Tattered and Torn - Days Three & Four : Rajec, Domaniza and the Bytca Archives

Rajec
Wednesday we were on our own. First stop Rajec (pronounced Ra-yetz), about ten miles from Zilina. Not only were we on our own but we had no contact information for the person with the key. We did, however, have the precise location of the cemetery so off we went, hoping to find some Rosenzweigs and who knows what else.

We were able to identify the cemetery from the road with no trouble. The door was locked and it was surrounded by a wall on three sides and a chain-linked fence topped with barbed wire at the top end.

Standing on a tree stump, I was able to see over the wall in a few places.

The cemetery seems to be in excellent condition and many tombstones appear, at a distance, to be legible. But we coudn't get inside.

In a group project of this sort, each person brings certain strengths. I am the one who reads Hebrew. Cyndi will pick a conversation with anyone, even though all she speaks is English. Linda? Linda is tall and climbs over walls.

And off she went, the non-genealogist, photographing all the graves in the cemetery from top to bottom.

There were probably eight or ten Rosenzweigs, three of them Jakob. A few others I don't recognize off hand. The non-matching Jewish and secular names doesn't help.

There is a Rozalie (Rachel) Rosenzweig who died in the summer of 1926. She could be my great-grandfather's sister-in-law, but her grave calls her the wife of Yaakov, while my g-gf's brother was Simon. He still may be the same person. The staones are very hard to read and I'll have to work on them later.

Dominiza
Next stop was Dominiza, a very small town not far away. That is where my great-grandfather was actually born in 1858. It was closer to the dusty village image I had from east Galicia, but even it showed some modernity.

Cyndi's directions sent us up to an empty field behind a row of houses - obviously the wrong place. So we followed Plan B, find city hall and ask.

Finding city hall was itself a project and we asked asked a woman named Melania for directions. She is a chemist in a lab in Povazska Bystrica and her English was quite good. She got into our car with her six year old Matthew and took us to city hall where we found someone who said she would search her records for Rosenzweigs and get back to me by email.

Our friends Josef, Melania and Matthew

Then Melania found us a local historian named Josef, who speaks no English, but eventually he found us the remnants of the Jewish cemetery fenced in the back yard of locked house. On the way up, Josef told us that there were basically three Jewish families in town - the Rosenzweigs, the Zelinkas and the Spitzers. As we know, they married each other. As one might expect.

We got a look through the fence by going through the field where our search had started. The cemetery is right behind where the synagogue once stood and has very few stones. But the one we could see was Joseph Spitzer, the husband of Nathan Zelinka's daughter Jeanette, whose grave we had seen Monday in Kotesova.

Josef said he would contact Pavel Frankel in Zilina about fixing it up and would try to get in and send us some photographs.

The house on the site of the synagogue, perhaps where
my great-grandfather and his brothers were circumsized.

Every person we met in Slovakia was helpful and friendly. More of both than we had any right to expect. As we prepared to wrap up that phase of our trip, we could only speak well of our Slovakian experience.

We were tattered and torn not so much physically (though I must replace my shoes when I get home), but by the experience of seeing these places where the various branches of our families lived for generations.

The Bytca Archives
We had one more stop Thursday morning, at the state archives in Bytca. It was across the street from the synagogue, which is undergoing some sort of renovation, or at least fund raising for that renovation.

The archives are upstairs in a grand old courtyard that one could easily mistake for abandoned. Here again, a nice local woman led us to the place after we passed it by a couple of times.

When we went in, we found a working archives with a few microfilm machines, some functioning. A couple of genealogists from Hungary were working with the actual documents, bare-handed. There were a few other researchers there as well. It was all in one small room, with the microfilms stored in other rooms.

We spoke with one of the Hungarian genealogists and their translator Stephan, learning that they had done the genealogy work for former French president Sarkozy. We exchanged contact information and Cyndi will probably follow up with Stephan later on.

Cyndi worked her magic with the archivist and she permitted us to photograph their paper index showing all their microfilm holdings. We will make a list of the Jewish records and perhaps put together a funding project to get them transcribed. As we left, I thought about Marla and Jay Osborne who actually live in places like this in order to get the work done.

Next stop Budapest.

Moritz Rosenzweig, Eighty-Eight Years Later

My great grandfather Moritz Rosenzweig died 19 Heshvan 5689, eighty-eight years ago today.

With his wife Regina and children, ~1905

He was born 26 November 1858 in Domaniza, Trencin County, Slovakia to Ignac (Yitzhak Yehudah) Rosenzweig and Mali (Miriam) Zelinka. Both his parents' families had lived in Trencin County for several generations.

He had a sister who died just before her sixth birthday and three brothers, two older and one younger.

The towns in red are "ours," as is
Považská Bystrica (aka Vag Bestercze)

Moritz' mother Mali died in 1905 at age eighty and Ignac in probably 1917 at age ninety-six. Both are buried in Vag Bestercze.

In February 1885, Moritz Rosenzweig married Hermina (Chana) Schaefer in Budapest. They had a daughter Elvira and a son Siegfried (aka Aunt Ella and Uncle Fred). Hermina died in 1889 and the next year, Moritz married Regina (Rivka) Bauer of Kunszentmiklos. They had three children in Budapest - Sigmund, Albert Jules and Ilona (later Helen). Uncle Julie (later AJ Rosen) was named Yitzhak Yehudah in 1893, after his grandfather who lived another two dozen years.

In 1901, Moritz went to the United States, arriving in New York but bound for Allegheny Pennsylvania, now the North Side of Pittsburgh.

According to the passenger list, he was going to his cousin in Allegheny. I cannot read the name precisely and do not know who it might be.
 
The following year, Regina arrived in Allegheny with the five children and one year after that my grandmother was born. She was named Miriam (Margaret) after Moritz' living mother.

He became a US citizen in 1906. I see no evidence that he ever returned to Europe, not for his parents' funerals nor to visit his ninety year old father. (I checked both US passport applications and incoming passengers on Ancestry.)

Moritz worked as a cabinet maker and the family attended the (predominantly Hungarian) Poale Zedeck synagogue in the Hill District. He served on the building committee for the new building in Squirrel Hill and died at age seventy, just after the first High Holiday services were held in that building.

Housekeeping notes
I have just set for 12 February at the Orange County JGS.

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

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

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