HEVRON

At the beginning of last week, I had a phone call from an old friend, Zvi Ofer, who lives in Kiryat Arba, right outside Hevron. Zvi and Celia's second son Uri would be making a brit on Thursday.

Uri and his family live in the Admot Yishai neighborhood of Hevron, quite near the cemetery. They live in the upper floor of a building called Beit Zechariya, which had been purchased by the Jewish Community of Hevron seven years ago, but that purchase has fallen under threat of  cancellation by the Supreme Court. (See more about that here.) The brit was to be in another apartment in the building, with the festive meal in the small park adjacent to the building.

Admot Yishai is named for the father of King David. He and his grandmother - the Biblical Ruth - are buried there.

There is something special about a brit during the nine days leading up to Tish'a beAv, the fast which commemorates the destruction of both Holy Temples in Jerusalem, as well as other national tragedies. During the nine days we do not eat meat or drink wine, have weddings or make music, go to the beach - and according to some customs we don't shave or do laundry. A brit overrides some of that - the meat and the wine and the music - and generally mitigates the sense of bad omen usually ascribed to the period.

A personal good omen too - a few weeks ago, when I was planning my coming blog posts, I set this week's subject as Hevron. It seemed to fit the theme of mourning and coming redemption associated with Tish'a beAv. And besides, the eighteenth of Av is the eighty-third anniversary of the massacre. I do not feel competent to retell this story, but here it is in one sentence.

The local Arabs slaughtered their Jewish neighbors and the British overlords took that as an excuse to snuff out a vibrant Jewish community, hundreds of years old.

You can - and really should - read more about that in dozens of sources including here and here and here.

(It also fits into the current discussion about the refusal of most of the world to acknowledge the murder of the eleven Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics.)

Hevron remained Judenrein for the remaining nineteen years of British rule and throughout the nineteen years of Jordanian occupation. When the Jews returned, many of the murderers were still there and they feared vengeance.

Who was the first Jew to return to Hebron in 1967? Who was the first Jew to enter the Cave of the Patriarchs in over 700 years? Before 1948, Muslims refused to permit Jews into the Cave of the Patriarchs, they were only allowed to pray outside on the steps to the building, the infamous "7th step"- and no further. Arab guards stationed there would beat anyone attempting to get any closer to the entrance. The first Jew in Hebron and in the Cave of the Patriarchs was the then Chief Rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, Rabbi Shlomo Goren z"l.
Rabbi Goren was with Israeli forces as the IDF conquered the Western Wall in Jerusalem. As a general, Rabbi Goren knew that the army's next mission was Hebron. He wanted to be among the first Israeli's in the ancient City of the Patriarchs, so he joined the soldiers stationed at the recently captured Etzion Block (sic), on their way to Hebron. On the 28th of Iyar, at night, he asked to be woken-up when the soldiers began their march to Hebron the following day.
The next morning he woke-up, only to find himself alone with his driver. Realizing that he had been "left behind," he ordered his driver to begin the 20-minute journey to Hebron; he expected to meet the rest of the army, already on their way.
Rabbi Goren thought it was strange that he hadn?t met any other Israeli soldiers on the road as he reached Hebron. He thought that by now the army would be in Hebron. Driving into Hebron, Rabbi Goren was greeted by the sight of white sheets, hung from rooftops and windows, throughout the city. He was astounded, but understood. Knowing that their relatives had killed 67 Jews and wounded many more during the rioting of 1929, the Arabs of Hebron were terrified that the Jews would take revenge. So, they didn't fire a shot, instead they hung white sheets from windows and rooftops to surrender.
Rabbi Goren quickly made his way to the Cave of the Patriarchs. Finding the huge green doors bolted, he fired his Uzi submachine gun at the lock - you can still see the bullet holes in the door till this day. Finally, after getting into Cave of the Patriarchs, he blew the Shofar - ram's horn, as he had done 24 hours earlier at the Western Wall, as a sign of liberation.

Only afterwards, did Rabbi Goren discover that when he left the base at the Etzion Block, the rest of the army was on the other side of the hill, making plans for the attack on Hebron. They did not know that the Arabs would surrender. In other words, Rabbi Goren, a lone Israeli soldier, single-handedly conquered a city of almost 40,000 Arabs. Jews had returned to Hebron and to the Ma'arat HaMachpela - Cave of Machpela or Cave of the Patriarchs, the second holiest site in Judaism!  



The Cave of the Patriarchs

I have always had an affection for Hevron, preferring the Cave of the Patriarchs to the Kotel in Jerusalem. I have spent parts of Tish'a beAv there at least half a dozen times and Yom Kippur twice. My wife and I went there for a day tour one year on our anniversary. And I have taken any number of visitors from abroad on what I call Ultimate Genealogy.



The "Tombs of Yitzhak and Rivka" are
 off-limits to Jews except ten days a year.

 Before the bypass road was completed sixteen years ago, I would drive right through Hevron on my way to and from work a few times a month. Then for more than a dozen years, I drove the bypass road most every day, right around the edge of the city.

At some point I decided I had to make some contribution and when JewishGen set up its Online Burial Registry  (JOWBR), I realized how to do it.



