The Parents of the Mościska Fathers

A few weeks ago, this dropped into my inbox.

Subject: New records on the All Galicia Database
From: Gesher Galicia SIG <sig@geshergalicia.org>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2019 11:38:03 +0100
X-Message-Number: 3
New vital records and Jewish taxpayer records are now available for all
to search on the All Galicia Database <https://search.geshergalicia.org>.
A. Vital records
- Mielnica (Melnytsya). Jewish deaths, 1820-1851 (162 records)
- Mosciska (Mostyska). Jewish births, 1909-1924 (1,259 records)
- Witkow Nowy (Novyi Vytkiv). Jewish births 1829-1861 (447 records)

As is my wont, I had a look, using the "Records added" option and choosing "in the past month."

The search produced two results, both in Mosciska (also known as Mostyska) which is about a third of the way from Przemysl to Lwow. It is not a town where I have ever seen any Pikholz.

The results included a major surprise. Look at what I marked in red.

The standard Galician birth records list the parents of the mother - and in Lwow the mother's mother's birth surname, at least in some years - but nothing about the father aside from his home town and occupation. But look at what we have here. 

In the first record, it shows both of the father's parents, with given names and birth surnames, as well as the mother's hometown. But oddly, not the father's. It also tells us where the parents of the child were married. The second record has all that, except the mother's surname.

This is a very big deal and I have not seen it in any other towns. There are not a lot of Mosciska birth records in JRI-Poland but the ones I found in the early 1900s had this information as well. So my impression is that this is a local custom, rather than one that simply showed up after the First World War.

How I wish we had those in Rozdol, Skalat and elsewhere!

In the case of Hirsch, the son of Benjamin Pickholz and Reisel Lowin, I did not know the parents of Benjamin. I have a birth record for Benjamin and did not have a wife or children for him. Without the paternal information in Mosciska, I would have had no way of identifying the one in this birth record as the one in the 1893 Rozdol birth.

The second record is from the Skalat part of the family. I know the maternal grandmother; she married in Podwoloczysk and her Pikholz mother was from Husiatyn. In fact, I already have both her 1893 birth record and her Podwoloczysk marriage record. This new birth record, from Mosciska, gives us the son Mechel.

Mechel's mother Brane has three grandchildren here in Israel and this record has given me another opportunity to break their collective silence on all things genealogical. One was once a neighbor of mine and all he was willing to say is "We are not from Galicia, WE are from VIENNA!".

Housekeeping notes

1. I shall be in the US for two weeks, beginning two weeks from now, visiting some of my elders. I have one presentation planned and two or three others pending.

22 August 2019, 6:30 – Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh, Multi-purpose Room of the Heinz History Center Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?

2. Family Tree DNA is having a sale through August. Here are the major discounts. There are additional discounts on upgrades.

Podwoloczysk Records - New Answers and New Questions

New records from AGAD
About two weeks ago, Mark Halpern of JRI-Poland posted the following, in reference to records from east Galician towns in the AGAD archives in Warsaw. 

Earlier this week, JRI-Poland processed and added a significant volume
of new and/or extended data. This includes about 8,000 new record
indices for eastern Galicia towns as follows:
-- Borszczow 1914, 1916-1929 M
-- Chodorow 1914-1929 M
-- Dunajow 1925-1934 D
-- Kopyczynce 1877, 1879, 1880, 1883, 1885-1914, 1916-1919 M
-- Lysiec 1919-1931 D
-- Mielnica 1898-1914, 1917-1929 M; 1910-1920 D
-- Podwoloczyska 1921-1934 M; 1920-1922 D
-- Sokal 1916-1935 D
-- Szczerzec 1917 B; 1916-1926, 1938, 1930-1932, 1934-1935 D
-- Zalozce 1914, 1916, 1920-1924 M; 1916, 1918-1921 D
-- Zbaraz 1914-1917 B; 1930-1937 M

Some of these towns are of interest to my Pikholz families and my Kwoczkas lived in Zalozce, but many of our families had left their home towns by the time we get to these records. There are some records that add a bit of information, but not much of real significance

But in Podwoloczysk, there are six records of interest, some answers and some raising new questions. (I keep expecting that new records will only provide answers, but no.)

1. The Kiwetz marriage
Tema Pikholz and Zvi Kiwetz, of Skalat, had twelve children almost all of whom lived into adulthood. Of those, only their son Yitzhak survived the Holocaust, losing his wife and three children. Another Holocaust survivor is the daughter of his brother Chaim and eventually that daughter was brought up by Yitzhak and his second wife in Haifa. The daughter was born in 1939 and I have met her, though the last time I looked for her I was not able to find her.

