One night in November 1933, a convoy of US Army trucks pulled up in front of a locked and deserted Russian government compound in Washington DC to undertake a mission that was both hushed and rushed. Obeying official orders from higher up, a platoon of American soldiers broke into the premises and began removing boxes…
Tag: genealogy
Old news is new again
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At some point in their lives, nearly everyone in our modern world gets into the newspaper, even if only for a birth, marriage or death announcement. That’s why the newly-emerging searchable electronic archives of publications like the New York Times, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail constitute a giant leap forward for genealogists,…
A search for six of the Six Million
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Sometimes when author Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives would cry at the sight of him, so great was his resemblance to his great-uncle Shmiel Jaeger. From some handwriting on the back of a photograph, Mendelsohn knew that Shmiel and his wife Ester and their daughters Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia had been “killed…
A worthy guide to rabbinic genealogical research
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Israeli genealogist Chaim Freedman gained much expertise in rabbinic genealogy by compiling the family tree of the legendary Vilna Gaon, which was published as Eliyahu’s Branches in 1997 on the 200th anniversary of the great sage’s death. In his new treatise, Beit Rabbanan: Sources of Rabbinical Genealogy, he attempts to impart some of his knowledge to…
Jewish genealogy in Pennsylvania
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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…
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…
