SAM PICKHOLTZ - A FEDERAL CASE

(An earlier version of this was published in The Galizianer, May 2009.)

I was really looking forward to the 27^th Annual IAJGS Conference in 2007.  I had never been to Salt Lake City.  In fact, I had never done any research at any of the Mormons' Family History Centers, since their missionary work precludes their having any public facilities here in Israel.  So although I looked forward to my visit, I had no idea what to expect.  I accomplished much, both at the Conference and at the Family History Library, but my first discovery came from an entirely different type of source.

On Monday morning I attended a lecture by Beau Sharbrough about a new company called footnote.com (since renamed  Fold3, with a specialization in US military records), which had acquired rights to film and make available records from the National Archives, among other sources.  The basic information on the website is available at no charge, but seeing the documents themselves requires either a paid subscription or a per-document payment.  During the Conference, we had free access.  The lecturer made much of the fact that in addition to standard documents such as naturalization papers and alien reporting, they would also be making available federal investigations that resulted from anything from organized labor to nosey neighbors.  Those investigations included not just the charges, but the responses, documentation and references provided by the accused.
  

We are still seeking definitive proof that
Aryeh Leib is the son of Mordecai.

I did a search on the various spellings of Pikholz and found an eleven page file for Sam (originally Schneier), the son of Szama Pikholz and Minnie Fried from Budzanow.  Sam was almost certainly a third cousin of my father, though thirty-odd years older. (None of our Pittsburgh seemed to be aware of a cousin not far away.)

It seems that in 1917, while Sam was living in Erie PA, one Capt. C.F. Rodgers of the American Protective League in Ashtabula Ohio charged that Sam was a draft dodger.  Sam was arrested and upon interrogation related parts of his personal and family history, including the claim that he was too old for the draft. 

From the report:

The Agent questioned Pickholtz closely, and he stated he was born in Austria, March 15, 1886.  He came here with his father when he was 12 years old.  His father died when he was 14 years old.  His father had been in this Country six (6) years before he went back to bring the children, and Pickholtz stated that his father was a naturalized citizen…

As part of his defense and in the presence of the investigators, Sam attempted to join both the army and the navy, but was rejected.  The agent determined that Sam had voted in June 1917 and “gave his age then as 31 years and 4 months.”  Despite the fact that Sam's defense was not based on any documentation, he was released from custody.

Rodgers had Sam arrested a second time on the same charge, but through the investigative office in Erie PA.  This second investigation revolved around a birth date of March 15, 1888 that appeared on Sam's application to join the Elks Club, a date which Sam himself claimed was false.  Rodgers also claimed that in an application for an insurance policy, Sam gave his birth date as March 15, 1889, supposedly supported by a birth certificate. 

In the course of the investigation, Rodgers wrote to his APL superior saying that if the local investigator did not act as Rodgers thought he should, he (Rodgers) would "take the matter up with …the U.S. Attorney at (sic) Pittsburgh, who is an old personal friend."  Rodgers closed by saying "I hear that rich Jewish influence is being brought to bear in this case…"  This theme appears in several subsequent letters from Rodgers.

Eventually the case was closed and Rodgers was criticized from all quarters, with recommendations that his commission be terminated.  They also determined that Sam was ineligible for service in the US Army, as he was an "Austrian Alien Enemy."

The final document includes this interesting observation:

Subject stated that his parents were dead and that he had no way of obtaining a birth certificate

Much of Sam's defense was based on claims which could not be proven one way or another, for lack of documentation.  But some can be proven – or rather disproven - by what we know now.

Sam’s mother Minnie died in New Jersey on 9 May 1938, so the statement about both his parents’ being dead was absolutely false. (She entered the US in 1921, after the case was closed.)

We have no indication that Sam’s father, Szama (sometimes Schama), was ever in the US, much less became a citizen.

Sam arrived in the US 25 January 1906 and gave his age as 17, so the 1888-89 birth dates look right.  He did not travel with his father and by no account was he twelve years old.

On his marriage license application (1919) he says he was thirty-one.

The 1920 census says he is thirty-one, but it also says (incorrectly) that he entered the US in 1902. 

On his SS-5, he says he was born March 15, 1888.

