Julius Lichterman / Joseph Davis

This blog is dedicated to my mother's first cousin Ethel Rosenbloom Klavan, the daughter of Uncle Hymen. Her fourth yahrzeit is this Thursday, 12 Kislev. It is one of my self-imposed kaddish days.

The disappearance of Julius Lichterman
My maternal grandmother Sarah Rosenbloom Gordon arrived in the United States before the First World War. She had been born and raised in Borisov - Russia then, now Belarus - as had her siblings and probably at least one of her parents. She died when I was eleven and we never had any meaningful conversation. And she never talked to her children about the past.

Left: Lichtermans. Right: Gordons.
Center: U. Hymen.

Her three younger full-siblings preceeded her across the ocean. Her unmarried sister Rachel Leah (Rosa) died the tenth of December 1910 (2 Kislev), according to her death certificate at age twenty-five . We think she was a bit younger. She was not married and had no children.

Another sister Shayna Liba (Sadie) was married to Julius Lichterman (Uncle Hymen referred to him as Zisal and the Lichtermans confirm that this is their Julius, the son of Joseph and Nechama.) She died the first of May 1916 (28 Nisan) and the death certificate says she was twenty-three. She was certainly in her late twenties. There were no children.

As I say, we know she was married to Julius Lichterman but the death certificate - which says "married" - has no space for spouse's name. Nor is there a space for "informant," though surely that would have been Julius.

After Sadie died, Julius disappeared. No one knew what happened to him. His own Lichterman family said he was so distraught at the death of his wife that he broke off contact with everyone, never to be heard from again.

My grandmother's brother, Chaim Benzion (Hymen), was the youngest and I knew him fairly well. Most of my discussions with him about family history were together with his daughter, Cousin Ethel Klavan.

It is my opinion that there was some sort of cousin relationship between the Rosenbloooms and the Lichtermans and I discussed the two families together here and here.Therefore I am interested in Julius as a family member, not just as an in-law. The Lichtermans said they were from Borisov, but were probably from a nearby town and when my grandmother arrived in the US, she said she was going to her cousin, who was married to Julius' sister.

The Rosenbloom sisters were active in revolutionary circles back in Russia and my own theory was that after their side won, Julius went back to what he expected to be the new socialist paradise. But I have no evidence of this.

In the course of my research, I have never located a marriage record for Julius and Sadie. The indispensible New York City Italian Genealogical Group site (searched by Steve Morse's site) has a marriage of Julius I. Lichterman and Bertha Kosminsky in 1909. But he is someone else, as we see in the actual marriage record.

Julius Lichterman as Joseph Davis
I looked up Julius Lichterman on the immigration and naturalization pages at Ancestry.com and found fifteen entries.  Several refer to a man born 1877, naturalized in Pennsylvania, crossed the border at Niagara Falls in 1914 and was married to Bertha. That would be the man in the previous paragraph, although the ages are not quite the same.

Several others refer to a man born 1898 in Vilna who arrived in the US in 1919 and was naturalized in 1928. Not our guy.

Others appear on undated naturalization index cards in New York and Pennsylvania with no informaation. Not good for much.

One is for a man born in 1883 in what Ancestry's transcribers call "Barieve." He crossed the border from Mexico to California in 1945. The age sounds right and the birthplace looks like a bad transcription of Borisov.

I cleaned this up a bit. There is nothing interesting on the second page except his signature.

He is indeed from Borisov. He is also known as Joseph Davies. (His signature looks more like Davis.) He was entering the US "to resume residence" at an address in Los Angeles. It seems to say that he was in California from 1909, though I cannot make out the actual location. "To resume residence" sounds like he had been away for some time, not on a vacation or business trip.

Is this "our Julius?" Well, for starters in seems unlikely that our Julius was in California from 1909 while his wife lived in New York until her death in 1916. But he is from Borisov and the age is right. On the other hand, perhaps he was in California when she died and that could explain why "mother's name" on his wife's death record was written in a different hand, probably later.

This Julius Lichterman died in Los Amgeles of 27 April 1949. He is listed in the California death index twice, once as we know him and once as Joseph Davis. (Not Davies.) The Social Security number is the same in both entries.

The death certificate tells us nothing at all, though it confirms both names.

We ordered the SS-5 from Social Security - thanks to Galit Aviv for helping with both these documents. All they could give us was the Numident version, not the original inn his own hand..

Also not useful.

I am not sure how to proceed. He seems like a loner. I expect that neither the cemetery nor a probate search would help.

It all looks so mysterious. Perhaps he was working for an intelligence agency or something.

I have more important fish to fry.

