New grand total for 2007

I've just received news of more donations for December 2007. The total for the year is now US$4,604 - a grand total.

Thanks for everyone's help!

Happy new year!

Forward to 2008!

2008, as I write, looms on the horizon. But the looming doesn't carry menace, but promise. Some of the promise is no more than hope - will we succeed in bringing in significant funding?

But some of the promise is guaranteed. There are a number of translation projects in the works - thanks to specific, generous donations this year - in particular for Salakas and Tauragnai - that will be completed in 2008. When we know how these cost out we will select further translation projects - and I do need group members to tell me what their priorities are.

I thank everyone who has contributed this year and who has helped make this a standout year.

I list below the donations to LitvakSIG for each year from 1999 that have been specified to Zarasai district. All figures are in US$.

1999....................228.00
2000................1,358.00
2001.................1,600.00
2002 ...............1,000.00
2003...................304.00
2004....................371.00
2005....................136.00
2006....................139.00
2007................4,054.00

This year's scale of donations means that we can make real progress. Please help keep this momentum going. If you haven't already, please think about a major donation - from yourself, from your family or from someone else who might be persuaded to contribute.

Ensuring the project's future

The Group has supported Zarasai district research over more than 8 years. Over US$5,000 has been raised by the group and, with general LitvakSIG funds, about US$12,000 spent on many thousands of records over the past 10 years. This has been fantastic work by a number of district and research co-ordinators.

We have gone away and looked at what remains to be done. There are probably more than 25,000 records still to translate for the District. Knowing current costs and estimating future costs, this will probably cost more than US$20,000. At current donation rates, it would take many years, and not before 2020, to gather this. I don't want to wait that long. I'm hoping you share this feeling.

I am therefore today starting a more active search for donors - including those at the US$100 level - but particularly for larger donors. The objective is to have the funds in hand within the year to be 100% confident that we can achieve the goal of 100% translation of Russian Imperial records for the District and its shtetls within a reasonable time. With help from Olga Zabludoff, Maria Krane and Linda Cantor, I have prepared a short presentation about the project. This is available as a pdf file.

I now need more help - and this is from you. I'm not asking you for the money (although if you want...), but for help in getting our message out to people who might be able to help. There are a number of ways this might be made to happen, that could include talking with:

(1) Individuals or charitable foundations that you know and who might be open to help.

(2) Individuals in your own families. I'm approaching the more successful members of my clan. Some of them have been thrilled to be brought into contact with long lost and never known cousins and are positive about helping.

(3) Your family as a group. Bringing together many small donations - perhaps in honour of a founding father or mother - has the potential to add up to a decent amount. I'm hoping that if even a small proportion of the 1,000+ people in my clan might be induced to give US$10 each, then that could be US1,000 raised.

The pdf presentation is the basic tool. It needs to be moved out to where it might do some good. Ask me for a copy.

It's easy for any one to donate http://www.jewishgen.org/Litvak/HTML/donate.htm for credit cards and http://www.jewishgen.org/Litvak/HTML/donor.htm is the form for a mail in donation.

Please use me as a resource; to talk with people, to answer questions, to persuade and to let me know how things are going: are there problems with the presentation? or the message? how could this be done better?

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. If you have any other ideas for how we might achieve our goal, please let me know. If you can suggest other people I should be mailing, tell me. And if you find someone who might give a very, very big amount: we can use it - LitvakSIG has a range of projects that need support.

Remember: our work as a Group is all about delivering "the gift of the past for the Jewish family of the future". Please help me make this

Unlisted records

The CD-ROM for "Avotaynu" is an interesting source for information of all kinds. Searching through it recently I came across two articles by researcher Yakov Shadevich from 1995 and 1996.

The 1996 article lists Revision Lists in the Vilnius archive. Now the surprising thing about this is that these Revision Lists are not in our database of records and they're not in the rtrfoundation listing.

Those for district shtetls is as follows:

Antaliepte 1882
Breslauja (Braslav) 1816–27, 1871, 1874
Breslauja-Slabada 1816–27
Dubinovo (Dubene) 1816–27
Dusetos (Dusiat) 1870–71, 1883
Kamajai 1871, 1875–76
Pandelys (Ponedel) 1871
Papile 1858, 1865
Rokiskis 1871
Salakas (Salok) 1816–27, 1848, 1858, 1860, 1871, 1872–75, 1880
Tauragnai (Targin) 1816–27
Vydziai 1816–27, 1871, 1882
Zarasai 1816–27, 1863–64, 1883

For some of the shtetls - Papilys, for example - these records are not matched by anything we had databased and represent a wonderful research opportunity.

