Dear Brother

In July 1936, my grandfather's sister Chawa wrote from her home in Gombin, Poland, to her brother Lajzer in Tel Aviv, which was at that time in British-controlled Palestine. My cousin Bracha, Lajzer's daughter, came across the letter a year or so ago, amongst her father's effects.

The letter is written in Yiddish, which unfortunately none of us can understand. However, we have had it translated into English, and it makes pretty harrowing reading.

Lajzer had emigrated to South America in the 1920s, and then to Palestine in the early 1930s. Chawa's husband had died, leaving her with four children - Marjem (21), Laja (19), Szejva (17) and Jakub Josek (15). She was also looking after her mother Gitla (my great-grandmother), who was aged 75 and was unwell. The situation for Jews in Poland during the 1930s was difficult to say the least - there was much prejudice, many Poles refused to trade with Jews, and restrictive laws were passed. 

Chawa and her family were keen to follow Lajzer to Palestine, and she made an application to emigrate which included herself, her mother and her two younger children. The application was accepted by the British authorities; however, none of them left Poland, and Chawa and all her children, apart from Laja, were killed in the Holocaust. We do not know what happened to Gitla.

Here are some extracts from the letter, which give an idea of what Chawa and her family were going through.

Dear Brother, 

We hereby share with you that we are in good health. We wish to hear of your good health forever. 

True, my dear brother, we sincerely thank you for your dear condolence letter. You have brought joy to our sad hearts with your words of condolences. True, dear brother, you have enlivened our weak mother with you dear writing, and she prays to G-d that she will live to see you again and come to the Holy Land. 

We want to work and we work very hard, but there is nothing here for us to eat other than what you my dear brother sends and the few dollars that I receive at times from my mother-in-law. If not for this we would suffer much need and go to shame with the children. 

The Jews are now being buried. It is all going over into gentile hands. And we work carrying a heavy load but earn nothing. When we want to buy something with our earnings, they say "for this you have to pay dearly". As a result there is no income. We toil really hard and with added fear from the gentile merchants, who are dismissive of our life.  

Imagine our situation. The boycott is so great. The bitter situation is that there’s nowhere to earn, and they raise the price only for the Jews. 

In short, the hatred is big, the boycott even more so. Between all this it is not possible to live.  

Chawa suggests that it is her mother's illness that is delaying their emigration:

I have sent your letter to Warsaw and I added, ‘that since my dear mother is not well, and I do not have anyone to leave her with, I ask that they postpone the aliya (emigration to Palestine) till she is healthy.’ 

So my dear brother, our dear mother is not feeling well and she needs great care. She has gotten very weak from heartache of seeing my lot. She can not eat what we eat and needs to heal. I am doing all that I can and more, but I do not have the means. She is very weak.

She then drops a bombshell - at least, it is to us:

My true dear brother, now I am going to get married with mazal (luck) right after Shabbos Nachamu (a Sabbath in late summer).

None of us were aware that Chawa had remarried - not even her grand-daughter Ewa, daughter of Laja, the only survivor. The fact that Chawa doesn't feel the need to mention who her new husband is, suggests that Lajzer may already have known about the impending marriage.

When we will arrive there [in Israel] in peace then with G-d’s help everyone will be able to earn their own. Because everyone wants to work and is capable of working, as they say. And when it comes around they will definitely work. There should only be work to do. They can not wait to help and to be together with you. 

G-d should give you joy and have compassion on my beautiful children and on my suffering. I should only live it through in good health.

After four pages of closely packed writing, Chawa adds a final sentence written vertically in the margin:

I can not describe to you exactly how things are and my desperate situation leaves me not wanting to write at all, it is only that I must write to you. I know very well that you have a lot of heartache from us. We send you our best wishes and all kiss you and hope to be with you.

Along with this letter, Bracha also found a number of documents that Chawa must have sent to Lajzer when she was making her application. These papers give us important information about the family, confirming or contradicting what we thought we knew before, and I will be writing about them in later posts.

On the Frankenstein Trail

It might have seemed a bit quiet here at TwentyOne Seven recently - I see the last post was nearly 8 months ago - but that doesn't mean the roots quest has slowed down. Far from it. In particular, the search for the Frankensteins - my mother's father's family - has gathered momentum, and by a combination of luck, hard graft, and serendipity, we have made considerable strides towards understanding where they came from, how they fit together, and what happened to them.

