Archive for the ‘jewish’ Category
It would be naive to expect family history research in Russia, and many other places within the former Soviet Union, to follow the comparatively smooth path that it can take in most of the English-speaking world and in many countries in Western Europe. Even if the First World War, the ensuing Civil War and the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia) are put to one side, millions were arrested, killed, internally deported, or incarcerated in the Gulag. For a great many others, the social revolution provided for a new, albeit still relative freedom of movement, and travel for education, employment and political career, often across great distances and what are today’s international borders, became commonplace.
The NKVD, a precursor of the KGB, disappeared many tens of thousands of Soviet citizens at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. The victims were drawn in from all across the USSR and from all sections of society, from the poorest to the elite, from the apolitical to the committed Stalinist, and from the capital itself to the remotest corners of the Soviet empire. The photographer and collector of Soviet era visual art David King gathered mugshots of some 166 of these victims for publication in a volume called Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (Francis Boutle, 2003). Apparently, King obtained the photographs from the NKVD’s interrogation files held by Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which documents the Soviet repressions across Russia and campaigns for official rehabilitation of the victims. It publishes regional and local memorial books and lists of the executed.
Among the haunting photographs in King’s selection are the following:
Fedor Andreevich Baikov – peasant, born 1861 in Moscow, executed 20 October 1930 on charges of anti-Soviet agitation
Pyotr Petrovich Dragachevatz (Dragačevac) – lithographer, born 1886 somewhere in what was later Yugoslavia, executed 19 April 1939 on charges of anti-Soviet espionage
Stefan Leonovich Geltman – collective farm technical manager, born 1886 in Zamość, Poland, executed 20 September 1937
Wolf Shmulievich Genpelman – Jewish apprentice locksmith, born 1914 in Dombrovitsy, near Rivne (Rovno), Volhynia, Ukraine, executed 1 November 1940 on charges of being counter-revolutionary
Yelena Ignatievna Oshmyago – railway guard, born 1911 in Sprugi, Belarus, executed 10 October 1939 on charges of railway sabotage
Dionis Petushkov – Russian Orthodox monk, born 1863 in Tver’, Russia, executed June 1931 on charges of anti-Soviet activities
Ruzya Iosifovna Todorskaya – technician, born 1900 in Łódź, Poland, executed 9 October 1937 as a Trotskyist
The Temporary Regulations of May 1882 required Jews within the Pale of Settlement to settle only in towns and cities. In Bessarabia, which was situated within the Pale, some towns were demoted to the status of village to debar Jews from residence. Town and city limits were also redefined to reduce the immediately surrounding area available to Jews. In addition, Jews were forbidden to reside in an international border strip 50 versts (about 53 km) wide; as Bessarabia was a border province, this meant that a significant area of land along the Russian border with Romania was also out of bounds. Rights of residence for Jews were therefore strictly delimited in Bessarabia to around 40 larger settlements.
And of course they were subject to all the other civil and political disabilities imposed upon the Jews throughout Russia.
They were subject to two special taxes: the box tax (collected on kosher meat, at slaughter and sale) and the candle tax (on candles lit in synagogues). The community as a whole was made to make up the deficit of a Jewish tax defaulter.
Quotas (of from 2% to 10% of intake) controlled the admittance of Jews to high schools and universities, while other higher education institutes elsewhere in the empire (such as the Moscow Medical Academy and the Veterinary Institute in Kharkiv) were completely closed. Jewish school teachers were forbidden from teaching Russian to their pupils.
Jews could not enter government service, with the sole exception of doctors. They were usually prohibited from serving as elected representatives of zemstvo or town assemblies or artisan boards, or were restricted by quotas, as in the case of aldermen and guilds.
Jews could not become officers in the Russian army but were required to undertake military service; for various reasons, a higher proportion of the Jewish population was enlisted. A collective punishment was exacted, so that a Jewish family as a whole was held responsible for draft-dodgers in its midst, to the tune of a 300 ruble fine.
And in Bessarabia, as elsewhere in Russia, the Jews were resented for their acumen and their success in the remaining fields left open to them: as landowners’ preferred tenant farmers, as vine growers and inn keepers, as orchard men and tobacco growers, as middlemen and agents, as traders and exporters, and as money-lenders. What is interesting but probably not at all unusual is that the anti-Semitic feelings which led to the April 1903 pogroms in the Bessarabian capital Kishinev definitely appear to have been orchestrated and encouraged by the provincial government and police, and stoked by local media agitation, rather than being a spontaneous outburst of animosity from the townspeople. 42 Jews were killed, countless Jewish properties damaged and a community temporarily divided.
The Third Partition of Poland took place in 1795 and the partitioning powers of Austria, Prussia and Russia embarked on a process of registration of the inhabitants of the formerly independent country. This affected all sections of society – the Polish gentry (szlachta), town dwellers, Roman Catholic and other clergy, and the peasantry – and was implemented as part of the process of social control and political subjugation. Jews, who had enjoyed some autonomy under the old Polish state, now had to register with the civil authorities, a process which required a surname. Where surnames were not already in use – as was often the case – civil servants would assign a name to a family as part of the registration process.
Norman Davies writes in his Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present (Oxford University Press, 2001) of how the young ETA Hoffmann, the German writer and musician, approached the momentous task of giving surnames to a people. He was posted and worked as a civil servant at Poznań (Posen), Płock and finally Warsaw.
