HILLEL ACADEMY OF PITTSBURGH ALUMNI REUNION

Last week, there was a reunion of students of the Hillel Academy of Pittsburgh, for alumni of eighth and twelfth grades covering about a dozen classes. I was a student there for seventh through tenth grades.

The entire high school,
when I was in tenth grade

The program was at the school, but Sunday we were being Skyped in for a few hours from Faygie Butler Posy's house here in Jerusalem. Morris Kinast was the organizer who coordinated with us and he had asked me to speak for a few minutes about what I have done over the years and reminiscences of Hillel.

Most of what I had to say about what I have done was on the Reunion's Facebook page and in the Power Point that Morris had prepared, but I agreed to complement what I had already written.

We had a nice turnout here on the Jerusalem end - twenty-one Pittsburghers, plus a few spouses. The Skype connection was not good enough to have any meaningful interaction, so I scrapped what I had planned to say. At the suggestion of Shanen Bloom Werber, I am fleshing out my notes here. (I always do what Shanen tells me to do.)

Hodesh Tov.

On behalf of everyone here, I want to thank Morris for getting us all together and Faygie and Carl for opening their home to the assembled. Morris asked me to speak about what has happened to me over the years, and to recall my experience at Hillel. Most of what I can say about myself is on the Facebook page and the Power Point, but I'll add a few things.

For those of you who remember me, I am very much as I always was. I was a chronic under-achiever and I still am. I was incurably optimistic and I still am. I was always losing the battle of the waistline and I still am. And I was insufferably full of myself and I still am - but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Of course like with most of you, the age is showing. I cannot read without glasses and I am constantly telling my grandkids to speak up - when I am not pleading with them to quiet down.

Back when I was thirty-seven or thirty-eight, I read a book about ADD and I recognized everything in it. Suddenly the world made sense. And I have been grateful ever since that they hadn't yet invented Ritalin when I was young.

For me, life's big game-changer came from Hillel, but not from the school or any of the teachers. It was from another student. Marc Fogel dragged me to Bnei Akiva and everything flowed from there. The idea of aliyah
was never on the radar of the school or the teachers.

So let me say a few things about Hillel, and what is Hillel but the teachers.

In Jewish studies, we had some excellent teachers who really knew their stuff. I expect that everyone who ever attended Hillel, would put Rabbi Nadoff at the top of that list.

We had others who knew their stuff - or at least we can give them the benefit of the doubt - but they couldn't control a class. Or they were simply boring. Or they had strange teaching methods. One in particular taught us a list of four hundred words and promised us that if we learned them, we'd be able to speak Hebrew fluently. Four hundred words. All nouns. I think of that teacher today when I use the words for soup and restaurant.

I learned over the years that Rabbi Rottenberg was right on almost everything, but that on one matter - which he himself defined as very important - he was absolutely wrong.

As far as secular studies go, anyone who ever thought that teachers should not be seriously demanding needs only to poll the Hillel High School students throughout the years about Mr. Tomko. He never felt he had to be anyone's buddy and no one expected any favors. Everyone learned.

There were other excellent teachers, as well as some average and a few who should have been doing something else.

There were two who tried to brainwash us on matters social and political. One did so as a matter of ideology. One did so out of ignorance, not ever considering that anyone might think that Franklin Roosevelt hadn't made the sun shine. Had I taken those particular lessons home, my father would have set me straight PDQ and I would have brought his arguments back to the classroom. It would have gotten ugly.

There were two classes we were never offered and over the years I was sorry for that. One was writing and one was speaking. Mrs. Belle used to have us get up and speak in front of the class frequently, but she never taught us how we should be doing it. As a result, I acquired the confidence to speak in front of a group even when I had neither structure nor style and without much content to offer.

Mr. Mandell hinted once that there was such a thing as a dedicated class in writing, but he never taught it. I went through school thinking that writing was for girls.

Let me leave you with something else, that I have learned over the years that has nothing to do with school. Those of you who still have a parent - or even older aunts and uncles - prompt them to talk and listen to what they say. Ask directed questions about when they were young and about their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, their aunts and uncles. Get names, dates, places. ("Russia" doesn't count as a place. Be specific.) Get them to label the photographs. ("My grandfather" is not an acceptable label.) If you can bring in a professional interviewer and cameraman, do it. We did that with my mother.

