Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #7 The Morris Men

So how did Shmuel Zaturensky become Simon Morris? And how come his father gets referred to as 'Herman'? Not to mention 'Czar Terensky', which we have already dealt with.

I believe the answers lie in these two records, which we have come across in earlier posts:

Simon's headstone: Shmuel, son of Moshe Chaim

His sister's burial record: Shprintsa, daughter of Movsha Chaimovitch, ie Movsha son of Chaim

Hanging on patronymics
The answer hangs on the use of patronymic names. The father of Shmuel and Shprintsa was called Moshe, both records agree on this. On Shmuel's headstone, it looks as though he has 2 given names: Moshe Chaim. In Shprintsa's burial record, 'Chaim' is clearly not Movsha's second given name, but the name of his father.

Who's the informant?
I think we need to take into account the circumstances in which these two records were compiled. By the time Shmuel/Simon died, he had been living in the USA for over 40 years. His father did not emigrate, so Shmuel's children, all born in the USA, would never have known him. Shmuel's wife Rochel Leah was his cousin, the daughter of Moshe's brother Meir, so she would have known Moshe and his patronymic - but she had died 3 years previously. So the informants for Shmuel's headstone would probably have been his children.

One possibility is that the children - by now teenagers or young adults - would have heard their grandfather referred to as Moshe Chaimovitch, but were not aware of the significance of the patronymic ending, and just assumed the name was Moshe Chaim. Or maybe there just wasn't room on the stone for any more explanatory lettering ....

Exceptions to the Rule
My preference, however, is that what we are seeing is a custom that I am now realising was quite established, if not all that common. In Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, a son is never given the same name as his father, nor a daughter that of her mother. Children are usually named after a deceased family member, the closer and more recent the better. So a boy might be named after a deceased grandfather or great-grandfather, or uncle of some sort - but never after his father.

What I am thinking is happening here would be an exception to this rule, which may happen in exceptional circumstances. This is for a son to assume the name of his father after his death, as a way of honouring him. I have two documented cases of this happening elsewhere in my family, where the father died shortly before the birth of a male child, and the baby was given the name of the father.

I also have another, intriguing case, where an adult son appears to have adopted the name of his father after the latter's death. In this case, I spent years wondering how come Jacob Frankenstein could be the son of Israel Jacob Frankenstein. Then I came across Jacob's headstone, and found that his Hebrew name was Jonah. We don't have any records from Poland for either the father or the son, but by the time Jonah got to London in 1879, he was Jacob, so I assume his father had died before then.

So maybe in this case, after Chaim died, his son Moshe adopted his father's name as a second given name, calling himself Moshe Chaim thereafter.

Retrospective anglicisation
This decision was not without consequences. His son Simon's descendants seem to have retrospectively anglicised Moshe/Moshe Chaim to 'Herman'. Now I have seen 'Chaim' morph into 'Herman' before, so that's not a problem. What's a bit odd is that his name is not really 'Chaim' in the first place. He's Moshe, son of Chaim, as we have discussed above. You'd have thought they'd refer to him as 'Moses', or 'Morris', like all the other Moshes in the world.

Passenger - manifest thyself!
I have not been able to locate passenger manifests for the immigration journeys of any of the members of this family, so as yet I am not able to see what names they were using when they left Russia for the USA. Once in the USA, they used a variety of versions of (Za)turensky, dropping the 'Za-' and becoming Terensky, Turansky, or similar. All of these names appear in the immigration databases, but I have not been able to identify any of these records as members of this family.

How are they managing to escape us? I can only surmise that they were all using a version of their name that somehow the search engines are not recognising. However, this is difficult to accept, as there are at least 6 of them coming over individually over a period of 25 years, from the around 1882 to 1908, and they are hardly likely to have kept that consistent - in a foreign language - over that length of time. But so far I haven't found a single one of them.

So I don't know whether Shmuel Zaturensky travelled as 'Simon Moses' when he emigrated around 1882, or whether he adopted the name after arrival - but this was the name he naturalised under in 1886:

As you can see, there's no age given, and no date or port of arrival to follow up. There is another Simon Moses floating around Illinois at this time, but he's not in Peoria, so I'm pretty sure this is our man. As we have seen, by 1920 he had adopted 'Morris', and his family has kept this name ever since.