The Erie funeral home says he was born March 15, 1890.  (The birth date on his brother’s NJ death certificate is March 11, 1889.)

This is the actual birth record of Schneier / Sam. He was born 18 March 1889.

This is the birth record of Sam's brother Uscher (Harry), who lived in New Jersey. He was born 20 March 1885.

So unless Sam and his brother Harry had actually exchanged identities, it seems that Captain Rodgers was on to something. Here he speaks at length. (The arrow is mine.)

EVERY AVAILABLE RECORD - Part 2 (SPECHT)

The month of Adar is upon us. Here is last year's discussion of some of our Adar yahrzeits, including my paternal grandfather and my Uncle George.

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I opened this discussion on acquiring every available record two weeks ago with examples from east Galician records in the archives in Warsaw. I continue this week, discussing American records.

There is some debate about the source of the name Pikholz. "Holz" is German for "wood" and as a result, those Pikholz who changed their names here in Israel took names that are based on words for tree - Etzion, Etzioni, Ilan, Allon etc.

There are two main schools of thought on the name Pikholz - one that it means "woodpecker" and one that it means "gatherer of wood" or some other wood-related occupation. On occasion I wondered if people moving from easten Europe to western Europe may have adopted a translation into another European language. In particular, I wondered if anyone going to Vienna or Germany had adopted the name Specht, which means "woodpecker" in German. I even joined a genealogy discussion list for the surname Specht, but everyone there has thusfar been totally Gentile.

So imagine my surprise when this showed up in my inbox in June 2007.

I recently came across your name on a Jewish Geneology website and I thought you might be able to help me. My grandmother's parents immigrated to the U.S. from the shtetl of Skalat in what was then considered Southeastern Poland, presentday Ukraine. I have been trying to locate some information on our family's history, and I was wondering if you could offer some suggestions on resources or tools for conducting the search. From my knowledge, my grandmother's father was Charles Specht from Skalat and he came to the Bronx NY during the 1910s. I was wondering if you had any info or records on his family. I am interested in connecting with my past. I could find out some more info for you if you need any. Thanks a lot and I look forward to hearing from you. David.

A Jewish Specht. From Skalat, no less, where our family comes from. I had a look at the Italian Genealogy Group marriage index (using Steve Morse's One-Step search utility) and found six Charles Specht who married in new York after 1910. One of those married a woman named Nettie Degen in 1914. David confirmed that this was the correct couple and added that they were second cousins.

There are Degens in Skalat records. We have a Degen-Pikholz couple from Skalat who had three sons in the 1870s. Maybe more, for all I know. So this whole line of inquiry suddenly looked very promising.

I found the 1891 birth of a Nechy Degen in Skalat, but the only Spechts in the area were in the Lwow/Przemysl area. I began to suspect that the connection to Skalat was only through the Degens and that the Specht-Pikholz-woodpecker axis was non-existent. Nettie's parents were Selig Degen and Chaje Perlmutter, neither of whom I recognized, but in theory Selig could have been an older son of the Degen-Pikholz couple.

David knew that his great-grandfather Charles had four brothers in New York - Louis, Harry, Jacob and Aaron, but he knew almost nothing about them. David's grandmother was not helpful. She wrote: 

Thank you for the information about my mother and father: Nettie Degen and Charles Specht.

Unfortunately, we never discussed their life in Skalat. I think it was nothing they wished to remember. My interest is purely curiousity. ... I have no wish to become involved with possible distant relations.

I had a brother and sister, many first cousins, all of whom are now deceased. I was the youngest. Their children, my children's generation, are now in their 60's and the grandchildren are not particularly interested.

My parents left Skalat to come to America to become Americans. We were Jews without religious connections. After the holocaust it was clear that Jews needed a safe haven, so Israel seemed a logical solution. IT must be a very hard life.

I wish you well and all the best.

And a few days later she wrote:

I have already told you all that I know about my family's connection to Skalat. I know of no other names than the legal names they had here in the USA. There is nothing to be gained by pursueing this matter any further. Goodbye.

Well, that certainly sounded final.