You think you know about your grandparents, but life is more than a resume.

I am a genealogist and there are parts of the basic structure of my family that I may never know, yet all I had to do was ask my grandfather's brothers back when I was a teenager, for they surely knew the answers.

Even if you aren't really that interested, eventually someone will ask  "Why don't you know..."

Then talk to your grandkids, independently of their parents. Repeat yourself shamelessly. They may laugh that you do, but "familiar is good." Tell them who and where and when. Make them charts and show them maps. And label your own photographs.

Last summer, I took one of my grandsons to the cemetery at PZ Sheraden. We went to my grandparents and great-grandparents and some aunts and uncles. I showed him the grave of the great-grandfather who was on the building committee of the PZ. He pretended to be interested, but he will remember.

If you talk to your grandchildren about these things, then sixty or seventy years from now, they will talk to their grandchildren and they will say "My grandfather said..." or "My grandmother showed me..." They will be talking about you. And you will know and your soul will be happy.

GO STEELERS                   PARTY ON DUDES          

THE 17th DAY OF THE OMER - תפארת שבתפארת

or   THE INTERNET AND ME          

or      MY FIRST-BORN SON AND RABBI SHEMUEL                

Computers in the Corporate Office

I had been working there for about a dozen years, this large, well-known (in Israeli terms) industrial corporation with maybe fifteen hundred employees. This was sixteen years ago and the Internet was just beginning to be used in companies such as ours. That's "such as," not ours itself. The head of the computer department had said in no uncertain terms that no one in the company needed Internet and no one would have it.

He had been terribly wrong before, as when he insisted in 1984-85 that no one would ever need a PC and that the two of us who shared one would soon be shown the folly of our ways.

Visicalc - Our computer's
memory was 32 kb

Lotus 1-2-3 version 1A

But I did the budget and cost accounting of the mining division for several years on Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 1A, while the processing plant economists kept working with pencil and paper, waiting for the expensive new central system to kick in. (It never did.)

I had learned a bit about email and the world wide web when I was in the US for my first-born son Yerachmiel's wedding a few months earlier and I was really interested in bringing those tools into my office. Such confidence that I had was really what you would call today "faith-based."

For some reason, someone overruled the computer guy, and I was told that I would be given my own Internet connection. Perhaps that spreadsheet work had given me some credibility with someone.

Counting the Omer - No Computers Needed

And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the day of rest, from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the waving; seven weeks shall be complete; even unto the morrow after the seventh week shall ye number fifty days          (Vayikra 23)

So we count the Omer for forty-nine days, counting each day and each week, from the second night of Pesach ending the night before Shavuot.

The colors show the seven Kabbalistic
terms, by day and by week

Kabbalah assigns one of seven Divine qualities to each of the seven days of the week and then to each of the seven weeks. First is חסד (hessed) kindness, then גבורה (gevurah) strength or fortitude, followed by תפארת (tif'eret) glory or beauty, נצח (netzach) eternity, הוד (hod) majesty, יסוד (yesod) foundation and finally  מלכות (malchut) kingdom. So the first week is hessed and the days of that week are hessed in hessed, gevurah in hessed, tif'eret in hessed etc. That pattern follows throughout the seven weeks and in saying this much, I have reached the outer limits of my understanding of the subject.

My First-born Son

Yerachmiel was born around noon Friday, the second day of Iyyar, thirty-nine years ago, in Chicago. My parents had made aliyah two years earlier and it was already Shabbat for them, so I could not call them with the news. Most of my other close family lived in Pittsburgh, but they were all on the way to Silver Spring Maryland for my cousin Marshal's bar mitzvah. So aside from my then-wife's Chicago family, the only call I could make that day was to Marshal's parents, who reported the news of the first grandson and first great-grandson to the Pittsburghers, including my grandmother.

Today, he and his wonderful wife of sixteen+ years, live in suburban Chicago with their sons. He has been ordained in traditional Jewish jurisprudence ("yadin yadin") which he continues to study and serves as the rabbi of a small, but vibrant shul.

