Nu? What's New? Vol. 20 No. 2

Underlined words are links to sites with additional information.

New Lists in the JDC Archives Names Index

The Joint Distribution Committee Archives has completed the indexing of a set of lists from the immediate post-World War II era, “Departures from Europe, 1947–1953.” The lists are memoranda regularly issued by the JDC Emigration Service of individuals who received assistance to emigrate from Europe to North and South America, Palestine/Israel, Australia, and South Africa or to resettle elsewhere in Europe. Information included on the lists details the originating JDC office, date, destination, and ship name where relevant; the lists include approximately 12,000 names. The JDC Archives indexing volunteers are currently working on a set of lists of parcels sent to survivors in Europe from family and friends in Palestine via JDC’s Jerusalem office. The list of such parcels to Poland is available; lists of parcels to countries in western Europe will be added as they are completed.

For a complete inventory of lists and cards that have been indexed, see the “Lists in the Names Index” page of the JDC Archives website at http://archives.jdc.org/our-collections/ names-index/lists-in-the-names-index/. The Names Index can be searched at http://names.jdc.org. The list now contains more than 500,000 names.

Plans to Map 1,500 Jewish Cemeteries in Five European Countries

Jewish Heritage Europe reports that the European Union has awarded a grant of €800,000 to the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative (ESJF) to map and survey at least 1,500 Jewish cemeteries in five countries in eastern Europe: Greece, Lithuania, Moldova, Slovakia and Ukraine. The ESJF statement said the project “is to fully survey all these sites, provide them with physical protection and to regularly monitor their condition. Moreover, the project will create ready-made and fully-costed construction models leading to physical-protection projects in the coming years.” It noted that the survey work will begin this month on the project.

The ESJF is a German-based international non-profit foundation that has received annual funding from the government of the Federal Republic of Germany since its foundation in 2015. To date it has erected fences or other enclosures to protect more than 120 Jewish cemeteries in seven central and eastern European countries, mostly in the towns and villages where Jewish communities were destroyed in the Shoah.

Additional information can be found at https://tinyurl.com/JHEEJSFGrant.

Website Provides Statistics on the Growth of Genealogy Industry

For the past seven years, the website Genea-Musings has presented statistics about the growth of the genealogy industry. There is a total of 24 different companies analyzed including Ancestry, BillionGraves, FamilySearch, FindAGrave, FindMyPast, Geni and MyHeritage.

For example, it notes that for one of the nine statistics about Ancestry, the company now has about 3 million paid subscribers compared to 2.7 million at the beginning of 2018. For FamilySearch, there are 11 statistics including 122 million indexed records added in 2018. For MyHeritage, four statistics including 9.50 billion historical records at the end of 2018 compared to 8.43 billion at the end of 2017.

The complete report can be found at https://tinyurl.com/GenealogyBenchmarks.

ITS Discovers 2,000 photos of Dachau Concentration Camp Survivors

The International Tracing Service announced on its Facebook page that it discovered a long-unnoticed file that contains photos of some 2,000 Dachau concentration camp survivors. The photos were created when the victims of Nazi persecution were required to submit pictures of themselves after their liberation to obtain certificates of their imprisonment. These gave them a means of proving their concentration camp custody and applying for aid.

ITS has digitized the file and indexed it. They plan to publish it online in the spring of 2019.

New Book: Unbroken Chain – Third Edition – Volume 4 Published

Volume 4 (of an anticipated five volumes) of The Unbroken Chain—Third Edition has been published. Author Neil Rosenstein has devoted the past 27 years to updating and improving his landmark work, The Unbroken Chain, and now is in the process of publishing its Third Edition. The new edition is a major improvement to the previous edition both in number of persons and quality of the work.

Second Edition (1990) Third Edition (2017/18)
Two volumes, 1,350 pages Five volumes, 4,500 pages
20,000 names 42,000 names
Surname-only index Full name index
No illustrations 300 illustrations (Vol 1 alone)
1,600 footnotes 1,000 footnotes (Vol. 1 alone)
Up to 16 generations Up to 22 generations

The Unbroken Chain documents the descendants of Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (MaHaRaM) of Padua (1482–1565) and Rabbi Judah Lowe (MaHaRaL) of Prague through 22 generations. Among the descendants of these two Torah giants are numerous famous persons including Martin Buber, Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, Karl Marx, Moses and Felix Mendelssohn, Yehudi Menuhin, Moses Montefiore, Helena Rubinstein and Judge Judy Sheindlin. A high proportion of genealogies are those of the leading Hassidic dynasties: Levi Isaac of Berdichev, Halberstam, Horowitz, Rabinowitz, Ro¬ke¬ach, Shapiro, Spira, Teitelbaum, Twersky and others.

Ordering information for any of the four volumes is at http://www.avotaynu.com/books/ UnbrokenChain-1.html. The site includes a complete list of names for each of the four volumes, as well as their Tables of Contents.