But I did want to see where the Spechts came from. I was going to the IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Salt Lake City a few weeks later, so I figured it would be easy enough to check the marriage certificates in the library there. I had found the certificate numbers through Steve Morse's site and the Italian database and I had also asked some New York friends to see if we could find any of the graves.

These two grave photos arrived the Thursday I landed in Salt Lake City.

Nettie's birth year matched Nechy from Skalat, so that much looked good. Charles' stone has no Hebrew so we know neither his birth name (which was surely not Charles) nor his father's name. Morris is not one of the names David had given me, but he is Moshe Zvi, so he could be Harry. Morris' father is Joel.

The next morning I paid my first visit to the Family History Library. It is truly a remarkable place. I found the five brothers' marriage certificates. Although the spellings varied, in all five the father was listed as Joel or Joe Specht and the mother was Anna or Annie Borger or Berger or something like that. Nettie's parents are Selig Degen and Ida Perlmutter and Nettie is twenty-three years old, so this matches Nechy from the Skalat birth index.

The witnesses for the marriage of Charles and Nettie are Morris and Joseph Herschhorn.

Joseph Herschhorn is also the name of the bride's father on the marriage record for Harry (aka Morris) Specht - but I had no way to tell if this was the same person as the witness or if that was significant.

But I was looking for their town of birth. Four of the brothers wrote on their marriage certificates that they were from Austria, which was pretty useless. But Jack was more specific.

The word was not 100% clear, but now after looking back at the JRI-Poland index, it is clear that he wrote Jaroslaw. This was my point in including this story in the "Every Available Record" series, before it became the story of the Specht family. There may be no point to get the marriage records of all five brothers, but in this instance only one of the five recorded the specific information that I wanted.

However it turned out not to be precise.

Jaroslaw is a town a bit northwest of Przemysl, definitely outside "Pikholz territory" but not very far. We have a Berl Pikholz of unknown age and origin who lived there in the 1930s, having married a woman from Jaroslaw. And we later found a Pikholz woman from Skalat who married a man from Jaroslaw and lived there with him until the War.

There was a bit more correspondence with David over the next few months. I even received this note from his grandmother:

Thank you very much for your report.

I believe two of my mother's brothers (Degen) migrated to Israel. I think they married and had children. I believe I have some cousins in Israel. I do not know their names.

I don't know if you have access to Israel's records. If so, would you see if you can find anything about them

Looking for long-dead Degens in Israel without knowing their first names is no simple matter, especially when you consider that most Hebrew is written without vowels, making it hard to distinguish between the less common Degen and the way more common Dagan.

It became clear to me that this family was not part of the Pikholz Project and my attention was drawn to other matters.

Then about six weeks ago, David wrote again, more than five years after our last correspondence. I decided that I was going to treat this as a client relationship rather than a potential cousin, all things considered, so nothing much happened.

But in preparing this blog, I reviewed everything and looked at all the source material with fresh eyes.

There is a list of Spechts born in a smallish town called Pruchnik, which is ten miles from Jaroslaw and fifteen from Przemysl. There I saw the children of Joel Specht and his wife Chane Borgen or Bergen, including the five sons plus several others who died in childhood. Charles is listed as Osiais (=Joshua), born in 1890. There are quite a few Specht references, including four children born in Przemysl to another couple named Joel and Chana Specht in 1790-1798. So we know that this family has been Specht for at least another hundred years back and that they were in the Przemysl area all that time.

I went back to a different set of US records and found WWI and WWII draft cards both for Morris-Harry and for Charles, the two oldest of the five brothers. (The WWII cards for what was called the Old Men's Draft.)  Charles wrote that his birth place was "Galicia" (WWI) and "Poland" (WWII) but Morris is more specific. His card for WWII says he is from "Prochnik." From the birth records we know that to be true. Here again, "every available record."

Pruchnik, Jaroslaw and Przemysl on the Polish side of the border. "Pikholz territory" on the Ukranian side.

Note that Pruchnik is in the Jaroslaw district and that explains how Jacob could reasonably have written "Jaroslaw" on his marriage record.

So clearly there is no connection between the Spechts and the Degens other than that they married one another. Except for the bit about their being second cousins. When David wrote six weeks ago, he said that although they were second cousins, they did not know that until they were in New York.