The old Rabbinic "Reishit Hochma" section, refurbished

Thus was born my Hevron Cemetery Project, showing the precise layout of the cemetery, with grave photos and translations. My latest update had been about six weeks ago, but when Zvi called, I realized I could take the opportunity for an additional update.


They are not accepting plot purchases, but at 120 that's where I would like to be.

The brit was called for five o'clock and got underway about five-thirty. There were a few dozens of men and similar numbers of women and children. The baby was named Shai. Afterwards we adjourned to the neighboring parklet, where there were tables set up for a catered meat meal.

It was a pleasant hilltop day, away from the heat that has been oppressing us for the last few weeks. The view down the hill was the city itself - the Arab homes and the much smaller Jewish neighborhoods. Less than a hundred yards away was an Arab house, flying the flag of the Palestinian Authority. Soldiers lounged around. Just another day in another Jewish neighborhood. And another baby boy joins the ranks of the Jewish people in the place where it all began.

CHAYA GITTEL WAGNER

I'm not sure how long ago it was. It was definitely before we began our single-surname Pikholz Project in the fall of 1998. And I know it was late spring, so it would have to have been 1998 or maybe 1997.  My own email files don't go back quite that far.

Wait - the JewishGen Archives. Here it is. From 27 July 1998.

Subject: BAUER from Kunszentmiklos
Comments: To: JewishGen Discussion Group-Moderation
<sgjewish@lyris.jewishgen.org>
I'd turn to you folks for some direction. We have
no LDS here in Israel and I'm not in a position to spend
significant money right now.

My ggm, Regina Bauer, was born 1 July 1870, probably in
Kunszentmiklos. Her father was Shemaya. (Perhaps he had a gentile
first name as well?) Her mother was a Stern From Kaloscha. We know
the names of Regina's brothers and sisters, but do not have an age
order. (Hermina, Ilona, Susanna, Lajos, Sigmund and Louisa. Louisa
came to the US, so we know something about her. One of the brothers
was a high official in Franz Josef's government - perhaps Commerce.)

I expect that my next step is a birth certificate, which would
give her mother's first name, but I'm not clear how to go about even
that simple step, from this distance. Regina was married to Moritz
Rosenzweig (a widower) in about 1889/90 and they lived in Budapest,
but I'm told they weren't married there. Perhaps that too is to be
found in Kunszentmiklos.

Your guidance would be greatly appreciated. (I've run this by the
Hungarian SIG, with no response.)

I got a response from Eleanor Bien in Virginia, she offered to get me all the Bauer records from Kunszentmiklos and to see if there was anything relevant in Kalosca in  exchange for my finding her great-grandmother's grave on the Mt of Olives.


CHAYA GITTEL WAGNER,
the namesake of Eleanor's sister
Carol Skydell, VP of JewishGen

Chaya Gittel Wagner had come to Jerusalem as an elderly widow and died in 1911. I don't remember if Eleanor had a precise date, but she knew her great-grandmother had come from Seret, in Bukovina.

Finding the grave was the secondary mission - the primary goal was to learn her father's name.

I had never done anything on the Mt of Olives before, though I had gone past it many times. How hard can it be, right? Of course I knew that the nineteen-year Jordanian occupation had been accompanied by much destruction in the cemetery, but still.

I decided to start by phoning the burial societies - first time for that experience! - and the first one I called had her. That was the Hassidim and her grave was in a section  right opposite the police station, near the checkpoint at the beginning of the Jericho Road that leads to the Dead Sea. He said if I'd come to the office, he'd go out to the site with me. The grave site was easy to find, he said, because it was very near an easily recognizable pile of tombstones that were out of place.

In the office, I saw the record. It had her name "Chaya Gittel bat" then a large space where her father's name ought to be, "from Seret" and the date, 18 Menahem Av 5671. They didn't have the father's name either, but they left a space in their record book, as though someone expected that this information might yet turn up. Not a good omen.

There was no mention of a surname, but apparently the date and the mention of Seret was enough for him to consider this an absolute identification. There is no gurantee, he said, that there actually is a stone. And if there is, it may not be legible.

We went up to the site and I saw the pile of tombstones that he used as a landmark. More like three stones at various angles, looking something like an Indian teepee.

Some of the graves had no stones. Others were broken or battered by the weather. We went up and down the row a few times, counting plots and trying to make out inscriptions. Eventually, he settled on an unmarked grave and said that this was Chaya Gittel.

Chaya Gittel's stone in its place.
You can see that the left side
had been buried.

But we didn't leave it at that. We decided to look around and see if perhaps the stone was someplace else nearby. And sure enough, one of the teepee stones, half-buried lengthwise, showed "Chaya Git" and "18 Menahem." The rest was in the ground. Even what we were able to read was face down and that may be why it was so legible, having been protected from fifty years of weather.

I seem to recall that we exposed the entire stone on that visit, though it was too heavy for the two of us to move to the grave site. There were four lines:

P"N [= Here lies buried]

Chaya Gittel bat

                   from Seret

18 Menahem Av 5671

No father's name, but there was a space. Like they were hoping someone would yet provide that information.

A few days later, I came out again with one of our boys and a crowbar and we moved the stone to its proper place. I felt bad for anyone who had used the teepee as a landmark, because the remaining stones were now quite useless for that purpose.