The 1816-27 records may provide the vital link to the 1784 Grand Duchy census.

I'll write about Mr Shadevich's other article in due course....

"Order, order"

The Speaker of the British Parliament traditionally intones "order, order" to open business. We say "order, order" when we have donations that allow us to place orders for new translations.

Thanks in particular to Maria Krane we are moving ahead with our first 2007 orders.

The tiny shtetl of Tauragnai has few records, so we're aiming to get them all. Interestingly one set of records from 1880 is a list of "Jews transferred from Salakas". There is also a similar list for 1875 for Antaliepte. There are no similar lists for other shtetls. What happened in Salakas to cause enough movement for special lists of this type?

Salakas researchers can look forward to the 1876 Salakas family list - to fill in the long gap between the 1845 and 1887 lists - and the 1901 Real Estate Owners list with a town plan. The plan could be quite exciting. There are also Real Estate Owner lists for Drysviaty, Pandelys and Rimse.

We have some money in hand for further projects - and I'd like your nominations of what to go for next!

Thoughts from the weekend

At the weekend I helped out at the JGSGB stand at the "Who do you think you are live" show at Olympia in London: Britain's biggest ever genealogical event. It was exhausting, but interesting and fun. One of the features at the show was celebrities being interviewed about their families (the BBC has a series that researches celeb's families).

I caught the end of one interview with a Jewish television personality - who said that his family had left Latvia because of "the pogroms". No, they didn't. (By the way, we know that his father's side immigrated to the UK from Latvia in 1893 and his mother's family arrived in the 1930s from, I guess, Germany).

Why is there this common misconception? and why did about 2 million Jews leave Russia between 1880 and 1914?

I think this idea gained currency for a number of reasons.

1. Coincidence of timing: The emigration accelerated after 1881. The most famous wave of pogroms in south Russia (Ukraine primarily) started in 1881.
2. 1930s emigrants: German/Austrian Jewish emigration in the 1930s definitely was motivated by antisemitic activity (eg Kristallnacht also called Pogromnacht).
3. Emotional simplicity: "Zadie, why did you come to America?" "Because of the Cossacks and the Pogroms."

But if the Cossacks and the Pogroms were so awful how come there were still about 4 million Jews in the Pale in 1914. Why didn't everyone leave? The only reasonable answer is that things were sometimes very, very bad, but only for very, very few (as made clear by Bartal in The Jews of Eastern Europe 1772-1881 at page 146). So why did our families leave?

I'm sure that someone somewhere has researched this thoroughly, and please, someone let me know what I should be reading on this.

I identify three types of cause for the emigration: push, pull and technical.

Push causes

1. Population growth was remarkable. The Jewish population in the Russian empire through the 19th century rose from 1.6 million in 1820, to 2.4 million in 1850 and reached 4 million by 1880. The marginal nature of the economy in the northern guberniya meant that there must have been problems supporting the population.
2. Periodic famines every 10-12 years would have become more problematic with urbanisation. 1868-1869 saw crop failures across the Baltic region from Finland down through Kovno and Vilna Guberniyas.
3. Economic stress was enhanced at the bottom end of the economy by the freedom of the serfs in 1861 which created new competition in many areas of Jewish activity and by continuing restrictions on education limiting Jewish access to the professions.
4. Government policy to Jews including economic restrictions introduced as "temporary rules" in 1882 (including as one element tacit support for pogroms).

Pull causes

1. Economic opportunity in the capitalist, industrialising nations (US, Canada, UK, South America) and in South Africa (diamond rush from 1871 and a gold rush from 1886).
2. Religious toleration in the West.

Technical causes

1. The so-called "second Industrial revolution" started in about 1850. New railways allowed easy movement around Europe - the first train arrived at Vilna in 1860. Screw propeller steam ships were developed - from about 1870 this allowed reliable, cheap transocean sea travel.
2. Development of the money economy in Russia and savings and credit institutions which allowed potential emigrant families to find the cash to send one pioneer to the West.

