He Should Be Turning Forty In A Month

Friday, 3 Elul 5774                     

Yochanan was born the third of Tishrei, the day after Rosh Hashanah. He should be turning forty a month from today.


I have known Sammy Hilberg for nearly fifty years and his wife Bryna almost that long. We made aliyah as part of the same gar'in (=settlement group) to Kibbutz Alumim, adjacent to the Gaza fence. Yochanan and his older brother Meir were born while we were all still living on the kibbutz.

We left the kibbutz about the same time - they to Kiryat Arba, adjacent to Hevron, and we to the desert town of Yeroham. We stayed in touch during those first years, which included the birth of their first daughter. Then they moved to Netzer Hazani in the unpopulated southwest corner of the Gaza Strip, not far from the ocean . One of the communities that constituted Gush Katif. Sammy, a mechanic by training, learned to grow hothouse tomatoes.

The first time I saw them in Netzer Hazani was when I was stationed there during a stint in the reserves. Their second daughter was born while I was stationed there. Later they had a third son and a third daughter.

Seventeen years ago, on a Thursday night, the third of Elul, Yochanan and eleven of his comrades in the naval commandos were killed on a mission in Lebanon. He was buried Friday in the Neve Dekalim cemetery in southern Gush Katif.. A month later was his twenty-third birthday.

Bryna spoke every year at the graveside memorial. A military service, with a naval contingent led by officers in white. She spoke as a mother telling us - and Yochanan - how she felt that day and in the days and years since, talking about her inability to fulfill her basic maternal role of protecting her son.

I was able to attend most of those memorial services and some of the weddings as one after another married and began building their own families.

Nine years ago, the Hilbergs, like all the residents of Netzer Hazani and the rest of the Gush Katif communities, became refugees, thrown out of their homes by their own government. The homes were destroyed so as not to turn them over to the Arabs. And the youth center that had been built in Yochanan's memory.

The Arabs destroyed the hothouses for reasons that made some kind of sense to them. It wasn't to build something for their own people.

It was supposed to bring peace with Gaza, as the Arabs were expected to take responsibility for their own welfare. We were no longer to be there and they would have no further excuse to attack us.

Sammy and Bryna and some of the others from Netzer Hazani were resettled on Kibbutz Ein Zurim, with a vague semi-refugee status.

And after eight years less one week, the army dug up Yochanan's body - together with the others buried in Neve Dekalim. Nearly fifty altogether. Many, including Yochanan and another soldier, were reburied in Nitzan, a refugee community on the coast between Ashkelon and Ashdod.

The second full-blown funeral was very difficult, perhaps moreso for the older brother Meir who had been abroad at the time of the first. The navy sent its people, as always; the younger ones no longer having any personal memory of Yochanan and his comrades in arms. 

Sammy announced that this second burial place was to be considered temporary.

A week later, we went back to Nitzan for the annual memorial. There are no words, but Bryna found them then anyway.

In the ensuing years, the silence of the memorial service has been punctuated by the grandchildren. Mostly the same people come. And Bryna speaks. Her mother has a walker now, but is alert and seems well.

This year was different. It wasn't so much Bryna the mother, but Bryna the citizen, speaking for all the residents of the area who have endured the last months of shelling and rockets. She recalled that people who worked side by side with them in the hothouses were now shooting at them. She recalled that some of those same Arabs came to console them when Yochanan was killed. And she recalled that they had been expelled from their homes and their lives in what was supposed to be a move for peace.

Yochanan Avraham ben Bryna and Shemaryahu Shemuel should be turning forty in a month. He has been in his temporary grave in Nitzan for nine years, a year longer than in Neve Dekalim.

May his soul be bound in life,

may G-d avenge his blood

and may his family and all of Israel find peace.

The cover of the memorial book, produced by family and friends

Breakfast at Poale Zedeck

Last year, my son concluded thirteen years as rabbi of a small congregation in suburban Chicago. During a number of those years, he and his family - his wife and six sons - would vacation at the yeshiva in Lakewood New Jersey, driving both ways. It is a long drive and usually they would stop overnight in Pittsburgh at Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken's.

This is the story of one of those stopovers.

The year Avrohom turned thirteen.