I took pictures before and after, plus a panoramic view and had two copies, one for Eleanor and one for her sister Carol. I visited again soon after, after receiving some special stones from Chaya Gittel Skydell.

A few weeks later, I received the Hungarian records from Eleanor. Some of them provide the basis for what I wrote here last month.

When I first considered writing about this here, I asked permission from both Eleanor and Carol. Here is what Carol wrote:

How nice to hear from you Israel.  I tell the story often about how genealogy binds us to people we may never meet in person.  People cannot believe that you were willing to find Chaya Gittel's grave, get your son and his friends to lift the stone that had fallen over it and ultimately visited memorializing the  visit with  prayers and placing two stones from my favorite beach in the entire world (Squibnocket on Martha's Vineyard).  Connectivity is what it is all about and people are truly amazed at what you did on our behalf, despite the fact we never met in person.

Go right ahead and share the story....I never stop telling it!

Housekeeping note - Next week's post will go up Monday, not the usual Sunday.

THIRTEEN YEARS FOR OUR DUTCH BOY

Prologue

In 1800s Galicia, our ancestors often had a proper rabbinic marriage without bothering to report it to the civil authorities. The children of such marriages were registered as illegitimate and were given the mother's surname, though usually the father would confirm his paternity in the "comments" column. But that was another place, another time, another mentality. Nothing like that happens anymore.

Marriage
My daughter Merav met her intended, Aharon Zvi Brand, here in Israel, and it was here that they planned to make their home. Her mother was (still is) in Chicago, so that's where they made the wedding, the evening leading into Merav's twenty-first birthday. As required by law, they took out a local marriage license.

In order to benefit from the status of immigrant, they went to the Jewish Agency emissary in Chicago - a friend of mine since we were both teenagers -  to do the paperwork. That included giving him whatever form the rabbi filled out at the wedding ceremony, to ensure that the Israeli authorities recorded the marriage. They didn't bother getting it back in order to report the actual marriage to Cook County within the required sixty days, but that really didn't matter because they planned to live in Israel.

Eleven and a half months later, their daughter Rachel Miriam Brand (called Miriam) was born in Jerusalem.

A few months later, the three of them set off on a two-year adventure in Amsterdam, where Aharon Zvi had been invited to participate in a small kollel, maintained by the local Jewish community, so that this former center of Torah study would continue to have a yeshiva-type presence.

Moishie
The main feature of the second half of their first year in Amsterdam was the difficult pregnancy. The problem began Pesach when they were in Antwerp, staying with a cousin of Aharon Zvi's. Merav was taken care of then, but it was a few weeks before she was able to return to Amsterdam.

Then she was back in the hospital again and this time they said it would be for the duration - which turned out to be forty-five days. At least it was in Amsterdam. But I was not in a position to go see her - not that there would have been much point in that. Nor was her mother, in Chicago.

Ury Link, whom I knew from the JewishGen Discussion Group, went to visit her in the hospital. (Ury and I never actually met until several years later, but such was the camaraderie of JewishGen, especially back when the group was smaller.)

The baby was born Friday, the eighteenth of Tammuz.

He was very small and jaundiced, so the mohel put off the brit. It must have been a strange feeling, with alomost no family there - even Aharon Zvi's Antwerp family were away. The only family member in attendance was my second cousin Judy Jaffe, whom I hadn't seen in forty years and who was living in Holland at the time. (It was only last summer when we finally visited in suburban DC.) Ury Link was also there.

The baby was named Moshe, after Aharon Zvi's mother's paternal grandfather. They called him Moishie.

Then they went to register the birth with the city. The clerk wanted to see a marriage certificate. Oops. So the birth of Moshe Pickholtz to his unwed mother was duly registered.

A visit to a Justice of the Peace in Chicago a year or so later allowed them to get new documents, but the original birth certificate is still there - waiting perhaps to be discovered by a genealogist working for a matchmaker or a prospective father-in-law. Oy.

Now he is a man, sort of
They returned here after their two years and settled in a neighborhood of Upper Modiin called Ahuzzat Brachfeld. When Moishie was two, Merav survived a bout of cancer and they have since had three more boys.

The bar mitzvah was last week. Frances and I were there for Shabbat, but no one else. In keeping with the custom of their particular community, it was a low-key affair. Shabbat - which was actually the day before his birthday - he read the maftir and haftarah in shul and they made a small kiddush. the kids threw candy.



Moishie's suit made him look grown up. His hat was a good size - he didn't look like a little boy wearing his father's hat. Moishie really wanted it to look right. (Eight year old Menahem made a reference to Moishie's concern with "his holy suit and his holy hat.") I brought him the set of Humash with commentaries that he wanted. The air conditioning worked and it was a lovely day.



Moishie and Menahem
with Cousin Ari



Miriam and Shloimie



Merav on the women's side
with Ari's fiance Bobbi

Wednesday evening they had an open house is a hall not far away. Earlier in the evening there was something for the boys in his class and Moishie spoke there. With the adults it was just meet and greet, though Moishie made a half-hearted effort to speak again, giving up the first time he was interrupted by singing.