In summary: there were reasons to go, places to go to and the means to get there. The pogroms may have helped create a mood where the movement happened sooner rather than later, but they were not what it was all about.

What does your family history tell us about this?

Developing the plan....

Why do we need a plan? That almost sounds like a silly question. Making a plan helps people to put in their viewpoint and gains commitment to what comes out of the process. It means we have priorities for our work and we have clear ideas of goals and outcomes. We haven't a plan right now.

My idea for making our plan is to work on two main levels:
- a district wide level; and
- a shtetl level.

The district wide level will focus on the translation of the district revision lists. We'll need to gain some feel for the numbers and types of records included there and then identify priorities.

The shtetl level plans will look at what's been translated for each shtetl, what's untranslated and taking account of the probable number of interested researchers we can set priorities for each shtetl.

For some shtetls there may be no records to translate. In those cases there are two main areas of possible translation activity: the district level records, and yizkor books - many of which have not been translated for the district's shtetls.

At the same time there is scope for other activity that should be useful:

1. Shtetl family trees - Steve Bloom has posted on this subject for Salakas.

2. Emigration studies - where did people go and when. This may help with ideas for developing your research as people from the same shtetl often went to the same place.

3. Creation of shtetlinks - websites for each of the shtetls - to bring together yizkor book material, trip reports, photos, family trees and anything else that's relevant.

So in the end we can create a priority list for each shtetl for all this possible activity over the next few years.

Let's hear from you, please!

Family Tree Project

First, I'll introduce myself. I'm Steve Bloom, from a small town in Virginia, US where I am a college professor. My great grandmother, who I only met once as a child, was from Salakas, Lithuania, and I have found her and her family in the Revision Lists.

I wanted to let everybody know that I have begun a family tree project, starting with Salakas.
The project will begin with creating trees from the on-line Revision Lists, but I will add more info from other sources (personal genealogies, Yad Vashem testimony, etc.). I have already added a handful of names from Yad Vashem that were fairly clearly the same person, but with, in some cases, maiden names added, or names of children, etc.

I have started with the surname ROZENBERG, since my ROZENBERG family was from Salakas. In addition to my family, I found 12 other apparently unrelated families in Salakas.
However, commonality of certain gives names, particularly Honel, suggests that there might be some common ancestry. Eventually, translating the somewhat earlier lists may help us to make these connections.

I will next move on to the KORB and SHADUR families, since I have seen these names already on the blog. Past that, I will collect trees for any surname requested. If none are requested, I'll
just go in alphabetical order of surname.

I will make trees with Family Tree Maker, which can be coverted to many other formats.

Suggestions on where to go next will be most welcome. Of course, it is my intention to make the data widely available for download somehow, but, for now, I can just email folks a tree upon request, once it is finished.

This is the sort of project that is likely to add to our knowledge incrementally rather than break through all the brick walls, but I do think representing the info in tree format will help make connections.

Records translated and available: first step to a plan

We have constructed a complete list of all records for the district. This includes all records on the terrific www.rtrfoundation.org website and those we already knew about.

This exercise threw up some interesting results.

There are a stack of district wide records which have not been translated - these range from an 1811 census for Braslav Uyezd, through1837 and 1864/71 censuses for the NovoAlexandrovsk Uyezd and more recent records. Some will overlap with shtetl level records, but some of the dates suggest previously unsuspected resources. A list is at the links on the left hand side of the blog or at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddtjn9x2_5ck6z52 .

For many shtetls there are lists that will be essential to proving connections between isonomic groups (I hope I just made that up: families of the same name) that remain untranslated. All the lists are sorted by shtetl at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddtjn9x2_6fk4t6q and you'll see what's on the ALD and what's not.

The last major group of records for research are vital records (births, marriages, deaths and divorces). These are primarily the territory of the VRT project - but in the district only Suvanaiskis is so far included in that effort. The extant records are listed here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddtjn9x2_2d9czd6 . These are mainly early 20th century records that can have a lot of interesting information.

Why is this the first step to a plan? because we now know the lie of the land. I ask researchers to contact me to indicate which records they think should be the priority for their shtetl.

Are these all the shtetls in the district?