“He glares at a client in deathly silence, and then shouts out the first word which comes to mind. This word, which enters into the Register, becomes the client’s official surname. At the end, Hoffmann says when the certificate is to be collected, and calls for the next customer.”
As described, the process, even when not demeaning, was completely arbitrary and often simply a matter of caprice:
“Before dinner, or on an empty stomach, he issues serious or melancholy surnames, after dinner more amusing ones.”
Davies relates how apparently one Friday Hoffmann gave Jewish registrants the names of fish; on Monday the names of flowers. On other days, everyone was given the names of birds, or church-related names. Once, hung-over following a drinking bout with a Prussian army officer, Jews coming to Hoffmann’s office were given military names such as Festung, Fojer, Pistolet, Szyspulver, Trommel, Trompeter and Harmata.
Even if some of these stories are apocryphal, the attitude of the partitioning authorities to their new Jewish subjects is clear. Davies’ account also flags the point that Jewish family historians should not necessarily read too much into the surnames on their family tree.
Hungary became an equal partner with Austria in the Dual Monarchy following the 1867 Ausgleich, or compromise. Ironically, Hungary, which had been struggling for national self-determination and parity of recognition, then pursued policies which, in trying to consolidate its own nation state, failed to recognise properly the rights of the national minorities within its borders.
A policy of magyarisation was pursued vigorously, with view to welding all regions and peoples into a single nation state, as had been achieved in, for example, France. However, unlike France, Hungary contained within its border almost entire nations, such as the Croat and Slovak, and very significant populations of, for example, Romanians and Serbs living in regions very sparsely populated by Hungarians. The magyarisation project was therefore a doomed enterprise and its measures – for instance, to make Hungarian the exclusive official language of state and the language of instruction in schools, with church services to be held and parish registers kept in Hungarian – quickly aroused resentment and opposition.
The pressure upon non-Magyar Hungarian subjects to assimilate included pressure to change patently non-Hungarian or insufficiently Hungarian surnames. The legal process of change of name was simplified to the submitting of a petition. The fee was reduced from 5 forint to 50 krajcár (half a forint), meaning that poverty could not be pleaded as a good reason to retain one’s true name. These cheap “shilling names” were adopted by many among the professional and business classes. Robert Seton-Walsh, writing in his Racial Problems In Hungary of 1908, states that the “demoralising custom” of change of name “has played havoc with the family history of the Hungarian middle classes; and few countries will supply such a puzzle to the genealogist of the twenty-second century”.
Among the examples he gives:
the Oriental scholar Hermann Bamberger taking the name Ármin Vámbéry; the banker Eierstock taking the name Tőkőlyi; the historian Frankl taking the name Vilmos Fraknói; the ethnologist Hundsdorfer taking the name János Hunfalvy; the painter Lieb taking the name Mihály Munkácsy; the banker Löwenmuth taking the name Báthori; the poet Petrović taking the name Sándor Petőfi; the literary critic Franz Schedel taking the name Ferenc Toldy; and the politician Weinberger taking the name Soma Visontai.
The campaign intensified and was particularly directed at those in official positions, such as local authority civil servants, school teachers, railway employees and post office staff, with a clear implication that those not complying could at the very least not expect promotion within the service. Seton-Walsh also cites a document issued by the Royal Inspector of Schools showing exemplary official changes of name among teachers in Bihar county in 1881, designed to encourage colleagues to follow suit:
August Bruckenthal of Haimagi taking the name Bihari John Modora of Olosig (known as Érolaszi in Hungarian) taking the name Tinodi Nicholas Radovich of Cuzap (Középes in Hungarian) taking the name Keti
Urban German and Jewish Hungarians – who of course were not pushing for their own independent nation state as the Croats and Slovaks were – assimilated more readily than the rural populations of Romanians and Slavs and those family historians with German and Jewish roots from Hungary should be alert to the possibility of a change of name in the nineteenth century whenever research results are not achieved under the expected family name. However, anyone with ancestors from Hungary should be mindful of the change of name campaigns and their possible impact upon their family history research.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research across Ukraine, including:
- officially recognised Displaced Persons who were resettled from Europe after World War Two
- former members of the Galizien (Halychyna) Division and Ukrainian National Army, many of whom were settled in Britain after the end of WW2
- western Ukrainian (Galician) Greek Catholic, Lemko, Boyko, Hutsul and Roman Catholic (latynnyky) emigrants to North America, especially the waves of Canadian immigrants from 1891 to 1914 and from 1920 to 1939
- families with roots in Kyiv and in Left-Bank Ukraine
- German ancestors from Black Sea, Gluckstal, northern Bukovina, Volhynia etc
- Hungarian families from Transcarpathian Ruthenia (part of Czechoslovakia between the Wars) now Zakarpats’ka oblast’
- Jewish communities from across Ukraine including Galicia, Podolia and Volhynia
- Polish families from western Ukraine (Małopolska Wschodnia: the former województwo lwowskie, stanisławowkie, and tarnopolskie)
For an opinion or estimate of costs for research in any area of Ukraine or any speciality, please feel free to contact us.
