Sibling Reunion?

Earlier this week, Lara Diamond posted about the reunification of her family with the descendants of her grandfather's aunt. This sparked a seriies of "me too" posts and comments.

Here is another version of the classic sibling reunification story, one in which I was tangentially involved, nearly twenty years ago. One with a different ending. (And with names changed to protect privcy.) 

An American genealogist was helping someone find what happened to her father's eldest sister, Feige Abramowitz. Feige's maiden name was unique and her birth date and birth place were known. Her husband was Shemuel (=Samuel) Abramowitz. This was in the late 1990s. Feige would have been ninety-one. The family "knew" she was killed, but didn't have any testimony or documentation.

A typical ITS card. (Can any such report ever be "typical?")

She asked me to have a look at the International Tracing Service card index at Yad Vashem. (This was before the major release of ITS records nearly ten years later.) I found a record that this same Feige Abramowitz - identified by maiden name, parents' names and birth date - applied for entry into the United States in 1947. The trail ended there. The Red Cross looked into the case, but reported back in a cryptic sort of way that they could not tell the family anything. 

We tried everything we could think of, including searching the Social Security Death Index using nothing but her birth date, but nothing looked right. Of course she could have died before 1962, when the online SSDI begins. Or perhaps she had not died at all.

Then we searched SSDI by the husband's birth date and found a Sam Abrams, who had lived in a large city in the Midwestern USA. Shemuel Abramowitz as Sam Abrams? With the same birth date? Looked promising. 

In that particular city, I had a third cousin who knew all the old Jewish women. I asked my cousin if she knew a Feige Abrams, about ninety-one, the widow of Sam. "You mean Phyllis," she said. "What do you want of her?"

A meeting was set up, very carefully, with the social workers in the retirement facility where Phyllis Abrams lived. Eventually she told her story. 

Feige Abramowitz was dead, killed in Poland. 

Sam survived. He met a fellow survivor in Poland and they married. She had no identification papers so he gave her his dead wife's identity. She spent fifty years in the United States terrified that someone might find out she had lied on her immigration papers and that she would be sent back to Poland. 

I'm thinking that the Red Cross had already figured that out.

Housekeeping notes
My own cousin reunion tour continues next week. I reported earlier on finding my grandmother's older sister's family and on meeting second cousins in Columbus Ohio and Nuremberg Germany. Next week Moscow where I plan to meet two more second cousins. With DNA kits in hand.

Then Orlando.

Your Mother Went By Salomea?

No, not my mother. Joe's mother. He is where this story kicks off.

Joe's article appeared in the issue of The Galizianer (the quarterly publication of Gesher Galicia) that came out a few days ago. He gave his kind permission to reproduce it here.
The article was originally published in the Winter 2013-2014 issue of L'dor V'dor, the quarterly newsletter of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland and they too have given their permission.

 

From my side, the story began when the International Tracing Service (ITS) index became fully available at Yad Vashem. My first look was in March 2008 and I found this. (I redacted the address.) 

Josef Nathanson of Baltimore had inquired in 1994 about Yetta Pickholz Schaffer of Lwow, born 1880, which may or may not be a precise year. He also inquired about her son and three daughters. As I have mentioned here on other occasions, east Galician families came to Lwow from all over, so there was no telling if this Yetta was from the Rozdol families or the Skalat families. I had no Yetta or Etta or similar born around that time, so I had no idea who this might be.

I wrote to Mr Nathanson at the address listed on the cards and we had quite a flurry of correspondence over several weeks. I had not yet begun my subscription to ancestry.com and my friend Renee Steinig found the passenger list with the name Salomea. But I still could not identify Yetta, so I could not place the Schaffers into the Pikholz family structure.

Joe had a precise date of birth for his mother, but despite my inquiries, we could not get the record from AGAD.  So there we sat for two years.

In 2010, AGAD received a few more years of records from the Civil Records Office in Warsaw, but there was a lot to be done before they would allow them to be indexed. I paid someone in  Warsaw to do an unofficial search, from which he could give me only extracts.