With Cousin Ethel Klavan and her son Ross, Jerusalem
May her memory be for a blessing

Lichterman - Checking the Source

My g-gm's grave in Borisov

Etta Bryna - my great-grandmother
I wrote about the maiden name of my mother's mother's mother Etta Bryna Rosenbloom at length in the early days of this blog four and a half years ago and for those who want the details, it's worth a reread. She died probably in her late thirties and we know precious little about her. In addition to the information I presented back then, Renee Steinig found the death certificate of my grandmother's other sister in Islip, Suffolk County - but it lists both her parents' names as "unknown." The informant was the hospital.

Etta Bryna's tombstone

So I am still where I was then. Etta Bryna's father is Yehudah and he is a Levi. My conjecture that she is a Lichterman still runs up against a lack of any proof that the Lichtermans - a known Borisov family - were Leviim, but the gravestones of the known Lichterman men have no Hebrew. The traditional grave of their sister Gitta Lichterman Benenson (below) calls her father "Yosef" with no mention of his being a Levi.

This is where I have been holding for the past four or five years.

Gitta Lichterman Benenson

Our new project for several Borisov families 
Recently I joined forces with Galit Aviv to have a look at several Borisov famliies who appear to be connected to one another. These would be the Lichtermans, the Kaplanskys, the Benensons and the Rosenblooms. There are a couple of others which might belong here as well. To that end, we have added several people to the Rosenbloom Project that I set up at Family Tree DNA some years ago and are getting a few others to test - including a granddaughter of Gitta.

Galit - whom I have not met, but expect to see when I am in the US during the winter - is a good and resourceful researcher. Among other things, she came up with the following.

This is the 1908 death and burial record for Moshe Likhterman the son of R' Yudel

Map from the
JewishGen Gazeteer

Likhterman the Levi, in Slutsk. He is also called "the son-in-law of R' Eliyahu" followed by the odd notation "l'm24." The burial is next to someone named Yehuda who died a few month earlier. Could this be the brother of Etta Bryna? The fathers of both are Yehudah who is a Levi. And is that Yehudah next to him perhaps his father? And what is that odd notation "l'm24?"

Slutsk is some ninety miles SSW of Borisov, but that needn't indicate a problem. Certainly not if this Moshe held a rabbinic position.

The next step was obviously to see the actual Chevra Kadisha records, the book from Slutsk which is the source for the above record.

I contacted the people who had submitted the Chevra Kadisha records and no one was quite sure what the source was, except that it was in Israel and that the translators (from Hebrew) too were Israelis. So I had a look at the web site of the National Library, on the campus of the Hebrew University here in Jerusalem, hoping I would find it either there or at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People which is now part of the Library.

The Manuscript Reading Room

The Chavra Kadisha book of Slutsk for the years 5439-5684 (1679-1924)

The book is in the Manuscript Reading Room at the National Library, so that's where I went. It had moved since the last time I was there and is now in a pleasant room behind the cafeteria. Two young librarians, Ariel and Moriah set me up with a microfilm reader that had a scanner attached and brought out the film in a matter of minutes.

I saw that the transcription was faithful to the original text, with one small exception. (The original calls the deceased "yashish" which in modern Hebrew means elderly, while the translation is "venerable." But venerable was a more common meaning when the original was written.)

The original had the ל"מ (l"m) - left of center on the third line - but not the "24" which I assume was some sort of typographical error. But I didn't know what those initials meant or if they were significant.

Until suddenly I did. Because I had seen this before.

Four years ago, I wrote in this space about the correct name of Hersch Leib Pikholz of Rozdol and the solution to the problem was found in the records of what we call Kollel Galicia here in Jerusalem. The records in question are too poor quality to show here, but here is what I wrote in that earlier blog.

I was surprised to see that there were no contributions by anyone named Pikholz, despite the fact that Rozdol was the place that all the Pikholz families from that area had come from. There are no lists of Holocaust victims from Rozdol, but from our own records we know that there were Pikholz families there at the time. Certainly in the late 1920s. Eventually, I realized what had happened. The person in charge of collections for Rozdol, Pinchas Kerner, was himself a Pikholz son-in-law and he knew all the families personally, so instead of writing out the name each time, he simply wrote P"H as a personal shorthand.

l'm is shorthand for Likhterman!

R' Moshe's father-in-law Eliyahu is a Likhterman. I asked Ariel to have a look and he said "It wasn't uncommon for people to marry relatives." Maybe it's that simple.

But I don't think so. I read it differently. The rabbi Moshe ben Rabbi Idel the Levi Likhterman the son-in-law of R' Eliyahu Likhterman. How about Moshe (son of R' Idel the Levi) Likhterman? Ariel said he could see that possibility as well.

I think Moshe's father is a Levi but is not Likhterman. Moshe took the name Likhterman from his father-in-law. So Etta Bryna can be the sister of Moshe Likhterman without that being her maiden name - and the Likhtermans are not Leviim. The father of Etta Bryna and Moshe is. What is his - and Etta Bryna's - surname?