Across much of Central and Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the middle class was small. The landed and ruling elite was separated from the peasantry and the labouring classes in the towns by a great gulf, rather than there being a sizeable middle class in to which both upper and lower echelons gradually shaded by imperceptible degrees. Of course, during the course of the long 19th Century, this traditional feudal structure changed with industrialisation and increased social mobility, and a recognisable and increasingly influential bourgeoisie began to emerge. What is striking about the traditional Eastern European society, however, was that the middle class was composed disproportionately of people regarded by both the landowners and the peasantry as non-indigenous, even if their families had lived in the vicinity for generations.
Karl Marx described how these people in the middle – the lawyers, bankers, moneylenders, tax collectors, merchants, traders, innkeepers, shopkeepers and so on – occupying the Lücken-Positionen, the gap in between, were overwhelmingly “non-indigenous” (Ivan T Berend, Decades of Crisis, University of California Press, 2001). Depending upon region, these roles might be filled by Armenians, Germans, Greeks or Jews. They were vulnerable for many reasons. They were regarded with distaste by the landowners and with resentment by the peasantry, although or because they were needed by both alike. Their religion usually marked them out as different and foreign. In the countryside they might live in isolation and even in the towns their communities were often small and occupied distinct quarters. This vulnerability became more pronounced at a time of national awakening (or re-awakening, as the case might be) and whenever assertive nationalism required an adversary it was likely to be turned against the perceived alien in the midst. Similarly, class consciousness was also likely to be directed against the moneyed middleman to whom both the upper and lower class turned in times of need.
These communities are one of the fascinating features of Eastern Europe up to the First World War. This is why the family historian may find Greek ancestors in Romania or Ukraine, and German and Jewish ancestors across the entire eastern half of the European continent and European Russia. Many towns, or quarters of towns, became German or Jewish settlements apart, islands in a sea of native peasantry. In such places, German often became the lingua franca of the town (certainly so in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Baltic gubernia of Imperial Russian) and would be learnt and spoken by all other elements in civic society, such as the Poles or Latvians in their respective lands.
Some of the people in the middle, such as the Armenian community in Poland, assimilated and only relicts remain. Elsewhere, for the reasons indicated above, the German and Jewish middle classes were subject to distrust, victimisation, deportation and worse over the course of the 20th Century and this distinctive element of Eastern European society has all but disappeared.
Up to six million civilians are thought to have been displaced within the Russian Empire between 1914 and 1917. Up to 30% of the inhabitants of Russian cities in wartime were refugees: places like Ekaterinoslav, Kharkiv, Kiev, Nizhny Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov and Samara, received tens of thousands of displaced persons. Refugees flooded into central, black earth and Volga basin gubernia, while many others crossed the Urals into Siberia, or found themselves deposited in Tashkent or elsewhere in Central Asia.
There were three broad types of refugee.
Firstly, there were refugees who fled the advancing German army as it threatened and occupied the Russian territory on which they lived.
Secondly, the Russian military authorities evacuated the population in the path of advancing German forces and as the Russian army was forced to retreat, usually operating a scorched earth policy to prevent resources (manpower, settlements, farms, crops) falling into enemy hands and transporting livestock and machinery behind their own lines to assist the war effort. This pattern also applied to Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, which the Russian army occupied in 1914 but was then forced to withdraw from: Austrian subjects either fled or were evacuated to the Russian interior.
Given the rapid advance of the Germans through the lands of what are today Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, these first two types of refugee merge one into the other: if the population did not flee the Prussian military machine, they were evacuated by the Russians. Neither type can be said to have migrated voluntarily; both were displaced in response to irresistible forces. Nearly all found themselves with limited or no means of support by the time they arrived at their destinations in Russia.
As men of fighting age had often been conscripted into the Russian army already, the refugees of these two types were overwhelmingly the women, children and elderly.
The third type of refugee formed a tiny minority. This was the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie who were able to escape to the Russian interior in a more pre-planned way, making their own private transport arrangements and reaching the relative safety and comfort of a major city such as Moscow or St Petersburg. Even those who started out with money might find themselves in reduced circumstances as the war wore on for years without resolution.
Given their origin, most of the refugees were non-Russian. they were, for example, Jews (never trusted by the Russian army command), Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians (not to mention German subjects of Russia, who were deported as soon as possible to the interior, often to Siberia or Central Asia, for reasons of national security). Where possible, the different peoples tended to form their own refugee communities in Russia and this was one of the various factors which crystallised national consciousness and precipitated demands for independence in their homelands in the wake of the War.
In all likelihood, any genealogist whose family history lies in the borderlands of the Russian Empire either occupied by the German army or regarded as a military zone by the Russian army during the years 1914 to 1917 is likely to find their family history research disrupted. Black holes in the documentary evidence are probable; family timelines will appear obscure. Births, marriages and deaths may not have taken place in the expected village or town of origin but somewhere along the long route that the refugees travelled into Russia, or at one or more of the places at which they were temporarily stationed or settled. In conditions of wartime poverty, hunger and disease, untold numbers of refugees died great distances from home and the family historian may never be able to identify when or where such deaths took place and were registered (if, indeed, they were registered at all). Instead, you will find no trace of a death which you know must have taken place, or of the birth or baptism of a child you know to have been born, in these years. The war was also a period of family rupture: even when a nuclear family unit did not become separated during the chaos, the more extended family is likely to have become dispersed to different locations and there cannot have been many families where one or men of fighting age were not conscripted and separated from the families for years.