Hitting on Moses
So how did he hit on 'Moses' in the first place? I think that once again the answer lies in the patronymic tradition that we were looking at above. His father was Moshe Zaturensky, so Shmuel would be referred to as Shmuel (ben) Moshe - Shmuel (son of) Moshe - Zaturensky. Drop the Zaturensky because it causes too many problems, and you're left with Shmuel Moshe. Anglicise that and you get Simon Moses. Hey presto - two names! Never mind that they're both given names. If they ask you for a surname, give them the second one: Moses. When, after 35 years, you realise that that sounds a bit too biblical, change it to Morris.

QED

A tale of three brothers - or maybe four

Here’s a tale of three brothers, all born in Gombin (‘Gabin’ in Polish) around 1780-1800. Or maybe four.

Lewek - my great-great-great-grandfather - stayed in Gombin, Moszek moved to Plock around 1810, and Wolf moved to London around 1820. In a declaration in 1840, Lewek says that “the family here (in Poland) chose the name FRANKENSZTEJN, but my brother in London chose WAJNBERG”.

This generation straddles the period when Jews in Poland were first obliged to take surnames, in 1822; each household was supposed to choose a different surname, so that the authorities could tell which was which. Previously the Jewish tradition had been to identify a person by the name of their father - their ‘patronymic’ name. So all three brothers are identified in the earlier records as ‘Jakobowicz’ - son of Jakob.

The records I have found show a clear progression in this family towards the adoption of a surname, as can be seen in the records I have found for Moszek. In 1812 he is Mosiek JAKUBOWICZ (patronymic) from Gombin, in 1818 he is Mosiek Jakob GABINSKI (place of origin = Gombin), and from 1824 onwards he is Mosiek FRANKENSZTEJN. In the 1818 record the name ‘Jakob’ could be interpreted as a second given name - ‘Mosiek Jakob’ - but I think this is unlikely, because children were not named after their fathers, but after a recently deceased close relative, such as a grandfather or great-grandfather. I think this 'Jakob' is not a given name, but a patronymic, without the patronymic ending - 'Mosiek son of Jakob'; none of the later later records refer to him by the given name ‘Jakob’.

So much for the three brothers. But could there be a fourth? In the Plock records throughout the 19th Century there are only two identifiable FRANKENSZTEJN families, and no other individuals using the name. One is the family of Moszek, the other is of a man called Szmul. They are the only FRANKENSZTEJNs in town. Could they be brothers?

The earliest records I have found which I can identify as being for this Szmul are from 1817 and 1819, where he is simply Szmul IZRAEL. Unfortunately none of his records seem to identify his father directly. Is ‘Izrael’ being used in these early records as a second given name, or as a patronymic, as I think is the case of ‘Mosiek Jakob'? If it is a patronymic, his father is Izrael and he is not a brother to Moszek (whose father was Jakob, of course) and we are looking at two men, who are not siblings, nevertheless choosing the same surname.

A further twist is that in the late 1810s they seem to have been living in adjacent houses: Moszek at Nowa 65, and Szmul at Nowa 64. Intriguingly, two generations later, a grandson of Moszek and a grand-daughter of Szmul are each raising families in the same house, at Bielska 17.

The couple Sura and Szmul Hersz KLAJNFELD, by the way, are cousins - their mothers are sisters, Golda and Hana, daughters of Szmul FRANKENSZTEJN. And this Moszek is the son of Icek Jankiel, son of the original Mosiek JAKUBOWICZ later FRANKENSZTEJN. Who said this was going to be straightforward?

Now Moszek and Szmul could just have been very close neighbours, so close they chose - and were allowed to keep - the same surname. Or they could be brothers. If they are brothers, I get a whole stack of new cousins.

Is that just wishful thinking?

Laja’s Registration Card

Laja Florkiewicz, daughter of my grandfather’s sister Chawa (see earlier posts in the series The Frankenstein Trail), was the only member of her family to survive the War. Chawa and her three other children were all killed in the Holocaust.

Chawa’s daughter, my cousin Ewa, tells me that her mother used to speak to her of escaping from the Warsaw Ghetto through the sewers, and of fighting with the partisans. Ewa says that Laja spent most of the War in the Soviet Union, married Josef Mandeltort there, and had her first child - Ewa’s brother Henrik - in Kazan, east of Moscow, in 1944. After the War the family returned to Poland, and Ewa was born a few years later. In 1962, shortly after the death of Josef, they moved to Israel.

Three cards

When I went to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, on the first morning of my visit to Poland earlier this year, I mentioned this story to Anna Przybyszweska, one of the genealogy experts there. Ewa particularly wanted to find out about Josef, her father - he had died when she was 10 years old, in Poland; she had spent the rest of her life in Israel, and all she knew of him was his name.

