Lichterman - Checking the Source

My g-gm's grave in Borisov

Etta Bryna - my great-grandmother
I wrote about the maiden name of my mother's mother's mother Etta Bryna Rosenbloom at length in the early days of this blog four and a half years ago and for those who want the details, it's worth a reread. She died probably in her late thirties and we know precious little about her. In addition to the information I presented back then, Renee Steinig found the death certificate of my grandmother's other sister in Islip, Suffolk County - but it lists both her parents' names as "unknown." The informant was the hospital.

Etta Bryna's tombstone

So I am still where I was then. Etta Bryna's father is Yehudah and he is a Levi. My conjecture that she is a Lichterman still runs up against a lack of any proof that the Lichtermans - a known Borisov family - were Leviim, but the gravestones of the known Lichterman men have no Hebrew. The traditional grave of their sister Gitta Lichterman Benenson (below) calls her father "Yosef" with no mention of his being a Levi.

This is where I have been holding for the past four or five years.

Gitta Lichterman Benenson

Our new project for several Borisov families 
Recently I joined forces with Galit Aviv to have a look at several Borisov famliies who appear to be connected to one another. These would be the Lichtermans, the Kaplanskys, the Benensons and the Rosenblooms. There are a couple of others which might belong here as well. To that end, we have added several people to the Rosenbloom Project that I set up at Family Tree DNA some years ago and are getting a few others to test - including a granddaughter of Gitta.

Galit - whom I have not met, but expect to see when I am in the US during the winter - is a good and resourceful researcher. Among other things, she came up with the following.

This is the 1908 death and burial record for Moshe Likhterman the son of R' Yudel

Map from the
JewishGen Gazeteer

Likhterman the Levi, in Slutsk. He is also called "the son-in-law of R' Eliyahu" followed by the odd notation "l'm24." The burial is next to someone named Yehuda who died a few month earlier. Could this be the brother of Etta Bryna? The fathers of both are Yehudah who is a Levi. And is that Yehudah next to him perhaps his father? And what is that odd notation "l'm24?"

Slutsk is some ninety miles SSW of Borisov, but that needn't indicate a problem. Certainly not if this Moshe held a rabbinic position.

The next step was obviously to see the actual Chevra Kadisha records, the book from Slutsk which is the source for the above record.

I contacted the people who had submitted the Chevra Kadisha records and no one was quite sure what the source was, except that it was in Israel and that the translators (from Hebrew) too were Israelis. So I had a look at the web site of the National Library, on the campus of the Hebrew University here in Jerusalem, hoping I would find it either there or at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People which is now part of the Library.

The Manuscript Reading Room

The Chavra Kadisha book of Slutsk for the years 5439-5684 (1679-1924)

The book is in the Manuscript Reading Room at the National Library, so that's where I went. It had moved since the last time I was there and is now in a pleasant room behind the cafeteria. Two young librarians, Ariel and Moriah set me up with a microfilm reader that had a scanner attached and brought out the film in a matter of minutes.

I saw that the transcription was faithful to the original text, with one small exception. (The original calls the deceased "yashish" which in modern Hebrew means elderly, while the translation is "venerable." But venerable was a more common meaning when the original was written.)

The original had the ל"מ (l"m) - left of center on the third line - but not the "24" which I assume was some sort of typographical error. But I didn't know what those initials meant or if they were significant.

Until suddenly I did. Because I had seen this before.

Four years ago, I wrote in this space about the correct name of Hersch Leib Pikholz of Rozdol and the solution to the problem was found in the records of what we call Kollel Galicia here in Jerusalem. The records in question are too poor quality to show here, but here is what I wrote in that earlier blog.

I was surprised to see that there were no contributions by anyone named Pikholz, despite the fact that Rozdol was the place that all the Pikholz families from that area had come from. There are no lists of Holocaust victims from Rozdol, but from our own records we know that there were Pikholz families there at the time. Certainly in the late 1920s. Eventually, I realized what had happened. The person in charge of collections for Rozdol, Pinchas Kerner, was himself a Pikholz son-in-law and he knew all the families personally, so instead of writing out the name each time, he simply wrote P"H as a personal shorthand.

l'm is shorthand for Likhterman!

R' Moshe's father-in-law Eliyahu is a Likhterman. I asked Ariel to have a look and he said "It wasn't uncommon for people to marry relatives." Maybe it's that simple.

But I don't think so. I read it differently. The rabbi Moshe ben Rabbi Idel the Levi Likhterman the son-in-law of R' Eliyahu Likhterman. How about Moshe (son of R' Idel the Levi) Likhterman? Ariel said he could see that possibility as well.

I think Moshe's father is a Levi but is not Likhterman. Moshe took the name Likhterman from his father-in-law. So Etta Bryna can be the sister of Moshe Likhterman without that being her maiden name - and the Likhtermans are not Leviim. The father of Etta Bryna and Moshe is. What is his - and Etta Bryna's - surname?