Moishie with the microphone and

Aharon Zvi standing behind the waiter

Since we were after the Seventeenth of Tammuz, there wasn't any music or dancing. Behind the head table, there was a growing pile of wrapped packages that looked like books. And there were the inevitable envelopes. Merav tells me he got six copies of Sefer HaHinuch and  a number of different editions of Mishna Berurah. It's challenging to be original.



The boys have school through the summer, until Tish'a beAv, but Merav let them go a bit late the next morning.

Menahem is going on nine, so their next event is probably his bar mitzvah. Or maybe Miriam's wedding. G-d willing. We should only have semahot.

PS - Some day I may learn how to get things lined up on these pages the way I want. Or not.

And here is the birth record.

BUDAPEST

My father's mother is not from Budapest. She was born in the United States. In fact, none of my ancestors were born in Budapest. But my great-grandparents lived there for the first ten years of their marriage and my great-grandfather and his first wife had lived there as well. In fact, of his six children, the first five were born there and only Nana was born after their 1900 emigration.

But somehow things Hungarian (including pre-WWI Slovakia) always seem to lead to Budapest sooner or later.

I wrote abit about Nana's mother's family a couple of weeks ago and today's story begins with her father's family.

Moritz (Moshe) Rosenzweig was born in a town called Domanis, in Trencin County Slovakia in 1858. His parents were Ignac (Yitzhak Yehudah) Rosenzweig and Mali (Miriam) Zelinka.

Trencin County is in northwest Slovakia, bordering on Poland and what is now the Czech Republic.

We knew that he had two brothers - Arnold and Simon. Each had a couple of children. Arnold had a daughter Charlotte who spent some time in the US, but eventually returned to Europe. That's what we knew and my research efforts were going in different directions. There quite a few Hungarian records that were microfilmed by the Mormons, but here in Israel, we have no access to any of that.

About eight years ago, a researcher in the US named Bob Hanscom wrote telling me that he was doing research on his Wilhelm family from Trencin County and since he had a Fani Wilhelm (1785-1864) who had married Nathan Joseph Rosenzweig and a Julianna (b. ~1813) who had married Moritz Zelinka, he offered to send me extracts of any Rosenzweig and Zelinka records he came across in his own Trencin County research.

I accepted gratefully and eventually I was able to add quite a bit of information on these two families during the 1800s.

This is what I was able to put together for the Rosenzweigs, down to my great-grandfather (in red). The Zelinka information is about three times that.

So that gave me two more generations of Rosenzweig ancestors and three of Zelinkas. Further, I learned that my great-grandfather had another older brother - Schandor (Salomon) - who had a family - as well as a sister Sali who had died in childhood.

I put both the Rosenzweig information and the Zelinka information online and sat back waiting to see if anything would happen. Nothing did.

As you can see, the family appears in more than just Domanis, so here is a small map of the immediate area, with our towns of interest in red.

And here is the general area within the context of Slovakia and it's near neighbors.

Eight years later...

About five months ago, I get an email from a fellow in Budapest. (I have blanked out some of the names, for reasons of privacy.)

I write you as unknown, but I'm sure you will understand why.

However some decades ago my mother and her father made number of searches

to find their relatives their always failed to find anyone. So you can

imagine the excitement of all the family when my sister found our

grandfathers name on your site.... Since date, ort [sic] and name is the same, I think it should be my grandfather.

I'm sure you worked really lot to collect and arrange all the information

published on your website, I admire your enthusiastic work.

My grandfather is Alfred Rosenzweig b. 3 Jan 1891, Vágbesztercze SLOVAKIA

(on that date the area belonged to Hungary). He is my mother's father.

Alfred moved to Budapest in the 1920s, married M____ (my grandmother) and

died in Budapest in 1958. He had one daughter, my mother E_____, born in 1933. As difficult times came Alfred altered his surname (Rozenzweig) to R_____ that sound more Hungarian.

I don't know how much information do you know about Alfred and his family,

but happy to share with you if interested. Even more I made a very amateur
family tree as well.

As you can see, this Alfred is the son of my great-grandfather's brother Schandor and a first cousin of my American-born grandmother. That makes the writer my third cousin, really a rather close relative.

Turns out he is an architect, about fifty years old, living in Budapest. His mother is still living and he has a sister. He and the sister each has two children. We exchanged a few emails and photographs, but I have not heard from him since that first burst.

But his last message included this:

My grandfather was deported to working camp during the war, he managed to

escape, first went to Kunszentmiklos, where a family hid him until the war

ended, and than he could come back safe to his family in safe. Interesting

to see on your list, that some of his cousins maybe lived Kunszentmiklos,

even in that time. My mother do not remember of those relatives, but she

thought it strange why Alfred went there from Kápolnásnyék lager, which is

in another part of the country. So possibly those relatives helped him to

survived the war, or someone else who was known trough those cousins.

If you have been following this blog over the weeks, you will recall that my grandmother's mother - that is Alfred's uncle's wife - was Regina Bauer from Kunszentmiklos. So it is entirely possible that it was the Bauers who were behind Alfred's Kunszentmiklos period.

As it happens, Regina Bauer's brother Sigmund died in Budapest in 1938 and his children had been born there. I would not be surprised if the two families knew each other, either in Budapest or in Kunszentmiklos.