The search results included two daughters and a son of Yetta and the extract identified the mother as "Jenta Pikholz, c. Salomon Striks i Szejndel Pesel Pikholz." Jenta, not Yetta. And parents we knew. In fact, we had Jenta's 1883 birth record.

Scheindel Pescha's grave - Vienna. Joe's great-grandmother.

Scheindel Pescha was the daughter of David Pikholz and his wife Szerke Kawa. She was born 1846, probably in Rozdol, and died in Vienna in 1925. David and Szerka had four sons that we know of and are in touch with a number of descendants. This is the family I call IF4.
    

One of at least ten ITS cards for Friedrich

Scheindel Pescha was married to Salomon Strix or Strycks or some similar spelling. It varied from document to document. They had five children before Jenta, apparently four who went by some form of Stryks and Mordecai, who was Pickholz. Mordecai had four sons in Vienna, with the wonderfully Viennese names Siegfried, Friedrich, Ernst and Otto. Their Jewish names: Shelomo, Gabriel, David and Avraham. They died in London, Dachau, Haifa and Buenos Aires and I am in contact with children of Ernst and Otto.

Otto's daughter gave me some bits of information on the Stryks cousins, but I was never able to make contact with them.

Oh, and eventually we found Salomea's birth record. She was born ten days earlier than what the family had "known."

Now if we could only get some DNA out of these folks...

Housekeeping notes

I have an article of my own scheduled for the next issue of The Galizianer.

The practical genetics course I am taking next month at GRIPitt carries with it a discount coupon for Family Tree DNA tests for my project members. Thus far three new signups and at least two working on it. Thank you GRIPitt and FTDNA!

Friday, I visited Hevron with my son Devir and my cousin Ari. We photographed twenty-two graves that were not there on my last visit nearly two years ago. (I really must get back to going more often.)  There is an entirely new section with four graves, next to the section with the old rabbinic graves. You can see my Hevron site here. I should have it fully updated in the next day or two.

NO STONE UNTURNED, NO PAPER EITHER

The Kling Family
A few weeks ago, we were in Nahariyya for Shabbat and made a few cemetery stops on the way home, including this one in the Kiryat Yam section of the Afek Cemetery, at the edge of Kiryat Bialik. It had been on my list for years, almost since the beginning of my Pikholz research.

Yaakov and Zisl Kling and their adult son Yehudah Inbal. Zisl's stone (right) says "bat Mordecai and Sarah Pickholz."

I first came across this family fourteen or fifteen years ago in the International Tracing Service microfilms at Yad Vashem. These films were a small portion of the ITS index and had been held by Yad Vashem since the 1950s. (Only in 2008 was the whole set made available.)

Zisl Sofia Kling, formerly Willner, originally Pikholz, daughter of Markus and Sara, born 23 March 1920 in Lwow, followed by a list of places she had been from 1941  - the Lwow Ghetto and various camps - until her arrival in Israel in 1948.

I had no idea who she was. I had no couple named Markus (probably Mordecai) and Sara Pickholz (and even today I still don't have such a couple) and a family living in Lwow could have come from any of the east Galician towns where Pikholz families were known to have lived.

I found an address and phone number in Kiryat Yam (near Haifa) for Yaakov and Zisl Kling but had no success in contacting them. I even went there once, but no one answered and none of the neighbors were helpful.

Eventually, I tried the burial society, where I found that Yaakov had died in 1987. I thought that perhaps Zisl was in a retirement home or living with a son or daughter, but had no success in locating her. I set it aside. There was so much else to do and many, more promising leads to follow.

Once the full index of ITS records became available in 2008, the folks at ITS became more cooperative and I acquired copies of the substantial files for both Yaakov and Zisl. There were several mentions there of a son Leon who was born in 1947. I eventually found him buried next to his father, identified as Yehudah Inbal. He had died in 1983. By then, Zisl had died (in 2005) and was buried on the other side of her husband.