Now we go back to my grandmother's passenger list where she seems to be going to her "cousin J. Ben..." I demonstrated four years ago that this is Jacob Benenson, the husband of Gitta Lichterman. So is my grandmother calling a relative of her mother's sister-in-law (who lived in Slutsk!) "cousin?" Perhaps the cousin was Jacob and Etta Bryna is a Benenson.

I haven't a clue if the Benensons of Borisov are Leviim. Of the Benensons on Find A Grave, there are eight or nine men with photographs and Hebrew epitaphs. None say "Levi."

There are a lot of "if"s and "maybe"s in this highly speculative scenario and I am not about to jump to any conclusions. But for the first time in several years I see some possible movement in this part of the family. And some new possibilities. My instincts have been pretty good. Maybe we will learn something from the new DNA project and the new contacts.

Oh yes, I also looked at the burial record for the Yehudah who is buried next to Moshe Likhterman. He is someone not connected. Apparently they didn't number the plots, but recorded the locations according to the next grave over.

Housekeeping notes
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 perhaps 14-16 February in the NY/NJ area  Perhaps even Sunday the nineteenth. Several topics are available including the Lazarus-Endogamy talk which I presented in Seattle and a new one about Uncle Selig 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?

It's been awhile since I have mentioned my book, available at www.endogamy-one-family.com.

ALL A MATTER OF TIMING

In late June, I received an inquiry from a woman named Louise, living somewhere in Israel. She was looking for information on her father's line and had been referred to me by Stanley Diamond of JRI-Poland.

Recently I have found the Gnivish family in Canada. They say we are related. There was a 17 th century Rabbi that took the name of his town Gnivishow. All the Gnivisch's stem from him. He is on the geneological tree of the Baal Shem Tov. His granddaughter married a grandson of the Rabbi Noam Elimelech.

So how do I find out if this is my family?

I need to find out about my great grandfather Samuel Gnivish from Poland.

How do I do that - cant find anything in Jewish geneology as records for Krosno are from 1900 or so - too late.

What do you think?

I have documents if there is anything you think might give a clue.

A couple of days later, she added that the 17^th century rabbi's name was R' Pinchas.

A few days later, I replied:

I did a bit of looking around without turning on the meter and I am not

encouraged.

I see that your great-grandfather and his wife Debora Hollander has stillborn twins in Krosno in 1893, the record being for the town of Korcyna.

You are correct that there do not seem to be earlier vital records from

Krosno, but do you know how long that had been their home? Perhaps thirty years earlier they lived someplace else.

The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People is being integrated into the National Library here in Jerusalem and there are a few earlier microfilmed records for Krosno, but these are not vital records. These would be community records rather than individual records. Even if an ancestor might be on a list of melamdim, there would likely be nothing attaching him to either previous or subsequent generations. Even so, most of these records are later - the earlier ones are from about 1877.

I did not mention that I do not have any particular expertise in rabbinic genealogy.

Louise replied that she wanted to meet, but would be going abroad for six weeks. As I was planning to go to the US in August, I suggested that we start from scratch after the holidays. I figured that by then we would need to start from scratch as I would not remember any of this correspondence by then. But I opened a file with her name on it and made a note on my calendar to drop her a note after the holidays.

For some reason, it was 24 October – four weeks after the end of the holidays – that I sent her a note and we made an appointment to meet in my office on 7 November. At this point I had no recollection of what she wanted, but we were going to start from scratch so it didn't matter. I did note the subject ine that accompanied all our emails "Gnivish family tree."

The following Monday, 28 October, I attended a seminar at the National Library – the staff there is trying to get involved in genealogy and invites genealogists to lectures from time to time. They want to make their resources aavailable to genealogy researchers on one hand and to learn how to best serve the genealogy community on the other.

Several of the speakers emphasized errors in rabbinic genealogies, often as a result of misunderstandings or ambiguities that get copied from one person to another. This is a matter in which I have some interest, as my regular readers know.

One of the speakers was Rav Yehiel Goldhaber, who works at the National Library. I did not realize at the time that he is American-born, as his accent is what we call yishivish. Goldhaber spoke about the family of Rav Meir ben Yitzhak Eisenshtat (1670-1744), who is known by the name of his major work Panim Meirot.

As Goldhaber ran through the names of R' Meir's children – not all of whom appear in the published genealogies – he mentioned that one of his daughters had married R' Pinchas Gnivish. Well, that was a name I had seen just a few days earlier, in the subject line of my correspondence with Louise. So I took his personal email address and  dropped him a note the next day. He said he would be pleased to hear from her.

To be sure, had I not been in correspondence with Louise a few days earlier, there is no way the name Gnivish would have triggered any recollections from four months previous. And if I had heard the name before renewing my correspondence with Louise, I would not likely have remembered the name from the lecture. (As I say, rabbinic genealogy is not where my expertise lies.)

The grave of the Panim Meirot
(photo credit: CC-BY-SA, Vischroni, Wikipedia)

So the next week, I met Louise in my office.  She was aware of the connection of R' Pinchas Gnivish to the Panim Meirot and in fact had a copy of the book itself. She was delighted to hear that I had made a contact with someone who had been doing serious research on the family and she called R' Goldhaber right then. They set to meet at his home later that afternoon. (She lives more that hour from Jerusalem and wanted to get as much done on this trip as possible.)