As it happens, Sigmund's older son Istvan came to Israel after the war with his wife and three Budapest-born children. Istvan's elder son - who lives quite near me - was born in 1933, the same year as Alfred's daughter. This cousin has not been interested in contact from me since our original contact, but I suggested to my newfound third cousin that perhaps he would respond to someone whose family seems to have a shared Holocaust-era experience.

My grandmother would find all this highly implausible. All she knew was that "everyone is gone."

SOME LITTLE PLACE YOU NEVER HEARD OF

Three years ago this week, we marked the completion of the annual Torah cycle from the time we moved to Jerusalem one year earlier. And for the first time since we moved, we went away for Shabbat. To Tel-Aviv. A hotel near the beach. It was part of the conditions that had come with my early retirement package.

There was nothing memorable about that Shabbat, except that the knee problem I had been having for six months seemed to have worked itself out. And of course the story I am about to tell.

There was a minyan in the hotel, but after I went Friday night, I decided to go elsewhere in the morning. We were quite near a large shul on Ben Yehudah Street, so I decided that would be my best bet. It is a large, well-kept building with a full program of services and classes, but as far as numbers of people, it had clearly seen better days. They had two minyanim and I went to the later one.

There were maybe thirty or thirty-five men but the very large space looked empty. I sat in one of the back rows. There was one older man in the row in front of me, a larger group near the front and others scattered about. Not much in the way of young people, but there were a couple of fathers with sons.

The man in front of me had a thick accent and at the end of the services, I asked him where he came from.

HIM: New York

Me: Where are you from before New York."

HIM: Slovakia.

Me: Where in Slovakia

HIM: Some little place you never heard of.

Me: Try me.

HIM: Medzilaborce.

Me: My wife had family in Vidrany. [Used to be a separate municipalityy, but now part of Medzilaborce.]

HIM: What was their name?

Me: Baum.

HIM (eyes wide): Schmiel Baum?

Me: Her grandfather was Mendel Baum. Schmiel Baum was his younger brother.

HIM: Schmiel Baum was a friend of my father. He used to cut through our yard on his way to shul, then stop for kiddush on the way home.

He spoke of being a teenager and of having known the Baum family, at least those of them who had not previously left for the US.

(In fact, Schmiel Baum had gone to the US himself in 1901 at age twenty-five, probably intending to bring his wife and three children later. When he was there he saw how his brother Solomon had "adopted American ways" and, horrified, Schmiel returned to Europe. Three of his eight children went to the US before WWII and one went afterwards as a refugee, but he and his wife Chana and their other four children were killed.)

Schmiel and Chana, at the bride's right.

He and I spoke a bit longer and each of us went back to his own hotel.

That evening, we went over to visit with him. He had gone to the US, raised a family, done very well financially and written a book about his life. He visits Israel often and in this particular instance, was here to see his grandson complete his officers' course.

Every once in awhile, someone says "some little place you never heard of." I love it.

"ARE YOU RELATED TO RABBI PICKHOLTZ FROM CLEVELAND?"

Cleveland
When this Pittsburgher first began having New York friends, they would always ask me how I am related to Rabbi Pickholtz from Cleveland, whose five sons went to Yeshiva University. In fact, over the years, most everyone I have ever met from Cleveland has asked that as well. Sometimes I joke that this is why I do genealogy - when my time comes after a hundred and twenty, I will no doubt be asked that again and I would be well advised to know the answer.

In the course of my genealogy work, I have corresponded by email with two of the sons of Rabbi Pickholtz and even had the occasion to speak with the rabbi himself on the phone, but it never worked out that I actually met any of them.

Noah
Soon after we moved to Jerusalem four years ago, we learned that Noah Pickholtz, the middle son of the youngest son of Rabbi Pickholtz, was studying at a yeshiva not far from us. We had him over for lunch and although it was very nice, it turned out to be a one-time thing.

We kind of kept up on his doings - mostly via the grapevine and Facebook - as he went into the army and eventually became engaged to Michal. We invited him to some of our activities, but as I say, it never worked out.

So we were really pleased to receive an invitation to the wedding, which was last Monday evening, not far from Jerusalem. Aside from the simcha itself, I was looking forward to meeting whatever of his family would be coming from the US. I don't think his father and I had ever had contact (though he had been in contact with my son in suburban Chicago on shul business), but I had a bit of contact with some of his father's brother's families.

I had also heard from Noah's older brother on the births of each of his four girls.

A couple of weeks before the wedding we received a Facebook invitation to the kiddush they were making the Shabbat before the wedding. It was at a shul about thirty minutes' walk from here, so we said we would be there. (It was a hot day and the walk was mostly uphill.)

I met his parents. (His father says "You are the one from the website." I suppose that's one way to put it.) And we met the bride's parents - they are from Basel Switzerland. I introduced my self to people as the Pickholtz genealogist, without getting into specific relationships.

The wedding itself was nice. It actually started on time. Since both families live abroad, most of the guests were friends of the couple, so we older folks were distinctly the minority. We met Noah's brothers and his sister-in-law. We sat at a table full of Clevelanders.

There were four people there named "Mrs. Pickholtz." During our trip to the US last summer, there were three occasions where there were three, but it has been some years since I have been with four. There should be a photograph which includes all of them - and the men too.

