Differently Every Year - Remembering Skalat

The memorial for Skalat
I was not planning on writing about the annual Skalat memorial this year, except perhaps a brief passage at the end. I have written about this previously on this blog - here and here and here. The meeting is important, but not what you would call "interesting." Pretty much the same from year to year.

We met at five o'clock Thursday afternoon, the seventh of Sivan - which outside of Israel is the second day of the Shavuot holiday.

There is a whole row of town monuments along that stretch. Maybe thirty or so. At the other end is Husiatyn, a town near Skalat which I have written about here and specifically about the Zellermayer-Pikholz connections here.  Near that is a monument to Vileika, where many of my mother's Gordons lived in the early and mid 1800s, probably earlier too. There is Pleshchenitsy where my Gordon grandfather's mother, Anna Kugel, came from. And Zbarazh, not far from Skalat, where we had other Pikholz families.

We were about twenty-five or so. Zvika Sarid led us. We lost his mother's brother Mottel Weissman a few months ago, so again we all said kaddish together. We did that last year when Mottel was too ill to attend. Zvika pointed out that there were only four people in attendance who had actually lived in Skalat. The rest were children and grandchildren, plus a few spouses. I wondered about some of the missing. I knew that Tonia Winter was not well, but her daughter always came. And Giza - she is young for a Holocaust survivor. Giza came a few minutes later.

Zvika's daughter Chava took a picture of their mother Yocheved standing next to the monument and I made a comment about the monument's being the same as it was last year. But of course, that is not the point. The point is that while Skalat is frozen in time, Judenrein for seventy-one years, Yocheved is not. She left, made aliyah, married had children and grandchildren. That is what Chava was recording. Her mother growing older.

Some of the topics of discussion at the last few memorials were not mentioned. Nothing about the monuments in Skalat itself or the money to maintain them. No one spoke of plans to go back to visit. Skalat had been planning to make itself a five-hundredth birthday party last August. No one mentioned that either.

Mottel's daughter Chanaleh had written something years ago - perhaps a school project - about the yearly visit of the Rebbe of Husiatyn, who used to spend several weeks in Skalat on his way from his home in Vienna to his father's grave in Husiatyn. This was along the same lines as Tonka Pikholz had written in one of the Skalat memorial books. Tonka herself is buried in Holon and her sister's son and daughter visited her grave, as they always do. Tonka would be a hundred this year.

Zvika read from what Chanaleh had  written, which included something about the Rebbe's friend Yosef Milgrom, on whose property there was a small house in which the Rebbe stayed in Skalat. People came from all around to seek his advice and blessings, including the non-Jews.

Bronia said that no one was left from Yosef Milgrom's family.

So I spoke up. And told this story. Three years ago, I spoke at the IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Washington DC, and in the course of my talk mentioned the Husiatyner Rebbe and his visits to Skalat. I spent the following Shabbes in Lakewood NJ, where my son and daughter-in-law and family were spending two weeks at the yeshiva. Someone asked me who I am etc and I said I am a genealogist, so he said that one of the rabbis who was there at the time had just written a book about his family.

I had a look at the book and saw a chapter about the Husiatyner Rebbe. So I went over to the writer, introduced myself and told him that I had just referred to the same subject in my conference talk. Across the table from him, and quite unrelated to him, sat an older woman who said "My husband's uncle Yosef Milgrom, built the hoiuse where the Rebbe used to stay when he was in Skalat."

"Small world" is a cliche, but cliches generally come from some truth. And Bronia was pleased that Yosef Milgrom has living family.

Zvika announced that he wanted to introduce something new for the memorial program. He read from the Hebrew version of the Weisbard memorial book, a personal testimony by Yoel Ben-Porath (Julek  Weinraub), as transmitted in 1995 to Lusia Milch. Zvika wants to "feature" a Skalater each year at the memorial meeting. He already told Zvi Segal that he wants him to prepare something about his father Shammai for next year.

No one wants to be the first to leave. We all hope that everyone will be there next year.

Other cemeteries
I usually use the day in the Tel Aviv area for other cemetery matters.

Gil Mordecai Scharf is a third cousin of my wife's, buried in the military section of the Holon cemetery.

He was a gunner in a tank and was killed during Operation Shelom HaGalil in 1985. He was nearly nineteen.