I also learned that the "Willner" on the first card was Zisl's first husband, Arthur Willner. No mention of children there..

In the meantime, I learned that the Klings had a second son, Motie (=Mordecai), born 1959, with an address in Eilat. After not succeeding in contacting him, I went to the apartment building but did not see him name on any of the boxes. I happened to see the mailman and he had never heard of Motie Kling.

I set this aside until I had the opportunity to visit the grave, but that opportunity never seemed to come up.

The Invitation
Eventually I did visit the graves and the fact that someone took the trouble to name Zisl's parents as Mordecai and Sarah Pickholz was encouraging. I figured that when I'd find someone, they'd know something. Perhaps some identification of Mordecai and Sarah. Perhaps Zisl had brothers and sisters. Perhaps birth places and ages for Mordecai and Sarah.

Then I saw the paper. Right there on Yaakov's grave, held down by two stones.

Deciding to literally leave no stone unturned, I picked up the paper and to my surprise, I found an invitation. Barely legible.

I neglected to photograph the invitation when I was there...

I could make out the date, 30 January 2013. It had been out in the elements for nearly a full year.

I could also make out the name of the wedding hall, in Haifa.

But no names of any sort. Well with any luck, that hall had only one affair that day and with a bit more luck, they'd put me in touch with the family.

... so I thank Dana Michaelovici for going to do it for me.

Than I turned the card over and learned that this was a wedding. Gal and Maor. No surnames, but a picture.

One of them must be a Kling grandchild - either from Yehudah or from Motie. I learned later in the week that there is in fact a custom among some Hassidic groups for the grandchildren to go to the cemetery to invite the grandparents and learned further that some actually leave invitations.

I get home, phone the hall, they won't give me any surnames, but they give me a cell phone number. I call but the person who answers knows no couple named Gal and Maor. I call the hall again and they refuse to give me anything else, invoking the usual claims of privacy.  They also refuse my request to forward a letter to the couple or the families.

Next I tried the Haifa Religious Council where - if one of them lived in Haifa - they might have registered the marriage. The Council might have provided the rabbi as well, if the couple had no preference of their own. The folks there were very cooperative. It was a simple search since I had the precise date. But they had no such couple. I tried Kiryat Yam.. Nothing there either. Next would be Kiryat Motzkin and Kiryat Bialik. I had had some issues with K. Motzkin regarding the cemetery there, so I started with K. Bialik.

The clerk there, a woman named Kochava, looked for all the men named Maor and found nothing. Then she checked the women named Gal and found nothing there either. Next she tried the date and there they were. Gal was the groom and Maor was the bride!

Since you have to document that you are Jewish for the Rabbinate, they had a record that Gal's mother was Sarah Kling, and HER mother was a Pickholz. Sarah was apparently named for Zisl's mother. So there is a daughter, Sarah, in addition to the two sons, Yehudah and Motie.

Kochava won't give me a phone number without permission, so after we hang up, she calls Gal, get's Sarah's phone number, calls her and comes back to me. Sarah lives in Kiryat Bialik and is very interested, but I should phone in the evening.

Perhaps she'll be interested in the seventy-odd pages that I had from the ITS.

Meantime, I recorded Sarah, Gal and Maor in my database.

Calling Sarah
In the meantime, I make a list of questions.

• What does Sarah know about her grandparents? Ages? Where were they born? Who are THEIR parents?
• Did Zisl have brothers and sisters? 
• Does Sarah have siblings besides Yehudah and Motie? 
• What other grandchildren are there besides Gal? 
• Why does Zisl's grave have Freida in parentheses, but the ITS card has the additional name Sofia? 
• What family members were killed in the Holocaust?
• Were there any children from Zisl's first marriage to Arthur Willner, who I assume was killed in the Shoah. (Note to self: Perhaps Sarah has never heard of Arthur Willner or a first marriage - I must be careful with this.)
• Does she mind if I tell the story on my blog, with names.?