The family structure
So now you know why I am writing about this particular family at this time. Let me explain the structure.

The late Rabbi Isidore (Israel) Pickholtz was one of four children of Berisch and Golde Pickholz. That's Pickholz for both of them. They said they were cousins and some of the descendants took that to mean first cousins, which as you can see below is incorrect.

Berisch and Golde were both born in Rozdol, east Galicia. The four children were all born in Galicia and they went to the US in the early 1920s. Berisch went first, with some of his brother's family and Golde went with the children in 1924, after the quota system had been instituted - a fact which necessitated some "special payments."

To the right is an outline of eight generations of the family, beginning with Isak and Feige Pikholz (maybe one couple or maybe two with the same names - a discussion for another time) and going down to Noah and his brothers. Nine, if you add in Dov and Tammy's four girls.

It is clear that Berisch and Golde are, at best, second cousins.

We accept as axiomatic that the generation above Isak and Feige is Pinkas and Sara Ryfka Pikholz and that all the Pikholz families from Rozdol are descended from this couple. I think that the name Pikholz came from Sara Ryfka, rather than Pinkas.

Our family website has more detailed information about the family of David and Serka Pikholz (the grandparents of Berisch) and that of Hersch Leib and Sara Pikholz (the grandparents of Golde), for those who are interested.

Are you related to Rabbi Pickholtz from Cleveland?
None of this addresses the original question about my relationship to "Rabbi Pickholtz from Cleveland."

My Pikholz family - as I have written here before - comes from Skalat, about a three-four hour drive from Rozdol in today's conditions. The Skalat families go back further than the original Rozdol couple and there are more of them. It is possible that Sara Ryfka, the wife of Pinkas of Rozdol, came from Skalat around 1800, but there doesn't seem to evidence of that. Not even a significant overlap of given names.

So the answer to the question remains as it has always been - not that we know of.

Oh and let's not forget:

MAZAL TOV TO MICHAL AND NOAH

FANI STERN'S PARENTS

Nana had this photo on
display forever. My grand-
daughter knows it will be hers.

Click to enlarge

This is not about my grandmother's mother, Regina Bauer Rosenzweig, who appears here on the right. Or as we call her - "Nana's mother."

It isn't even about her parents Simon/Shemaya Bauer and Fani Stern.

It's about her grandparents, and in particular, her mother's parents.

But first a bit of background. The Bauers had seven children, all of whom lived to adulthood. The children were born and raised in Kunszentmiklos Hungary, where the Bauers lived. The Sterns were from Kalosca. All this I knew from Nana.

The map on the left shows a section of Hungary directly south of Budapest, including the towns I will be discussing here.

Some years ago, I acquired copies of all the Bauer records from Kunszentmiklos and organized them into a rudimentary outline. It was clear from those records that earlier Bauers had lived in Apostag, not far away and the whole lot of them seem to have moved in the same period, perhaps because of legal restrictions on where Jews could live. I have a set of Bauer records from Apostag, but have not done anything with them.

At the same time, I acquired the marriage record of Simon Bauer and Fani Stern.

The marriage in Kalosca on 29 January 1862, 19 Shevat 5612 of Simon son of Lasar Bauer, age 28, of Kunszentmiklos
and Fani daughter of Salomon Stern, age 21, of Kalosca. (Click to enlarge - it's the second  record on the page.)

This document gave me both the ages of the bride and groom and the names of their fathers. In the case of Simon's father Lasar, we have a Lazar Bauer in Kunszentmiklos, married to a Roza Lowenstein. Lazar was born in 1791 and died in 1867. They may be Simon's parents - or not. I have not recorded them as such, but have recorded that Simon's father is Lasar.

I searched Kalosca records for any Salomon Stern and I found a death and two births.

This Salomon Stern died in Kalosca in May 1862 at age 57. That was a few months after Fani's wedding. Fifty-seven is within the norm for Fani's father's age, but who knows if this is actually the right person! As I say in one of my lectures, even if I am quite sure this is the right person, once I record him as such, I won't re-examine it later. Nor will my research heirs, should I be so fortunate as to have any.

I also found two births for children of Salomon Stern, a daughter Sali in 1851 and a son Wilhelm in 1853. The earlier record is very poor quality, so I bring the one from 1853 here.

Wilhelm Stern, born in Kalosca, 2 February 1853 to Salomon Stern and Beti Grunwald

Now obviously it is tempting to say that our Fani Stern is the daughter of this same Salomon Stern and Beti Grunwald. But the truth is, even if we know that this is her father, we have no idea if Beti Grunwald - whose children were born nine and eleven years after Fani - is Fani's mother. Problem is, the Hungarian National Archives and LDS have Kalosca Jewish records only for the period 1850-1895, so we have no idea if there were children between Fani and the later two.

In preparing this blog, I had a discussion with Beth Long, a professional researcher in Budapest, and she explains that after 1895, all the records are part of the civil record, rather than the Jewish record. These records exist for Kalosca (as well as Kunszentmiklos) and can be searched. There are certainly deaths after 1895 for people born in the 1830s and 1840s, so perhaps we can find more there.

