I'm interested in translation of the attached note to my mother from her grandfather, Hertz Kalish. My mother believes it might be some sort of congratulatory note on her graduation. 
--
Don Libes
Potomac, Maryland

According to their ship manifests, my grandfather: Charles Platzman was
born in Pietrzykowice (immigrated in 1911) and his older brother, David
was born in Zaleszyki (immigrated in 1908). My mother once told me that
they had twin brothers over in Europe. I'd like to find their siblings'
names so that it may help me with DNA cousins for whom we have not yet
found any connection. I thought that perhaps a revisionist list would
list everyone.

Linda Strauss

Felissa,

I think you made some astute observations about the two images.  My sense is these two images are not NYC, but are somewhere in the mid-west and likely either St. Louis or KC as you surmise. If you examine old images of NYC you will note the lamp post in that city are of an entirely different design than the one shown in the photo of your grandmother.  Interestingly, a few of those old-style lamp posts are still around in NYC. Additionally, the building architecture has a mid-west appearance. If you are able to adjust the contrast in the two images you might be able to discern additional signage information on the buildings. The signage is key to finding the information you are seeking. With the information that you already have plus anything else you might be able to glean, look up the store names in city directories for St. Louis and KC. A translation of the Hebrew would be a promising additional lead. neighborhood. With the use of the directories your might be able to nail down the exact location and narrow down the date of these images. I would date these images to somewhere between the mid and late 1920s. The truck in photo 2 is probably the first 5 years of the 1920s.  The sedan with the trunk attached to the rear bumper is probably a little newer. The hats that everyone is wearing and your grandmother's dress all add up to the 1920s.

I hope this helps.

Jeffrey Gee
Arizona

Try looking up the names of the businesses and their addresses where known in city directories from the 1930s for Kansas City (both for KC, Kansas and KC, Missouri) and St. Louis and for Brooklyn (if there's a separate directory for it from that era, if not then for New York City).  That should pinpoint it.  You can get access online to a multitude of city directories through Ancestry.com; I imagine that other genealogy websites may also contain city directories.

I agree that "pop" argues for not NYC -- that word still hasn't made the journey east of the Mississippi!

Erika Gottfried
Teaneck, New Jersey

Response to Jim Gutterman about Tuchin - All the Tuchin revision lists are online on the Tuchin KehilaLinks page https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/tuchin/tuchin.htm. This includes years not yet uploaded to the Ukraine database (1816-1817). Also various lists from the Polish period that you may find useful for the 20th century. Unfortunately there are no  birth/marriage records known to have survived for Tuchin.

Response to Sammy Iger and others about Rovno: All of the 1851 revision list for Rovno town (4581 records total) has been translated. It has been submitted to the Ukraine database but not uploaded yet. Please contact me for more information. I'm afraid I don't see the surname IGER or variants in that list.

David R. Brill
Cherry Hill, NJ

Does anyone know how to order a book from Avotaynu without using its website? Because Avotaynu doesn't use https/encryption, I'm reluctant to order on its website.The number on Avotaynu's website for telephone orders is inoperative, no one has responded to messages I've sent using its online "contact us" tool, and there is no reference on the website to ordering by mail/check. Thanks.

David Solomon
sol2516171@...

I can't answer that question exactly, but among my ancestors--my father's family all came from Lithuania--many went to South Africa but some came to the US as well. It seems to be a bigger group in South Africa (where they spell they family name "Judelman"), but I don't know of any impediment keeping them from going elsewhere. I would also like to know--was it more expedient to immigrate to SA?

Rachel Youdelman

Perhaps one got bed and food while the other just had a bed.

--
Diane Jacobs, Somerset, New Jersey

While to access all of Ancestry's records and databases, a subscription is required, some of Ancestry's databases are free.  Don't dismiss Ancestry until you have seen a padlock on the data.  I have a subscription so I can't tell if it is or is not free.  The 1940 census is free.  There is however a list of free collections on Ancestry.
--
Sarah L Meyer
Georgetown TX
ANK(I)ER, BIGOS, KARMELEK, PERLSTADT, STOKFISZ, SZPIL(T)BAUM, Poland
BIRGARDOVSKY, EDELBERG, HITE (CHAIT), PERCHIK Russia (southern Ukraine) and some Latvia or Lithuania
https://www.sarahsgenies.com

What might be the difference between these terms in the 1891 English census (London)--LODGER and BOARDER? This person's household had 3 lodgers and 2 boarders.

John Anderson,
Orlando, FL

Preserving Holocaust History: Collecting Oral Testimonies and Researching Family Fates

With experts from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Jo-Ellyn Decker, Research and Reference Librarian, National Institute for Holocaust Documentation. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Ina Navazelskis, Oral Historian, National Institute for Holocaust Documentation. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

MODERATOR:

Jaime Monllor, International Outreach Officer, National Institute for Holocaust Documentation. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Join us for a live digital program featuring representatives from the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who collect, preserve, and make accessible to the public the vast collection of record on the Holocaust.  The Museum has collected and produced over 25,000 interviews, making it one of the largest Holocaust-related oral histories collections in the world.  In addition, it has thousands of collections and millions of pages of searchable material from the International Tracing Service Digital Archive from the Arolsen Archives.  Learn how the Museum continues producing oral history interviews despite the pandemic and hear about the meticulous research process offered -- relevant for Holocaust survivors, their families, and others wishing to discover more about the fate of those persecuted.