But that is now and I was telling you about sixteen years ago.

So.  Where Is This Leading?

A few days after Pesach sixteen years ago, I was told that the company had ordered me an Internet line, from a soon-to-be-defunct provider called shani.net. It was to be up and running the following Sunday. So Sunday morning, the day after Rosh Hodesh, I made my way to work as usual - driving to Beer Sheva, going to the 5:40 minyan, then getting the company bus for the half-hour ride to our offices. I would sleep during that ride, usually drifting off before we even left the city.

But that morning, I stayed awake another two or three minutes, enough to see the large billboad near the exit to the city. Some forgettable inspirational message with one of the iconic, ubiquitous pictures of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who had died going on three years earlier.

And down at the bottom, it said http://www.chabad.org/.

And I figured that was as good a way as any to test out my new Internet connection. When I went into the site, I saw that they were offering a daily email called something like "Thought For The Day." I signed up.

They sent me their thought for that day - 2 Iyyar, the seventeenth day of the Omer. I no longer have what they sent, but it made an impression, so I will bring the story from another Habad publication.

My grandfather (the Rebbe Maharash) was born on this day [2 Iyyar] in 5593 (1833).

When he was seven years old he was once tested in his studies by his father, the Tzemach Tzedek. My grandfather did so well in the test that his teacher was enormously impressed. Unable to restrain himself he said to the Tzemach Tzedek, "Well, what do you say? Hasn't he done marvelously?" The Tzemach Tzedek responded: "What is there to be surprised about when tiferet-within-tiferet does well?"

With the footnote:

1.

There are seven midot or Divine attributes, the first (and major) three being chessed (kindness), gevura (severity) and tiferet (beauty). Each attribute contains elements of the others, chessed-within-chessed, gevura-within-chessed, etc. 49 combinations in all, corresponding to the 49 days of the omer. The Rebbe Maharash was born on Iyar 2, the day of tiferet-within-tiferet, an extraordinarily high spiritual level.

The Rebbe Maharash, properly known as Rabbi Shemuel, was the fourth leader of Chabad.

"Tiferet within tiferet." My son's birthday.

It was clear that this Internet thing and I were going to be good friends.

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.

EXAMINING THE SKALAT FAMILIES

Jacob meets Joanna
One of the purposes of a family genealogy web site is to serve as a place where unknown family members can find each other. In the case of the Pikholz Project, we occasionally meet a previously unknown branch in exactly this way - someone looks for his grandfather online and finds him on our site.

About nine months ago, I received an email from a young woman in Warsaw named Joanna who told me that her late grandfather Julian was the son of a Polish woman and an older Pikholz man. Joanna didn't know the man's first name, but she knew where he lived and what he did for a living. She continued:

The features of my grandfather Julian, my mother and her brother, and mine have always been perceived as original and Semitic rather than Slavic, which might be accounted for by our origin and the multicultural mixture existing in the borderland area.

Around the year 2000 my mother told me and my son Filip that my grandfather Julian's father was Pikholtz, the administrator of one of the estates where my great grandmother Marta had worked (she had become a wife and a mother by then which means that Julian was a child born out of a romance). My mother told us the situation was very awkward, Marta was Julian's lonely mother so, in an intolerant environment, he was badly treated being a child born out of wedlock, and Jewish to top it all.

I took a long time to associate certain facts of my grandfather's life with his speechlessness. Being Polish and Jewish he had to hide from both the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and from the Germans. Then he had to hide from the Polish being a Jew. His features and his face were unambiguous.

My mother told us that the Pikholtz family were in the ghetto (probably in Podwołoczyska) during the war. Someone saw the Pikholtz sons being brought away, Julian was said to know one of them personally.

I had no problem identifying Julian's putative father as a certain Josef Pikholz who has a single living descendant, a great-grandson Jacob here in Israel, who is one of the prime movers of our research and a Polish speaker to boot. (Well, not "a single living descendant" - Jacob has children and grandchildren - but you get the idea.)


There are other children in some of these families.

If what Joanna tells us is true, then she and Jacob are second cousins. That would be closer than any other relative he has on his mother's side. But how do we prove it?