The modern names:

Antaliepte Braslav Drisviaty Dubinovo Dukstas Dusetos
Jūžintai Kamajai Kazachizna Kriaunos Kvetkai Obeliai Okmyanitsa
Onuskis Opsa Pandelys Panemunelis Papilys Pelikany Plyussy Redutka
Rimse Rokiskis Salakas Skapiskis Sloboda Smalvos Suvainiskis
Tauragnai Vidzy Zamoshye Zarachye Zarasai

I have added a link on the left to a document which has all the alternative names.

Is your favourite shtot or shtetl missing? let me know please!

So, how much do we need to raise?

There are, I am reliably told, 20,457 records for the district on the All Lithuania Database. Looking at the lists for what has been translated and what remains to be translated there is at least the same amount to go in terms of revision and other lists - and there may be more - I need to include all the information on www.rtrfoundation.org into our master list.

If we reckon on about US$0.60 per record, we'd need about US$15,000 to more or less complete the district records. If we allow for some contingency perhaps US$20,000 should be our fundraising target. At current funding rates this might take a long, long time to raise.

There are perhaps 450 researchers listed on JGFF for the district - so we need about 1/2 of them to become US$100 members of the Research Group. I might be very persuasive, but that might be beyond me. So I'm thinking about what we might be able to offer donors for much larger sums - say U$1,000 or US$5,000 - in terms of recognition. But as the old Hungarian recipe for rabbit stew says: "First, catch your rabbit..."

So who has contacts with anyone who might be able to directly or through a charitable foundation donate $1,000 and above? At this stage I just need some idea if anyone who reads this has potential contacts.

Comments please!

1846 kheder list sent to research group members

A list of kheders in the district in 1846 has been sent to District Research Group members. This gives for every shtetl a list of kheders - the name of the teacher and where they were - usually in someone's house.

Olga Zabludoff has prepared the following note from a Russian language encyclopedia and Dov Levin’s book "The Litvaks".

All Jewish communities in Lithuania had at least one melamed [teacher] for boys aged 3 to 13. If there was a group consisting of more than five boys, the community organized a kheder. A Jew who didn’t enroll his son to study could be exiled from his community.

Wealthy families sent their sons to study in large towns, and the boys returned home only for holidays. For kheders with more than 25 students, an additional melamed assistant was hired.

First Importance kheders were for the wealthiest people; tuition was high. Second Importance Kheders for less wealthy Jews charged more moderate tuition fees. There were also kheders for poor students with minimal tuition. Both primary- and secondary-level kheders existed within the three categories of kheders.

The Bulletin of Jewish educational institutions combines the various types of kheders into dated lists by district.

Primary-level kheder was for 3- to 7-year-old boys; secondary-level kheder was for boys to age 13. The curriculum in the primary kheder started with the Hebrew alphabet, moved on to the Pentateuch with Rashi’s basic commentary, and soon thereafter concentrated on selected portions of the Talmud with the traditional commentaries. At a slightly later stage, when the pupil reached Bar Mitzvah age, he moved on to a deeper study of the Talmud in a small group taught by a melamed who was a recognized scholar. This system was aimed theoretically at giving the student the ability to continue his studies on his own and become a Talmudic scholar. He could also, if he was able, continue his studies at a small yeshiva. However, students in kheders for the poor had to be exceptionally gifted in order to study in a yeshiva.

Crossing borders: the district's lost shtetls

My grandmother told me that it was said that we used to "go to sleep as Lithuanians and wake up as Russians" - she was brought up in Lithuania during the Great War. And there are a number of shtetls that were in the Novo Alexandrovsk Uyezd ["NAU"] and are now in Belarus. These seem to include Braslaw, Dubinovo, Okmyanitsa, Opsa, Plyussy, Slobodka, Vidzy, Zamoshye, and Zarachye. Vidzy has 46 resarchers listed on JGFF and Braslaw 22.

There are records listed at www.rtrfoundation.org for NAU, the older Braslaw Uyezd and at least some of these shtetls at the Vilnius archives. Most of the Zarasai district shtetls were in the Braslaw Uyezd.

Perhaps we need some sort of cross border project to work on these records?

My thanks to Batya Olsen for prompting these thoughts to-day with an enquiry about Vidzy. Batya is the Disna district co-ordinator.

