Ukraine: Dartmouth students restore cemeteries

Dartmouth College students are heading to Stojanov, Ukraine to restore its Jewish cemetery during June 9-19.

Since 2002, the school’s annual Project Preservation has restored cemeteries in Belarus (2002 Sopotskin, 2003 Indura, 2004 Kamenka, 2005 Lunna), Ukraine (2006 Druhzkapol and this year), and Lithuania (2007 Yurburg)

There’s also a link to a podcast on the project with Rabbi Edward Boraz.

Established in 2002, Project Preservation is a Tucker Foundation cross cultural education and service project. It is organized and coordinated by Boraz, who explains that these European shtetlach (shtetls) were once mainly Jewish and now have no Jewish residents. Without people to care for them, they are neglected and overgrown.

Stojanov is the birthplace and former home of author Leon Wells, who appears to be the sole survivor from that town, who chronicled his life in the town and throughout the Holocaust in his books, Janowska Road (Macmillan Company 1963 and Halo Pr 1999) and Shattered Faith (University Press of Kentucky 1995).

Boraz says this year’s trip is dedicated to Wells’ work. The cemetery has no headstones because they were used for flooring for the collective farms in the Soviet era.

Before traveling, students design and implement a 10 week- week course focusing on understanding genocide, an emphasis on the Nazi period, impact on Europe and the history of the village they will be visiting that year. Following the course, students first visit Auschwitz, and then travels to the village to work on the cemetery. Usually assisted by villagers, the group cuts the vegetation, rights headstones, erects fences and holds a rededication ceremony.

“I am deeply moved that each year, a diverse group of students of different faith traditions and ethnicities are committed to and willing to confront first hand the legacy of one of the most tragic events in the history of western civilization, the genocide of the Jewish people of Europe,” says Rabbi Boraz. “My own humanity and my own rabbinate have been transformed in many ways because of the nature of the encounters I have with students and with this program.”

Some students have traveled to more than one town.

Boraz says that they receive calls to visit specific villages to work on the cemeteries after these years of visits. Sometimes requests come from people whose ancestors once lived there, and sometimes from the people now living in the town who want to preserve their history. “I hope we continue this work, because unfortunately, there is no shortage of Jewish cemeteries that need our help,” he says.

Read more – including student comments and the podcast link – here.

Salzburg Jewish Cemetery: all-graves index

Celia Male of London has just returned from Salzburg and Vienna and completed indexing all graves in the Salzburg Jewish Cemetery.

See the photographs here.

In addition to the 227 graves, she’s indexed the names of all burials on plaques at the entrance and added genealogical and biographical notes.

The site now includes all names of graves desecrated by the Nazis as well as post-Holocaust burials (1945-1949), for more than 600 indexed names. Some are quite distinctive.

Says Celia,

I hope, as a result of this work, there will be some genealogical discoveries and some people may identify family members lost in the holocaust, but who actually died in Salzburg whilst in DP camps – [mostly Polish]. Salzburg Jewish cemetery is quite a *surprise*. This is because a high proportion of the graves suggest that the burials were of Polish and Galician Jews as well as Jews from Czernowitz, Bukowina and Romania. I have identified a few German Jews too and Jews coming from Vienna, Bohemia/ Moravia as well as the Burgenland.

Now, Celia has posted details on the graves of Jews from Bukowina, Czernowitz and some other Hungarian Jews. She notes that graves are arranged alphabetically by family name; click to enlarge the photograph. G

Go from “thumbnail” to “detail” and scroll through or choose a slide-show which will, at the fastest pace, take you just under an hour. This however is quicker than going to the cemetery itself and you get a free guided tour! You can superimpose my notes by clicking the letter *I* in the the centre of each picture.

Unreadable graves are grouped together and we gradually deciphering the Hebrew Script on them. Can you decipher this Hungarian grave?

Family names include ALTARAS, BALD, BERCEANER, BONYHADI, COWRIGARU/COVRIGARU, RACHMUTH, ROTH, SCHAFER, SCHORR, ZATAN/ZALAN; there be more not yet identified.

In Celia’s “Missing Headstones” section, here are some of the names from post-Holocaust deaths: BOROWNIK, JODXINER, JANCORICS, JAKOBOWITZ, PULVERMACHER, FINGER, SCHLOMOWICZ, GILMOWITSCH, GARB, MUNITZ, PROVISOR, TAUC, GESUNDERMANN,
MIEDZYPORSKA, TAFFET, MAIDANEK, GRUBER.

UK: 1851 Jewish population study

An 1851 study on the UK’s Jewish population has been updated with several thousand names, announced Louise Messik of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain.

The 1851 Study now contains more than half the UK’s Jewish population of that year, nearly 21,000 individuals representing mainly England, Wales, Scotland and some from Ireland

It also traces information before and after that year for an individual if he or she have been researched or data made available. The database tries to show where they were and what they were doing, by decade, throughout their lives. Some entries date to the 1740s-1750s, or even the 1740s, while some lived to the 1940s-1950s. While some died after a day or so, others lived to 100 or more.