So this is one of the frequent challenges of Eastern European family history research. You cannot apply without reservation what you know from your experience of undertaking genealogical research in Australia, or Canada, or New Zealand, or UK, or USA. You should expect discontinuities in the family timeline and gaps in the surviving documentary record. You may never know where key family members were at certain dates. But the challenges are one of the many reasons why family history research in Eastern Europe is so interesting and rewarding, as each breakthrough does not come with the relative ease and certainty with which you may be accustomed from undertaking your research in the English-speaking world.
The emancipation of the peasantry and the reform and re-distribution of land in Central and Eastern Europe during the course of the 19th and early 20th century had profound consequences for social mobility. Ironically, however, the peasantry seldom enjoyed great benefits. Freedom from serfdom meant freedom to be an underpaid and often under-employed agricultural labourer, or a subsistence smallholder of minimal land and assets, or a dislocated casual labourer in city factories.
Rather, the social revolution in the countryside created movement between the upper and middle classes. The topmost echelon of Hungarian society, the aristocratic and noble landowners such as the Bánffy, Esterházy, Jósika, Kemény, Somssich, Teleki and Wesselényi families, possessed vast estates and political power, which they retained well into the 20th century. However, beneath them was a broad layer of lesser nobility and gentry which did not fare so well once it lost its free peasant labour and exemption from taxation. They were not proficient in land or financial management. As they started to fail, their former estate managers and upwardly mobile bankers, industrialists and merchants purchased their great houses and lands. 19th century fiction abounds with scenarios in which the two previously distinct social classes inter-marry: the impoverished aristocrat marries into the new wealth of the family of a financier or manufacturer, while the latter marries into the name and prestige of the aristocrat. More frequently, of course, the dispossessed gentry simply became déclassé and found employment in the civil service, the military and the judiciary. In this way, the embourgeoisement of the former landed gentry still left them in positions of influence.
Through estate purchase and intermarriage, the most successful nouveau riche entrepreneurs and merchants assimilated into the upper strata of Hungarian society. Noble titles could also be bought. The industrialist Manfréd Weiss (1857-1922), became Baron Csepeli Weiss, Csepel being the island in the Danube on the south side of Budapest on which his iron and steel factory and munitions works were located. The sugar manufacturer Sándor Deutsch (1852-1913) became Baron Hatvany-Deutsch, the town of Hatvan 60 km east of Budapest being the site of his sugar factory.
Of course, as the 20th century wore on, further social upheaval, both in wartime and under Communism, brought vast change to both the upper and middle classes in Hungary. When undertaking family history research, it is important to remember that social mobility affects all classes and that movement can be up or down or both at different times in the history of any one family. It is also, of course, one of the destabilising factors which leads to migration within a country or emigration abroad.
The writer Bruno Schulz is not much read in the English-speaking world nowadays, nor perhaps anywhere outside Poland and Israel. You can find pretty much his entire fictional output in a single volume English translation by Celina Wieniewska.
Schulz was the small-town Jewish boy who never really made good, a kind of obscure provincial Franz Kafka with a runaway mind veering towards the fantastic. He came from a modest and alternately successful and failing middle class background. His father Jakub Schulz was a clothier and later a bankrupt; his mother Henrietta or Hendel nee Kuhmärker took over the family business. The family appears in the JewishGen Ukraine Database, the commonplace nondescript name Schulz drawing no attention to itself, just one more lost Jewish name among many. But there is Bruno, born in Drohobycz in 1892 (actually 12th July 1892). It is not clear whether the civil authorities recognised the Jewish marriage of his parents, although the family is thought to have been an assimilated one, as some family entries seem to be registered under the mother’s maiden name Kuhmärker rather than Schulz. It was not at all unusual for Galician Jewish births to be recorded under the mother’s maiden name both in the days of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and during interwar Polish times; therefore, it is advisable to search under both names.
Most summaries of Bruno’s family life refer to a single sister Hania and brother Izydor. However, there appear to have been two more siblings at least, namely Isak, who died as a three-year old boy in 1879, and Hinda, who also died aged three years of age in 1890; quite possibly there were others who died in infancy or childhood. Hania appears to have been born circa 1873 and to have married Moses Hoffmann in 1900; at the time of her marriage, according to JewishGen, she was spelling her name Anna or Chane. They had a son Ludwik in 1903. Izydor seems to have been born as Baruch Israel in 1881. He was a successful engineer with oil mining interests in Galicia; a 1912 directory shows that he was then residing at ulica św Bartłomieja in Drohobycz. He died in 1935.
As for Bruno, he became an art teacher in the local school, wrote his fiction and received moderate acclaim for a while. Like Kafka he never married, although he had a string of female friends and correspondents and eventually was affianced to Józefina Szelińska, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who taught Polish and later worked in the bureau of statistics (perhaps the register office?). For her sake he renounced his religion, becoming officially “faithless”, but the intended resulting register office wedding never came to pass. Schulz survived the first Soviet occupation of Polish Galicia but was not to survive the subsequent Nazi occupation.
As a modern poet once sang, “Every moment leads toward its own sad end”. Bruno Schulz was shot by a Nazi named Karl Günther while carrying a loaf of bread back home to the ghetto in November 1942.
Last Friday and Sunday I attended the Who Do You Think You Are? Live exhibition at London’s Olympia, answering questions on resources for family history and giving research advice.
