JEWISH GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY OF TORONTO

Poland SIG

Jewish Cemeteries in Poland and the Pandemic – an Update Directly from Poland

with Witold Wrzosinski, Director of the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, Poland

VIRTUAL MEETING: Join from Home

                                                               Thursday, 18 February 2021, at 7:30 pm. ET.

In recent decades, a huge increase of interest in the Jewish past has taken place in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe. It has taken many forms, ranging from thousands of private genealogy projects, to preservation and digitization efforts, to museums, TV shows and conferences, to a notable growth in heritage tourism.

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto and its Poland SIG will present direct from Poland Witold Wrzosinski to discuss his efforts in preserving our Jewish history by preserving our Jewish cemeteries. As the co-founder and co-director of the Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland, he has been indexing epitaph inscriptions from Polish-Jewish cemeteries for the last 14 years and run an open access, searchable online database with more than 110,000 photographs and transcriptions from more than 100 cemeteries.

Join us as we explore his efforts during COVID-19, especially in these trying times when travel is hardly possible and people rarely leave their homes. How do we even start finding the right people? What is the future of local projects already undertaken by descendants in cooperation with residents in dozens of remote Polish towns? Are Jewish cemeteries bound to deteriorate now for good? How are the relevant institutions in Poland dealing with this challenge? Let’s try to get answers.

Register today at: Clicking Here or https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYod-6tpz4vEtVLYIJz4MdO2Be1k0wmSwQP

February is our promotional month where we are offering our SIG programmes and their recordings to the public. We trust that you benefited from our Ukraine SIG and Latvia SIG programmes this month. Starting in March, our policy is to return to keeping SIG programmes and their recordings open only to members. This will keep the size of our SIGs smaller and thus allow the kind of presentations, discussion and interaction that are a hallmark of our special interest groups.

To our guests, consider joining our membership for only $40.00 per year by Clicking Here or consider a donation by Clicking Here to assist us in continuing our mission providing a forum for the exchange of genealogical knowledge and information. (Canadians receive a CRA tax receipt.)

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Jerry Scherer

Vice President, Communications

jscherer@...

JewishGen is pleased to announce the addition of two new component data sets and a significant update to an existing component database in the Holocaust Database at https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Holocaust/

Traunstein Displaced Person Camp Records (https://tinyurl.com/1q9sc3po)

Traunstein, located in southeast Bavaria, was the site of a former Dachau subcamp.  In 1946 it was converted into a Displaced Persons (DP) camp for Jewish refugees, primarily from Eastern Europe.  During the camp’s existence, children were born in the camp and they are included in this collection.

Traunstein was intended as a temporary stopover as survivors sought to emigrate or decided to return to their countries of origin. The “population” varied in number during its use.  It was limited to Jews from all over Europe, the largest places of origin were Poland and Hungary, due to anti-Semitic problems in other camps.  It remained open until 1949. 

Further information on many of these persons, including their destinations, is available on the Bad Arolsen website.  Start at https://arolsen-archives.org/en/ (the Arolsen website), type in Traunstein and utilize the alphabetical index for such files.

This 1947 collection consists of 11,659 records of names of adults and children, date and place of birth, prewar nationality and residence and other available comments.

A team of JewishGen volunteers, led by Carol Oliver, Coordinator, Alicia Goldstein, Diana Simcha and Esther Simon compiled the list.

The 1933 German Towns Project (https://tinyurl.com/p4re8xsb)

In the 1960s, the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany wrote letters to mayors and other officials of West German counties and towns, asking them to list the Jewish inhabitants of their communities as of 1933, i.e. pre-Hitler, and, to the extent known, the fate of these Jews.  This collection includes the reports created by those local towns received by the International Tracing Service.

The information on each individual varies in detail.  In almost all cases, dates and places of birth, as well as dates of death, where known, are listed.  (In some cases, street addresses were provided, but these have not been entered into the database).  Where it was known that an individual had been deported, this is noted, though a check of other material indicates that the compilers were not aware that many persons on the lists had been deported. 

The records include surnames, given names, maiden names, date of birth, place of birth, date of death, place of death, and other comments.  The current update increases the dataset from 35,418 records (from 178 towns) to 47,298 records (from 263 towns).  The transcription continues under the direction of Carol Oliver with Esther Simon and Diana Simcha, all of which are JewishGen volunteers.

JewishGen appreciates the efforts of all the volunteers who have been working on this project which includes Carol Baird, Nicole Heymanns, Gary Mokotoff, Hans Nord, Irene Peters, Vera Nagel, Peter Strauss, Inge Wiesen, Robert Winter, Esther Simon and Diana Simcha

Jewish Children Attending Umberto School #1 Between the Wars in Salonika 9Thessaloniki), Greece (https://tinyurl.com/3obka0s2)

This small data set includes the names on 157 Jewish Children that attended he Umberto Italian School #1 in Thessaloniki, Greece between the world wars. The list was put together by Antonio Crescenzi, the events coordinator in Thessaloniki's Italian Institute of Culture. He prepared the list for a reunion/Graduation Day ceremony that took place on January 27, 2014, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Antonio found the 157 unawarded middle and high school diplomas and assumed that many of these students were deported in the Holocaust. His plan was to award the diplomas to the students or their descendants. However, most of the students were born in the 1910's so they should have received their diplomas long before the German occupation of the city. Therefore, it’s possible, these students just didn't attend their graduation and never picked up their diplomas.

Regardless, it's an interesting list of students, their parents' names and their date of birth, all good genealogical information.

Nolan Altman

Director of Data Acquisition - Holocaust Database

February 2021