I went to the Kiryat Shaul cemetery to visit the two Zellermayer graves that I wrote about not long ago. Avraham's grave has his full birth name "Avraham Isak ben Zalman Yehudah." I wasn't sure it would, as his children's graves just have "Avraham." His yahrzeit was the day after my visit.

Also in Kiryat Shaul, I visited the grave of Zvi (Stanislav) Domnivsky. I mentioned him three weeks ago when I discussed the family of my Uncle Jachiel. Stanislav had submitted Pages of Testimony for two of Uncle Jachiel's Tunis grandsons and had defined himself as a relative. I was hoping the gravestone would give me a clue exactly how he was related. But it did not.

From there I went to the Yarkon cemetery to the grave of Stanislav's daughter Lydia.

That did give me some information. It says "My dear mother."

I will have to contact the burial society to see what they can tell me about the son or daughter - who probably has no idea who the Tunis family is.




Housekeeping notes
Occasionally I order records from Polish State Archives other than AGAD, when I need something for myself or for a client.  I made an exception recently when I placed an order with the Przemysl Archives - my sixth time ordering from them.

They are awkward to work with. They require statements explaining how the person placing the order is related to the person in the record, they send poor-quality paper copies by mail rather than scans, they cover up the other records on the page lest someone learn something that hasn't been paid for - and they take a very long time to process the orders even after they have been paid.

But in this case, a family member wanted  ten records on his other side, so I gathered up a few other people and placed an order on 11 September. The records came this week. Finally. One person received the single record he ordered. One got nothing. Another received part of an order. The original fellow who wanted ten got three of the ten, but also a handful of others that he hadn't ordered.

I think I am finished with Przemysl. (As my father would say "Famous last words?")

Uncle Jachiel Had Three Children

My father did not know much about the family history, but he did pass on two tidbits that no one I

Unsigned undated note, written late 1973 or early 1974

spoke to later had ever heard. He told me that his grandfather Hersch Pickholtz, who died when my father was eight years old, had an uncle Selig Pikholz whom I discussed here about thirteen months ago.

And he told me that his grandfather Hersch Pickholtz had a brother Jachiel, who had three children and that his family "never left Europe."

I have no idea why my father knew of these uncles.

My great-grandfather Hersch Pickholz arrived in Baltimore in 1903 and travelled to Pittsburgh, where he added the "t" to his surname.  His older sister Leah Braun and her family had been in Pittsburgh since the mid-1880s. Another sister Bessie was married to David Lozel Frankel and they too lived in the US with the surname Franzos and later some became Francis. According to the 1910 census, Bessie and her husband arrived in 1890.

Based on my father's information, I recorded the brother Jachiel with a wife and three children, in addition to Hersch and the two sisters. I could only guess where Jachiel fit in age order.

It appeared that the four children were born in Podkamen, where we have no records, and Bessie was sent back to Skalat to be married. We knew that Hersch lived in Zalosce, near Podkamen, and when JRI-Poland received access to Zalosce records (births 1877-1890, deaths 1823-66, 1877-97) we saw that Jachiel lived there as well. We see no births for Leah's three children, so they may have lived in Podkamen.

We located a death record for eighteen year old Wolf Pickholz, who died 6 April 1892, identified as the son of Jachiel and Sime. So Wolf would have been born 1873-74. I assume that he is one of the three children of Jachiel whom my father had mentioned, though it is possible that because he died young, he was not included in this count.

I saw no other births or deaths for children of Jachiel, so I assumed that the other children were either born before 1877 or elsewhere - Podkamen, for instance.

JRI-Poland also had a death record for Sime, 6 December 1894, at age forty-six. If she was born in 1848, Jachiel was likely the eldest sibling.

I moved the record next to the headings for clarity. Columns 3 & 4 are missing in the archives' scan.

In column 5, you can see her name on the first two lines. The last four lines tell us that she is the daughter of Aron and Ester Schapira of Skalat. The third line begins with "Ehegat" which Vienna-born Henry Wellisch tells me is an abbreviation for Ehegattin which means "married wife" and that is followed by the name of her husband Jachiel Pickholz. If Jachiel had predeceased her, we would expect the record to say "wdowa" (widow in Polish) or the German equivalent.

On the other hand, there are three choices in column 8 - single, married and widowed - and it's the third box which is checked. So we have conflicting information on this record, but it is more likely that she was a widow.