What can you find? It does depend on individuals, although most entries include where and when a person was born, their parents, where and when they married their spouses, when and where their children were born, their address and occupation in that year.

Where available, other data includes residences and occupations to the 1900s, date, cause and location of death and burial. Notes are included on published biographical sources, related people in the database and more. Source references, when possible, are included with each data item.

A quick search for Cohen – my favorite default when testing a Jewish database, showed 994 Cohen records, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, with birthplaces in several countries, London and other UK locations. A search for Da Costa showed more than 80; Rodrigues, 25.

One field shows others in the database who have the same mother’s name or father’s name to the individual in question.

The database represents some 200 contributors from around the world, headed by editor Petra Laidlaw.

North Carolina: Jewish heritage project

For more than four centuries, there has been a Jewish presence in North Carolina, and an ambitious new undertaking – a multi-media cultural offering – is documenting this history, “Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina.”

The Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina (JHFNC) has raised $1 million towards producing the project, with only another $250,00 remaining to reach the budget, according to a press release. Public and private funding has included corporate, state and individual family gifts from throughout the state.

Down Home will tell the over 400-year history of Jewish settlement in North Carolina in a multi-media project that will include a traveling museum exhibit, a broadcast quality documentary film, a richly illustrated book published by UNC Press and public school educational programming with a teacher’s guide. The written and oral histories, photographs and artifacts chronicling the story of immigrant Jews and their contributions to the communities in our state will travel in the museum exhibition to North Carolina’s major history museums.

The Down Home film will debut this fall at the Museum of History in Raleigh and will be shown in venues throughout the state in 2009.

According to the JHFNC website:

Fragments of North Carolina’s Jewish history can be found on the shelves of libraries, museums, and archives. But the stories that make this history come alive remain forgotten in attics and closets, and waiting in the memories of community elders. As letters and photographs fade, as parents and grandparents pass away, and as small-town synagogues close and their records disappear, this heritage may be lost forever.

The research material for the project will be the largest body of historical records about North Carolina’s Jews. The permanent home for “The North Carolina Jewish Collection” will be at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It will be professionally preserved and available to scholars.

The JHFNC is also working with a university libraries consortium from across the state (Duke University, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UNC-Charlotte) that hold Jewish North Carolina collections. A master guide is planned to aid those interested in this subject.

Established in 1996, the JHFNC is the state’s only Jewish historical organization. It collects and preserves artifacts and records North Carolina’s Jewish settlement history while conducting programs to examine and portray the state’s Jewish experience. Its slogan is “Honoring History. Celebrating Culture. Connecting Communities.”

Learn more about the project in a movie trailer for the “Down Home” exhibit here.

Read more here .

Ukraine: Dartmouth students restore cemeteries

Dartmouth College students are heading to Stojanov, Ukraine to restore its Jewish cemetery during June 9-19.

Since 2002, the school’s annual Project Preservation has restored cemeteries in Belarus (2002 Sopotskin, 2003 Indura, 2004 Kamenka, 2005 Lunna), Ukraine (2006 Druhzkapol and this year), and Lithuania (2007 Yurburg)

There’s also a link to a podcast on the project with Rabbi Edward Boraz.

Established in 2002, Project Preservation is a Tucker Foundation cross cultural education and service project. It is organized and coordinated by Boraz, who explains that these European shtetlach (shtetls) were once mainly Jewish and now have no Jewish residents. Without people to care for them, they are neglected and overgrown.

Stojanov is the birthplace and former home of author Leon Wells, who appears to be the sole survivor from that town, who chronicled his life in the town and throughout the Holocaust in his books, Janowska Road (Macmillan Company 1963 and Halo Pr 1999) and Shattered Faith (University Press of Kentucky 1995).

Boraz says this year’s trip is dedicated to Wells’ work. The cemetery has no headstones because they were used for flooring for the collective farms in the Soviet era.

Before traveling, students design and implement a 10 week- week course focusing on understanding genocide, an emphasis on the Nazi period, impact on Europe and the history of the village they will be visiting that year. Following the course, students first visit Auschwitz, and then travels to the village to work on the cemetery. Usually assisted by villagers, the group cuts the vegetation, rights headstones, erects fences and holds a rededication ceremony.

“I am deeply moved that each year, a diverse group of students of different faith traditions and ethnicities are committed to and willing to confront first hand the legacy of one of the most tragic events in the history of western civilization, the genocide of the Jewish people of Europe,” says Rabbi Boraz. “My own humanity and my own rabbinate have been transformed in many ways because of the nature of the encounters I have with students and with this program.”

Some students have traveled to more than one town.

Boraz says that they receive calls to visit specific villages to work on the cemeteries after these years of visits. Sometimes requests come from people whose ancestors once lived there, and sometimes from the people now living in the town who want to preserve their history. “I hope we continue this work, because unfortunately, there is no shortage of Jewish cemeteries that need our help,” he says.

Read more – including student comments and the podcast link – here.