Amongst our discoveries have been a stash of documents shut away in a cupboard in Tel Aviv for 30 years, including a letter written in Yiddish that no-one could read. We've now had it translated, and it is mortifying, the saddest letter I ever hope to read.

Then there were a couple of Freedom of Information requests that uncovered a completely unsuspected twist in the family story, and give us a different perspective on the havoc caused by the First World War, and how people tried to cope with it. And the cousin I had never met before, who helped join the dots, and left us open-mouthed at the story of her mother's escape from the Warsaw Ghetto.

And then the cousin I never knew existed - well, she's probably a third cousin or so - who spotted her family name in a list of names I was researching that I'd put at the end of a message to an online forum. "I think we need to speak", she said.

And the photographs, and the partial family trees, half-hidden away on genealogy websites, and the half-remembered anecdotes, all of which first whisper, then speak out, then shout out loud - cousins!

We are now at the point where we have four Frankensteins, Tauba, Rifka Leah, Bajla and Jankel Josek, of comparable ages, who all seem to come from the same tiny village, who all appear to have a father called Wolf, and whose families have stories that claim at least some of them are siblings, and go on to describe a network of cousinhood.

All we need is proof.

The stories are surfacing, gradually, telling of emigration, return, re-emigration, further emigration, planned emigration that didn't happen, invasion, war, international agreements, desertion, revolution, ghettos, slaughter, escape, resistance, post-war return, more emigration. Then there's the husband with two wives, and the wife with two husbands, the informal adoption, the changes of given name, the changes of surname, the naming patterns ... In short, the usual stories. However, so far, documentary evidence has been very thin on the ground.

I'm now in Poland for a couple of weeks, to see what I can find. I'm in Warsaw for a few days; I'll see the genealogy people at the Jewish Historical Institute tomorrow, and that meeting could shape how I spend the following few days. Then I'm going up to Gdansk for the weekend, to see Frankenstein cousins who come to be Polish by a different route.

And then next week, I'll be spending a few days in and around Gombin, the town my grandfather said he came from. He came to London in 1913, married and raised his family in the UK, and died in 1955. He never went back to Gombin; he never wanted to. I hope he doesn't mind me going back there for him.

Researching: SHREIBMAN (Pinsk); ILYUTOVICH (Lida, Novogrudok, Gomel); ZATURENSKY (Nesvizh ?); LEVIN (Streshin, Gomel); FRANKENSTEIN, FINKELSTEIN (Gombin); ZELMAN (Gombin); KOHN (Nadarzyn); IGLA (Nadarzyn); WAKSMAN (Demblin-Irena, Gniewoszow-Granica); SZECHTMAN (Bobrowniki); GLASMAN, GLUZMAN (Demblin-Irena); LENDENBAUM (Bobrowniki); ELBSZTAJN (Bobrowniki); EIZENSTADT (Gniewoszow-Granica); LEFSHITZ (Zhuravichy); ALIEVSKY (Zhuravichy); SZWARC (Gombin), SCHWARTZ (London, Leeds)

Cousin Report #27

There I was, at the Blowzabella do the other night, pretty much minding my own business, soaking up the music and sipping down the London Pride, when I was accosted by this woman asking "are you Michael"?

Well I couldn't really deny it, especially when she said "surname Shade?", and I'm glad I didn't because it turned out to be my distant cousin Mira. We had never met, though we did have a brief email exchange a few months ago, during which we realised we would both be going to the BZB do last Saturday.

She's my great-grandmother's brother's second wife's great-grand-daughter - is there a word for that? She'd been googling for her grandmother, Mary Levin, and came across a photo I'd put up on Flickr a couple of years ago from a Walk I did around some of our Levin places in the East End: I'd tagged the photo with some of the family names, and Google spotted them.

It turns out she and her husband are keen on French traditional music, and he plays the hurdy-gurdy. The world, as they say in Spain, is a handkerchief.