I'll get back to this a bit later. Meantime, here are some Jewish population numbers. In Kalosca, the Jews were 4-6% of the total population. These numbers are from Yad Vashem's Pinkas Kehillot.

KENNETH JACKSON STULL, Proud Jew

National Commander, American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor

Uncle Kenny

When I still very young, I already knew that Uncle Kenny was different from my other relatives. He had tattoos on his arms and his back. He was an electrician and smoked Lucky Strikes. He came from rural western Pennsylvania and used expressions like "redd off the table." He sat flat-footed on his haunches, with his arms around his knees, the way he learned from the Filipinos. And he had been a prisoner of the Japanese.

And on one or two occasions that I recall from childhood, he referred to himself as a Jew.

He was also my sandak (~godfather).

Kenny Stull was the eldest son of Francis Jackson Stull and Velma Thompson and was married to my mother's older sister, Ethel Gordon. Aunt Ethel had grown up in Vandergrift Pennsylvania without any Jewish education to speak of. There were no outward signs of anything specifically Jewish in their home or their lives.

The house on Franklin Avenue,
two and a half years ago.
I was surprised how annoyed I was that the
owners had allowed it to deteriorate so.



They had gotten married shortly before he went off to war and although he had been home a couple of years by the time I was born, they had no children. I guess that's partly why my parents chose him to be my sandak. Besides, the sisters were close despite the eleven year age difference.



We lived in Pittsburgh and they were in Vandergrift, but we visited with them often and when we'd stay over, it was at their house on Franklin Avenue, rather than with my grandparents. When I was very young - I want to say six, but that's crazy even for my parents -  my mother put my younger brother and me on a bus to Vandergrift for a few days' visit with Aunt Ethel and Uncle Kenny.

They had a "Lassie phone" with a party line and you had to dial the operator and ask for Vandergrift 577A. I knew how to do that well before first grade.

One time we went to see them when I was about five and they brought out a little blonde girl, maybe three years old. "This is Sally. Soon she will be our daughter." Sally became Donna and about two years later, they had a daughter on their own. Aunt Ethel was in her fortieth year.



With their children and son-in-law

 Eric was born seven years later. Aunt Ethel died when he was just turning fourteen.

A few days before his thirtieth birthday, Eric was killed in a freak automobile accident in which he should have played no part.  Donna died of cancer five years later, leaving a husband and two children. The second daughter has not responded to our attempts to make contact during the last few years, even when my mother died.

I stayed in touch with Aunt Ethel and Uncle Kenny until I moved to Israel thirty-nine years ago. They travelled to Chicago for my wedding and we visited with them a couple of times in Vandergrift.

To the extent that I thought about it at all, it was obvious to me that he had become Jewish because he married a Jewish girl and they wanted to keep her parents happy and his references to himself as Jewish were for effect. Shows how much I knew.

He Killed a Girl
One day, when I was about twenty-six and here in Israel, my mother started talking ex nihilo, as she did from time to time. I will tell you what she said, but mixing in the details I have learned since. I don't know if my mother knew all these details as she had been ten years old and hadn't yet known Kenny.

Indiana (PA) Evening Gazette, 3 February 1937
"Mudless Shoes Freed Motorist"

On the evening of 8 January 1937, Kenneth Jackson Stull of Leechburg was driving on the road between Leechburg and North Vandergrift and he hit a girl. She had been walking along the road - one of a group, which apparently included her mother. Catherine Frayer Beatty was seventeen when she died and had been married for two weeks.

On 2 February, a coroner's jury accepted the highway patrolman's testimony that it was an accident. She had no mud on her shoes, so she must have been walking on the road itself, not off to the side as Mrs. Frayer had claimed. It had been dark, so he wouldn't have seen her. No charges were brought.

Soon after, he was in church on Sunday morning and the angry voice from the pulpit said something like "There is a murderer among us. The law says he is not guilty, but he knows and we know he is a murderer." Kenny left the church, never to return.

Having renounced his spiritual anchor, he was rather at a loss what to do next. My mother said "He drove around until" - and she made it sound like hours, but it may have been days or weeks - "he came to a 'Jewish church' and he went in." And some time after that, he completed his conversion and became Jewish.

I don't think he knew any of the Gordons at the time. He didn't marry Aunt Ethel until November 1940. Very possibly he decided that since he had become a Jew, he should look for a Jewish girl. Yet they were married in Hardy West Virginia, so it seems they eloped. (Thanks to Beth at the Vandergrift Historical Society for that  bit of information.)

Soon the army came calling. He learned about the Phillipines. And Bataan. And Corregidor. He survived the infamous death march and whatever else the Japanese had in store for their prisoners.

The four Vandergrift Gordons in WWII        (My mother was too young)
The Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh) 24 September 1943.

 He came home, went to work for my grandfather for awhile, eventually going off on his own. He tried a few businesses, eventually settling on one he called Ken Electric, was elected to serve as a Vandergrift Councilman and smoked his Lucky Strikes.


Beth Jacob Cemetery, Lower Burrel Pennsylvania

 

Uncle Kenny served two one-year terms as National Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor veterans organization and participated in a veterans trip back to the Far East to see the camps once again.

He lived his last years near his second daughter down south and died weeks before his seventy-sixth birthday.