Before the big event
I went to Washington DC for the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, after a few days in Baltimore (another story for another time). The Conference ended Friday and Elliot Greene dropped me at the airport in Philadelphia where I picked up a rental car and drove to Lakewood.to spend Shabbat with the kids. (I told a story mentioning that Lakewood visit here.)

I spent a very pleasant day with the family, my son his wife and five of their six boys. Their second son, Avrohom, was in camp in Cleveland. The plan was that Abrohom would meet up with the family in Pittsburgh, getting a ride from Cleveland with one of the Pittsburgh boys at camp. But that wasn't going to work out, so I became the back-up plan.

Avrohom's thirteenth birthday fell while he was at camp, and they made a bit of a thing about his becoming a bar mitzvah. The bigger,family celebration was to be the Shabbat immediately after returning to Chicago, with a Sunday evening planned at Skokie Yeshiva for more family, classmates etc.

The kids' trip back to Chicago from Lakewood included Wednesday night in Pittsburgh. Wednesday night, meaning Thursday morning. I saw an opportunity and everyone signed off on it.

 From my great-grandfather down to my grandson. That's six generations.

It was not meant to be something big. The invitation went out to family members in Pittsburgh, including some we barely knew, as well as to a few old classmates of mine.

Pittsburgh Week - the first days
Sunday I returned the rental car in Philadelphia and flew to Pittsburgh where I picked up another. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I did alot of visiting with Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken and Monday I did a round of cemeteries on the north side of Pittsburgh. Probably a dozen of them.

Sig Rosenzweig - Zelig ben Moshe

Tuesday morning my wife arrived from Israel, to join the party.

Wednesday I drove to Cleveland to pick up Avrohom from camp. On my way up I stopped at the Ridge Road Cemetery where I photographed nine family graves. On the way back to Pittsburgh, Avrohom and I went to the Kinsman Road cemetery and visited the grave of my grandmother's brother Sig Rosenzweig who had died in1918 of influenza. He was twenty-seven.

The inscription is very difficult to read and finding the grave took quite a long time. I am guessing that we were the first family members to visit in decades.

Once in Pittsburgh, we made a stop at the Old Poale Zedeck Cemetery in Sheraden, where we visited the graves of my great-grandparents Regina and Moritz Rosenzweig (he of the shul building committee), my grandparents, Uncle Joe and Aunt Helen and some other family members. Avrohom appeared interested.

By the time we got back to the house, my son and family were there.

Thursday
Everyone was up early Thursday. How could we not be.

There had been some serious flooding earlier in the week, with deaths, and there would be more in another month, but this night was wind. And fallen trees. Rain as well.

We were only five houses away from the shul, but even that was something of a project. A number of our local guests did not make it, much as many had missed my own bar mitzvah years before due to an eighteen-inch snowfall the day before.

But we had out-of-town guests, despite the fact that we had only invited locals. Uncle Bob and his wife drove in by trailer from Baltimore ("Why go to a party in Chicago where there is an actual Torah-reading in Pittsburgh?") His daughter Linda - never one to miss a family occasion - came up from West Virginia. Three Kwoczka cousins - two of whom I had met less than two weeks previous - drove up from Baltimore. And a "new" third cousin from the South Hills and a classmate from Fox Chapel came despite the weather.

And sometime along the way, we heard that my great-grandfather, Moritz Rosenzweig, had made an appearance. He was on the building committee, but died in 1928, weeks after the first High Holiday services in the new building, but while they were still holding services in the old building in the Hill District. His wife had a stained glass window installed in his memory, at the top of the front wall of the main sanctuary, to the right of the Aron Kodesh. There was a heavy glass plaque.

During Shabbat services, less that two weeks previous, the plaque fell and shattered. They say it nearly hit the shul's executive director on the head.

It was as though Great-Grandfather was saying that we shouldn't forget him on this occasion.

We had the regular Thursday morning service. Avrohom read the Torah. I was saying kaddish for my mother that year, so there was that.
Afterwards we adjourned to the social hall downstairs, a room that had seen many family celebrations over the years. A buffet breakfast with enough left over that the kids made sandwiches for the drive to Chicago.


I spoke. My son spoke.