So I spoke with her. She goes by Sarit. As usual, it's a bit of a project to explain who I am and what I want, especially when I have no clue who she is either. Sarit doesn't know much. She has just the two brothers, who are both dead, but they left children. She is widowed and has just the one son. She knows that her mother had a sister, but she doesn't recall if her name was ever mentioned.

She knows about her mother's first husband and even has a photograph of him. She was really surprised that I knew of him.

But she has pictures and papers, including some documents with her mother's story, which were prepared as part of her claim for reparations. That kind of thing is likely to be very helpful. Sarit will have to get that organized and scanned for me and already wants to when I am coming to Kiryat Bialik.

She explained the Sofia/Freida thing. Sofia was a name she never used here and Freida was a name she decided she liked, so she'd use it from time to time.

In the meantime, I emailed her a few of the cards like the ones that appear here above and will Dropbox her material from the ITS files. I also prepared a little chart with what I know of the family and indicating what specific information I hoped she could give me.

I am hoping that this brick wall will actually come down in the next few weeks. Perhaps we can even find her some living family, even if it's distant.


Housekeeping notes

1, I am posting this Sunday, 25 Shevat. If you don't know the significance of this date, please see my post from two years ago.

2. Last Monday, I was just interviewed by Marian Pierre-Louis for her weekly Genealogy Professional podcast series. I air on 10 Feb. Afterwards she said she enjoyed listening to me speak because my accent reminds her of her uncle who grew up in Pittsburgh. Marian has already written about the interview - and my Pittsburgh accent - on her personal blog.

Reminds me that when I was in Chicago last summer and I asked my thirteen year old grandson to bring my spare glasses from the box in my suitcase.  He goes into the kitchen and I hear my daughter-in-law say "He means BAHX."

3. Follow up from last week.  I heard from the burial society. arrangements were made by her brother-in-law. Both he and his wife (Freida's sister Rachel Rozner) are long deceased.

H is for HELLENBERG, HALPERN, HUSIATYN

Wednesday at Yad Vashem - The visit was not meant to be
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Yad Vashem to do some work in the International Tracing Service (Arolsen) database for a client.

When I got there I found that the database was down. Obviously it was not meant to be, at least not that day.

Hellenberg
In the days that followed, I learned a few things about one of my Pikholz puzzles.

In earlier visits to the ITS database, some years ago, I found these two cards.

Mendel and Frieda Pickholz, a married couple, he born 1883 in Podwoloczysk, died in 1941, she born 1893 in Czernovitz, released from the ghetto there in 1944. A handwritten note with a 1965 date seems to indicate she survived the war. Maybe she is a Hellenberg. It's not clear what the Halpern is doing here.

I ordered the files from Germany. Aside from the fact that Mendel died in the Czernovitz ghetto, my German-speaking friends could not add much.

Then came two breakthroughs, two weeks ago. First I received the 1923 Czernovitz marriage record for Mendel and Frieda, thanks to Daniel Horowitz of My Heritage. The next day, I heard from Batya Unterschatz that she had located Freida living in Tel Aviv until her death in 1971. In the same apartment was Bella Hellenberg, about the same age, perhaps a sister-in-law. Batya was not able to identify family members of either woman.

Defining Mendel
Here is the marriage record - the second one on the page.

Groom: Mendel Pickholz, son of Joel Halpern and Chana Pickholz; Bride Freida Hellenberg - with a note

Well, I certainly recognize the family of Joel Halpern and his wife Chana (sometimes Chancie) of Husiatyn. Here they are, with Mendel and his wife Freida at the bottom left.

I believe that Gabriel is the son of Nachman Pikholz (b.1795) though I have no actual evidence.

I also believe that the son Moses, born 1851, is the same man who heads the family we call TONKA. Here we have a bit of indirect evidence. Tonka is Moses' granddaughter and lived in Skalat. She wrote a piece in the Skalat memorial book about the Rebbe of Husiatyn, who used to spend several weeks a year in Skalat. Tonka's father Tuvia was a Husiatyner hassid and that fact may be connected to the fact that Gabriel - a Skalater - lived in Husiatyn.