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Salakas cemetery data

Maria Krane has very generously provided significant information on burials at the Salakas cemetery. She provides the following notes.

"The Salakas Jewish Cemetery is located 10 km SE of Salakas. A memorial was later constructed at the entrance of the forest to commemorate those who lost their lives during WWII, murdered by their neighbors, and buried in a mass grave.

The cemetery was documented by Regina Kopelovich in 2001, who had to ask the mayor of the town to have it cleared of the underbrush and debris, so that she could read the tombstones and transcribe them. Regina had to take a helper who turned over many stones that were not standing and therefore, unable to be read. Some stones remained undocumented because they were too heavy to lift. Most of the stones did not contain surnames.

The project was funded by Maria Krane, in memory of her mother-in-law, Rose Krane nee Rachman, who was born in Salakas in 1910. "

The information includes burials from 1805 to 1940. A few of the more recent stones carry surnames; most only give patronymics.

To meet file size restrictions I have cut the data into two parts. The spreadsheets can be opened here by clicking on the URL (I hope! let me know if you have a problem):

Part 1 http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pwqonpED2qPyIn5f_dOZdCQ&hl=en

Part 2 http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pwqonpED2qPyVPq5rYlm5cA&hl=en

To save the file to your computer click "File" then "Export" and choose your format.

Many thanks to Maria Krane.

Going live

Welcome kind visitor! take your shoes off and relax. This blog is now open for your comments. I've had a few emails directly following the announcement on the LitvakSIG forum and digest. Thank you Steve Bloom, Linda Cantor and Oscar Friedman for getting in touch and for your best wishes for this incumbent.

Steve is another Salakas researcher (looking at ROZENBERG) - and he tells me that for one of the Polish shtetls he's also interested in someone prepared a family tree for the whole shtetl. While they had the benefit of vital records and we have to rely on revision lists it is still possible we may be able to get some way with a "Family Tree of Salakas" and, for example, put names to some of the many "Last Name Unknown" women who arrive in our family trees and massively branch our family trees. We will need to obtain as yet uncaptured revision lists for 1858/71 and 1876. Is this a worthwhile medium term project? Comments?

Linda is the Chair of the terrific RokiskisSIG (link down on the left). Her family - as some of mine did - came from somewhere else before hitting downtown Rakushik. She'd like us to do more record capture for some of the smaller shtetls. I wonder whether we can try to emulate the Rokiskis website for other parts of the District? Maybe not in such splendour....

Oscar is researching the KORB family from Salakas, but seems to be missing the key record to tie in his grandfather to the records. His family believe that Meir KORB may have gone to Argentina. I had not thought to look for members of my clan in Argentina: Chicago, Boston, Minnesota, New York, Ekaterinoslav, Schedrin, London and South Africa, yes, Argentina no. It would be interesting to analyse shtetl emigration patterns. And it might give clues for research in our own families. What do you think?

Paul

Some thoughts about projects

I'd like your ideas about projects we can undertake together in this and future years.

A huge amount has been achieved in recent years with help from many researchers in the the district. We have thousands of revision list and other records that allow some of us to trace our families to the 18th century. Rokiskis has created a first class shtetl website.

These achievements allow us to consider projects that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. But for some shtetls basic translation work still needs to be done, and for a few there are very limited or no records available. Whatever the position for each shtetl and for each researcher there are worthwhile projects that should allow us to build a better understanding of our families' history.

For me there are three main questions that motivate my research:

• where did we come from?
• where did we go?
• who are we today?

I'll be posting summaries of information about each shtetl in the district to allow for informed discussion.

I look forward to your comments.

Other contemporary district maps

These are tourist maps from the Utena county website: they cover Zarasai, Ignalina and Utena districts.

Click on the maps to see them in larger size.

Rokiskis district map

This is the current Rokiskis municipality area. It covers a central part of the old Zarasai district.

Click on the map to see it in large size.

1650 Blaeu map

This part of a map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania published in about 1650 and drawn by Blaeu.

Unusually north is to the right -->. So Vilna is on the far left and Dinaburg (Dvinsk/Daugavpils) on the far right.

Salakas (Solok) and Rokiskis (Rakisski) are swapped around. And Kamajai looks to have travelled east.

Click on the map to see it at a good size.