Well then, despite what I wrote here a few weeks ago, DNA seems to be the way to go. The easiest thing of course would be a Y-chromosome test on all male lines, in this case leading down from Josef. But line from Josef to Jacob includes Jacob's mother. Nor is there an all male line from Josef's father Arie Leib or even from Josef's grandfather Nachman. So although we have a male line from Josef to Julian's sons and grandsons, we have nothing to compare it to.

I spoke with the folks at Family Tree DNA, where I had done my own testing last year, and they suggested a test they call Family Finder which can measure degrees of cousinhood based on the percentage of overlapping DNA, without regard to whether the lines being tested are male, female or mixed. Since we are talking about really close cousins here, that should suffice.

So in the coming days, Jacob will be discussing with Joanna exactly how they will do this test.

The Twenty-two Skalat-area Pikholz Families
But since we are already dipping our toes into this pool, we decided to look at the next step.

We have probably twenty-two Pikholz families of four or more generations from the Skalat area and although we assume they are all related, we have no proof, nor do we have any idea what the full family structure might be. To be sure, some of those families seem to be related to one another, based on patterns of given names, family traditions or other considerations, but that represents only the preliminary stages of proper research.

So the question is, how can we use DNA testing to advance the project.

Here again, the obvious path is that of Y-chromome testing, to see that everyone leads back to some original male Pikholz. Unfortunately, that will not work. Two of the families (marked in blue in the chart above) have no living descendants, so there is no one to test. Five others (marked in red) - include my own line - have women of unknown (or at least unclear) parentage in the first generation, so the male line is meaningless. Of the other fifteen, only seven have a male line that has living descendants, plus there is an eighth which can also be useful. Let's lay them out.

LAOR - This is the family of Jacob and perhaps Joanna that I discussed above. Assuming the connection with Julian proves to be valid, Julian's son is a candidate for testing.

RITA and TONKA - We have living descendants, but no male line.

ROSA and ELIEZER - We have one son in the second generation of ROSA and he married a daughter in the second generation of ELIEZER. Unfortunately the living lines from that marriage are not male-only. We do, however, have one line in ELIEZER which is all male, down to two brothers who live in Israel. Members of that family are interested in their history, so there should be no problem getting one of them tested.

MATI - The man at the top of this family is almost certainly in the second generation of ELIEZER, but there is no male line to test. However, one of the daughters in the next generation married a Pikholz of unknown parentage and we have a male line from there. I am very interested in having that line tested. Contact with the single candidate for testing is sporadic, but it is not hopeless.

VLADIMIR - The top if this very small family is also possibly from the second generation of ELIEZER. There is one person to test, an older Russian-speaker here in Israel. I hope we can secure his cooperation.

ORENSTEIN and DORA - These two families are related, according to family tradition, and there is a marriage between them. We have one male line for DORA in the US, none for ORENSTEIN. Here too, contact with the single candidate for testing is sporadic, at best.

STEVE, IRENE and WELWELE have no male lines and we have no real ideas whom they might be connected to.

GRIMAYLOW - This is a family with no obvious connection to any other, but the one line we have is a male line with two brothers, one about eighty and one over ninety, both living in Israel and both have sons. I have never been in contact with either, but some years ago was in contact with their sisters. This will not be simple, I suspect, but may be doable.

ISRAEL - Of the two brothers in the second generation, one had daughters who went to the US and the other had sons, one of whom has one candidate for Y-chromosome testing. He rebuffed my only attempt at contact  some years ago, but perhaps we will be able to do something this time.

CHONE - This family is from eastern Ukraine, but my guess is they came from Skalat. My contact is with a female descendant in the US, but she has brothers who would qualify for Y-chromosome testing.

So we have eight people we'd like to test, six of whom may need serious convincing. Not to mention that these tests cost $169 each.

Another thing
Four of the five families whose earliest identified Pikholz ancestors are women, have female lines which I would like to test.

PITTSBURGH - This is my family and there is one line that is female all the way down. Perhaps we can get cooperation there.

RISS - There is one very elderly woman in Chicago who qualifies. She has only sons, but the female-line test can be done with a male at the end, as males have mitochondria too.

KCMO - There is one candidate. Maybe. If we can make contact with her. We haven't thusfar.

