From The London Jewish Chronicle, March 20, 1931 ◊ This shocking tale from the height of the depression focuses on a poor and desperate mother who, with a helpless infant, was caught in a bureaucratic no-man’s-land between the United States and Canada while authorities argued over which country would take her. Dorothy Cohen, a Jewish girl,…
Some time in the late 1940s or 1950s, when my aunt and uncle moved from a house on Toronto’s Vaughan Road, they left behind several old family photographs hidden in the rafters of the basement ceiling. Luckily the new owners of the home were considerate enough to save the old photos. Decades went by. Sometime…
The late eminent American genealogist Rabbi Malcolm Stern once observed that there is nothing so fascinating to a person as his own genealogical research, and often, nothing so boring as being stuck at a dinner table with a family-tree enthusiast who insists upon endlessly discussing their latest research. With her recent book The Juggler’s Children:…
Review of KRAKOW: A Guide to Jewish Genealogy, by Geoffrey M. Weisgard in association with Gesher Galicia. Softcover, 114 pages. Published 2011, www.geshergalicia.org Like JewishGen and Jewish Records Indexing Poland, Gesher Galicia is one of the great success stories of the Jewish genealogical world, offering a wealth of highly useful and easily accessible information and…
In the year 1839, had you been a traveller along the road from Rzeszov to Cracow, you would have been obliged to show a passport in Podgorze, the suburb of Cracow on the Austrian side of the Vistula (“Weichsel”) River. After submitting to a cursory inspection from Austrian officials, your vehicle would have crossed the…
TORONTO SAGES is a booklet compiled and published in 2004 by Mayer S. Abramowitz, a grandson of Toronto cantor Nosson Stolnitz. Its full title is “Chachmei Yisrael of Toronto — Toronto’s Sages.” The booklet presents information about 35 Toronto rabbis from their tombstones, translated into English; some Yiddish and English obituaries are also included. The contents…
From Canadian Jewish News, February 2014 Aaron Lansky, president and founder of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., announced at last summer’s Jewish genealogy conference in Boston that Yiddish over the next few years “will take its place as the first completely digitalized and accessible literature in human history.” The Yiddish Book Center is…
Those who grapple with translating the Russian-era Polish-Jewish civil documents (births, marriages, deaths) may find the attached document of value. It is a list of Jewish names in Russian printed characters on one side with their Polish equivalents on the other. I often refer to this list when wanting to check what a Jewish name…
Genie Milgrom, the author of My 15 Grandmothers, was one of numerous captivating speakers at the five-day International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Boston in August 2013. Although she was born into a Roman Catholic family of Spanish origin in Havana, Cuba, Milgrom felt an affinity for Judaism from a young age. She was five…
From the Canadian Jewish News, October 2013 Some 70 years after he last saw his father, mother, brothers and sisters alive, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen Belsen concentration camp was recently given a photograph of his family for the first time. “When I received this photo, I said, ‘This is better than…