The new Podwoloczysk include her parents' marriage. We know them to be Chaim Kiwetz and Pinie Podhorcer, a variation of Podhoretz. She told me that her mother's mother was also a Kiwetz, a relative of her father.

In fact she is incorrect. Her mother Pinie Podhorcer is the daughter of Menachem Kiwetz and Ester Podhorcer. Her parents' fathers are brothers.

2. There are Picks in Zbarazh
When I first began looking at AGAD records nearly twenty years ago, I saw a Zbarazh couple Lewi and Malka Dwojre Pick with two children born in the 1850s. At the time, I had no idea if this Pick (sometimes Pik) family was part of the Pikholz family of Skalat so I recorded what I found. Soon enough I became convinced that this is not our family but I continue carrying them in my database. There are a few others as well, who probably fit together, but I have not put any work into this family.

I have not found any of them alive during or after the Holocaust, but frankly I have never really looked.

The new Podwoloczysk records include a marriage of a younger member of the Pick family - Israel Jakob Kahane born to Reisel Pick and her husband Nuchim Kahane in 1899. This is the youngest member of this family that I have run across.

3. Josef's son Chaim

Josef Pikholz of Klimkowce (the grandson of Nachman Pikholz of Skalat) who has been mentioned here from time to time, lost his wife Lane Feldman in 1885 at age thirty-two. Soon after, he married his first cousin Sure Elka Pikholz and we have birth records of the children they had together. We know nothing about any of them. (These are half brothers of Jacob Laor's grandfather.)

The new Podwoloczysk records include a 1926 marriage for Chaim. I have suggested to Jacob that he have a look at the Yad Vashem records to see if any of Chaim's family are listed under his wife's surname.

4. The death of Syma Pikholz
Josef's father Arie Leib (1829-1901) also lost his wife in 1885 and afterwards he married a woman named Syma Friedmann. They had a son Nachman David in 1891, about whom we know nothing. Jacob wondered not long ago whatever happened to Syma. We now have her death record; she died in 1920 at age seventy.

5. Is this our Chana?
The Podwoloczysk records have a 1920 death for Chana Halpern.  The record does not identify her parents or her husband or her house number or her home town but she appears to be the daughter of Gabriel (the son of Nachman) and Sara Pikholz of Husiatyn, the wife of Joel Halpern. Her age on the death record is 64 which means she was born about 1856.

The problem is that our Chana's father Gabriel died in 1852. So either this is not our Chana or the age on the death record is incorrect. For now, I am not going to attach this death record to our Chana, but I shall make a note that it might be our Chana with an incorrect age.

6. Brane's husband
This is the most problematic of the new records, so let me start with a bit of background. Chana Pikholz, whom I just mentioned above, and her husband Joel Halpern had a daughter Brane on 13 January 1893 in Podwoloczysk. 

In 1919, Brane had a son in Vienna. On the birth record she is identified unambiguously by her known birthplace and birth date. The father is not named.

That son, who went by Pickholz, ended up in Israel and I have visited his grave. The tombstone has the correct date of birth but the wrong year and identifies his father as Avraham. He has three children, all in Israel, who flat out refuse to talk to me - other than to say "We are not from Galicia. We are from Vienna!" If they would talk to me, I would ask about the identity and surname of Avraham, whether there were additional children, when their father came to Israel, what happened to Brane and more.

Be that as it may, the story seems clear. Brane was born in Podwoloczysk, went to Vienna, married Avraham and had a son in 1919.

But the new record in Podwoloczysk throws a monkey wrench into all of that.

On 29 September 1922, a Friday three days before Yom Kippur, in Podwoloczysk Brane Halpern the daughter of Joel Halpern and Chancie Pickholz, married Isak Siegel, the son of Chaim and Hinde Siegel. Brane's birth date is as we know it and Isak is a few months younger. (This is not the Isak Siegel of Bredowicz who is a Pikholz descendant himself.)

There is no mention in the record of her having been married previously or of her living in Vienna.

Perhaps there is an error someplace, though I cannot imagine where it might be. Might Isak and Avraham be the same person with a double name? I doubt it. What else might explain the documents?

Perhaps she didn't live in Vienna but went there to deliver her child, a child who did not have the benefit of married parents. Then she came home, married and returned to Vienna. Perhaps I should be looking in Vienna for Brane and Isak Siegel - maybe with additional children.

