New look for Tracing the Tribe

Yes, you are in the right place! Don’t change that station! This is still Tracing the Tribe – with a slightly new look.

I made the somewhat traumatic decision to switch to the newer Layout feature of Blogger from the old Template format. I’d been putting it off as I had visions of losing the entire blog and all postings since August 2006. Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and was actually rather simple.

When I made that decision, I decided to tweak things a bit and make it easier to read with a lighter background for the posts. Please let me know how you like it.

Some things still have to be tweaked and added in again, such as the Tag Cloud, but I’m working on it.

Another thing to cross off my to-do list.

Canada: Quebec City’s Jewish history

Quebec City is celebrating the little-known history of its Jewish community with a recently opened exhibit – Same Cloth, Different Thread: The Jews of Québec – as part of the city’s 400th anniversary, according to the Canadian Jewish News.

Quebec City’s Jewish population was probably never much more than the 125 families it had at its peak in the 1940s and ’50s. But the community’s history goes back to the 18th century and its impact, especially on the capital’s commerce, was far greater than the numbers would suggest.

The exhibit, open through September 26, is part of Shalom Québec, a series of events and a collaborative research project among historians and academics.

The Shalom Québec website provides much more information about the community, and visitors are are invited to contribute stories or memorabilia.

The bilingual exhibit is in the Gare du Palais railway station, because of its location on a street where many Jewish stores were located. It includes text, photos and more, beginning with a profile of Esther Brandeau of France, considered the first documented Jew to arrive in New France.

In 1738, Brandeau arrived, disguised as a male sailor. When discovered, she was sent to a convent, refused to convert and was sent back to Europe the next year.

Congregation Beth Israel Ohev Shalom is the only synagogue, headed by president Jonathan Hawey, born in Quebec City in 1955, He was raised a Catholic, but his unusual name combined with genealogical research confirmed he was the direct descendant of an 18th century Scottish Jew (who married a Catholic and assimilated). Hawey converted to Judaism and says that his Hebrew is better than his English.

Some of Quebec’s early Jews: Samuel Jacobs, 1759; fire chief John Franks, late 18th century; engineer Sigismund Mohr, late 19th century; prominent Jewish businessman Maurice Pollack from Ukraine, early 1900s; Sadie Lazarovitz, one of the first Canadian female law graduates (1928).

Some difficult times are addressed, such as the anti-Semitism of notary Jacques Plamondon, and the synagogue’s arson before its inauguration in 1944. World events include France’s Dreyfus affair, Russian pogroms, the Nazi era and the State of Israel.

Read more here.

Shalom Quebec offers much more detail on the area’s Jewish history, with history, timeline, religion, families, important sites, research and more. The site is in French and English. There is much more information on Brandeau and other early Jews.

California: Berkeley’s Jewish pioneers

There are so many sources to consult when detailing the genealogy of a person or a family. Don’t forget real estate records, university yearbooks, newspapers and a range of other records, as demonstrated in this story on Berkeley’s Jewish history.

The story, focusing on the pioneering Fischel family, by Daniella Thompson, appeared in the Berkeley Daily Planet. She also publishes Berkeley Heritage for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA).

Among the fortune seekers lured to northern California by the Gold Rush, the Jewish contingent was small but significant. Jewish immigrants would go on to play an important role in the economic and cultural development of the Bay Area, and Berkeley was no exception. Although early accounts rarely discuss Berkeley’s Jewish community, some members figured among the young town’s prominent citizens.

The story centers on a pioneering family – Fischel – which arrived in Berkeley in the late 1870s, and began buying property and building.

Simon Fischel immigrated from Bohemia, then a Crown Land of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Born in 1846 or 1847 (depending on source), he arrived in New York as a teenager in 1865, worked as a butcher for more than 10 years, and became a citizen in 1872. He married Rosa Bauml in 1870 and their first four children were born in New York. Around 1878, they arrived in Berkeley and are listed in the 1879 city directory.

The story thoroughly details the family using such resources as census records, building records, university yearbooks, newspaper advertisements and articles.

On Nov. 6, 1890, the Berkeley Advocate regaled its readers with this anecdote: “A lady called on Fischel & Co. the other evening and made arrangements for that company to supply her family with meat. The team was daily sent to the house, when it was discovered that no such family resided there. It turned out that Mr. Fischel was deceived of a young man who donned the garment of a virgin to fool Fischel.”

Fischel wasn’t a kosher butcher, as he sold pork, but he was involved in the First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland, founded by Gold Rush-era settlers.