Now we go back to my grandmother's passenger list where she seems to be going to her "cousin J. Ben..." I demonstrated four years ago that this is Jacob Benenson, the husband of Gitta Lichterman. So is my grandmother calling a relative of her mother's sister-in-law (who lived in Slutsk!) "cousin?" Perhaps the cousin was Jacob and Etta Bryna is a Benenson.

I haven't a clue if the Benensons of Borisov are Leviim. Of the Benensons on Find A Grave, there are eight or nine men with photographs and Hebrew epitaphs. None say "Levi."

There are a lot of "if"s and "maybe"s in this highly speculative scenario and I am not about to jump to any conclusions. But for the first time in several years I see some possible movement in this part of the family. And some new possibilities. My instincts have been pretty good. Maybe we will learn something from the new DNA project and the new contacts.

Oh yes, I also looked at the burial record for the Yehudah who is buried next to Moshe Likhterman. He is someone not connected. Apparently they didn't number the plots, but recorded the locations according to the next grave over.

Housekeeping notes
Program chairs - and people who know program chairs - please note. I have some available dates during my coming US trip, particularly the weekdays between 23 January and 2 February, in the east and midwest and perhaps 14-16 February in the NY/NJ area  Perhaps even Sunday the nineteenth. Several topics are available including the Lazarus-Endogamy talk which I presented in Seattle and a new one about Uncle Selig where DNA is not the main point of interest.

The following programs are set, with some others under discussion:

22 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Maryland, Baltimore County Public Library, 1301 Reiserstown Road, Pikesville
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?
29 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Greater Philadelphia, Main Line Reform Temple 410 Montgomery Avenue, Wynnewood
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
5 February 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Cleveland, Park Synagogue East, 27500 Shaker Blvd,  Pepper Pike
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
10 February 2017, 11:00 – ROOTSTECH2017,
Jewish DNA: Successes and Lessons from the Journey
12 February 2017, 1:30 - Orange County JGS - details to follow.
13 February 2017, 7:30 - JGS of Los Angeles, American Jewish University, 15600 Mulholland Drive
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?

It's been awhile since I have mentioned my book, available at www.endogamy-one-family.com.

ETTA BRYNA'S SURNAME

Mother's mother and maternal grandmother both died in the month of Nisan.

My grandmother, Sarah Rosenbloom Gordon (Sarah bat Israel David) died on the third day of Pesach 5719, fifty-three years ago, at age seventy-three more or less.

Her mother, Etta Bryna bat Yehudah the Levi died on the sixth of Nisan 5656, one hundred sixteen years ago. How old was she?  I can only guess. Almost surely in her mid to late thirties. Her eldest daughter was about eighteen. Her only living son was a few weeks short of his second birthday. The story is that there had been other sons who did not survive infancy, so the local rabbi suggested giving this one the name Chaim. Chaim Benzion, he was called. He was the only one we knew, aside from my grandmother herself, and I didn't exactly know her.


Uncle Hymen writes his mother's name as "Ethel Beatrice (last) unknown,"
a back-translation from what he had named his own daughter.

  We are also missing Etta Bryna's maiden name. I am sure my grandmother would have known that, but no one ever asked her. Likely my grandfather too, because although they married in New York, they knew each other in Russia when he was courting her sister. Or maybe he didn't.

My great-grandfather (and namesake) married again soon after his wife died and the new wife - who had two children of her own - may have discouraged further connections with the dead wife's family. Maybe Etta Bryna's family didn't live in Borisov, so seeing them would have involved some effort. Or maybe they were in town and Uncle Hymen simply never realized they were his mother's kin. Uncle Hymen left Borisov for America when he was only twenty, so who knows what he once knew and later forgot.

But Uncle Hymen had some old pictures in his house on Carmody Drive and I had seen them when I visited. One showed his sister Shayna Libe standing next to Etta Bryna's grave. That's how I know the date. That's how I know her father's name. I should be showing you that picture here, but I cannot. The second cousin who has it will not show it to anyone. He barely - and rarely - admits to having it.

My grandmother had a hard life and when I knew her, she was old, unwell and and her list of languages didn't include much English, which is why I wrote above that I didn't exactly know her. She had been active in Russia's illegal Socialist movement and was involved in the first revolution, after the Russo-Japanese War, spending a couple of years in Siberia for her trouble. The whole family were Socialists.

On her marriage certificate, Sarah Rosenbloom signs in Hebrew



In Siberia (the one with the black hat)



In 1910, she followed her two younger sisters to New York, arriving a few months before the death of the older of the two - Rachel Leah (Rose), who was the one my grandfather had really wanted. In 1914, Sarah married Raymond Gordon and they moved to Vandergrift Pennsylvania, a place she never liked. They raised five children, he owned a furniture store and she lived for those occasions when they would see the rest of the family in Washington DC and New York. (He would say "But we just saw them last year.")