Then about sixteen months ago, I received an email from Pamela Weisberger asking me this:

Do you know this Pickholz from Zalosce?  Card File of Landowners 1880 in
Lviv archive:  #168/1/2081

Zalosce Card#  29 House # 31 Pickholz Jachil heirs Residential Parcel #95

This card was discovered by Natalie Dunai. I do not have a copy of the card itself, just the transcription.

The card refers to house 31, which we see is where Sime died. Jachiel's son Wolf had also died in house 31. The property was owned in 1880 by Jachiel's heirs, so he must have been dead by then but perhaps not long as the owners were not named.

In any event, it seems clear that Jachiel died before 1880 and the fact that his sister Bessie had a son named Jachiel in 1878 probably means he was dead by then. So he seems to have been in his thirties.

There was nothing else in the Zalosce records telling us anything about Jachiel's other children.

But something else had turned up between finding Sime's death record and Natalie's discovery.

I moved the record next to the headings for convenience.

On 16 December 1899, Jechiel Jakob was born in Loszniow to Arja Meier Tunis and his wife Sara, the daughter of Jechiel and Syma Pikholz of Zalosce. Loszniow is near Trembowla.

Child number two, Sara.

Jechiel Jakob died in 1900 and a daughter Syma Ester who was born in January 1901 died a few months before her second birthday. Another son Moses was born in February 1907 and died later that month.

Two other sons lived to adulthood. Chaim Benzion was born 27 October 1902 and Layzor Izak was born 2 May 1904. My grandfather's first cousins.

The marriage of Arie Meier Tunis and Sara Pikholz was recorded in Trembowla 25 June 1918. It  gives Sara's date of birth as 15 July 1876.

I found Pages of Testimony at Yad Vashem for both sons. One set was submitted by Stanislav Domnovsky of Tel Aviv in 1957. He wrote that he was a "relative." Stanislav died in 1976 and is buried in Kiryat Shaul. I have not followed up who this might be, but he is on my cemetery list for next month.

Stanislav calls Layzor Izak "Leopold" and he was a lawyer, married to Ada Weinberg. Chaim Benzion he calls "Chaim Karol." He was a physician and was killed in Lwow. Stanislav says his wife is Anna Kahane and that they had a four year old son George.

I found this in early 2005. That matters.

At the same time, I found three Pages submitted by Anna Weinfeld of Rehovoth in 1999. One Page was for "Leopold (Layzor)," an attorney, married to Ada Weinber. They had two children, whose names are not mentioned. Children of my father's second cousin. She writes of Leopold "Shot in a group of professionals in Lwow." Her relationship - SISTER-IN-LAW.

Another Page was for "Chaim (Mondek)," a physician with one child. She writes that he served in the Polish army and was taken to the camp Pelashov, near Krakow and that he was "shot to death in the back by a Ukrainian policeman." Her relationship - WIFE!

The third Page was for six year old "Jerzy (Jurek)," born March 1937. This must be Stanislav's George. He was hidden as a Gentile.  She writes further, "He was placed with a Gentile woman and after neighbors told the authorities, he was taken to Skalat  and executed." Six years old. That was July 1943. Relationship - MOTHER!.

I have written before that timing is everything.  Here too. I found these Pages in May 2005. Anna Kahane Tunis Polsiak Weinfeld died in Rehovoth in November 2004.

I should really get to her grave as well.

I spoke with Anna's daughter (from a later marriage) who sent me to a woman named Marta (83 at the time) who knew Leopold and Mondek. She was able to tell me that Leopold had a son living in Wroclaw. I had someone in Poland check and we learned that my third cousin Stanislaw Tunis died in Wroclaw the previous year. I don't yet know if he had children, but I have someone on it.

Anna also submitted a Page of Testimony for Arie Meier Tunis. I assume that Sara died before the Holocaust.

Uncle Jachiel had three children - Wolf born 1873-4, Sara born July 1876. There is another one out there somewhere. Probably born in the early 1870s. My grandfather's first cousin.

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.

THE CLIENT IS NOT ALWAYS RIGHT, BUT HE IS ALWAYS THE CLIENT

DON'T LOOK THERE - I

The first attorney who wanted to hire me was a loud New Yorker here in Jerusalem, dealing with an inheritance. The deceased had filled out Pages of Testimony at Yad Vashem for five brothers and sisters. Another brother and sister had survived the Holocaust and had predeceased her – one lived in Europe and one in the US.