On the occasion of my father's bar-mitzvah seventy-five years previous, his grandmother, the wife of Moritz Rosenzweig, had given him a set of five machzorim, with the prayer services for the holidays.. Those came to me after my father died and I had them rebound a couple of months earlier. There - in the same place where my father had celebrated his own bar mitzvah - I turned them over to my grandson.

Afterword
Then everyone went home.

And because I have just spent a full week with Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken while in town for my DNA course. After having spent three days with Uncle Bob and Ro in Maryland.

What DNA Came From Which Ancestors

As I have gotten older, I have become more hesitant just diving into new technology. Invariably, once I get into it, I get used to it fairly easily, especially when I really need what it has to offer.

A few days ago, I finally got into mapping chromosomes with the help of two graphic tools from Kitty Munson Cooper, whom I met in Salt Lake City.

The object of this exercise is to see which bits of my own DNA can be traced to specific ancestors, or more correctly to which ancestral couple. (An extension of that would be to reconstruct the DNA of those ancestors, but that is another story.)

I am going to present here only my paternal side. I expect to see test results from two second cousins from my mother's side and I'd rather wait on those before drawing conclusions there.

Segment Mapper
I have ten known relatives on my father's side who have tested. Seven are descendants of my great-grandparents Hersch Pickholz and Jutte Lea Kwoczka. One - Ralph - is a great-great-grandson of one on my great-grandfather's sisters and the other two are the grandson (Bruce) and great-grandson (Pinchas) of my great-grandmother's two brothers.

The other seven are my sisters Amy and Sarajoy, my father's sister Aunt Betty, my father's first cousin Herb, my double second cousin Lee and two other second cousins Terry and Rhoda.

The chromosome browser provided by Family Tree DNA, allows a comparison to only five people at a time. Kitty's Segment Mapper allows comparison to as many as forty people at once.  Soon enough I'll try more comparisons, but for now all I need is ten.

I left out the X chromosome since that is only from my mother's side.

Ralph has two bright green segments in chromosome 1 and another in chromosome 19, all of them overlapping several descendants of my grandparents. Since Ralph is on my great-grandfather's side, these segments must be from his parents Izak Fischel and Rivka Feige.

Pinchas has the same kinds of matches on chromosomes 1 and 7 and Bruce has one each on chromosomes 1 and 16, so those segments would be from my great-grandmother's parents Mordecai Meir and Bassie.

Chromosomes 4 and 20 have matches only from the four people who come from my grandmother's side - my sisters, Aunt Betty and Lee. None of the other Pikholz appear there. That indicates that the entire length of those two chromosomes are from either my grandmother's Rosenzweig side or my mother's side.

There is a nice match involving Ralph, my sisters and me on chromosome 3, but no one else among my father's relatives. I have not included that because it is quite possible - prehaps even probable - that this represents a connection between Ralph and our mother's side.

Many of the remaining segments are pretty clearly from my great-grandparents, but we don't know enough to say which of them. Yet.

I should be able to add additional segments to my specific ancestors by using someone other than me as the base. That would be the case if Ralph or Pinchas or Bruce matched a handful of my father's family members, but not me. I am not sure there is a tool for this.

Chromosome Mapper
So what does it look like? I ran it through the second of Kitty's tools, the Chromosome Mapper.

As I say, I am trying to be conservative here, so I did not label any of the sections of the middle chromosomes, even though the first figure shows a high likelihood that there are segments on my Pikholz/Kwoczka side.  I'd like a bit more proof there.

I am also aware that all of this is tentative because the chromosomes come in pairs and it is possible that when I have a match with two people at the same place, one might actually be from my mother's chromosome and the other from my father's. I need to figure out an efficient way to check this. (See my remark about chromosome 3 above.)


But thanks to Kitty, the process wasn't hard. I think I am getting the hang of it. I should be able to add some other Pikholz descendants to the segment mapper and we'll see what shows up. But not this week.

Housekeeping notes
We are away for a few days, so I may not be as responsive as usual.

Family Finder Illumina OmniExpress Matrix

Filtering Family Finder matches by project
For some months now, I have been complaining that Family Tree DNA has not been responding to my pleas to add a "by project" filter to the Family Finder match page.

This is what the results page looks like for my sister Sarajoy, showing her six closest matches. I have access to this page because I am a group administrator and she is a member of my group.

I removed the surnames here. Note that all have known relationships entered.