For a newcomer to family history – and the interest in family history has yet to reach a plateau and continues to mount – the scale and corporate gloss of the event may come as something of a shock. Family history is big business now. This year’s principal sponsor was the multinational corporation Ancestry. As well as the customary somewhat clinical Ancestry stand where visitors could search Ancestry databases, on offer also was the Ancestry scanning bay and the Ancestry members-only hospitality suite, a kind of hybrid between a gated community with its own private security and a business-class airport lounge laying on complimentary refreshments and a little ineffective back massage.
Who Do You Think You Are? Live grew out of the Society of Genealogists’ annual show, which used to take a more modest and less expensive exhibition space in Victoria. Three key events precipitated the explosion of interest in family history in England – the online release of the 1901 census in 2002, the publication of the birth, marriage and death indexes by the company now known as Find My Past, and the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? TV series. Wall To Wall, the makers of the Who Do You Think You Are? documentaries, saw an opportunity to piggyback the long-standing annual SoG event and co-opt the family history societies. This seemed like a partnership at first but it now looks increasingly like there is a cuckoo chick in the family history community’s nest, slowly pushing it out.
Which brings me back to Ancestry. A visitor entering Who Do You Think You Are? Live was funnelled through the Ancestry stand. He or she may not have been subjected to a body scan or relieved of all their cash, but the American corporate giant is unmissable. Meanwhile, over in a far corner of the exhibition centre, on the far side of the area reserved for family history societies, the visitor could see, if they had the stamina, stands which are in fact far more interesting and which reflect the range and diversity of family, local and social history organisations that have become marginalised. Passing the Anglo-German Family History Society stall, with its books on sugar bakers, pork butchers and WW1 alien internees on the Isle of Man, the visitor would have reached the British Deaf History Society and, in the very corner, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, with its humble trestle table, small selection of fascinating volumes and enthusiastic volunteer staff. The JGSGB and its ilk cannot afford more floor space, or a prime position with guaranteed footfall, but I hope that they and all the local and subject societies had a worthwhile weekend and can continue to carve out a niche for themselves within what is now the family history marketplace.
A good seven or eight of the family history enquiries I took at Who Do You Think You Are? Live concerned Jewish family history research. Most enquirers knew or believed that their ancestors had roots in Poland, although one had Dutch and another German-Jewish ancestry. However, all Jewish researchers are likely to confront the same brick wall: how to establish a place of origin outside Britain, if this is not recorded in family papers or lore. And this is no easy question to answer.
The census returns, including the 1911 census released in 2009, seldom name a specific place. Too often the census return states merely Austria, or Poland, or Romania, or Russia, or Russian Poland. Even where a city or town such as Kovno or Warsaw or Wilna is given, it is not necessarily the case that this is the actual place of origin rather than a convenient shorthand for a district or region of the same name.
Naturalisation records may give the required information but, of course, many immigrants, and perhaps a majority of the poorer ones, settled without going to the trouble or expense of formal naturalisation (or wished to avoid the encounter with the authorities that it entailed). Naturalisations are indexed in The National Archives’ online catalogue and can also be found in the London Gazette. However, the researcher will need to access the underlying naturalisation file, or what survives of it, at The National Archives in Kew to find out full details. Naturalisation records before 1921 are on open access but those of later date require a Freedom of Information Act application.
Family historians with Jewish roots are welcome to contact Bluebird Research with any questions they have. Or, of course, they might wish to contact the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain…
There were scarcely 19 years of peace in interwar Lwów, between September 1920 and September 1939. Ironically, the city which had been at the forefront of Polish national and cultural activism during the long years of partitioned Poland became somewhat peripheral now that the country was united and independent. Its prestige declined. From having been Lemberg, the capital of the self-governing Austro-Hungarian crownland of Galicia and the fifth largest city of the Empire (behind Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Trieste), it became Lwów, one of many satellite cities within the orbit of the Polish capital Warsaw. And of course the ambitious and the unemployed, students and professional elites, now gravitated towards Warsaw.
There were three national communities in the city. During the Austrian era, from 1772 to the Great War, the authorities counted the population by religion rather than nationality, as, to a greater or lesser extent, an empire exists by denial of nationality or at least of national expression.
Between 51% and 53% of the city’s inhabitants were Roman Catholic. These were overwhelmingly Poles, with a very small minority of Austrians and assimilated Germans and Armenians (although a separate Armenian Catholic Church still functioned in Lwów).
18% or 19% were Greek Catholics, who were rusyny or Ruthenians, and increasingly identified themselves as Ukrainians as the 19th century advanced and the community’s national consciousness awakened.
27% or 28% were Jewish. The Jews of Lwów had traditionally resided in two designated areas and continued to do so even after regulations were relaxed in 1867. The first area comprised a largely affluent and assimilated community in the neighbourhood of three streets in the old town: ul Żdowska, Ruska and Zarwańska. The second area was a more working class and religiously Orthodox Jewish community in the Krakowskie and Żółkiewskie suburbs.
These three large national communities interacted and shared certain common aspirations during the era of Austrian rule, despite the irreconcilable incompatibility of Polish and Ukrainian national claims to the city and despite a wide range of internal differences. For instance, the Jewish community included assimilationists and Polish nationalists; Zionists; Bundists and communists; and largely apolitical Orthodox Jews. The Jews appear to have least frequently intermarried with the other two communities: it seems probable that intermarriage was restricted to those who not only assimilated but also converted to Catholicism. However, marriage between the Polish Roman Catholics and Ukrainian Greek Catholics was not unusual.