While she was here, the subject of Louise's Kushelewitz line came up so we had a look at the JewishGenFamily Finder, my resource of first resort. There we saw that this the husband of a friend of mine is doing that family, so I called the friend on the spot and I let the two women discuss that.

I understand that the meeting between Louise and R' Goldhaber was very productive, for both of them. She wrote the following:

Was wonderful - like a dream - to meet Rav Yehiel Goldhaber - so thankful you went to his lecture

Will meet him again on his return and will put him in contact with the lovely Canadian Gnivishes .

Then added:

It turns out my copy of Panim Meirot is very rare and of great interest to Rav Yechiel as it has much added handwritten text.

You never know exactly when you should be paying attention, but sometimes it's all in the timing.

SEMINAR AT THE NATIONAL LIBRARY

A DAY AT THE LIBRARY
I spent a day at the National Library, on the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University, the week before last. The library staff, particularly Mrs. Elona Avinezer, the Head of the Judaica Reading Room, want to better serve visitors who come with genealogy questions, so they invited several genealogists to give talks to the staff about what we do and how we do it.

We had the whole morning, from about nine o'clock until nearly one. I was the last of the morning presenters and I did a case study of the family of Peretz Pikholz of Skalat. I wanted to touch briefly on a large number of sources, ending up with a non-document that moved our main question from "beyond a reasonable doubt" to "beyond a shadow of doubt." As time was running out, I tacked on a bonus conclusion about the next generation up, even though the supporting evidence is far from conclusive.

After a break to visit the cafeteria, we had several presentations by library staff about resources that they thought we may not have known about. We finished up at about a quarter past five.

The whole program was generally well-received by the forty-fifty participants. It was open to the public, though it did not get much publicity.

A few things that I learned. Irit Shem-Tov, of the Israel Genealogical Society, discussed the notion of family numbers. These numbers were assigned to a family unit and remained with it no matter where they went. Irit was mostly interested in Lwow, but this idea is relevant to Hungarian research as well.

Professor Yitzhak Kerem is a Sephardic researcher and it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that he seems to find Sephardim every place you look, even in Ashkenazic communities. I spoke with him afterwards about the Scharf family tradition that Shimshon Scharf (who married Bassie Ruchel, the daughter of Peretz Pikholz) was in fact a Turkish Jew named Arak. I gave our Scharf-Pikholz researcher his address and perhaps he'll be able to help out with that.

I also spoke to him about the theory that our Pikholz family might have come from Vyskovo (then Hungary, now sub-Carpathian Ukraine) where there were some minor Hungarian land-owning nobility named Pikholcz. The idea here is that our family were living on their land and when required to take surnames, too the name of the landowner - as happened with for instance many of the newly-freed slaves in the United States. Kerem thought that made perfectly good sense and as I type these words I realize that can solve another problem that has been nagging me for the last ten years and has been aggravated by our latest DNA results. Finding actual evidence, however, is another matter entirely.

Shalom Bronstein gave a better idea about what is actually going on with the Paul Jacobi Archives, a subject which until now has generated much talk.

Gil Weissblei of the library staff spoke about a number of lesser-known collections. I was intrigued by the David Tidhar collection. Tidhar published a nineteen-volume set (in Hebrew) called "The Encyclopedia of the Founders and Builders of Israel" which has some 6000 brief biographies of Israeli personalities in the years leading up to 1960. It turns out that Tidhar had sent questionnaires to all these people and those questionnaires are available for research at the National Library. I imagine that they contain information which was not included in the completed work. Tidhar was also a private detective and his files from that work are also in the Library's collection.

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Housekeeping notes:

I have an article in the next issue of Avotaynu. I have not seen the final version yet, but I assume the title "GETTING IT WRONG" will remain intact. The article is about being careful about possibly recording incorrect information and how such information is likely to cause damage later on. That has been a mantra of mine of late.

I sat down a few days ago to look at my presentation for the conference in Boston, four weeks from now. I knew it needed a bit of reworking and updating since I last gave the talk six months ago. What I had forgotten until now is that the entire Power Point presentation is in Hebrew, so I have to redo the whole thing.

Barbara Stern Mannlein has graciously agreed to introduce my talk at the conference.

I have approached a large number of Pikholz descendants about DNA testing lately, prompted by the company's $99 sale on Family Finder (autosomal) tests. Some ordered kits immediately. No one said "no." Most are either ignoring me or thinking about it. The sale lasts until 25 July.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about redoing my office. Here are some photos of the more-or-less finished product.













Jewish law requires leaving an unplastered piece of wall
as a rembrance of the Temple in Jerusalem.
I have incorporated twelve illustrations from an old Passover Haggaddah
so that the redemption of old will remind us of the redemption to come.

Curse you, Blogger, for not leaving these images where I put them!