Among the tools offered on this page are filters by name and ancestral surname. If for instance, I want to see whom she matches who has listed the ancestral surname Gordon (our mother's name), I can enter "Gordon" in the window to the left of the red arrow (which I added for convenience) and press "Apply." then all we will see is matches that Sarajoy has with people who have Gordon among their ancestral surnames.

I can do the same thing for the "Name" window - I can see whom she matches among people actually named Gordon. And I can use both filters at the same time.

What I cannot do is see whom she matches among members of a project. I solved that problem originally by having all my Pikholz descendants list "Pikholz" (that specific spelling) among their ancestral names and using the "ancestral surnames" filter. But some two dozen non-Pikholz who match many of the Pikholz descendants would not make it through that filter, since they do not know of any actual Pikholz in their families.

So I have been lobbying for an additional filter based on membership in a project and have been complaining to whomever will listen that my pleas are getting no response.

Along comes Roberta Estes
Last week in her blog "DNAeXplained – Genetic Genealogy," Roberta Estes published what she calls "the second in a series about DNA projects, how they work and how they can benefit testers and others," which you can read here.

About halfway through this long post, Roberta dedicates five short paragraphs and one screenshot to an FTDNA tool called "Illumina OnmiExpress Matrix" which I had not seen before. This matrix is a tool available to project administrators and the link to it appears at the top of the second column of the group administrators home page.

It looked to me like this might be a way to work around the filter problem that has had me so troubled.

Now, I try to keep up with developments, whether by reading blogs, following groups on Facebook, listening to podcasts or following FTDNA on Twitter and either this is the best kept secret in autosomal analysis or I have been sleeping though the presentations.


Here is FTDNA's FAQ for the matrix.

I had a look at the matrix and found that while Rebekah Canada is quite good at explaining the various parts of the FTDNA site, this October 2013 FAQ is just not right.

First of all, it does not allow you "up to" twenty people. I entered forty-five and it has yet to stop me.

Second, there is a fourth option for display of data.

Third ... well let's just have a look.

But why talk about it when I can show you
I started with my Kwoczka project which has a manageable nine members, just to see how the matrix works. (We have results for a tenth but she hasn't joined the project yet.) All the relationships among the nine are known.

All nine names originally appeared in the "Group Members" box and I had to move them one by one into the "Selected Members" box. If I wanted to rearrnge them after selections, I had to move them up or down one at a time and one row at a time. No drag and drop.

The four data-display options appear in the small window towards the center and I chose "Relationship." Note that these are not the known relationships I entered into the system, but the suggested relationships as calculated by FTDNA. But with anomalies.

One that I like is that it omits the remote cousins, as you can see with Pinchas and my two sisters.

Actually I have no trouble with their listing my sister Amy as a bit closer to our Aunt Betty and our father's cousin Herb. Such is the randomness of DNA. But I was very surprised to see the relationships listed next to my red arrow. FTDNA thinks Amy is Aunt Betty's grandparent, grandchild or half-sibling, while it thinks that Sarajoy and I are her "Aunt/Uncle, Niece/Nephew." But ever since we began looking at autosmal relationship charts, we have been told that all these show matches of about 25%. No one has ever made a distinction between the relationships suggested for Amy and those suggested for Sarajoy and me! Did I sleep through that too?

I switched the data display to "Relationship Range" and got what the FTDNA match page shows, including the remotes. And it continues to ignore the known relationships.

When I set the display to "Total Centimorgans," it gave those to the tenth decimal point, even though the last four-to-six digits were zero in every case. I cannot imagine whom is served by that supposed degree of accuracy, especially since in larger matricies, it makes it impossibly wide.

The fourth data display - the one that does not appear in the FAQ - is "In Common With Members." As best I can tell, it lists everyone who matches all nine of us (about 125 people), with the relationship to each. Again, the remotes are counted but left blank.

The Pickholtz Surname project has about sixty members, about half of whom are actual Pikholz descendants. In order to test the limits of the matrix, I selected forty-five members and displayed by relationship. Here is the result. I had to shrink the page substantially in order to present it here, but you really are not supposed to look at so many all at once.

There is no significance to the two shades of grey. The left side is normal page width and the "extra" is on the right. The names along the top and the left side are not frozen in place, so once you begin scrolling, you lose them.