Anna explains

While I was explaining all this, Anna was fiddling with her computer, as experts tend to do, and before I had finished she was printing off three sheets of paper and handing them to me. There they were - Laja, her son, and her husband. These were print-outs of data from a Register of returning Jews, compiled from 1946 onwards by the Central Committee of Polish Jews. The registration cards are now held in the Archive of the Institute.

Here’s a scan of Laja’s card - you can click on it for an enlargement:

Laja's Registration Card

The card is dated 14 October 1946, and contains basic identity details, plus information about occupation and residence before, during and after the War. There’s some new family information, and a number of intriguing discrepancies with information we have from elsewhere - but we’re getting used to that, aren’t we? In this post, and probably a couple of further ones, I’ll be discussing what we think we can glean from it.

Two birth dates for Laja

Laja gives her name as Lea Mandeltort, née Florkiewicz, born in Gombin (Gabin) on 28 December 1921 - and here’s the first discrepancy. On the Certificate of Residence obtained by her mother Chawa in 1935, which lists the dates of birth of all her children, Laja’s is given as 7 February 1917.

from Chawa's Certificate of Residence

In 1946 Laja was nearly 30, but claimed to be not yet 25. She appears to have used the younger date through the rest of her life. We’re pretty sure the earlier date is correct, and Ewa is puzzled as to why her mother should have wanted to change it.

Two maiden names for Chawa

Laja’s parents are given in this document as Elia Florkiewicz, and Ewa Finkielsztein. Ewa is not a problem, it’s a Polish version of her mother’s Yiddish name Chawa. However Chawa's maiden name was not Finkielsztein, but Frenkensztejn:

from Chawa's Certificate of Residence

This was another puzzle, until I started thinking about Laja’s family situation, and realised that, by the time she was 14, there were hardly any Frankenszteins left for her to have contact with. Her grandfather was, we think, the only male of his generation to stay in the area, and she never knew him - he had died before Laja was born. Her grandmother used the surname Frankensztejn, but Laja would probably only know her as ‘Booba’ (‘Granny’). Her mother Chawa of course had become ‘Florkiewicz’, and Chawa’s sister Chaia had also married. Chawa’s brother Lajb - my grandfather - had left for London in 1913, and never returned; we don’t know if they were ever in contact. The other brother, Lajzer (also known as Itsek), was the only one who appeared to be using the family surname, and he used Finkelsztein - we still don’t know why (see the earlier post Siblings). Lajzer had left Poland in the 1920s, and by the mid-1930s was living in Palestine, from where he corresponded with Chawa, and sent her money.

from Chawa's letter to her brother

So perhaps it is understandable that, some seven years after Laja had last seen her mother, she ascribed to her the only family name she was familiar with.

And four names for Josef

Ewa had told me her father was Josef Mandeltort, but that he had adopted her mother’s maiden name, Florkiewicz, as it “sounded less Jewish”. 

Poland had become an uncomfortable place to live for many Jews well before World War II - Chawa’s letter to her brother, written in 1936, gives a graphic picture of the hostility they faced from Polish authorities and some sectors of Polish society. The majority of Poland’s Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and only a few amongst the survivors tried to return after the War. Those that did return found themselves in a country still riddled with anti-semitism, which reached its peak with the infamous pogrom in Kielce in July 1946.

In these circumstances it is understandable that some of those that did return might try to make themselves appear less conspicuous.

Laja’s father was Eliasz Florkiewicz. There is a long-standing Polish Catholic family in Gombin called Florkiewicz, but there do not appear to have been any other Jewish families in the area using the name, and very few elsewhere. It does not appear to be a ‘Jewish’ name. So how come Eliasz’s family used it?

We are in touch with the local Polish Florkiewicz family, and we are both intrigued by the possibility that there could be a direct connection between us. However, if there is, we have not been able to trace it. We think it is possible that one of Eliasz’s ancestors, some time in the 19th Century, may have chosen to use the name for motives similar to those discussed here for Josef - to blend more in with the Polish population.

Here’s an extract from Josef’s Registration Card:

from Josef's Registration Card

He was not Josef - he was Izrael.

So Izrael Mandeltort came back to Poland after the War, and became Josef Florkiewicz.

And we haven't finished with Laja's card yet - for further discussion see (coming soon): 

Laja’s War - Laja’s other Grandmother

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!