Sunday January 23, 2022 

10:00 AM To 12:00 PM Mountain Time

9:30 AM to 10:00 AM Schmear, Schmooze, and Share

Program starts promptly at 10 AM

On Zoom  

Speakers’ bios:

Jo-Ellyn Decker is currently a Research and Reference Librarian in the Holocaust Survivor and Victims Resource Center.  In this role she conducts research using Museum collections, especially the International Tracing Service (ITS) collection from the Arolsen Archives, in order to trace the paths of persecutions related to individuals, Jewish or non-Jewish, persecuted, or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social, and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945, this includes, inmates of concentration camps, ghettos, and prisons as well as people who were in hiding or displaced.  Ms. Decker earned a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies: Appreciation, Promotion, and Management of Historical and Cultural Antiquities from Bethany College, WV, in 2006 with minors in History and in German. She holds a master’s degree in Library and Information Science (M.L.I.S.) from Kent State University in Ohio.  Ms. Decker began her career at the Museum in 2008. 

Ina Navazelskis is a journalist of 35 years’ experience specializing in East European affairs and 20^th century history. Since 2001, she has been on staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Oral History Branch. In that time, she has conducted almost 400 in-depth video interviews with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and liberators from over a dozen countries in three languages: English, German and Lithuanian. She has written extensively about the Baltic States in the context of World War II and its aftermath. Her work has appeared in publications such as Newsday, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, St. Petersburg Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Transitions Magazine, Index on Censorship, the German language newspapers Die Zeit and Sueddeutsche Zeitung, as well as the Lithuanian language publications Kauno Dienos and Ieva.  She is also the author of Fragments and Fissures:  Dispatches from Vilnius 1990-1991 (in Lithuanian: Versus Aureus, Vilnius, 2012); Leonid Brezhnev (in English: Chelsea House Publishers; New York, 1987); and Alexander Dubcek (in English: Chelsea House Publishers; New York, 1990).  She was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2009.

Jaime J. Monllor currently is the International Outreach Officer at the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he oversees a range of international activities under the Museum’s Rescue the Evidence Initiative.  He provides leadership and direction for the development and operation of the outreach program, analyzes its needs, and defines policies, procedures and guidelines for its execution.  He joined the Museum in 1996 to manage the visiting scholar and academic scholarly presentation programs at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.   He also served as a Program Producer for the Museum’s Educational and Public Programs Division, producing a variety of programs that examined the Holocaust and contemporary genocides.  Prior to joining the Museum, he worked at the National Endowment for the Arts’ Office of Communications.  Jaime earned a M.A. in Language and Foreign Studies / Latin American Studies, American University, Washington, DC, and a B.A. in Communications, University of the Sacred Heart, San Juan, PR.
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Ellen Beller President JGSCO

Tara,

I've had good results with two South African websites:

SA Jewish Rootsbank, the South African Jewish Database
National Archives of South Africa

FamilySearch has some South African records, but I'd recommend starting with these two websites.  Many Jews emigrated to South Africa from Latvia and Lithuania.  

Ellen


Ellen Morosoff Pemrick 
Saratoga County, NY

Researching WEISSMAN/VAYSMAN (Ostropol, Ukraine); MOROZ and ESTRIN/ESTERKIN (Shklov & Bykhov, Belarus); LESSER/LESZEROVITZ, MAIMAN, and BARNETT/BEINHART/BERNHART (Lithuania/Latvia); and ROSENSWEIG/ROSENZWEIG, KIRSCHEN, and SCHWARTZ (Botosani, Romania)

Yad Vashem Partners with the Museum of Jewish Heritage and JewishGen to Expand Access to Yad Vashem's “Pages of Testimony” and the 4,800,000 names commemorated in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names

Genealogy researchers on JewishGen can now tap into Yad Vashem’s collection of Pages of Testimony memorializing family and friends lost in the Holocaust

11 January 2022

I’m not really of much help, but I wonder if you’ve become familiar with musician Peter Holsapple, whose name I know from having worked with R.E.M. for a while. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Holsapple

David W. Perle

Thanks for the Canadian info but I dont think that this can be correct for my grandparents as if they came from there, they would have had to have gone there from Poland and then back to England which I feel would have been unlikely at that time (but maybe not impossible :))
Any idea where I could search to find an entry point to Britain for these grandparents and their first child. They lived in London at the time of the 1891 census and continued to live there until their deaths.

Gillian Cook 

Does anyone know if any 19th century records survive from the town of Dubrovytsia?
--
Rob Klegon
Chicago, IL USA

Hi,
I have had a question that has been 'gnawing' at me for some time.  It seems to me that most of the Jews who got affidavits (or the South African equivalent) to emigrate to South Africa came from Lithuania (and Latvia?).  Was South Africa the only country to which emigration was possible from Lithuania?  Thank you.

David Cherson