KHARKOV - My contact person here became invisible six or eight years ago.

Also, there are two sisters here in Israel whose mother was Pikholz from all four grandparents. Their female line goes back to the female half of the top of ORENSTEIN.

All of these are interesting in a "you never know what might turn up" sense.

There are some other possibilities as well, but that's enough for the present.

Perhaps in a few weeks, I'll analyze our Rozdol families in the same way.

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.

YEDIDYAH AT REST

24 Adar 5772

I have found that the Hevrot Kadisha (burial societies) here in Israel are among the most cooperative institutions with which I have dealt. Many have put information on line and all of them are very helpful with telephone inquiries. The website for the one serving Greater Tel-Aviv, for instance, not only tells you where to find the graves in its six cemeteries, but also tells you who is buried on each side of the grave in question. The one in Petah Tiqva has a computerized station at the entrance to the cemetery, which will give you a printout of the grave location with directions.

Not just in the olden days

Jerusalem, however, poses special problems, particularly the ancient cemetery on the Mt. of Olives. The terrain is difficult, rows and sections are not well-marked and most importantly the Jordanians destroyed many of the tombstones during their nineteen-year occupation of the city. And many of the pre-State graves have no surnames. The Hevrot Kadisha - and I can speak only of the three Ashkenazic societies - do the best they can. Their maps are computerized. They will give you step-by-step directions over the phone in the manner of "go six rows to the east then ten paces towards the electric pole." They will also arrange for one of their guides/security people to meet you and show you to the grave. Which may or may not have a tombstone. Which may or may not be in its original place. 

The Judean Hills from Yedidyah's grave

The story I am about to tell illustrates a particular sort of problem that doesn't come up in most grave searches. But it is typical in the sense that everyone involved gave his best effort to solve a problem.

CHAPTER ONE - The Background
Michele is an American who was working in Tel-Aviv for several years. She contacted me back a few months after I first began accepting clients, about three and a years ago, to see if I could locate her great-grandfather's grave on the Mt. of Olives. Yedidyah Choper had been born in Volkovysk Poland (now Belarus), and had gone to New York before 1900. He came here to live his final years sometime after his third wife Alte died in 1923. Michele wasn't sure when he had died beyond "between 1945 and 1947."

Yedidyah had five sons. Three went to the US early on, one was killed in the Holocaust and one survived and went to the US afterwards. No one is quite sure which of the sons is from which of his first two wives.

Later Michele wrote of a visitor Yedidyah received, his grandson, Manny.

Yedidyah and Manny

He was a pilot in the Army Air Corps - had taken some generals to Cairo for a meeting in '44 (I think) and got leave to visit his Zayde in Palestine.

With a few phone calls, I determined that Yedidyah was buried in a section that was nominally under the jurisdiction of the Hassidim Burial Society, in row thirty-two, grave 11 in one of several sub-sections that belong to an organization called Agudat Achim that brings Americans for burial here in Jerusalem, occasionally burying Americans who lived here. Hassidim told us that he had died on 27 Adar 5705, sixty-seven years ago this week.


A few weeks later, I met Michele and we went up to the grave site, together with my eleven-year-old son Devir.



Michele at Yedidyah's gravesite

The area was in poor condition - better than some sections, worse than others - and many of the stones were either illegible or missing altogether. Some graves had been rebuilt by relatives, after 1967. After we looked around unsuccessfully ourselves, Hassidim gave us phone directions and we located the spot of the unmarked grave. You can see from the photograph that the upper (horizontal) stone with the epitaph is missing and only the base remains. Michele took some pictures and on the way back to town we discussed what might be involved in having a new stone put in place. She decided to leave that for the time being.

CHAPTER TWO - The Challenge
About a year later, I heard from Michele again. She wanted to put up a stone on Yedidyah's grave. That would include designing the epitaph, since we had no idea what had been written on the original stone.

We started off discussing what kind of stone, what kind of lettering, how high to build it, the wording and of course her budget. I don't get involved in this kind of thing often, but I had had some contacts with local tombstone makers so I knew where to get quotes. In the meantime, I rechecked all the details with Hassidim and things got complicated.