May their souls rest in peace

This is Aharon Shreibman, whose grandfather Hirsh was a brother of my great-grandfather Nevakh. So we're sort of cousins. Or at least, we would have been, if the Holocaust had not intervened.

For years our family has wondered whether any of our relatives had got caught up in the Holocaust. My four grandparents had all emigrated to the UK in the early part of the 20th Century, and we didn't know of anyone who was still living in Eastern Europe through the 1920s and 30s. Whether there was anyone still there, or whether we had just lost touch, we didn't know.

A few years ago, on the JewishGen website, I came across a database of people who had been killed in the Holocaust. This list had been compiled by the Soviet authorities immediately after they recaptured towns from the Germans in 1944, using testimony from neighbours, eyewitnesses and survivors (the 'Extraordinary Commission'). There were around 20 Shreibmans on the list for Pinsk, my grandfather Movsha's town, but from the scant details furnished it was impossible to identify any of them as 'ours'.

I then found another listing, this time of inhabitants of the Pinsk Ghetto in 1941/2, which shows 14 Shraibmans. Again, I couldn't identify any of them as ours - except for my grandfather's elder brother David, who is listed as a shoemaker, aged 71. There are a few recognisable family groups, but David seems to be the only Shreibman in the house he is living in. He does not appear in the Soviet Extraordinary Commission list, however, so we do not know when or how he died. And we do not know anything of his own family, or those of his brothers and sisters, so we cannot we tell whether any of the other Shreibmans in these lists are related to him in any way.

I have just now searched the Yad Vashem listings of Holocaust victims, still looking for Shreibmans from Pinsk, and have been able to compile a list of over a dozen, whose names had been submitted to the Holocaust Memorial Centre by relatives or survivors. These submissions often include personal and family details, and sometimes this information can enable you to establish a connection.

And indeed, two of the people in this list do appear to be people who are on our family tree - Aharon Shreibman, whose photo above was posted on the Yad Vashem database, and Meer, younger brother of my grandfather Movsha Shreibman. And once you work through the documents, you realise that their families are there in the list too, and that some of them may be on the other lists as well.

To see why I feel that these families are indeed 'our' Shreibmans, let's take a closer look at the Yad Vashem submissions.

There are two submissions for Aharon - one entered in 1999 by an unspecified relative named Varda, and a much earlier one from 1957, by a niece, Rakhel, who also submitted one for his wife Sara. I compiled a database of all the information I could glean from these and all the other Pinsk Shreibman submissions, to see what connections I could deduce, if any.

Looking at the first two lines of these extracts, you can see that the two submissions on Aharon differ in several respects:

They differ on his date of birth - by 10 years - and also on the name of his wife. However it was the names given for his parents that clinched it for me - they correspond with those found by the research we commissioned a couple of years ago in the Belarus Archives, which turned up a birth record for Aharon dating from 1897 (in between the two dates submitted by Varda and Rakhel). This showed his parents as Leizer and Chasya-Braina. Varda gives his mother as Khasia Breina, and Rakhel gives his father as Eliezer and his mother as Khasia. I'm as certain as can be that these two submissions are for the same person, and that that person is my second cousin once removed. My cousin Aharon. Killed in Pinsk in 1942.

Similarly with Meir. There are two submissions, one by Friedel's sister Henia in 1956, and another by her brother Shmuel in 1957. There are differences, but none significant - apart from the name of Friedel's mother, who was probably (but not necessarily) their own mother too! 'Our' Meir was born in 1896, according to the Belarus research, which is close enough to the dates in these submissions. But is this Meir really 'ours'?

In this case the detective work had to be a bit more subtle. Whilst Henia and Shmuel both submitted names for Friedel's parents, neither of them had anything for Meir's. Our Meir's father - my great-grandfather - was called Nevakh (Noah), and his mother Shprintza.

Now take closer look at the names Meir and Friedel gave their children. The first son is clearly named after Friedel's father, Avraham David, suggesting the family were following the established Ashkenazi custom of naming children after a recently-deceased close relative. When their second son is born a few years later, they call him Noakh. We do not know when our Nevakh died, but we do know from the Belarus research that his son David was the householder of the family house in Pinsk in 1912, which suggests that Nevakh had died earlier. So the first son was named for the maternal grandfather, and it very much looks as though the second son was named for the paternal grandfather.