Advisory Opinion States “Right to Be Forgotten” Is Not Extraterritorial

Jan Meisels Allen, Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee, reports that the European Court of Justice advocate general (advisor) announced an advisory opinion in the case between Google and the French Data Regulator, CNIL on whether the CNIL determination on “right to be forgotten” is global. The advisory decision is that Google can limit the “right to be forgotten” to internet searches in the European Union, therefore, the advisory opinion finds for Google and not extraterritoriality.

The Advocate General Szpunar said, “The fundamental right to be forgotten must be balanced against other fundamental rights, such as the right to data protection and the right to privacy, as well as the legitimate public interest in accessing the information sought.” In certain situations, a search engine operator may be required to delist at the worldwide level, but the case before the court now does not justify this.

Meisels Allen notes that the decision is critical in the fight between privacy and freedom of speech and press. The full court decision will be made later this year. Today’s opinion is not binding by the Court, although in many cases, but not all, the Court does follow the advocate general’s advice.

Additional information can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FTBF0119.

Fulton History Site Now Has Digitized 44 Million Newspaper Pages
Exactly five years ago, Nu? What’s New? reported that the Fulton History site at http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html had digitized and indexed 26 million newspaper pages, primarily from New York State. The number of pages now at the site has grown to more than 44 million. Of greatest interest to Jewish genealogists will be such newspapers as the Brooklyn Eagle, Long Island Daily Press and Long Island Star Journal. The site now includes some newspapers from Alabama, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington.

The site is especially valuable to genealogists with roots in New York City and environs. There are 378 references to persons named Mokotoff including the fact that I made Eagle Scout in 1953, family wedding announcements, and numerous news items about my father’s first cousin, Max, the black sheep of the family, whom I describe to others as having been married six times—four times consecutively and twice concurrently.

FamilySearch Adds More Than 600K Records This Week

A list of recent additions to FamilySearch, more than 600,000 indexed records, can be found at https://tinyurl.com/FamilySearch010719. This site provides direct links to the individual collections. Those identified with a dagger (†) are Christian-only records. They include records from Chile(†), Czech Republic(†), Germany(†), Hungary, South Africa, and Ohio in the United States. Almost 200,00 digital images were also added from BillionGraves.

Most notable to persons researching their Jewish family history is the addition of 114,000 index records to the Hungary Civil Registration (1895–1980) collection.

Note that at the website, announced collections may not be complete for the dates specified and will be added at some later date. Also note that counts shown in the announcement are the number added, not the total number available in the collection, which can be greater.

Article on 1890 U.S. Census Substitutes

Almost all of the documents of the 1890 U.S. census were destroyed by fires in 1896 and 1921. Family History Daily has published an article titled “The 1890 Census Was Lost Forever, but These Records Can Help You Fill the Gap” which identifies substitute record collections that might provide the information sought in the destroyed census. It notes that if you are an Ancestry subscriber, the company has compiled a record collection called the “1890 Census Substitute,” which is a set of hundreds of databases containing records from 1885 to 1895.

Other potential sources are:
• 1890 Veterans Schedule
• State and Federal Censuses from 1885 to 1895
• City and County Directories from the 1880s and 1890s

The article can be found at https://familyhistorydaily.com/genealogy-help- and-how-to/1890-census-gap/.

Last Chance to Submit Presentation Proposals for Cleveland Conference

Time is running out for submitting proposals for presentations at the 39th Annual IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy to be held in Cleveland, Ohio, July 28 through August 2. The Call for Submissions will close at midnight, Sunday, January 20.

The major tracks for the conference include:
• The Shoah
• Jews in the Heartland of America
• Getting Started in Genealogy
• Cleveland Area Resources for Genealogy
• DNA: What It Is and How It Can Help You

Presentations on other topics are encouraged, as well.

For information on how to submit a proposal, go to the conference website at http://www.iajgs2019.org and click on the Speakers tab. Accepted speakers will be notified in March.

Make sure the members of your family who were murdered in the Holocaust are not forgotten. Submit a Page of Testimony in thier memory to The Shoah Victims' Name Recovefr Project. Go to http://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en. Click the words "Submit Pages of Testimony Online" or “Download Page of Testimony Forms.”

Pages of Testimony are special forms created by Yad Vashem to restore the personal identities and to record the brief life stories of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices. These one-page forms, containing the names, biographical details and, when available, photographs, of each individual victim are essentially symbolic "tombstones". Since its inception Yad Vashem has worked tirelessly to fulfill our moral imperative to remember every single victim as a human being, and not merely a number. To date there are some two million seven hundred thousand names recorded on Pages of Testimony, written in more than twenty languages, stored for perpetuity in the circular repository around the outer edge of the Hall of Names. Many shelves remain empty bearing witness to the millions of individuals who have yet to be memorialized.