It has been calculated that 16% of pre-WW1 marriages were mixed*. This needs to be placed in context of the respective sizes of the two communities. For instance, in 1900 there were 82,590 Roman Catholics and 29,327 Greek Catholics in Lwów. When this numerical imbalance is factored in, it means that one in three Poles may have been marrying a Ukrainian. Mixed marriages declined after Galicia became part of independent Poland and tensions between Poles and Ukrainians increased, but even in the 1920s mixed marriages are estimated at 8%.
These figures are salutary. History is necessarily written in generalisations with only occasional references to individuals by way of exemplification. The reality for individuals is granular and subject to infinite degrees and gradations of experience. In pre-Soviet era Lwów, there may well have been some “pure” Polish and Ukrainian families but it would not be surprising for family history research to demonstrate or suggest otherwise.
*Estimates of intermarriage are by Lidia Zyblikiewicz, cited in Philipp Ther’s “War Versus Peace” (Harvard Ukrainian Studies XXIV (1/4) 2000).
Records for the different communities in Lemberg / Lwów / L’viv are today found in L’viv and Warsaw. Bluebird Research offers professional family history research services in L’viv, across Ukraine and Poland, and would be delighted to undertake genealogical research on behalf of anyone with Jewish, Polish or Ukrainian – or mixed! – ancestry from the region.
Stability is not a common trait in Jewish names and those researching their family tree should not expect too much consistency from generation to generation or even over the course of a single individual’s life. Leaving to one side the traditional naming patterns before the era of (supposedly) fixed surnames, Jewish names change, or different names are used, for a host of reasons.
A Jewish person or family resident in a country using the Cyrillic alphabet will spell his or her name, or have it spelt for them in official papers, in one way but transliterate it differently into the Latin alphabet. There is not a simple 1:1 correspondence between the characters of the two alphabets and there are different transliteration systems which, in turn, have changed over time and differ by place (for example, French and German transliterations from Russian often differ from the English and American).
Of course, many Jews and virtually all educated Jews in Eastern Europe were fluent in at least two languages, depending on their place of residence: in the former Russian empire, including the Congress Kingdom of Poland, they might well have spoken Russian, and/or German, and/or Polish. The Jewish lingua franca of the empire was Yiddish, although an increasing number were at least conversant with Hebrew. Yiddish also had its dialects, such as Litvish spoken by the Litvaks, which affected the pronunciation and therefore also the spelling or rendering of proper names.
When Jews emigrated westwards, to Germany, for instance, or France or the Netherlands, and especially when they came into contact with the English-speaking world, their eastern names caused difficulties of orthography and pronunciation, and were subject to change in spelling and usage. Here is Joseph Roth writing in The Wandering Jews (translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta Books, 2001) about the experience of Galician Jews arriving in Vienna:
“Christian papers are in order. All Christians have sensible, European names. Jewish names are mad and Jewish. Nor is that all: they have two or three surnames, qualified by false or recte. You never know what to call them. Their parents were married by a rabbi. The marriage has no legal standing. If the father’s name is Weinstock, and the mother’s Abramovsky, then the children of their union will be called Weinstock recte Abramovsky, or perhaps Abramovsky false Weinstock. The boy, for example, is given the Jewish first name of Leib Nachman. Because the name is difficult and might sound provocative to others’ ears, the son styles himself Leo. So his name is Leib Nachman styled Leo Abramovsky false Weinstock. As far as the police are concerned, names like that are nothing but trouble.”
So the Jew will simplify or change his name to satisfy the civil servant who wants sensible order to prevail. Not that that will invariably give satisfaction, as the Jew will have papers, if he has papers at all, which do not support the claimed new identity, and which will cast further suspicion upon him.
Roth’s remarks in a later chapter of his book should also be borne in mind when undertaking research:
“Don’t be surprised at the Jews’ lack of attachment to their names. They will change their names with alacrity, and the names of their fathers, even though those particular sounds, to the European sensibility, are charged with emotional weight. For Jews their names have no value because they are not their names. Jews, Eastern Jews, have no names. They have compulsory aliases. Their true name is the one by which they are summoned to the Torah on the Sabbath and on holy days: their Jewish first name and the Jewish first name of their father. Their family names, however, from Goldenberg to Hescheles, are pseudonyms foisted upon them.”
Roth is writing primarily about Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews of the former Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empire but his cautionary words are salutary for anyone undertaking Jewish family history research.
1922 was a year of great change in the land.
For the largely Polish landowners of Lithuania, it was a time of loss and sorrow. Land reform led to confiscation of their estates, leaving each with just a small plot around the manor or farmhouse in which they dwelt.
For the Lithuanian peasantry, it was a time of plenty. The same reforms redistributed former estate lands among the peasants, who therefore were now working their own land for the first time. Harvests were good and the peasants enjoyed a newfound prosperity.
1922 was also the high-water mark for Lithuanian Jewry between the Wars. The sudden spending power of the peasantry created a new demand for the goods produced by Jewish craftsmen and sold by Jewish traders. More importantly in the long term, however, a honeymoon period for the Jews of Lithuania was coming to an end.