Dear Michele,

I was at the cemetery yesterday to confirm the location of the grave, so that I could give specific directions to the stonemaker.

It turns out it is not as simple as we had thought.

According to your photo, your ggf's grave is in the row that starts with Chaim Shelomo Goloventzitz, and is adjacent to the grave of Chaim Alexander Ziskind.

I called the Burial Society and spoke with Natan, who is my usual connection there and who was not available the day we went together. Natan has your ggf's grave in the next row to the west, that begins with Yehoshua Zelik Tarshish. This row sort of splits into two due to the topography and Nathan says that your ggf is in the "half row" that leads from the Tarshish row.

When I tried to get more specific, intending to record the individual names in that half-row, he made a reference to the graves of Meir Philips and Gershon Gottesman as being eight graves apart. In fact, those two gravestones are side by side. So it is clear that either Natan's records are not correct or the new Gottesman stone was put in the wrong place.  

Now this whole section is subcontracted to a burial society called Agudat Achim and Natan suggested that they would have more precise information. So I called the man there, presented the problem and he said that he would have a close look at this in the days after Yom Kippur. I shall, therefore, get back to him next Thursday. 

I went back and forth with the man from Agudat Achim and soon it was March. Michele had family coming at the end of April after which she herself would be returning to the US, so we needed to be done by then.

I got both burial societies' versions of the rows in question and compared them with the actual graves on the ground. Some graves matched, some did not. In some instances, recent tombstones didn't match the names on the graves. I had long since "turned off the meter." This had become more a matter of principle than of simply doing a job for a client.

Dear Michele,

I spoke with the fellow from the burial society a few days ago. He says they have done everything they can using both maps and tools at the site.

He is fairly sure which is the grave site, but is not 100% positive, therefore he cannot permit the erection of a new monument

He is planning to put a plain slab on the spot and will show us where. This is not a satisfactory answer as far as I am concerned, but I am not sure what we can do about it. I will speak with some outside rabbis on the subject.

We decided where we thought the grave site is and took counsel from a senior rabbi. He had the authority of Halacha, but had no administrative authority over the burial societies. He said we should put the stone where we thought the grave was, but instead of writing "po nitman" (here lies buried), we should write "bahelka zo nitman" (in this section lies buried).

We settled on the inscription, on the types of stone, the height and the molten-lead lettering. I sent the stonemaker a Word file and he faxed me back the final design as it appeared on his computer.

The full inscription was to read:

In this section lies buried

A man dear to his wife, children,

grandchildren and great-grandchildren,

R' Yedidyah

ben R' Israel Zeev

Choper

Born in Volkovysk,

Died in Jerusalem

on 27 Adar 5705

May his soul be bound in life.

This stone erected in 5770 by his descendants.

In Israeli terms, everything went well from that point. It was not completed - only partly because of changes in the stone that Michele wanted - until the very last minute, but that is considered normal around here. I hope that Yedidyah Choper would find this to his satisfaction. May his memory be for a blessing.

.

NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a fellow in England, as follows:

I should like some research conducted about a distant relative whose family may have settled in the UK and Israel.  He was the nephew of ...Getzel [who] lived in Odessa.  His youngest son, Hyman K[redacted] (my grandfather), who was born in 1878, came to the UK in the 1900s.  He told people that his father had a sister, Sadie, who had a son who was also living in the UK.  It his his relatives who I am trying to trace.  The only information I have is what my grandfather once said, which was that the man's name was Berman (though that could be Burman, I suppose), that he was about my grandfather's age, perhaps a little younger, and was living in the Edgware Road in London in the 1950s.  He had a kiosk which sold newspapers but which may have been a small department store.  Berman had a sister in Israel (who married someone named Chainin) and a son in London who was a senior civil servant, who would have been born in about 1910.  Both Saul [who had recommended me..IP] and I thought that the best way to trace Berman was through his brother-in-law.

Please let me know whether this is the sort of research which you would be prepared to undertake.

