Miriam Weiner’s Jewish Roots in Poland: Pages from the Past andArchival Inventories is a pioneering work that presents a concise, authoritative inventory of extant Jewish records in the Polish State Archives and its regional (oddzial) branches, and in more than 2,500 Urzad Stanu Cywilnego (USC) or local town hall record offices throughout Poland. It also…
Kurzweil’s classic ‘From Generation to Generation’
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It has been almost 25 years since novice Jewish genealogist Arthur Kurzweil wandered into the Jewish Division of the New York Public Library to search the card catalog for references to the Galician shtetl of Dobromil, where his father and numerous ancestors had lived. Kurzweil had heard enough family legends and stories about the town…
German ‘fairy tale roads’ . . . and a medieval synagogue
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Rising from a knoll deep in a Hessian forest, Schloss Sababurg is ringed by a distinctive old hedge of brambles, through which the Grimm Brothers were forced, nearly two centuries ago, to cut a path in order to reach the castle, which was then a noble ruin. (The castle dates from the 14th, the brambles…
A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico
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It has been only about two decades since tales began surfacing in the popular press of Hispanic-Catholic families in the American Southwest who lit candles in secret on Friday evenings and retained other long-held family customs bearing unmistakeable resemblance to Jewish rites. Some families abstained from work or travel on Saturday, circumcised newborn boys, drained…
The Jewish ‘New Muslims’ of Meshhed, Iran
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In 1839 an unfounded rumor spread among the Shi’ite Muslims of the town of Meshed in northeastern Iran that a Jewish woman had committed an act of disrespect towards Islam. According to a period account preserved in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, an angry mob “attacked the Jewish quarter, broke into the Jewish houses,…
Markman’s Jewish Remnants in Spain
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In the town of Trujillo, Spain, home of Francisco Pizarro and other conquistadors, there is a row of shops off the main square of special interest to Jewish travelers. When I was there about ten years ago, a pharmacist pointed to a door in his shop and invited me downstairs; there, I found an archway…
Hundert’s study of 18th-century Opatow, Poland
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Professor Gershon Hundert, the distinguished historian and chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University, beguiled an audience of Jewish genealogists last summer in New York with midrash-like tales of early Jewish history in Poland. For centuries, the Jews felt very comfortable in Poland, Hundert said, referring to stories that even the name…
Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations
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On an autumn day in 1890, Daniel Baldinger, a 35-year-old married Orthodox man living in Krakow, reached a monumental decision: he would divorce his wife of ten years, Reizel, because she had not borne him any children. Daniel was soon remarried to a much-younger wife, Lieba, who eventually grew to love him and worried that…
Yiddish letters knit together ‘A Thousand Threads’
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When he turned 18, Tsvi Shapiro decided to leave his home shtetl of Butrimantz rather than be conscripted into the Lithuanian army. With a half-brother working as a lawyer at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York, he should have had an excellent chance of being admitted into America and fulfilling his dream of…
Lives Remembered: Photographs of a Small Town in Poland
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The collected photographs of Zalman Kaplan, who ran a studio in the town of Szczuczyn, Poland between 1898 and 1939, might never have been considered remarkable or been made the focus of a traveling museum exhibit, had it not been for the almost complete destruction of Szczuczyn’s Jewish community of 3,000 souls during the Nazi…