Housekeeping notes
I shall be speaking, in Hebrew, for the Rishon LeZion branch of the Israel Genealogical Society on Monday, 14 January at 7 PM at the Rishon LeZion Museum, 2 Ahad Haam Street. This is not a DNA presentation, though there are a few DNA references. The topic is

מֵעֵבֶר לְסָפֵק סָבִיר

מה שיודעים, לעומת מה שאפשר להוכיח

BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT

What We Know vs. What We Can Prove

We're Not From Galicia - We're from Vienna

Vienna
One of my favorite ancedotes when talking about my Pikholz research is about a fellow who lives across the road from where we lived until six years ago. His surname is Pickholz and he is about eighteen months older than I. He turned me down flat when I asked him years ago about his Pickholz ancestry. His excuse was "We are not from Galicia, we are from Vienna." Fancy people.

I got no further with his two sisters, who live in the Jerusalem area. We have crossed paths with the families of a couple of his kids as well, and no one has any interest in contact.

Fourteen years ago, I had some correspondence with Mrs. Heidrun Weiss of the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien (the Vienna Jewish community aka IKG) and she wrote, regarding the father of my neighbor:

"...Pickholz was born in 1919, June 1 in [Vienna] (2nd district, Taborstr.96). Mother Brane, father not [identified]. The birth is not official, that means it never was reported by mother or father, just by the nursing home."

I tried to follow up, but no information was available. So for nearly fourteen years I carried around this Brane Pickholz, probably born in the 1890s and nothing else.

I don't remember how many Pikholz descendants we had named Brane or Breine at the time, but even now we have only a dozen - ten from Skalat families and two from Rozdol. The only family where this name had any prominence is the Riss family, which I wrote about just two weeks ago.

Husiatyn - again

Logo for "The G" was designed by Assoc. Ed. Leo Albert

Lately I seem to be coming back to the small Pikholz family from Husiatyn again and again. In March, I wrote a blog post called "The Dead Man in the Zellermayer House" and I decided to expand it into an article for The Galizianer, the quarterly publication of Gesher Galicia. As it happens, the issue with that article came out a few days ago.

That article includes the following family diagram:

(A smaller version of this diagram appeared here when I discussed the Husiatyn Pikholz family back in January.)

As I reviewed the draft of the article, once again bemoaning the fact that we have no decendants of the two married children of Chancie and Joel Halpern, it occurred to me that perhaps their daughter Brane, born 13 January 1893 in Podwolocysk, just might be our mystery woman who gave birth in Vienna. in 1919.

Back to Vienna
I went back to IKG, asking if perhaps they had anything else on this birth or on the mother of the newborn. I mentioned the possibility that she might be the woman born in Podwoloczysk in 1893, and they came back to me with assorted forms to fill out - who I am, why do I want this information, where will I publish it, etc etc.

The actual birth record arrived some weeks later, and the mother is indeed identified as being born in Podwoloczysk on 14 January 1893. We won't quibble over the one day's difference.

There was no charge, but I sent a donation.

In my database, I added Brane's son, three grandchildren, twelve great-grandchildren and the two great-great-grandchildren that I know of. Surely there are more.

I wrote to my former neighbor and his two sisters on 12 June. None of them has replied thusfar. Wait until they find out I want some DNA.

Housekeeping notes
GRIPitt was wonderful. I had car and phone issues which detracted from the total experience, but that was not the fault of the program.

I gave a talk Wednesday evening on Special Challenges of Jewish Genealogy, which was very well received. Maybe thirty-forty people attended.
Earlier in the day, the rental car broke down while I was at the cemetery. Alamo was terrible about service and the only way I was able to get to my lecture was with the help of the eighty-nine year old woman who lived next door to the cemetery. At seven-thirty she drove me back to the college.

With Debbie Parker Wayne

A FEW NEW RECORDS

About a month ago, the following announcement showed up on several of the JewishGen discussion lists.

This is just the beginning. It continues on for several more paragraphs.

Note the reference to the All Galician Database as AGD, not to be confused with AGAD, the Warsaw archives which holds most of the available vital records for east Galicia in the late 1800s.

Having interests in most of the towns with the new records, I decided to have a look. Their drop-down menu did not include Skalat and Podwoloczysk (or for that matter Brzezany) among its choices, so I did a search for Pikholz records from Grzymalow, which is quite near Skalat.

The actual search. (I added the red arrow for the readers' convenience.)

The search produced thirty-two results, six of them from Grzymalow, the rest from elsewhere in east Galicia. Thirty-one showed the name Pikholz  - one was Pekules, which is reasonable as a sound-alike. I already had most of these records and I have actually met some of those mentioned in the Grzymalow school records. And it turns out I get the same thirty-two records regardless of which town I ask the system to search.