As a rule, before answering this kind of inquiry, I poke around a bit, without turning on the meter, to see what the likelihood is that I can accomplish anything useful. As often happens, my first task is to understand what it is that the inquirer has told me. Many times the story of a family structure suffers from antecedent ambiguity. It may be perfectly clear to the writer whom each "his" refers to, but it is not always clear to the reader. Had I actually taken this case, I would have drawn up a chart based on what I understood the family structure to be and sent it back to the client for confirmation and with notations such as "Born when?" (More often than not, the client sends it back with all kinds of corrections and clarifications. Sometimes he just goes away and it's probably for the better.)

I attended a lecture by Dr. Neil Rosenstein at one of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) conferences, on the difficulties of doing rabbinic genealogy which is his specialty. Although linking to a prominent rabbinic line is considered analogous to getting onto a major highway, once there, you often find that the antecedents are very confusing, there are few mentions of years and the punctuation does not always meet the needs of the modern reader. He brought one example where a particular rabbi's line was described something like this:

His father was xxx and his mother was xxx and his father was xxx and his father was xxx and his father married the daughter of xxx and her mother was the daughter of xxx and his father was xxx...

The way Rosenstein told the story, he published a work describing this nine-generation lineage, realizing only later that it seemed like too many generations for the number of years involved. Only several years later did he realize that the "her" that I marked in bold blue actually refers to the mother of the rabbi at the bottom of this lineage rather than the person immediately preceding that pronoun.

In the case the man in England presented, we seemed to be talking about a woman named Berman or Burman who married a man named Chainin a couple of generations ago. No given names here, except that the woman's mother was Sadie.

The first question, of course, is how you write Chainin in Hebrew, since there is no Hebrew letter that sounds like the English "ch." People unfamiliar with languages other than their own often think that sounds transfer from one language to another simply and unambiguously, not realizing that a name with a simple spelling can be written half-a-dozen ways in another language. In Hebrew this is complicated by the absence of vowels. (In one memorable instance, I was looking for someone with the uncommon name KERN, but in Hebrew it is written the same as the very common KEREN. Client was not happy.)

The name that made the most sense to me as a representation of Chainin was what I would write as Sheinin and there are probably 150 households by that name in Israel. So even assuming this is correct AND that the name hadn't been changed either by the original couple or by subsequent generations AND that the family had sons to preserve name going forward AND that they even remained in the country, finding someone would be no simple matter.

And it's one thing to look for a needle in a haystack.  At least when you find the needle, you know you have completed the task. In the case of many searches you have to wonder how you will recognize a positive result even if you happen across it. There may be many needles - which is the right one? Or it may not be clear if what you find even qualifies as a needle.

There is one possible solution, of course. That would be to write letters to all those 150 households and ask if there was a Berman woman in their past.  Or Burman. Or Borman. I have done this kind of thing before. About ten percent of the letters are returned by the post office. Probably another thirty or forty percent are not answered. Of those who do answer, many tell me their life stories and expect me to find answers to their family questions. It isn't the kind of thing I want to do, even if I had the time, which I don't.


Another possible solution is to put this story out in places where such things are discussed. For the most part, the potential client shouldn't need me to do that, aside from some very basic guidance. But as he pointed out when I mentioned using this as a blog topic, maybe someone reading my blog will recognize the people.

CANDLES OF ADAR

MORRIS PICKHOLTZ - Chaim Menahem ben Zvi and Itta Leah
My father's father was fifty-one when I was born and was in the hospital with a heart attack. It was serious enough that my parents thought I might be named for him and he had already been given the additional name "Chaim." As it turned out, he lived another nine years and died of something else, on the ninth day of First Adar 5717, fifty-five years ago.

My grandfather was born in Zalosce, in east Galicia. He was named for his mother's uncle Mendel Kwoczka who had died seven months earlier. When he was six, his father and second brother went to America, following the eldest brother and the first two sisters who had gone earlier. The next year, his mother took the three youngest on a ship from Liverpool to Montreal and from there to join the others in Pittsburgh via St. Albans Vermont.

At age twenty-four, he married his brother's sister-in-law and they had three children. My grandfather was in the wholesale grocery business on Miller Street with two of his three brothers and much of that time the business was sufficient to support the three families. When Uncle Joe turned sixty-five, they closed down Pickholtz Brothers (which I remember visiting a few times) and my grandfather worked his last years selling for a company called Tak-A-Toy, that placed small toys on racks near checkout counters in grocery stores and supermarkets.

