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.