So this is our Meir Shreibman, my great-uncle. And our Friedel, and our Avraham David, and our Noakh, my first cousins once removed.

Meir is given as killed in Pinsk in 1941; he may have died soon after the German invasion. Friedel, Avraham David and Noakh are in the Ghetto List:

They were killed in 1942, according to the submissions by Friedel's brother and sister, along with all the remaining inhabitants of the Ghetto. Aharon and his wife Sara are not on the Ghetto list, but the submissions say they also died in 1942.

May their souls rest in peace.

A new Shreibman

I've found a new Shreibman! Well, he's new to us, but he's quite old really - he's the earliest Shreibman we know of. Meet Movsha Shreibman, born - we suppose - sometime around 1740.

Yesterday I came across the 1816 Russian Census ('Revision List') for the town of Pinsk on the JewishGen website - I don't know why I hadn't spotted it before - and there they were - father and son, Girsh and Movsha (here, Movsha Dovid). We already had their names, and a date of birth for Movsha Dovid, from later Censuses. This, however, takes us one step further back into the past, thanks to the Russian - and Jewish - custom of patronymic naming, as in 'Movsha Dovid, son of Girsh'. Thus the Census gives us not only the names of the people it is recording, but as part of the identification it also gives us the names of their fathers. As we can see, Girsh's father is also a Movsha.

Girsh's age is given as 50, which suggests a date of birth of 1766. This in turn allows us to guess that his own father Movsha may have been born around, say, 1740.

It is interesting to see that the surname Shreibman was already being used by the family in 1816; we can't tell from this census record whether it dates back to the previous generation as well. Most Jews in Eastern Europe used patronymics until around the beginning of the 19th century, when the Russian authorities began requiring them to use surnames.

The name 'Shreibman' means 'writer', or 'scribe', and we can assume that the first use of the name would be a reference to that person's occupation. Was Girsh the first 'Shreibman' in our family? Or his father Movsha, perhaps? Or were they from a line of scribes maybe, who were already being referred to as such before the formal adoption of surnames?

Notice also the given names, repeated across the generations, usually at one remove:

Movsha (b abt 1740) - Hirsh (1766) - Movsha Dovid (1798) - Hirsh (1827).

There was  - maybe there still is - a tradition amongst Ashkenazi Jews of naming children after deceased relatives, especially recently deceased close relatives such as grandparents, and although we don't know the dates of death of these Shreibmans, we can see the pattern in their names.  

Another of Movsha Dovid's sons was Nevakh, or Noah. Nevakh used 'Dovid' and 'Movsha' for two of his own sons. And then this latest Movsha - my grandfather - named his first son - my father - David. And although my parents were not observant Jews, they continued with the tradition: my Hebrew given name, so they told me, is 'Moishe'.

You can see this pattern of naming in the revised version of the family tree.

So, Movsha Shreibman the First, born around 1740 - welcome to the family!

Climbing the stairs

Lewis (Leibisch) Levin was a brother of my great-grandmother Mikhlya. He was born in 1861 in Streshin, a little village on the river Dniepr, in what is now the south-east of Belarus. In the early 1900s he came to London accompanied by his three children from his first wife, who had died a few years previously, and his second wife with her own daughter. They found somewhere to live in the heart of the East End, where tens of thousands of East European Jews had settled over the previous 20 years or so.

My own grandmother - Lewis' niece - came to London soon after, aged about 18, and stayed with the Levins, probably helping to look after the children. Within a couple of years there were two more boys, and they moved from one accommodation to another, always along Whitechapel High Street and Mile End Road, presumably to have more room for the expanding family. In every document, and in various trade directories, Lewis is a 'Paper Bag Maker', even sometimes a 'Master Paper Bag Maker'; his own children, and my own young uncles and aunts, were all roped in to work in his paper bag factory, which was mostly located on the kitchen table.

We knew that he had died in 1927, aged 67, and that he was probably living on his own by this stage - his second wife had died when the boys were very young, his older children had all left home for marriage, America, or the Russian Revolution, and the younger boys didn't see their futures in paper bags and left home to work elsewhere and to put themselves through night school.