The story follows their real estate ventures recorded in the Berkeley Advocate and elsewhere. Among his properties was the Fischel Block (1888) on the northwest corner of Shattuck and University.

It was by far the most elegant building on the intersection, adorned with bay windows along the second floor, showy corbels under the eaves, a decorative metal railing along the roofline, and an impressive corner turret crowned by a witch’s cap.

Then whole clan seems to have been living in the area. Simon’s brother Isaac and his wife Elsie built his family home next door to Simon, bought other property and built a rental house, but died early; brother-in-law Jacob and Lilly Bauml built a few doors west.

Simon bought more lots and built more houses which survived until 1955. The story details the deaths of Simon and his wife, and newspaper obituaries for both, a well as continuing commercial activities of other family members.

Elsie Fischel’s 1890 house was purchased several years ago and restored – the recipient of a 2008 Preservation Award from the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA).

Read the complete story here.

Texas: Family reunion and more

In Dallas, the Texas Jewish Post’s “All in the Family” section includes a story on the Rachofsky family reunion that took 2 1/2 years to plan.

The section also includes my own stories, “Milestone events are family history opportunities” (while having family at a celebration, get some genealogy work done) and “10 Steps to Family History.”

At the Rachofsky family reunion, 37 Dallasites gathered with relatives from across the country. Ongoing for 30 years, their family tree database includes Rachofsky, Kobeisky, Shwayder, Rittmaster, Vitovsky and extended families, totalling some 7,000 people. Nearly 2,000 are direct Rachofsky descendants (including spouses).

During the recent winter solstice, 61 Rachofsky family members from Texas and eight other states attended the bi-annual family reunion held at the Marriott Quorum. Attending were 37 from Dallas, as well as family from Houston, the Texas Hill Country, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Florida, California, Colorado, Wyoming, Maryland and New Jersey. They ranged in age from 2 years old to our 90-year-old family matriarch, Norma Ray Gremm. The central focus was a genealogical chart stretching almost 90 feet and mounted in double rows across two long walls of the Marriott’s Mesquite Ballroom. This was accompanied by photos of the three Rachofsky brothers who founded the family dynasty in the United States in the mid-1850s, which now encompasses almost 2,000 descendants.

It goes on to recount the years of email communication with family researchers in California, hundreds of emails to family in the US, England and Israel. Their researcher attended his first family reunion in 1922, at age 4.

Read about color-coded name tags indicating descent from which of the three brothers, and the previous generations. Some younger members had tags demonstrating nine generations. The family researcher kept busy updating his records.

Researching their tree includes documenting stories and oral histories, digitally preserving photos and more, locating and photographing graves and organizing reunions. The effort is made possible through donations of time and resources of many cousins.

“Milestone events” offers tips on working genealogy into life-cycle events, and explains why I go to weddings and other celebrations with a manila envelope tucked under my arm.

Poland: Siedlezcka cemetery restored

The Jerusalem Post carried a story about the recent ceremony marking the restoration of Siedliezcka’s Jewish cemetery, founded in 1850.

The cemetery served numerous southeastern Poland communities in the Carpathian Mountain foothills, including Kanczuga, Gac, Bialoboki, Markowa, Manasterz, Zagorze, Chmielnik, Jawornik Polski and Zabratówka.

The last burial was in 1940 and only 500 graves remain. Kanczuga’s recorded Jewish history dates to 1638; by 1939, there were more than 1,000 Jews, 80% of the population. In 1942, more than 1,000 Jews from the town were rounded up by the Germans, marched to the cemetery, murdered and their bodies tossed into a mass grave.

Among the attendees were Jerusalem Post columnist Michael Freund, who also chairs Shavei Israel, and the town’s mayor, Jacek Solek, who agreed that the town would pay for the paving of a new road to the cemetery.

Freund’s family is from Kanczuga.

The restoration was financed partly by Freund and his family (through Warsaw’s Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland and the Siedleczka-Kanczuga Landsmanschaft headed by Howard Nightingale). The project included cleaning the cemetery, restoring grave-sites and rebuilding the surrounding stone wall. The wall was essential as farmers had been attempting to expand their fields into the cemetery.

Freund said he funded the work as he could no longer watch the neglect.

“It was sad for me to see that a number of the gravestones collapsed or were broken and that the cemetery was overgrown by trees and bushes, and essentially looked like a forest. It was also evident that many gravestones were taken from the cemetery over the years to pave local streets, or were looted by local persons,” he said.

Read more here.