The latest version of an English Page of Testimony
This week is Yom HaShoah. Do you have family
who have not been memorialized? Go to
http://db.yadvashem.org/forms/pot/filling/out?language=en

The deceased had also filled out Pages of Testimony for her parents, stating that they had nine children. The attorney wanted to know what happened to the ninth. I suggested that there may have been a child who died before the War and he agreed that this was likely the case, but he needed documentation. The family came from a town for which there were no surviving records, so it would be no simple matter to prove the death of a child or young adult in the 1920s or 1930s.

I told him my hourly rate and he refused. He wanted a flat fee based on results only. I wished him luck finding someone on that basis, and he eventually agreed to my terms. He did insist that I was to spend no time on Pages of Testimony, because he himself had checked all the possibilities and the ninth child was not there.

The eight known children had been born during the period 1908-1926, so I expected to find the ninth during that period, or perhaps a bit earlier or a bit later.

The first thing I did was to ignore the attorney's instructions and check the Pages of Testimony. He may have been the know-it-all attorney, but I was the professional. At least, that's what I was trying to be.

The deceased had submitted many Pages of Testimony, not just for her immediate family, but for other relatives and acquaintances, mostly from her home town. One was for the missing sister. She was married, therefore went by a different surname, and she had lived in her husband's town. The odd thing was that she was born in 1900, way before any of the others, and had two very young children who were born when she was in her late thirties. But the hometown and the parents were clearly identified and the deceased had identified her as a sister, so there was no question of accuracy.

I billed the attorney for two hours' work. He was not happy to have missed the Page himself. He shorted me on the check and I sent it back. When he asked me if I could find records of the deceased's cousins, I turned him down.

I should have agreed to a flat fee.

This week is Yom HaShoah. Do you have family who have not been memorialized?

DON'T LOOK THERE – II

One of my first clients was an Englishman living in Jerusalem. He wanted to know a few things about his grandfather, who had gone to England from eastern Europe around 1900. He had seen his grandfather's grave, so he knew the father's name, but didn't know anything about the mother. He also wanted to know about the grandfather's immigration to England.

I asked about other family members and he told me that the grandfather had two sisters who went to the same city in the US and both married Jews with common surnames, but he didn't know anything about their families and could see no point in going that route.

The immigration was fairly straightforward. I found the grandfather arriving in England several years later than expected, but his name, age and home town identified him unambiguously.

But there was nothing on the mother in any of the sources I could find.

I went after the sisters in the US. In most states, a death certificate has a space for mother's birth name. Of course that does not always mean it actually appears, but it is a reasonable way to check. Another possibility is the application for Social Security (SS-5) which also has a space for mother's birth name. But both the death certificates and the SS-5 forms required an unambiguous identification, and we didn't have that.

So I messed a bit with the US census records for 1910 and 1920 and eventually found someone who could be one of the sisters, with a son named the same as the client's father. The local Jewish community is well-organized and I figured I could get death and burial information from them – for a fee – and that I might find the sister buried in the same place. From there to death certificates would be an easy step.

I brought this plan to the client and he shot it down. "I said I don't want to look there."

I don't think it was just the money. There must have been something else. But he is the client, so that's where it ended.

PLEASE SPARE ME THIS!

On 8 February, prospective client – a genealogy researcher whose name I know - writes:

Hello,

I would like to find in Israel descendants of my family who lived in the tsarist Russia and early USSR in Moldova, Bessarabia and someparts of Ukraine. Could you help me?

On 9 February, I respond:

[T]he answer to this kind of question is "maybe." It depends on so many things.

Tell me what you know, what you want to know and what steps you have already taken. Then I'll have a look.

On 14 March, I follow up:

[I]s there something you wanted to do with this?

On 16 March prospective client writes:

what do you mean by "is there something you wanted to do with this?"

I would like to find in Israel the surname [surname redacted] of those who came from Ukraine, Moldova and Russia proper.I have the census of 1858 in [town name redacted] are 6 males. I know to about 80 per cent their descendants. I would like to find those who came to Palestina and Israel.

So that's the answer to "tell me what you know." I wished her luck.