I would like to tell you about the four which I  am planning to order, all from the Podwoloczysk.records in the AGAD archives.

  

Prof. Jonas Zellermayer came to Israel form Vienna when he was twenty-four and lived here 

for nearly seventy years. His son-in-law was my boss thirty-five years ago.

Everything we have here lists his father as Avraham, without the second name, so we now know that his father was actually Avraham Yitzhak. One odd thing with this family - we know much  about Avraham's family, but not his parents' names. We know the names of the grandparents and his Pikholz great-grandparents, his mother's three brothers and two sisters, but we know neither the name of his Pikholz mother nor that of his Zellermayer father.

But now we know, as their marriage record was the great surprise of this new set of indexed

records. Jonas'  father Abraham Eisig was the son of Zalmen Juda Zellermayer and Ettel Pickholz.

The fact that he came from Liczkowce may also prove useful as we have several Zellermayer-Pikholz connections and it is not at all clear if there is a larger family story to be told.

In fact, at least three of the four  records I cite here are in some way connected to Zellermayers. 

In the meantime, I sent the marriage entry to the two granddaughters of Abraham and Basie and as a result had my most significant interaction with either of them in some years. Those two granddaughters are, by the way, named after Basie's parents Don and Rifke.

We have a Pikholz couple named Gabriel and Sara who lived in Husiatyn. They had a son Moshe in 1851 and a daughter Chanzie. Gabriel, who was described as "from Skalat" died in

1852 at age thirty in a house associated with a Zellermayer family. Our only knowledge of Chanzie is that she was married to Joel Halpern and lived in Podwoloczysk, which we learn from the 1887 death record of their young son Isaak and the 1893 birth record for their daughter Breine. We know nothing further of Breine.

The new records include the 1911 marriage of their previously unknown daughter Jente to Schamschon Duwid Sirki, son of Mechel and Ester. Thusfar, I have not found other references to the surname Sirki, but it would be great if we can find some descendants.

And this one must be related too. In 1896, we have the Podwoloczysk marriage of Wolf Feldman, age 29, son of Hirsch and Male of Tarnopol to Etie Golde Pikholz, the thirty-two year

old daughter of Gabriel and Breine of Husiatyn.

This cannot be the same Gabriel above - that one died 1852 and this one had a daughter in 1864. Nor can it be any other Gabriel we know. And although we do not have any ther couple named Gabriel and Breine, we do have the one Gabriel with a granddaughter Breine and another whose mother is Brane. It all seems to revolve around Husiatyn.

I haven't a clue how this couple fits in, but the existence of the marriage record opens the possibility of finding some Feldman descendant.

So I must see if I can find anything else of the Sirki and Feldman couples - nothing so far. I will also order the four records themselves from AGAD, as these are not online.

I plan to see if others want to order anything, so that I can put together a larger order, so I asked if any other new records will be added to the All Galicia Database in the coming weeks. (No sense in placing an order and finding out two weeks later that it could have been bigger.) The answer I received was "Nothing that would be from AGAD."

One other odd one. A couple of weeks ago, Jurek, a research colleague in Sweden was

looking at a 1938 telephone directory that Logan Kleinwaks had just uploaded to his wonderful site. There was a listing - apparently a business - for "Pickholz i Wachs" in Skalat. The telephone number is 8. Nothing else but the street name.

This is very strange, as there are no other Wachs in Skalat, at least during the earlier period for which we have records.

But we do have some sort of undefined relationship between the Wachs family of Zalosce-Podkamen and my own Pikholz family  who lived in that same area. So I cannot just ignore this.

I have asked one of the surviving Skalaters here if she knows anything about this business or the families involved and I plan to ask others as well.







- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
If you missed my piece about Uncle Kenny last year, you might want to have a look. His yahrzeit is Monday.

PICKHOLTZ, BERNSTEIN and FRIENDS (or maybe relatives)

(Part two of two - see part one here)

Last week, I looked at the Pickholtz-Bernstein family who came to the United States from Skalat in 1890. We do not have all the details of their first years in the US, but the main gap in the story is what happened to David Bernstein, who was eleven months old when the ship sailed.

This week, I want to have a closer look at the other two Skalat families who followed the Pickholtz-Bernstein family on the passenger manifest, almost consecutively.

Lines 206 and 212-214 are people who seem
to be unconnected to the Skalat families.

You can see the actual manifest, but it is easier to work from the transcribed information presented here on the right.

I spent a morning looking at the JRI-Poland vital records for both the Kaczors and the Aberbuchs. (This was complicated by the fact that their "sounds-like" algorithm does not think that Aberbuch sounds like Auerbach, even though the same people are listed both ways.)