A bigger problem is that there does not seem to be any way to save a matrix other than as a screen shot. So if I want to make a modification tomorrow or next week, I have to rebuild the entire matrix from scratch, a very cumbersome process.

Roberta says she would really like "the ability to simply generate a file that downloads to a spreadsheet with a match matrix for everyone in the project."

As for me, I think there should be a way to associate some of these families together as a way to get a handle on the complexities of the matches.

Yes, Uncle Joe Laughed

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my grandfather's brother Uncle Joe and my grandmother's sister Aunt Helen and in particular posed the question Did Uncle Joe Ever Laugh?

Their grandson, my cousin Marshal, provides  an answer in the guest blog below. (No, he has not done a DNA test, but his brother Lee has.)

IS THAT A SMILE?

Guest blogger Marshal Spector

Recently Richard/Israel wrote a piece with the heading asking if his Uncle Joe ever smiled. It contained recollections and musing about my Nanna and Pa that bothered me a bit. Pa died when I was 5 so I have vague memories of him. Lee found a picture from my parents' wedding with my Grandfather having a smile on his face.

A great smile on a great day
 the wedding of his only daughter

Richard asked where the picture was from. In responding, I added the following:
Pa may not have been outwardly expressive, but he taught by example—he (and his brothers) conducted his business in an honest and fair manner (counting cans during the war), lived within his means (never bought anything on credit) and took good care of his family. I understand your upset at not being invited to their 50th anniversary party—my guess is that it was a generational thing.

My mother told this story many times:
Mom would be at home with her friends when the ice cream man would come down the street. Pa would reach in to his pocket and pull out change. My Mother would only take as much as she needed for the ice cream that she wanted. Her friends asked her why she didn’t take more—there was more change in her Father’s hand and he may never know.
My grandfather showed that he trusted my Mom, my Mom learned to be honest and she taught honesty to her friends.

My guess is that my Grandfather smiled broadly on the inside, knowing that his daughter had all the right (Jewish) values—trustworthiness, righteousness, decency and integrity. My grandfather exemplified the best of “old-fashioned” values that are, at times, sorely lacking in today’s culture.

My Mother smiled much of her life, at times under difficult circumstances, thanks to the home in which she was raised and the extended family that was so much a part of that generation.

I wanted to share that with you given what you wrote a while ago about My Grandparents.
Wishing you and the family well, along with peace and security to the people and land of Israel.

Salt Lake City

I posted Thursday about my week in Pittsburgh, neglecting to mention that this was probably my best ever visit with Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken.

This has been a different kind of conference for me than in years past.

I was surprised to find that most of the people I talked to here had never heard of GRIP, so one day I skipped my new set of "I LOVE ENDOGAMY" T-shirts and wore the shirt we got from GRIP. The rest of the time was the new T-shirts except when I spoke, which was shirt and tie.

I spent very little time with my Galizianer friends, spending more time with the blogger crowd. There were a few meetings that I was invited to - bloggers, media etc - and I saw alot of the same people at each. I also attended the talks of several of them. These included people I have known somewhat over the years but also some younger ones who have become Facebook friends in the past months, including two with Pittsburgh-area ancestors.

At one point in one of those meetings, I was exchanging Facebook direct messages with someone who was sitting three seats away from me, like the modern version of passing notes.It was like I was seeing for the first time how the younger generation works.

I am not going to review all the lectures I attended. The lectures are availble for purchase and enough people blogged talks in real time - here, here, here and here, for instance.

Jim Tanner, not in his usual
 bent-over-the-laptop pose

There was one prominent blogger from the general genealogy community who was here for the whole conference, typing away all day. James Tanner is said to be the most prodigious of the genealogy bloggers and some of his children have followed him into the field. I had not been familiar with his work until now.

Wednesday evening, I had the privilege of spending two and a half hours with Kitty Munson Cooper and Gaye Tannenbaum, talking tools for DNA analysis. Kitty has written a few tools herself and is well thought of in the general DNA genetics world. Kitty will speak to the folks at GEDmatch about creating a tool which would have specific relevance to my own work.

I know Gaye's name because she co-authored one of several articles by Dr. Jeff Paull, for which I served as a pre-publication reviewer. Another in that series is due out in the Fall Avotaynu.

