The Dead Man In The Zellermayer House

Last week, I wrote about the new acquisitions from the AGAD archives, including the 1909 marriage record for Abraham Eisig Zellermayer and Basie Pudles and the 1910 birth record for their son Jonas.

For convenience, I placed the record higher on the page, adjacent to the headings

According to this record, Abraham Zellermayer was born 27 February 1883 in a town called Liczkowce, near Husiatyn, to Zelman Juda Zellermayer and Ettel Pikholz.

This index entry from JRI-Poland appears to be the birth of his father. The actual record is just below but it is very difficult to read. (Thanks to Mark Halpern for his help with that.)

The second line is the birth of Selman Cellermayer. I was hoping for a house number. No such luck.

There are several connections between the Pikholz and Zellermayer families, as shown below, with the Pikholz shaded blue and the Zellermayers shaded yellow.  I am not sure exactly how the Zellermayers on the right connect to those on the left, but there are clear indications that they do, including the fact that one on each side (in red) was born in Liczkowce.

I have been particularly interested in Chaje Cirl Pikholz in the top right corner. I haven't a clue who she is.1 We have no other children for her.

It had been my impression that Abraham Zellermayer and his wife had come to Israel in the 1930s, but I had never found any

Adolf & Julius in the Citizenship index of the Mandatory Government.
Adolf is shown here as born 1883 in Liczkowce.

trace of them here and the two granddaughters I know have never been particularly communicative. But once I learned from the marriage record that he had been born in Liczkowce in 1883, I realized that I did have evidence of his arrival. I just hadn't realized that on his Mandatory Citizenship file, he had gone by Adolf. I already had the file for his son Jonas, aka Julius, and it was easy enough to copy Abraham's as well. Basie went by Berta. They had lived previously in Vienna.

When I sent the marriage record to the granddaughters, one of them told me that Abraham and Batya, as she was known here, were buried in Tel-Aviv's Kiryat Shaul Cemetery, which is online and where I had not seen them before. This time I searched by given names and fathers' names and found them.

Deller Meyer Batya and Fellermayer Avraham in the database of the Greater Tel-Aviv Burial Society

I shouldn't have been surprised. I already knew that their younger son was listed as Max Zeller Meyer. Next time I am in the area, I'll photograph their graves and add them to our Virtual Cemetery.

So that should have wrapped up this inquiry, at least for now. Except for the matter of Gabriel.

I  have mentioned the family of Gabriel and Sara Pikholz from Husiatyn several times, including in connection with some of the new records last week. In fact, I wrote at some length about their family only two months ago. Gabriel Pikholz died in Husiatyn in 1852 at age thirty. I believed (and still do) that Gabriel was the son of Nachman Pikholz (b. ~1795) and the father of Moshe Pikholz, whose family appears here.

What I did not mention before is precisely where in Husiatyn Gabriel Pikholz died.

House number 70 in Husiatyn is where one of the Zellermayers lived. We see that Feige Zellermejer died in house number 70 just four weeks before Gabriel, identified as being "from Skalat," died in that same house.

My impression has been that this is where Gabriel stayed when he went to Husiatyn, very likely for some reason to do with his Hassidic rebbe.

I do not know exactly who this fourteen year old Feige is. I have not tried to piece together the Zellermayer clan and we do not have access to the full set of records.

But I do have a full copy of the Husiatyn death records for the period 1816-1876. I started looking through them in reverse order and saw that none of the later ones had house numbers.

Except one. From 1869.

Down at the bottom of the page, in house number 70 is the death of Abraham Eisig Zellermayer, age 73.

Well, we have a birth of Selman (=Zalman) to Abraham in 1859 and he is very likely the father of the Abraham Eisig born 1883. If this Abraham Eisig who died at 73 in 1869 is Selman's father, it would mean Selman was born when his father was past sixty. Maybe. Or maybe not.

We have a thirty-one year old Malka Zellermayer who died in house 70. That's the name of Selman's mother. But this Malka died in 1851, so she wasn't the mother of the Selman born 1859. (No "maybe" about that.)

There was a Juda Zellermayer who died in that same house in 1850 at age twenty-eight and a Nisin(?)2 age ten in 1836 and a baby named Baszie in 1830. There is also a Chanzie Mariem Celler in 1837 and I am assuming that she is also Cellermayer.

The only non-Zellermayer who died in this house was Gabriel Pikholz. But it would be a leap of faith to cite a family connection between Gabriel and these particular Zellermayers - who may or may not be the family of "our" Abraham Eisig.

Or maybe there is one more Pikholz-Zellermayer marriage we hadn't known about. After all, we have no idea what Gabriel's wife Sara's maiden name was. Perhaps Gabriel's presence in Husiatyn (and the birth of his son Moshe there in 1851) had nothing to do with the Rebbe and everything to do with his wife's family.

Now if I could only get some DNA from a couple of Gabriel's putative descendants and from the Zellermayer granddaughters, I could perhaps muddle the picture further.

A happy Purim to everyone.

1 After considering that Gabriel is probably the son of Nachman Pikholz, it is tempting to think that Chaje Cirl (top right corner of the tree chart) might be his sister. But we are pretty sure that Nachman had a year old daughter Cirl who died in 1840. That pretty much rules out his having a daughter Chaje Cirl who had a child in 1848.

2 The handwriting on the 1836 death record is not clear, so I crowd-sourced it on JewishGen. The results were Nisin-32, Ruven-10, Bevin, Nevin and Besin five each, and a handful of names with one "vote" each. In fact, we know that there were Zellermayers in Husiatyn named Rubin. We do not know of any Nisin (Nathan, Nisan, etc.)

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.