I'll spare you the details, but I did find two connections between Aberbuch and Kaczor. The more obvious (but perhaps less useful) is Nuchim Kaczor who married Lea Auerbach. They had six children in the period 1891-1901 in Podwoloczysk and in one of the birth records, Lea is identified as being from Skalat.  I don't see anything connecting them to anyone else in our story.

The other is Leiser Auerbach and his wife Zipore Goldstein. They had six children 1881-1888 in Zbarazh. In several of the records, Zipore (aka Cipre) is identified as being from Skalat. Zipore died in 1890 at age twenty-eight having buried four of her children at between six and thirteen months of age.

Here is the thing. Zipore Goldstein, the wife of Leiser Auerbach is the sister of Rifka Kaczor, the wife of Rachmiel from the passenger manifest.

I would not be surprised to find the widower Leiser Auerbach in the United States in the 1890s or early 1900s, but I have not really looked for him there.

I have no idea if Leiser is closely related to Aron from the passenger manifest, but if he is, it would not surprise me one bit.

I saw no connections between Aberbuch and either Pikholz or Bernstein.

The Kaczors of Skalat are a much bigger project. In fact, I know several people who are working on parts of that family - including a client of mine - but to my knowledge no one is looking at all the Skalat Kaczors in a single project.

Probably 340 out of these 357 search results are in Skalat itself. A large family.

I started with a search for "surname sounds like Kaczor" and "given name sounds like Rachmiel." There were thirty-six records in the Tarnopol area - twenty-nine in Skalat and one family of seven in Podwoloczysk. ("Sounds like Katcher" produced those same results.) There is nothing there that tells us anything about Rachmiel's parents, so unless someone dives into this on the American end - death or cemetery records, for instance - there is not much to do on that.

Searches for records which include both Kaczor and Bernstein come up empty and, of course, had there been and Kaczor-Pikholz connections, I would have been all over them long ago. (That said, I have a low priority interest, considering the possibilty that Kaczor, Kaczka and Kwoczka all come from a single source.)

So why is this any more than several families from the same place travelling together? Maybe it isn't. But still, let's see what else we have.

First of all, in discussions a few years ago, Lee Katcher, the late Norman Kotcher and Steve Pickholtz concluded that one of the Kaczors lived with Steve's grandfather while in school. I don't know the specifics - not even if he was from the family on the passenger list - but they felt thatthis was an indication of a family connection. Maybe. Or maybe it was just good friends from the old country.

Then there is a mortgage document in the names of "Berisz Pickholz and Sarah his wife, Rachmiel Katcher and Rochil his wife, [Heren?] Katcher and Catherine his wife and Bluma Barenstein." (Note that Rachmiel's wife was Rifka on all previous documents.) A second document is similar but does not include Bluma. They are identified as being from New York City. The documents are dated June and July 1890 and refer to land purchases in Pittsgrove New Jersey. Pittsgrove is just a couple of miles from alliance where Sarah was buried eighteen months later, so at least Berisch and Sarah must have actually lived there.

Here again, this joint mot\rtgage may be a sign that we are talking about family. Or maybe it was several Skalat families participating in the experiment that tried to make New Jersey farmers out of east European Jews. This plan is probably what put them on the same voyage. How long they remained farmers, who knows. Local Pittsgrove records probably can shed light on that period.

This is Steve's project, but perhaps someone reading this might have something to suggest. I for one have no experience with US land records. Nor do I have the time or inclination to acquire that experience at this time.

BERNSTEIN
This is a good time to make some additional Bernstein comments.

I did an "exactly" search rather than "sounds like" so as not to get all the Braunsteins. Another large family.

There are three researchers listed in the JewishGen family Finder doing this large family. Two of them seem to be active and I am in contact with one of them. Many of these Bernsteins - may all of them - are kohanim.

We have at least one other Pikholz connection in that Bernstein family.

In 1955, a woman named Haya Henkin in Rehovoth submitted a Page of Testimony to Yad Vashem in memory of her sister Betka / Boncia Bernstein of Skalat, who was married to Berl Pikholz. They had three sons - Josef, Moshe and Aharon, all of whom were killed.

I spoke to Haya's daughter Malka on Kibbutz Saad, who also filed a Page of Testimony for Betka. She confirmed that this is the Bernstein family who are kohanim. She did not know anything about her Uncle Berl, so I do not know where he fits into our families.

Neither Haya nor the daughter knew the ages of the children.

Betka was born in 1902, so her husband could be one of several Berls we have who were born in that period. Perhaps we will know later on.