And I spoke with Alex Denysenko about some record sets in Podolia, particularly Nemirow. Unfortunately, those end in 1852, while I want 1865-1880. He will check about census records, which should serve a similar purpose in my Pikholz research.

 I was involved in two presentations - a panel and a lecture.

Gary at the podium while the rest of the panel looks on.*

The panel was on Monday afternoon and was called "Internet Collaboration: How Do We Share Our Family Trees Online?" The concept began as a pro or con debate on Geni.com and programs like it and took off from a presentation at the conference last year. I discussed this at some length a few months ago. The panel ended up a bit more generic with each of three debaters explaining how he brings his family tree to the attention of the general public.

We were told to write up a full text of a fifteen minute opening, then ask each other questons. I wrote up my fifteen minutes a few weeks ago, but when I looked it over, it seemed more like an article than a talk. Although I speak reasonably well from notes, I have never actually written a speech and this did not sound like one.

I took advantage of being with Uncle Ken in Pittsburgh and we went over it in quite a bit of detail - until 11:30 at night, way past his usual bedtime. I made some changes in the text, but most of the change was in the way I spoke and the way I listened to myself - both thanks to him. Uncle Ken has been mentoring graduate students art Pitt since his retirement twenty-five years ago, so he knows whereof he speaks.

Thanks to Preeva Tramiel for this one

I also spoke Wednesday morning on "Beyond a Doubt: What We Know vs. What We Can Prove," the same title I used for a similar talk at the DC conference three years ago. I was once again introduced by my good friend and colleague Renee Steinig and the talk went well. Turnout was not what I had in the much smaller room in DC, but you can only control so much.


The handout for that talk can be found here.

Following that talk was a bit of unpleasantness. I was scheduled for 9:00-10:15, with the last fifteen minutes for questions. But there were few questions, so we ended ten minutes early. I was still at the podium with ten minutes left on the clock, when the speaker scheduled to follow came up and ordered(!) me off the podium so she could set up. There may be ramifications to this going forward.

I attended three talks on publishing. Tammy Hepps presented her Treelines program, which serves as an online tree, but with a story-telling capability.  Very impressive, but it looks like a lot of work. Perhaps If I had an assistant, I'd have a go at it.  Treelines is not a finished product and we should expect it to become a pay site when it is further along, though Tammy says that those who join now will be grandfathered in free. It is an impressive piece of work, even if it may not be right for me.

Mike Karsen spoke about publishing actual books, but in small bites. One part of the family at a time. He has an actual Pledge Card where people promise him that they will publish something within twelve months, in exchange for various goodies from Mike himself.

Part of the idea here is that once you have done one, it becomes much easier to do others.

This is an excellent idea and a very good way to approach publishing, but here too, I don't think my schedule is up to it.

Finally, Marlis Humphrey, the President of IAJGS, gave a talk about publishing online. Clearly the wave of the future, but just as clearly, too much for me, at least right now.

I attended Martin Fischer's lecture "Finding Living Relatives: Techniques for Discovering Previously Unknown Mishpoche." One of the questioners afterward  said that he has overcome reluctant relatives by sending them incorrect data about themselves, which almost forces them to set the record straight. (making a woman older than she is, for instance.) This got lots of laughs and applause as it is clearly one of the more efficient ways to address this phenomenon.

However, I have seen more than one discussion - I don't recall if on JewishGen or on non-Jewish sites - where everyone agreed that this is unethical.

I posted about this on Facebook and got quite a few comments, mosty objectng to the questioner's suggestion. My son, who studies Jewish law on such things, says that is definitely improper.


At the last lecture I attended before leaving the conference, I found myself sitting next to my MtDNA match that I wrote about four months ago.

I am pleased to say that there was a minyan three times a day while I was at the conference. The food, on the other hand, did not give us the idea that there is a vibrant Jewish community in Salt Lake City.

Housekeeping notes
* The photo from the panel debate was taken by Lara Diamond and graced her blog post here.

On either end of the Conference, I got to spend Shabbes with my son and his family in Chicago. (Number two son is away at camp.)

Monday the eighth of Av and we are going into the Tisha beAv day of mourning. May everyone have an easy and meaningful day and may this be the year that this day of national mourning becomes one of rejoicing.