The figure of Lewis has long fascinated me, and a few months ago I ordered a copy of his Death Certificate, to see if it could offer up anything new about him. And so it did - an address: "of 84B Whitechapel High Street". So now we knew where he had been living at the time of his death.

The next time I was in the area I looked for the building. Next to the Whitechapel Library I found number 82; a few doors down was number 87. The two or three buildings in between did not appear to be numbered, but I assumed 84B would be one of them and duly took a photo as evidence.

My cousin Beatrice, Lewis' great-grand-daughter, is currently in London - her mother Alice (Lewis' grand-daughter, now aged 101) is unwell, and Beatrice has come over from the US to be closer to her. Yesterday afternoon Beatrice and I went on a 'Musical Walk round the Jewish East End', organised by the Jewish Music Institute, and guided by the historian David Rosenberg (highly recommended, by the way). Beatrice's grandfather Sam had been involved in the Workers' Circle, a friendly society established to further the interests of working-class East European Jews, from the 1910s onwards, and her mother Alice was active in the Yiddish theatre movement from the 1930s, and Workers' Circle and Yiddish theatre both featured in David's programme for the Walk.

The group met outside the Library, and then David led us off down a narrow alleyway between two of the neighbouring buildings - Angel Alley, you can see it at the extreme left of the photo above. There on the right a notice was pinned to a door: 'This is NOT 84B, it's 84A. 84B is opposite!' You can hear the exasperation in the printed words. You can probably also hear my involuntary intake of breath, for 84B turns out to be the premises of Freedom Press, the long-established Anarchist publishers and booksellers.

David was going to tell us about some of the radical figures and groups that flourished in the area 100 years ago, but Beatrice and I were just standing there, minds racing, staring at the building.

After the Walk, we grabbed David for a chat over a superb falafel lunch (PilPel, Brushfield Street), then made our way back to see if the Freedom bookshop at 84B was still open. It was. We explained why we had come, and asked the lady in the shop if she knew how the building was being used in 1927. She kindly went off to find a book containing a history of the organisation - and its premises - which told us that at least before 1942 there had been a printing press occupying the ground floor.

"Would you like to see upstairs?" I had to ask her to repeat the question, partly because I don't hear very well, but mainly because I couldn't believe what I had just heard. Upstairs? Lewis must have lived upstairs, 85 years ago. We took a deep breath, and followed her up. The staircase, banisters, walls, and some of the doors, looked as though they had had nothing done to them in 100 years or more.

She took us into one of the rooms, and we discussed the layout. The room we were standing in had a structural beam across the middle, and we reckoned it had probably originally been two rooms. On the landing there was a blanked-off door which confirmed this.

So we sat, and stood, in one half of the room, looking out to the brick wall opposite (the Library building, in fact), and tried to imagine a bed, and a chair, and a table. Where was the sink? There probably wasn't one, he'd have had to bring water in from the bathroom. Was there even a bathroom? How did he cook? Did he cook?

But it was the stairs that got me. He must have gone up and down these stairs every day for months, maybe two or three years. And here we were, treading the same steps, holding on to the same worn banisters, knocking on doors - his door, maybe - to feel the wood.

He fell ill here, and died at the London Jewish Hospital down the road in Stepney Green. I've just looked at the Death Certificate again. He died on 20 October 1927. Just 85 years and one day before we came to visit him.

Finding more new cousins

It's happened again.

Four weeks ago I found some Shreibmans, on my father's side, that I never knew existed. They are descendants of Aron, a cousin of my grandfather. We didn't know of Aron's existence until he appeared in the research we commissioned in Belarus last year. Aron emigrated to America, and became Harry, and now we are sharing family stories with the sons and daughters of his sons and daughters. If only my father - or any of his seven brothers and sisters - were alive to share this moment with us!

Two weeks on, and I've found some Frankensteins.

My mother's father, Leibisch 'Louis' Frankenstein (above), came to England from Poland some time in the 1910s. A few years later his brother Itzhak 'Isaac' Finkelstein, emigrated to South America, and then after a few years went on to Israel. Before you ask, neither Isaac's nor Louis' families have ever been able to explain why the brothers used different surnames. Did one of them change his name? And which was the 'genuine' family name? No-one knows.