Milt Rosenberg and His Guest, Jan Thompson

I often have podcasts on while I work and two or three times a week will listen to Milt Rosenberg's wonderfully eclectic night time interview show on WGN in Chicago. On Memorial Day, he had on a woman named Jan Thompson who is in the process of releasing a film called "The Tragedy of Bataan."

As I listened to the archived show the next day, I decided to google "Kenneth Jackson Stull," just to see what is out there. What I found included this: 

On January 25th  members of the “A” Company led by the 803rd Battalion’s Executive Officer, Captain James D. Richardson joined men of the 21st and 34th Pursuit Squadrons, all virtually untrained and poorly equipped to become combat infantrymen in the defense of the Aglaloma-Quinauan Point area on Bataan’s rocky southwest coastline.  These raw troops aided by Philippine Army and Scout forces engaged in combat with about 600 Japanese invaders who had attempted a landing behind the lines.  On January 26th in a Japanese ambush, 10 men of “A” Company were killed-in-action and another 38 wounded, decimating the unit.  On February 5th “A” Company’s survivors were relocated to Corregidor where they spent the next 3 months engaged in tasks that they had been trained to do, i.e., widening and extending Kindley Field, the island’s airstrip, constructing aircraft revetments, maintaining roads and utilities, etc.  Working in the open, the unit was exposed to ever-increasing Japanese artillery barrages and air raids and suffered eight more casualties including the C.O. of the company, Cap’t Zbikowski who was killed on April 2, 1942.  Just prior to Corregidor’s surrender on May 6, 1942 the remaining physically fit “A” Company men were integrated with marine and navy defenders on the beaches at Monkey Point.  Troops of the Japanese 61st infantry Regiment, a component of the 4th Division landed on the north coast of Corregidor on May the and the island was surrendered by General Wainwright the following day.

Pvt. Kenneth Stull left Corregidor in the latter part of May and after a brief stop at the Bilibid Prison in Manila he was transported north to the Cabanatuan P.O.W. camp where he remained until November 1942 when he sailed to Japan on the freighter, “Nagato Maru.”  After his arrival in Japan in late November 1942, Stull spent some time at the Shinagawa P.O.W. camp/hospital in Tokyo, perhaps in ill health prior to moving to the large Omori camp located on an island in Tokyo Bay and connected to Tokyo proper by a 300 foot long timber causeway.  The Omori camp became the home for many Air Force personnel downed in the Pacific during the war or over Japan in the last year.  

Thanks to the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Museum at
the Brooke County Library in Wellsburg West Virginia for this envelope

I sent the link to some of my family, including to three of my DC-area second cousins who are some years older than I.

Cousin Dick Sincoff wrote back:

I greatly appreciate the article. A significant omission was the Bataan Death March, which he survived. At a local theatre in D.C., not long after the fall of Corregidor, we saw captured Japanese film and saw Kenny standing near Gen. Wainwright. My mother made us stay through to the next showing to confirm it. She ran from the theatre; she called Ethel in Vandergrift and told her that he was alive. Ethel already had received a telegram from the War Department that Kenny was missing in action and presumed dead.

He continued thus (emphasis mine):

After the release of prisoners, he went to rehab hospital in Hawaii for many weeks and finally was flown to Andrews air base in suburban Maryland outside of Washington. I went with my mother and father to greet him. He was rail thin but held himself tall. He still had the thick glasses he wore--albeit wired and patched. He spoke very little about the war thereafter, but in 1948, when I was 13 and spent 2 weeks with him, he opened up some, told me some of the horrors and some of the sabotage that US prisoners did while in the camps. He was often beaten because he was Jewish.

As you know, Kenny converted to Judaism. At one time while a POW, the camp boss told told all Jews to come forward, and Kenny did so. As he stepped out, a fellow American, held his arm and said, "Stull, you don't have to do that." Kenny said yes he did, because he was a Jew. I felt great emotion hearing his stories, as I guess did he. For the rest of his life, he never liked men with extra-short haircuts and avoided rice.

On summer afternoons after work, he would walk with me on the bluff overlooking the river and rail tracks and softly tell me things, out of earshot from Ethel. I still wonder if he opened up with others as he did with me. Maybe I was just a kid who needed to know, who needed to hear the horror, and maybe not let it happen again. But it did, didn't it?

This is the story of one man, my uncle and sandak and has significance for me and other family members, so I can close here.

I really should be saying kaddish for him. For my sandak.

Afterword for Genealogy Researchers

But there is also a lesson here for us genealogy researchers which I don't want to pass by. I don't know who besides me knows the story of the conversion. Cousin Dick, for instance, will learn those details when he reads them here. Nor do I know how many other people know the bits I emphasized in red above. I certainly hadn't and my mother probably didn't either. Until last summer, Cousin Dick and I had not seen each other in probably fifty years, though we have been exchanging emails recently.

Often when we researchers contact cousins, we will talk to one or two of a group and assume we have them covered.  That is not the case. You can never tell when a particular story or piece of information has fallen only to one specific person. And even so, what makes something come up from distant memory into conversation. It is important to talk to everyone, and not just once. And there are still important things you will miss.



Graphic by Sarajoy