Anyone with the surname Eisen (which means ‘iron’) knows that Jews have had an historic involvement in the steel trade. From Shtetl to Milltown: Litvaks, Hungarians, and Galizianers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1925 by Robert Perlman is a thorough local history that chronicles the rise of various Jewish communities in a sprinkling of towns in and…
Tag: genealogy
An organization that redeems lost Jews
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A New York rabbinical court made a precedent-setting halakhic decision last summer that could eventually pave the way for legions of “lost” Jews to return to Judaism. The case revolves around Wendy Armstrong, a real estate professional in St. Louis, Mo., who was raised in a Christian home and attended a Methodist church as a…
Conversation thrives on JewishGen discussion group
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Just as the medical profession has debated the ethics of using data from horrendous Nazi medical experiments, the Jewish genealogical community recently discussed the ethics of using a Nazi census of “non-Teutonic” people in Germany in 1938-39. For the most part, the medical community has wisely branded the Nazi’s medical sadism as completely inadmissable to…
‘Portraits of the Past’ focuses on Jews in German countryside
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Ten years ago, American historian Emily Rose became curious about a pair of fine oil portraits that had hung above the fireplace in her grandparents’ apartment in New York. One of the paintings showed a portly, distinguished man, the other a woman adorned in a lace bonnet and pearls. Since they derived from the mid-1800s,…
‘Jewish Victorian’ a fascinating window into British past
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It is not commonly known that 14 large asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter were discovered by Herman Goldschmidt, a French-Jewish astronomer and artist, over a remarkable decade of scientific achievement beginning in 1852. Since only 20 asteroids had been known to science before Goldschmidt’s heavenly investigations, which he began with only…
‘Unbroken Chain’ links diverse rabbis, celebrities
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Dr. Neil Rosenstein of New Jersey has been researching his roots ever since his childhood in South Africa. Born in Cape Town in 1944, he studied medicine there and interned in Israel, but despite the rigours of medical school he never abandoned his family tree research for long. A surgeon, he jokingly describes his medical…
Weiner’s Jewish Roots in Poland a ground-breaking inventory
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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…
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…
