Destroying your passport does not cancel your citizenship. Rather, according to the decree of 25 Nov. 1941, German Jews lost their German citizenship when living or moving abroad. 
--
Andreas Schwab, Montreal, Canada

Andrea,

There is no way to guess about her original name.  I can tell you that my ggm Yenta was called Yetta after coming to The U.S.  A hundred other ladies that called themselves Yetta may have had other names.

Your gm's Hebrew name may be on her tombstone.

Also, if she was born outside of The U.S. than her passenger manifest will list her under the name she used prior to arriving here.

Good luck,

Sherri Bobish

Ellen, be careful with the use of Ita if you live along the Mexican border.  Ita is a common Spanish nickname,
--
Herschel Sheiness
San Antonio, Tx
jsheines@...

To add more possibilities to this growing list:

My German-Jewish mother's secular name was Jettchen (pronounced Yettchen), a diminutive of the nickname for Henrietta.  (I won't go into what her "Hebrew" name was, as this would only add confusion). 

However, no-one called her Jettchen; they used one of two other nicknames:  Hette and Hetti.

I always thought that a nice Hebrew name to go with these would be Hadassah.
--
Fredel Fruhman
Brooklyn, New York, USA

Jeffrey's reply illustrates a fact that we all need to keep in mind
with questions like Andrea's. Two related ones, in fact.

1. With the exception of common, well-known Biblical names such as
Sarah or Jacob, names do not translate, in the sense that when people
move from one country to another, especially when it involves crossing
an ocean, they often change their name, not only to the counterpart of
their original given name, e.g., Ya'akov to Jacob, but often to an
entirely different name. It's often been noted in JewishGen
discussions that men with a wide variety of names in Europe, not only
names beginning with S, became "Sam" in America. This has jokingly
been called "Samification."

2. Especially in cities, Jews' civil given names often did not
correspond in any predictable way to their ritual names. I'm a good
example of this; my Hebrew name is Yitzchak Yisrael, as is that of my
cousin Paul Plotz. We were both named after our grandfather Ike. Yes,
alliterative naming is common, but far from universal.

So attempts to deduce ritual names from civil names or vice versa,
ditto European names vs American names, are misguided at best. Even
when a civil name is Biblical in origin, it's not necessarily the
person's name by which they were called to the Torah or that appears
in Hebrew lettering on their gravestone. Think about it from the point
of view of how a person gets their given name or names. Typically,
their parents announce their name on a civil document and at a bris or
naming ceremony. Anyone who has cared for a newborn knows that it's
usually a hectic time, and making everything match up neatly is not
high on their list of priorities.

Dick Plotz
Providence RI USA

My grandfather had TB and died at Seaview Hospital on Staten Island in 1920. I'm pretty sure it was still operating into the 1940s.
Sherry Robinson, Albuquerque NM

Hello Andrea,  My great-grandmother's name was Heneh Yuteh, but somewhere along the line she started using the name Yetta Chana and even more often just Yetta.  My mother was name in honor of Yetta with the Hebrew name Yehudit, which in English became Judith. Incidentally, my mother had a strong bond with Yetta and often in later life referred to her as "Yitta" which seems to have a warmer tone to the name, at least to my ears.

Jeffrey Gee
Arizona 

Why don't you do a search in the JOWBR database for women named Yetta, and see what their Hebrew names were.  That way you could tally the Hebrew names to determine the most common.

Eric Bloch
Glendale, WI

Yetta and Yenta may be two different names, but I frequently see gravestones for people named Yetta with Yenta as their Hebrew name.
--
Peter Cohen
California

Is anyone familiar with how to locate records of German soldiers from the Franco-Prussian War (aka. Franco-German War, War of 1870) or any records whatsoever about particular regiments within the German army? 
I have a family birth record from 1871 from a village in the Nassau area of Hessen which indicates the following:
 
"Der Vater des Kindes ist zur Zeit in Frankreich als Fusilier des XI. Armeecorps 21. Division 42 Brigade 2 nassauisches Infanterie-Regiment Numero 88, 10 Compagnie"

"The child's father is currently in France as a Fusilier of the XI. Army Corps 21st Division 42 Brigade 2 Nassau Infantry Regiment Number 88, 10 Company

Thanks for your ideas and input.
Michael Rubin
Boston, MA  USA

Deborah Hospital is in Browns Mills, NJ and started out in 1922 as a TB sanitorium. They then began doing some of the first heart surgeries. You can google it.

Phil Goldfarb
Tulsa, OK
President, JGS of Tulsa

searching for Gitovich, Leet, Froug, Brom, 

Hi,

Many Holocaust related records in France are held at the departmental archives, not local archives.  Nice is in the Alpes-Maritime department, and their archive's website is https://www.departement06.fr/culture/archives-departementales-2797.html.

However, since Nice is a large city, you should also check with the city archive, https://archives.nicecotedazur.org/.  Both websites are in French.

USHMM has selected records from the Alpes-Maritime departmental archives.  I checked the finding aid.  We do not have the Police d'Estrangers records.

Megan Lewis, reference librarian
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

I know that my grandmother was thought to have tuberculosis in the 1940s and was sent to a sanitarium named Deborah.  We lived in the Bronx at the time.  That's all I know.