From 1919 to 1922, Jewish and Lithuanian activists had worked side by side in the cause of the newly independent Lithuania. The country was governed from the left by social democrats and the progressive Populists (liaudininkai). Jews worked in the foreign ministry, for example, where their language skills and overseas connections helped in negotiations with the Germans, Russians, English and French. Jewish life flourished in Lithuania and attracted non-Lithuanian Jews from Russia and Ukraine, both those fleeing civil war and its aftermath, and those recognising the progressive state of Lithuania and the opportunities it might bring.
It was the liaudininkai who had pushed through the radical land reforms in favour of the peasantry. Ironically, once land reform had happened, the peasantry switched allegiance from left to right, from the liaudininkai to the conservative and largely Roman Catholic Christian Democrats. Government edged to the right and the civil service was gradually Lithuanianised. Jews started to be viewed with suspicion, especially those who had joined the communists en masse from the Bundists in 1921, or pushed for greater Jewish national autonomy. Jewish support had also been welcomed when Lithuania was campaigning to recover Wilno (with its large Jewish population) from Poland but, as this possibility receded and the situation on the ground was accepted, Jewish involvement in government no longer seemed as essential. Ultimately, a military coup in December 1926 produced a further lurch to the right and the Lithuanian National Union party took power for the next 14 years.
The years 1921 to 1923 are therefore key in modern Lithuanian history and may represent a point of great change in many individual family histories, whether Polish, Lithuanian or Jewish. Poles, adrift in the new state, would look ever more longingly towards Poland. Lithuanians asserted their new independence and for many the land reform was a great life-changing event, redefining their relationship to the land. And the disappointments after the early promise for Jews meant that many would channel their energies inwardly into their religion and communities, or outwardly into more radical politics such as communism or Zionism, or else look beyond the seas.
Bluebird Research has many years’ experience of successful genealogical research in Lithuania and is at your disposal should you require professional research. Please contact us for an assessment and estimate of possible costs.
In April 1941, a new administration, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska or NDH, was established in Croatia as a client state of Nazi Germany and with it a reign of terror.
Although Istria and parts of Dalmatia including the port city of Split, usually considered Croatian, were annexed by Italy, the territory of the NDH extended across Bosnia Hercegovina and the Srem. This meant that the Ustaša, the Croatian fascist party, were responsible for lands that included, as well as the Bosniaks, an estimated 1.9 million Serbs and sizeable populations of Sephardic Jews and Roma.
Summary executions of Serbs began almost immediately, and mass deportations from 4th June 1941. 180,000 Serbs are believed to have fled Bosnia for Serbia by the end of July 1941 and tens of thousands who stayed were rechristened as Roman Catholics. By the end of 1942, perhaps 150,000 Serbs were detained in death camps on the territory of the NDH, 300,000 had been killed, and thousands more had been sent to Auschwitz.
The Jewish population of NDH in April 1941 was probably between 36,000 and 39,500. They were immediately subjected to plunder, victimisation, arrest and execution. 26,000 died in Ustaša death camps, the most notorious of which was Jasenovac. The camp’s population apparently never exceeded 3,000, as prisoners were usually murdered shortly after arrival. At least 80,000 people – Jews, Serbs, Roma, and communists including Croats and Bosniaks – died at Jasenovac.
There are two websites which contain specific information about individuals at Jasenovac.
The first is the Jasenovac Memorial Site, which has a searchable database of 75,159 names of those killed at the Jasenovac complex. This is a work in progress and the number is that of known victims as at November 2008. The final count will be higher.
The second, the Jasenovac Research Institute, has published a larger database of 597,323 names of Yugoslavs killed in WW2, compiled by Yugoslavia’s Federal Institute of Statistics in 1964.
You should search both these databases if you believe that a relative may have died in Yugoslavia during WW2, or are trying to determine the fate of a missing person.
Except for the two databases mentioned, all the numbers given above are estimates and different sources give different, sometimes wildly different, numbers. The majority cited here are from Yugoslavia As History: Twice There Was A Country, by the US academic John R Lampe, published by Cambridge University Press (2nd ed, 2000).
Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire in the ten years either side of 1900 are generally thought of as having fled the persecution and poverty there for the safe shores of America. However, a lesser-known story is that of the Jews from Russia who travelled to South Africa.
These migrants came especially from the region around the city of Kovno, now known as Kaunas in Lithuania. As well as the city itself, many came from towns elsewhere in the Kovno gubernija (which corresponds to the greater part of central and northern Lithuania), such as Palanga, Panevėžys, Rietavas and Šiauliai.
They travelled via a port such as Libau (today’s Liepāja in Latvia) on ships bound, via the Baltic Sea and (after its opening in 1895) the Kiel Canal shortcut, for English east coast ports. From there, they travelled overland, usually via London, to Southampton to embark for the Cape.
This movement of people was not accidental: a whole business existed to cater for them, from the ticket agents in the Kovno area, to shipping lines such as the Wilson Line shuttling between Libau and Hull, to the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter in London which housed and orientated many of the trans-migrants, to the Castle Line and the Union Line which specialised in the route to the Cape.
And like any successful movement of people, it became self-perpetuating, as the new South Africans sent home letters, and money, encouraging others to follow suit. The first countrywide Union of South African census in 1911 indicates a population of 46,919 Jews, a majority of whom were Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks who had arrived since 1892 and were residing in the Cape. By 1921, the Jewish population had risen to 62,103, but with more of a shift in gravity towards the gold-mining and commercial centres of Witwatersrand in the Transvaal (which accounted for 33,515).