The extent of our families' meagre 'knowledge' is that their parents were Jacob and Gittel, there were probably three other siblings, all girls, called Hava, Haia and one whose name we don't know, and they came from a town called Gombin (Gabin) in Poland. We have a rough idea of Louis' and Isaac's years of birth. Other than that, nothing.

Or rather, next to nothing.

My cousin Bracha, Itzhak's daughter, and I have been getting our heads together. Bracha tells me that Itzhak had a relative called 'Reimond Ball', who was active in the Gombiner Society in America, and that Itzhak himself had been President of the Society in Israel. And that there were other relatives, called Schwartz, who had six sons, all tailors, who went to London, and helped my grandfather when he arrived there 100 years ago: one of them was called Abraham.

Now this being the 21st Century, the Gombiner Society in the US has a web-site. On the web-site I came across a reference to a 'Raymond Boll'. Promising! They also had a database with listings of Gombiner families from a few years around the turn of the 20th Century, with dates of birth and, where appropriate, death.

Amongst the families in the database I found a Jacob and Gitla Finkelstein, with a daughter Jenta Bajla who married a member of a Svarc family. And a Bajla Frankenstajn, who also married a Svarc, and had eight children; the two girls died young, the six boys survived. One of them was called Abraham. This Abraham Svarc was just a few years younger than my grandfather Louis and his brother Isaac.

And then I found that some of the US Gombiners have even set up a Facebook Group; it is 2012, after all. When I saw that the owner of the group is called Dana Boll, I felt we might be on the right track.

And indeed we are. Dana and her cousin Joyce are grand-daughters of Raymond Boll; their fathers recall Raymond being in contact with Itzhak Finkelstein, who they assume was a cousin to Raymond. They tell me that Raymond's mother was Rifka Leah Frankenstein, who married twice and had mountains of children. They also have a Bajla Frankenstein, who married a Schwartz, and had 10 children. However, although they think of Itzhak as a cousin, they know nothing further about him. He does not appear on their family tree, and at the moment, no-one quite knows how he fits in.

They do, however, have a 'Lajb (?)' - with a question mark - on their tree, and a Chava, as brother and sister. So they do have reference to two names that appear in my grandfather's family - his own, and one of his sisters' - although, again, they are not sure which bit of their family they 'belong' to.

So, to sum up:
1) My own family's knowledge includes:

• an Itzhak Finkelstein who used to be in contact with a cousin Raymond Boll, both involved in the Gombiner Societies in their respective countries

• Itzhak has a brother Leibisch and a sister Chava, plus two other sisters, one called Chaya and the other unknown

• their parents are Jacob and Gittle

• Itzhak also has a cousin Abraham Schwartz, one of six brothers, who went to London and knew Leibisch there

• we do not know the exact relationship with Raymond Boll and Abraham Schwartz

• no other related Frankensteins or Finkelsteins are known to us

2) In the database, we find:

• a Jacob and Gitla Finkelstein who had a daughter Jenta Bajla who married a Svarc

• a Bajla Frankenstajn who married a Svarc and had six sons, one of which was called Abraham

3) Our possible new cousins' knowledge includes:

• a Raymond Boll who used to be in contact with a cousin Itzhak Finkelstein, both involved in the Gombiner Societies in their respective countries

• Raymond Boll was a son of Rifka Leah Frankenstajn

• Itzhak's parents and siblings are unknown

• a brother Lajb and a sister Chava, who are closely related but whose parents and any other siblings are unknown

• a Bajla Frankenstajn who married a Schwartz and had about ten children

So, nothing definite, as yet, no absolute proof. In particular, we do not yet have anything that identifies a specific relationship between Jacob Finkelstein and Rifka Leah Frankenstein, Raymond's mother. Were they brother and sister? Cousins maybe??

Nevertheless, life is short, and I'm happy to accept the weight of evidence, which as far as I'm concerned points to the conclusion that, for the second time in a fortnight, I've found new cousins.

The sharing of stories is about to begin. If only my mother were alive to share this moment with us! Happily, two of her sisters are still here, as is their cousin Bracha - and they are going to be the ones with the best stories to tell.