Robert Hanna

Researching:
CHANAN/HANAN/HANNE/HEINE/HINEY (Warsaw, Poland); BLUMENBLAT (Sarnaki, Poland); KARASIK, THOMASHOW/TOMOSHOFF, COHEN (Babruysk, Belarus); RUBINSTEIN, BUNDEROFF, PASTILNIK, NEMOYTEN, DISKIN (Minsk, Belarus).

As I understand it, statelessness implies that you have lost your
citizenship without being acknowledged as a citizen of another state,
wherever in Europe you were born, and citizenship is confirmed by a
passport. In my family's case, my parents destroyed the German
passports that had taken us to England after England declared war on
Germany in 1939. We were told that we were therefore not German, but
stateless. Looking at my father's internment record, I see that in any
case the family's German passports expired in 1940. Some months later,
in order to be able to emigrate further to USA, my mother was issued
with a travel document which acted only as a one-way passport and did
not confer British citizenship on her (a passport she never used). Only
after WW2 was over were we able to obtain British citizenship by
naturalisation.
Eva Lawrence
St Albans, UK.
--
Eva Lawrence
St Albans, UK.

My grandmother was from Nova Chortoriya in Western Ukraine.  There are a variety of spellings in English.  She pronounced it "Chorkh - tria".

 

Bruce Adelstein

ADELSTEIN (Bacau,Romania)
LEIBOVICI (Botosani, Romanian)
FRIEDMAN (Nova Chortioria, Ukraine)
GOCHMAN / SHAFER (Lyubar, Ukraine)
FINKELSTEIN (Kaunas, Lithuania)
RIFKOVICH (Kaunas, Lithuania)
TOIBB (Shepatovka, Ukraine)
FRANKEL (Zaslov, Ukraine)

 

--
Bruce Drake
Silver Spring, MD

Researching: DRACH, EBERT, KIMMEL, ZLOTNICK
Towns: Wojnilow, Kovel

Hi, 

I'm currently reading a book, The Spiral Shell, a memoire by Sandell Morse about Jews in France during WWII...how some were hidden, how some resisted, about some organizations which helped, etc. Although the book is not about Nice, perhaps you may find it of interest and it may provide some additional resources to you.

All the best! 
--
Karen Calmon Lukeman
KALMANOWITZ (Lyubcha and towns near Grodno, Vilna and Minsk)
GOLDSMITH (Bakshty and Ivje)
NASSER (Damascus)
BENBAJI (Damascus)
BALLAS (Damascus)

To flip the question around, my grandmother's English name was Yetta (born in NYC) and her Hebrew name was Sura Malka.  
--
Alan Moskowitz
New Jersey

I have seen a lot of citizenship problems in police papers found in the Czech National Archives. It seems it was a tricky situation.

Austro-Hungarian citizenship based on "home rights" in a certain community. The Austrian law -- No. 103 from December 1863 -- stated that a woman lost her original home rights and took on those of the husband with marriage. That explains the situation of Mr. Resnicoff's grandparents. Conversely, the U.S. probably did not automatically issue citizenship to the wife just because she married a U.S. citizen. According to the Austrian Law No. 105 of 3 December 1863, paragraph 19, on which Czechoslovak law later based, Mr. Weinberger should have been designated as having "home rights" in the place of his birth after becoming homeless due to his father's emigration. Why that didn't happen, I don't know. Unless it had to do with the change with the break-up of Austiria-Hungary in 1918.

In the 1920 Czechoslovak citizenship law, ethnically non-Czech and non-Slovak people with home rights on the territory of what became Czechoslovakia were supposed to opt for Czechoslovak or another/their former citizenship. If they failed to do so, then they could became stateless.

However, statelessness was only really problematic when it came time to travel outside the country. In day to day life, it made little difference. If Mr. Weinberger did not opt, then it was not a great problem in a practical sense during the Republic. All of that became a nasty problem, however, after the Sudetenland crisis, and I've seen many examples of the Czechoslovak authorities acting arbitrarily to the detriment of non ethnically Czech/Slovak, especially German-speaking people/citizens and Jews in that period (Sept. 1938-March 1939). Many Jews with Czechoslovak citizenship fled the Sudeten region in peril of their lives with the Nazi takeover and the central authorities were very reluctant to allow them in or to allow them to stay.

That became worse after March 1939 with the Nazi invasion. Whoever didn't have their papers in order and didn't get out somehow very soon, by May, June 1939 could be in real trouble. The bureaucratic hurdles made it almost impossible, and many ended up in the camps and murdered for that very reason.

Rick Pinard, Prague

Trying to decipher out the given Hebrew name of my great-aunt, Eleanor Walker. My best guess is that it should be נעכע

--
Steven Usdansky
usdanskys@...
Researching USDANSKY (Узданский): Turec, Kapyl, Klyetsk, Nyasvizh, Slutsk, Grosovo; SINIENSKI: Karelichy, Lyubcha, Navahrudak; NAMENWIRTH: Bobowa, Rzepiennik, Gorlice; SIGLER: "Minsk"