If the two Moses are the same, we have living descendants of Gabriel and Sara. Of Chancie's children, we have not found any descendants beyond the above chart, but perhaps the newly-found marriage of Mendel and Freida gives us something to work with.

I found what the note on the marriage record says. Mendel and Freida were divorced in Czernovitz in 1936. That  explains why Freida was using her maiden name Hellenberg in Tel-Aviv.

 I did some searching in the yizkor books listed on JewishGen and found a listing in Husiatyn for "Yoel, wife, daughter Chanchia, Sons Moshe, Berl and Fishel." Close, but not quite what I wanted. But since I'd be going back to Yad Vashem in a few days to do that client work that I hadn't done a few days earlier, I figured I should have a look at the actual Hebrew version of the Husiatyn book as well as seeing if the ITS database had anything on the putative sister-in-law Bella Hellenberg.

I also decided to go to Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel-Aviv, to visit the graves of the two Hellenberg women. I wanted to see if the stones said "our mother" or "our sister" or what and if there was any additional memorial to family killed in the Shoah, as is often done here.

The following Wednesday - Yad Vashem and Kiryat Shaul
Wednesday morning, I went to Yad Vashem, set myself up for a look at the ITS database and asked my friend Zvi, who was on duty in the library, for the yizkor book for Husiatyn.

First I did the work for the client.

I found ITS references to a Bella Hellenberg, but not the right woman.  I found the Joel Halpern family in the Husiatyn book but there was nothing beyond what I had already seen in the JewishGen translation.

I did find ITS references to the wrong Joel Halpern and figured I may as well order those files. The file numbers didn't make sense and I went to discuss it with Zvi, returning the Husiatyn book at the same time.

As I waited for Zvi to get off the phone, I saw a man in hassidic-dress looking at the Husiatyn book that I had just placed on the counter. I asked him not to take it until Zvi has written that I had returned it. Turns out he works at Yad Vashem and has some Husiatyn interests as well. But the person who REALLY knows Husiatyn, he told me, was out in the lobby.

David Margaliot came in a few minutes later and we introduced ourselves. Also a man in hassidic dress, he runs an organization called Maagarim in Ashdod. Something about international archival services and a Husiatyner hassid. We exchanged cards and will speak later, but now I see why the visit the week before had not worked out. It was this week that I was meant to come to the Yad Vashem research library.

I proceeded to Tel Aviv. and found the two graves in Kiryat Shaul.

Freida Hellenberg, sister and aunt. No possessive pronoun - "my" or "our. "

Bat Mordecai and Chani from Chernovitz.

And her date of death.

So there are no children, but at least one brother or sister, living at the time of her death in 1971, probably here in Israel.

I submitted a request (it carries a fee of NIS 50) to the burial society for information on next of kin or other family information and I hope to hear from them soon.

There are niece(s) and/or nephew(s) - whom I can probably find - but whether they know anything about the family of the aunt's ex-husband is another matter.

Bella Hellenberg is called Betti. "My dear mother, my dear sister." Nothing else I didn't know.  She died in 1957 at age sixty.

Neither of the women's stones mentioned family lost in the Shoah.

The possibility that Betti/Bella's son or (more likely) daughter knows anything is pretty remote, but if nothing turns up with Freida's people, I'll check Betti's.

I am not optimistic, but progress often comes as a surprise.

Housekeeping notes
1. I am to be interviewed this week by Marian Pierre-Louis who does a weekly podcast with genealogy professionals. It should play next week

2. We have a set of matches between Pikholz and Kwoczka family members and my eighth grade math teacher and her daughters.

WHO IS THIS LEA PICKHOLZ?