What this means is that a great many of those North Americans and British with Litvak ancestors are likely to have kin in South Africa. There are many good sources for Jewish family history research in Lithuania and prospects of success are often favourable, as long as the place of origin within the country is known or can be identified. Bluebird Research also has an excellent researcher in South Africa should genealogical research be required there.
It is a cruel irony that wartime internment tends to catch more innocent victims than any real enemy within. In the C20th, definitions of enemy aliens have focused on the holding of passports only; if on the evidence of this document it appears that you are a citizen or subject of a nation with which we are at war, you shall be treated with suspicion at best, and quite possibly rounded up in camps.
The outbreak of WW2 is a striking case in point. Britain was one of the countries to which refugees from German Nazism and Italian Fascism were trying to escape. At the outbreak of war, there may have been 74,000 Germans and Austrian passport holders in Britain, plus 19,000 Italians and 8,000 Czechs. Inevitably the great majority of these people, the victims of right-wing authoritarian regimes, would hold foreign passports. Not all would be intending to remain in UK: some would be waiting for entry visas to USA or hoping to relocate to Palestine. When war was declared in September 1939, the authorities categorised aliens as class A, B or C. Class A were interned for reasons of national security, B remained at liberty but faced some restrictions, while C were recognised as friendly and, in many cases, refugees from Nazism. However, with a change of government in May 1940 and a perceived heightened risk of invasion, an emergency decision was taken initially to intern all male aliens between the ages of 16 and 70 located in a wide strip around the south and east coasts, followed by all class B German and Austrian male citizens. In June 1940, the class C men under 70 were also interned. Nazi sympathisers, members of the Italian Fascist Party, German communists and Jewish refugees were now treated the same.
One of the least explicable episodes which followed was the transfer of 2,542 mostly German and Austrian internees on the Dunera to Australia. The ship left Liverpool in July and arrived in Sydney in September 1940. At least 90% of those on board were Jewish, including perhaps 400 teenage boys aged 16 and over, although there were others who had also been oppressed by the Nazis, including Sudeten Communists and even some Austrian aristocrats. The story is well told in Cyril Pearl’s The Dunera Scandal (Angus & Robertson, 1983).
What is extraordinary, but indicative of the way in which post-War German and Austrian culture and society was utterly depleted and diminished by its persecution of the Jews, is the wealth of talent on the Dunera. Many were at, or later reached, the top of the tree in their professions. There were academics of every stripe, analytical chemists and engineers, art historians and professors of music, philosophers and writers, psychologists and sociologists, even chefs.
Of particular interest to a Man of Kent such as myself are two “locals” aboard the Dunera. The first was Walter Kaufmann, a Berlin native born in 1924 whose adoptive parents were murdered by the Nazis, who was attending Herrlingen School, which in 1933 had relocated from near Ulm in Germany to Bunce Court in the village of Otterden, SW of Faversham. The second was Fritz Heinz Georg Grün (later Fred Gruen), who had been born in Vienna in 1921 and was studying at Herne Bay College when war broke out.
By 1947, 1,451 of the Dunera internees had returned to UK, 913 had settled in Australia, 165 relocated to other countries and 13 died.
After 17 years in Australia, the left-wing Kaufmann moved to East Germany in 1957 and has been a prolific short story writer; he wrote a semi-autobiographical piece detailing his experiences of exile and internment. Gruen remained in Australia and became an academic and influential economist.
Earlier this year, Yale University Press published The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread by Maria Balinska, about everyone’s favourite breakfast roll. The book has been positively reviewed in the press.
This put me in mind of an earlier publication called The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World by Mimi Sheraton (Broadway Books, 2000). The bialy differs from the bagel in not being boiled before baking and in having in the centre a depression, filled with onion or poppy seeds, rather than a hole. It originated in Białystok and acquired its short name after being brought to New York by immigrant Yiddish-speaking bakers some time after WW1. It appears to have died out in its native Białystok with the disappearance of the Jewish community.
Białystok was a large and densely populated city by the mid-C19th, when it was situated in the Grodno gubernia of the Russian Empire. The majority of the city’s population was Jewish: by 1895, 47,783 Jews out of a total population of 62,993 (76%). As well as merchants, shopkeepers and tradesmen, many worked in the textile industry or were otherwise part of a growing urban proletariat which was later to become radicalised and active in the Bundist movement. From 1920, the Białystok area was incorporated into newly re-independent Poland.
Ancestors from Białystok found, for example, on the English or American census returns, or in other sources of use to family historians, may give their country of origin as Russia, or Poland, or Russian Poland. Beware that, as well as being the name of the city, Białystok was also a uezd (district) within the Grodno gubernia in Tsarist times, and a larger eponymous województwo (province) in Poland during the inter-War years: therefore, it is possible that ancestors claiming to have come from Białystok may have come from the surrounding area and used the name for convenience.
Researching family history becomes much more satisfying when, instead of concentrating narrowly on direct ancestors, the collateral branches of the same family are also investigated and the search turns round and heads towards the present day. Notwithstanding the shoah, the Jewish diaspora from Białystok is global, and a genealogist is just as likely to discover that he or she has surviving kin today in Argentina or Australia as in Israel or USA.