All those years, he was an active member of the Poale Zedeck synagogue, serving a number of years as vice-president of the men's club, while my grandmother was president of the sisterhood.



I have a replica of this gene

 He went into the hospital on a Shabbat morning, soon after my ninth birthday. No one had to tell me that evening that he had died - I knew on my own. They didn't let me go to the funeral. I was mad about that for probably thirty years.

My grandparents lived in Squirrel Hill - first on Phillips Avenue and later on Northumberland Street, across from the police and fire stations, not two blocks from our house. So we saw them often, but I cannot say that I had much of a one-on-one relationship with him. My loss. I'd like to think that I talk to my own grandchildren more than my grandfather spoke to me. But I always sat on his right at the seder table. And he was the one who noticed that my toes pointed out when I walked.

There is a Sunday when I was seven-and-a-half that I will always remember and appreciate. My father and grandfather, together with Uncle Bob, took me to Forbes Field. It was my first game and the last of the season. We sat in the bleachers in left field. Going to a game was a really big deal, as we didn't have much baseball on television and certainly none in color, with real green grass. The Pirates lost 4-0. Johnny Podres started for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The next week he pitched in the World Series and won two games.

I learned how to keep a scorecard that day.

And I learned the word "generations."

Four Other Ancestors
Simon (Shimshon ben Shelomo?) Rosenzweig, born Rajec Slovakia 1787-1790, died Puchov Slovakia 3/4 Adar 5620, 26 February 1860. He was my father's mother's father's father's father.

Golde Buchalter died in Obertyn east Galicia 2 Second Adar (11 March 1881) at age sixty. She was my wife's father's mother's paternal grandmother.

Betsy (Beile Gittel bat Moshe Aharon) Diamond, died in London, 8 Adar 5697 (19 February 1937) at age ninety-three. She was my wife's father's mother's maternal grandmother.

Binyamin Yitzhak ben Mordecai Aharon Mostek (aka Lindenberg), born 1866 probably in Prznasnyz Poland, died 24 First Adar 5708 (5 March 1948) in New York. He was my wife's mother's maternal grandfather.

Uncle George

My mother's brother, Gershon ben Yerahmiel and Sarah Gordon, born 5 April 1920 in Vandergrift Pennsylvania, died 15 Second Adar 5760 (22 March 2000) in Pittsburgh.

Uncle George and Mother

Uncle George was the younger of Mother's two older brothers and they were particularly close. They lived not far from us while we were growing up, though he went back to Vandergrift every day to work in his father's furniture store, "R. Gordon & Son.". Eventually it became his.

He served as a lieutenant in the US Army during WWII and together with his wife raised three children. He was a good man and a fine uncle.

One more that I want to mention, who is not a family member

The fifteenth of Adar is the yahrzeit of Uri Megidish, may G-d avenge his blood. In fact, I think He did, in rather spectacular fashion.

When I served in a reserve artillery unit, one of the two communications sergeants in our battery was Uri Megidish. He had big bright teeth and smiled all the time. I knew him in another context, as he was vice-principal of the religious high school in Yeroham when I lived there.

Our paths diverged and Uri moved to Gan Or, a moshav in Gush Katif, where he became a farmer. He worked in his own greenhouse and he enabled a few local Arabs to make a living as well. Until the day that one of them stabbed him to death. It was the fifteenth of Adar 5753, nineteen years ago.  Uri was thirty-nine and he left a wife and four children. His first son had celebrated his bar mitzvah two months earlier.

The years went by and one fine day - oh what a fine day it was - eleven summers later, Uri's daughter had given birth to his first grandson. The day of the brit, an IDF helicopter took out a car carrying two terrorists in Gaza, killing them both. One of them was Uri's murderer.

Thirteen months later, Gan Or and the rest of the Gush Katif communities were destroyed and turned over to the Gazans. Uri's was not one of the bodies that had to be disinterred, as he had been buried in his parents' moshav, Segullah, near Kiryat Gat.

Uri and I were not close friends or anything, but you know how sometimes something silly revives a particular memory of a particular person? This will always be linked in my mind to Uri Megidish. That and the big Hines Ward smile.