known as Min Ha’adumim, who went
from Jerusalem to Rome after the destruction of the Temple, and more
recently to Israel.
Ancestry.com now has an every name index for the 1920 census.
Casa Shalom—The Institute for Marrano-Anusim Studies in Israel lists
its holdings and has a website www.casa-shalom.com.
Military information at www.abmc.gov/home.php.
Family Names in Israel from the year 700 CE.
South African Centre for Jewish Migration and Genealogy Studies in
Cape Town primarily used to research the estimated 15,000 families
who migrated to South Africa in 1850-1950. Can be accessed at
http://chrysalis.its.uct.ac.za/CGI/CGI_ROOTWEB.EXE.
Arolsen files as a research source is the International Tracing Service
(ITS) and provides useful information. www.english.its-arolsen.org.
Italian Genealogy Group has added a New York City Bride’s Index
1891-1937 to its site at www.Italiangen.org/databaselist.stm.
Mishpacha Vol 25, No. 2, Spring 2006
Searching the 1929 Polish Business Directory, www.kalter.org.
Montreal directories online 1842-1940.
Myfamily.com includes Canadian 1911 census and more.
On-line Bremen lists expanded 1920-1934 at www.schiffslisten.de/
index_en.html.
Major additions to JRI-Poland Database lists 67 more towns.

shemot - jgsgb

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