So I went a bit more into the Skalat records. As I said earlier, the birth record for Nechy Degen shows her father as Selig Degen and that her mother is Chaje Perlmutter from Budzanow, which is twenty-two miles SSW of Skalat. There is one other Perlmutter from Budzanow living in Skalat, and that would be Dwojre Herschhorn, the daughter of Joseph Herschhorn and Freude Perlmutter. This is Dora who married Charles Specht's brother Morris-Harry. As both the Degens and the Herschhorns had daughters named Nechy, my guess is that the mothers Freude and Chaje Perlmutter from Budzanow are sisters. That means that Charles and Morris-Harry married first cousins.

The Budzanow records do not show births for either of these Perlmutters, but there are many Perlmutters there. Some of them came from Skalat.

I do not know if this challenge is doable any more than I know if we can find the descendants of the Degen brothers in Israel. For now I am ordering Pruchnik records from Przemysl and my next order from Warsaw will include a few Degen and Perlmutter records from Skalat and Budzanow. Of course, I am NOT going to order Every Available Record, at least not for now. There are limits to these things.

Part 3 in a few weeks.

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Housekeeping note
I have been invited to speak at the Israel Genealogical Society's Kiryat Tiv'on branch on Sunday evening 17 March. I will be speaking in Hebrew and the subject is
BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT: WHAT YOU KNOW vs WHAT YOU CAN PROVE

DID AVRAHAM WEIDENFELD WORK FOR YAD VASHEM?

MOSHE PICKHOLZ FROM BUDZANOW
About thirteen-fourteen years ago, I received a phone call from Shuki Eckert, a Galician researcher with whom I have some overlapping interests. He was at Yad Vashem and he had found a set of about a hundred Pages of Testimony for Pikholz family members. Did I want them?

Well, of course I wanted them. I had inquired a few months earlier and Yad Vashem had been able to provide me with twenty-four Pages, so this would increase the set considerably.

Undated Page of Testimony
for Moshe Pickholz of Budzanow

Among this new group was a couple from Budzanow, for whom no submitter was listed. The father was Moshe Pickholz, born 1888 in Buczacz, with no parents' names listed. The mother was Tema Pickholz, born 1990 (sic) in Budzanow. Her parents were named as Jonah and Matel. They were shot in the Trembowla ghetto in 1942, as was their unmarried son Munio, who was born in 1920.

As I say, there was no submitter listed, nor was there a date or a place where the Page was filled out, but the style was consistent with the first big names project in 1956-57. The only identifying information was the signature of the person from Yad Vashem who assisted in filling out the form. Weidenfeld.

The Pages for Tema and Munio were the same way.

There is a Pikholz couple whose children were born in Budzanow in the 1880-90s, but Moshe does not seem to have anything to do with them. I have not been able to locate the one living descendant.

Moshe's family sat untouched in my "unconnected" pile for several years.

SIGNED BY J
I had never paid much attention to the signature of the Yad Vashem representative on any of these Pages. Apparently, during the big project in the mid 1950s, Yad Vashem sent people around to survivors, asking them to fill out the forms and helping them to do so. Many of the Pages are unclear or incomplete - perhaps because some survivors filled out so many, perhaps because the task was emotionally difficult, perhaps because it was the person from Yad Vashem doing the writing. In many cases, these helpers were students.

In one memorable case, I was looking at a Page on behalf of another researcher and I was surprised to see that I recognized the scrawled signature of the Yad Vashem helper. I'll call him J and I knew him as the Chief Financial Officer of a company where I worked for a few years around 1980, in Beer Sheva. I showed Dov, another co-worker from that period, twenty-odd years earlier, and he agreed - the signature was J.

J was originally from Nahariyya (on the coast, north of Haifa) and would have been a university student in the mid-1950s, which fit the profile of those sent by Yad Vashem to help collect these submissions.

THE FAMILY FROM BUCZACZ
The Page said Moshe was from Buczacz and there is, in fact, a Pikholz family from Buczacz - a family I have mentioned several times in this blog. Chaim Yaakov Pikholz had four sons and I was in contact with a few of the descendants - who in the course of time have been determined to be my fourth cousins. Most of the living descendants lived in the Haifa-Netanya area. There was also a daughter Taube, about whom we knew nothing. 