But let's get back to Etta Bryna's maiden name. 
We have four families - the Rosenblooms, the Jaffes and the Lichtermans from Borisov and the Gordons from nearby Dolginov - connected by marriage, at least.

All these families had additional children.

We know that Uncle Hymen didn't remember his mother's maiden name, so his documents can tell us nothing.

The unmarried sister Rachel Leah died in 1910 and is buried in New York. Her sister Shayna Liba attended the funeral, so the mother's maiden name was definitely known by someone available. Unfortunately, we have not located the death certificate.

Etta Bryna's maiden name should appear on both the marriage certificate and the death certificate of my grandmother, Sarah Gordon. But it doesn't. She herself did not report it for the marriage and Mother said it would have been like her father not to bother to ask. (Most of the information about my grandmother is wrong on the marriage record.) The informant on my grandmother's death certificate is not listed but was probably my mother's sister and she almost certainly hadn't a clue.

The younger sister, Shayna Liba died in 1916 and her death certificate has a number of oddities. Her name is listed as "Sadie Rosenblum," even though she was married to Julius/Yehudah Lichterman. (Uncle Hymen referred to him as "Zisal.") The certificate has no space for spouse's name or for informant's name, so we do not know who provided the information. Her father is recorded as "David Rosenblum," instead of "Israel David." (He was known as "Srul.") Her age is recorded as "23" when she was in fact twenty-six or twenty-seven and it says she lived in the US five years, when we know she was there since at least 1907. The certificate has her mother's name "Yetta Lichtman," but this is written in a different hand, as though it was added later, perhaps when a family member showed up with the information.

When I first saw this, it occurred to me that perhaps Etta Bryna's name was not Lichtman, but Lichterman, and that the daughter Shayna Libe (Sadie) had married her first cousin. This made exquisite sense given that both families were from Borisov. I saw no evidence of anyone named Lichtman in the Borisov area.

One more piece of evidence is my grandmother's passenger manifest.  When she went to the United States in 1910, her passage was paid by "cousin," despite the fact that she had a sister in New York (or New Jersey).  Her destination was identified as "cousin J. Ben...on, Brooklyn NY 517 New York Ave."

There is no 517 New York Avenue in Brooklyn in the 1910 census, but there is a 517 New Jersey Avenue.  At that address, we find a couple named Jake and Gittel Benenson. Jacob Benenson is also from Borisov as is his wife Gittel Lichterman, of that same Lichterman family. So perhaps when my grandmother said she was going to her cousin, she meant Mrs. Benenson, the Lichterman.

(Incidentally, the 1910 census has Eliyahu Ber and Mary (Gordon) Jaffe in the same building as the Benensons.)

So without much available in Borisov records, I concentrated on the question of whether the Lichtermans are Leviim. If their father Joseph was Etta Bryna's brother, the his children's tombstones might indicate that. Five of them were in the US.

Julius disappeared soon after his wife's death and no one ever knew what became of him. They say he was heart-broken. Perhaps he returned to Russia, attracted to the successes of the Bolsheviks. In any case, no tombstone there.

Last summer, I visited the graves of Gittel (NY) and Alice (DC). Gittel's is a traditional stone, but no Levi reference. Alice's has no Hebrew. I also went to the find the grave of the brother David, in DC. There is no stone. Another brother, Nathan, is buried in Virginia and I have someone who promised to take a look. I have no great hopes.

Another brother, Chaim, died in Europe but two of his children came to Israel. His daughter doesn't know if they are Leviim and her brother's grave doesn't say. The two youngest Lichtermans, Paya Bluma and Nahum, supposedly never left Russia.

One would think that if Etta Bryna Rosenbloom is indeed the sister of Joseph Lichterman, there would be some overlap in their children's names. We know that Etta Bryna had sons who died young and there may be overlap with them that we cannot know. (Joseph has a son Yehudah, which was Etta Bryna's father's name, but that's not really significant.) There is no overlap among the daughters, but here too there may have been early deaths that we don't know about.

Then there is this:

A revision list (like a census) entry for 1874.  (The birth years for adults are often estimates.)



Etta Bryna's eldest daughter Alta with
 daughter Etta Bryna Kaplan - mid-1920s

If the second person in this household is the Joseph Lichterman we know - which seems likely - the fact that he had a daughter Bryna (at the bottom) may reflect a relationship with our Etta Bryna.

This investigation is obviously not complete. There is much to be done and occasionally new documents become available. One of these days we may be able to make a determination.

As writing, this is a poor ending. As research too.