Lea Pickholz Keller of Drohobycz
After the Second World War, the allies set up an organization called the International Tracing Service (ITS) with headquarters in Bad Arolsen Germany, to deal with all documentation regarding civilians during and after the war. This included deportations, camp records, refugees, people looking for other people, slave labor, etc. Over the years, ITS did lookups for people but did not make records or indecies available for general research, aside from some microfilms which have been available at Yad Vashem since the 1950s.

Attitudes began changing a few years ago and in early 2008, a much larger index was made available to the public at Yad Vashem. My first search of the new index showed files of a number of Pikholz descendants whose names I had not known before, among them Lea Pickholz Keller of Drohobycz. She was born in 1906 to Ben Zion and Rifka Rachel, but it was not clear which of her parents was the Pickholz. Lea was killed in Belzec in 1942.

I requested the file from Arolsen and learned that Lea's husband Pinchas had had some post-war correspondence wth the ITS from his Tel-Aviv address. I found two Pinchas Keller buried in Greater Tel-Aviv cemeteries, both of whom were age-appropriate for Lea and both of whom had died within the past fifteen years. I located the son of the right one.

The son was very surprised to receive my letter. He knew that his father had lost a family in Drohobycz, but didn't know any details.  He certainly didn't know anything about the first wife's lineage. But I did learn about the two children that Pinchas and Lea had together and who were killed. A son Shlomo and a daughter Rachel. I found an ITS card at Yad Vashem for Shlomo, but none for Rachel. Shlomo too had been killed in Belzec.

So this is where I was left, with a Lea Pickholz born 1906 in Drohobycz, to Ben Zion and Rifka Rachel. Another unidentified Pikholz descendant, at a time in my research when I'd have thought I'd be solving these questions, not finding new ones.

Identification
Birth, death and marriage records from east Galicia are held in the AGAD archives in Warsaw, but they may not be released from the Civil Records Office to the archives until the last record in the set is a hundred years old. Even then, we cannot order these records until they have been processed, fumigated, microfilmed and indexed. And there are no plans at the moment for additional indexing. AGAD's staff will not do searches, even if there is a precise date, which I didn't have in Lea's case. So the transfer in 2010 of Drohobycz birth records for 1906-09 was not much help.

In the course of some other inquiries, I found a man - I think he is a former AGAD employee - who is able to do searches in the newly transfered records based on surnames, and provide extracts of the records. He charges by the hour but can do several surnames at once. I got a quote from him for a number of record sets and contacted a few other researchers for each town, to spread the costs. (By the time of this writing, I have done this with three groups of record sets.) The extracts came quickly, but since there were dozens from the main Pikholz towns Rozdol and Skalat, Drohbycz took a back seat. (I had not done this project specifically to find Lea's birth.)

The five record sets I had ordered provided extracts of four births from Drohobycz, three from neighboring Boryslaw, thirty from Rozdol and thirteen from Skalat, as well as thirteen Skalat deaths. Lea was born to Ryfka Ruchel Pikholz and Benzion Flam/Kornhaus(l)er (it is not clear which surname comes from Benzion's mother and which came from his father) on 16 August 1909 in Boryslaw. That's 1909, not 1906 and Boryslaw, not Drohobycz. The record further tells us that Ryfka Ruchel's parents are Dawid Samuel and Sara Pikholz, a couple we know well.

We certainly know this couple. Dawid Samuel Pikholz was born in Rozdol in about 1838 to Aron and Chaje Pikholz. Aron was born about 1818 to the original Pikholz couple in Rozdol, Pinkas and Sara Rifka. Dawid Samuel and his wife Sara Thalenberg had four children that we knew of: Schaje, Chaja Lea (m. Samuel Glucksman), Abraham and Iszak. There are a few descendants of Schaja in the US and Canada, but they have no interest in contact. Chaja Lea and Abraham each had a number of children, but I have found no trace of anyone beyond their birth records. Iszak was known as Tallenberg and lived in Budapest and had three children. I am in touch with one of Iszak's two grandsons, who lives here in Jerusalem, and he was interested to hear of his mother's previously unknown first cousin.

I am pleased that Lea now has a place in the Pikholz tree.