Some time later, I learned that there was another daughter, Rivka, who married Binyamin Hersch Bernstein of Radauti, in Bukovina. The couple lived in Radauti. because of the distance, there was probably less contact with these Bernsteins than the Buczacz families had with one another, but here too there are a few living descendants in the Haifa area. Actually, three of the Bernstein children lived in the Haifa area - one other was killed in Bukovina.

The last of the three who had lived here died in 1985 at about age eighty-three. She lived in Kiryat Motzkin and has two daughters. Her husband was Avraham Weidenfeld, who died in 1974.

FROM A MICROFILM IN SALT LAKE CITY
Five years ago, I attended the IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Salt Lake City and I took some time to examine any number of record sets at the library there. One of those record sets was for Budzanow and included the marriage record for Moshe and Tema. Ours is the second one on the page.

Moshe Pickholz married Tema Baltuch in Budzanow, 8 August 1911

The groom is Moshe, the son of Juda Mendl Pickholz and Heni Schutzman, from Buczacz, born 1880. The bride is Tema Baltuch, the daughter of Jona Schutzman and Marjem Baltuch, Marjem being from Mikulince. Tema was born 23 August 1884 in Budzanow. (I looked at the Schutzmans and determined that the bride and groom were not first cousins.)

The name Juda Mendl is totally unknown to me among Pikholz descendants. Mendel in any form or combination is rare and we have no other Juda among the Skalat Pikholz families. (There are some Leib and Aryeh, but no one specifically Juda.)

But the most likely solution was that Juda Mendl was a previously unknown son of Chaim Yaakov of Buczacz. After all, that's where Moshe was born. But I certainly did not have enough evidence to record him that way, so Juda Mendl and his son Moshe remained among the unconnected.

BACK TO YAD VASHEM
Some time later, I had the occasion to have another look at the Pages for Moshe and his family (by now online) and I saw how Yad Vashem treated the matter of the missing submitter.

They listed their agent, Weidenfeld, the fellow they sent to help the survivors fill out the forms, as the submitter. I checked with them and they said they assumed that this Weidenfeld had been the submitter himself, as well as having worked for Yad Vashem.

Makes sense to me.

I asked them if they would have any idea who this Weidenfeld was and they hadn't.

Then it occurred to me that perehaps this was Avraham Weidenfeld whose wife - the daughter of Rivka Bernstein - may have been a first cousin of Moshe.

If so, it seemed odd that Avraham Weidenfeld submitted pages only for this one cousin and his family, not for anyone else from the Buczacz family. I looked at pages submitted by anyone named Weidenfeld and saw nothing clarifying. It also seemed odd that if Moshe were the cousin of the submitter's wife, Moshe's parents would not be named on the Page, but his wife's would have

I spoke to Avraham Weidenfeld's two daughters and neither was willing to tell me anything - not even if the signature looks like it might have been that of their late father.

But now I had a more specific question - did Yad Vashem ever employ a man named Avraham Weidenfeld of the Haifa area, in their names project. I gave them an approximation of his age as well. Yad Vashem's personnel department told me that they had no information on who did that work in the 1950s and in general had no record of any Weidenfeld.

So I phoned J. It seemed predestined.

J had lived in Nahariyya, so he probably did his work for Yad Vashem in the Haifa area during the summer or other university vacation periods. So perhaps he knew the others working in that project in the same area. Perhaps they had been in a training seminar together.

J is retired and lives near Beer Sheva. He was very surprised by my call, moreso by my question. He had no idea about any Weidenfeld, but suggested I call his older brother who had been involved in the names project for a longer period of time.

The older brother didn't remember any Weidenfeld, but then he said there was not much contact among the Yad Vashem people in the field. He did tell me that they were not employees of Yad Vashem, but rather worked as part of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. So I tried the Institute and the personnel department at the University, where they thought I was really nuts.

Maybe I am, but it seemed like a good idea.

So for now, I am left with my puzzles and theories. I am recording this so as to be sure not to mislead anyone who might someday examine my database.

IMPORTANT HOUSEKEEPING NOTE
My talk in Givatayim on DNA is 14 October, not 10 October as previously announced.