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Search Bureau for Missing Relatives
I sent a copy of the Page of Testimony written in 1955 by Abraham Dov
Landau to the Search Bureau and some weeks later, I received a response
that neither Sarah nor Abraham Landau were alive, but that their son,
Moshe Landau, lived in Holon. This led to the breakthrough that allowed
me to document the Mokotowskis of Otwock. In January 1985, Avi Landau,
son of Moshe and grandson of Abraham Dov and Sarah, came to the United
States on a business trip and brought with him the complete family tree
of his branch of the Mokotow family.
Holocaust Survivors
Friends and neighbors of Holocaust victims can often provide valuable
information. In 1985, more than 5,000 Holocaust survivors from
throughout the United States gathered in Philadelphia to remember the
Holocaust. The Jewish Genealogical Society of Philadelphia participated
in assisting survivors who were still trying to determine the fate of
their loved ones. At the event, I met a woman from New York who told me
the tragic story of how she had to abandon her six-year-old son on a
street in Warsaw during World War II and was looking for advice on how
to locate him today. Each survivor wore a name tag showing their name
and European town of origin. She was from Otwock. After discussing her
plight, I commented that I had relatives named Mokotowski from Otwock.
Her face lit up. "Do you mean Yitzhak Mokotowski?" she asked. "He and
his family were neighbors of mine." This meeting was a chance
encounter, but other exchanges have occurred on a more formal basis.
The National Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors located at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum consists of computerized information about
more than 35,000 Holocaust survivors living in the United States. While
the Museum will not release addresses of persons in this database, they
will forward letters.
German Records of Otwock
The archives at Yad Vashem has a number of documents relating to the
fate of the Jews of Otwock. No documents in this collection offered
information pertaining specifically to persons named Mokotowski;
however, one interesting artifact they hold from Otwock is a broadside
that was posted in Otwock shortly after the Germans occupied the town
demanding the Jews raise 100,000 zlotys. The poster named 15 persons
responsible for raising the money. One of the names was Tobias (Tuvia)
Mokotowski.
Vital Statistics Records
Although most things Jewish were destroyed in the Holocaust, government
records usually were not. It is a credit to the archivists of the world
that, despite the attempts by the human race over the centuries to
destroy each other, archivists have been conscientious in trying to
preserve the original source material of our history. Vital statistics
records for Poland, Hungary and Germany have been readily available to
the public for many years. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, other
countries have opened their doors to inquiries, most notably Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Slovakia. Other countries such as
Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Moldova are still in the process of
establishing links with the West for purposes of record research.
Inquiries to Romanian archives generally go unanswered.
Luck
People sometimes attribute successes to luck. In Holocaust research,
what seems like luck is often the product of persistence. If you try
many avenues of exploration, most will be unsuccessful; the few efforts
that do succeed, you may attribute to luck. I will end this case study
with two stories of luck that will describe how I linked the
Mokotowskis of Otwock to the main tree of the Mokotow family. The
veteran genealogist will see that, in truth, it was nothing more than
taking all the resources available to the researcher and piecing them
together to come to a successful conclusion.
The vast majority of information I amassed about the Mokotowskis of
Otwock came from the Otwock yizkor book and the recollections of living
persons who had secondary information. Response from the Polish State
Archives in Warsaw to my inquiry indicated that there were no vital
statistics records for Otwock from the 19th century; therefore, it was
not possible to go back in time on that path.It was while attending a
Jewish genealogical conference in Washington, D.C., that I located the
Otwock yizkor book and had translated for me the article "My Father
Eliezer Mokotowski." Toward the end of the seminar, while sitting in
the Hebraic division of the Library of Congress and convincing myself
that I had done everything possible at the library, I recalled that the
article stated that Eliezer Mokotowski had been born in Karczew. The Shtetl Finder, by Chester Cohen, lists about 1,200 towns in Eastern Europe
where Jews had lived in the nineteenth century. To give the book more
substance, the author included the names of individuals from the town
who were prepublication subscribers to books written in Yiddish during
that era. Under the description of Karczew was the entry: "In 1879,
advanced subscribers to the book Da'at
Moshe were. . .Yehosie Efraim
Mankitow [sic]. . ." Monkitow is the Yiddish pronunciation of Mokotow.
At that moment, I recalled that I had in my possession a marriage
record from the town of Karczew of a Mokotow.
Some months earlier, I had devoted a full week at the LDS (Mormon)
Family History Library in Salt Lake City searching the vital statistics
records of the Mokotow ancestral town of Warka, located about 50 miles
south of Otwock. After completing that task, in ever-widening
concentric circles, I searched records of adjacent towns. This included
Karczew, for which there was only one Mokotow record--a marriage
record.
I had brought my LDS findings to the seminar and opened my file folder
to the Karczew record. The name of the groom was Efraim, but the
previous word was not Yehosie. Then I realized the registrar had gotten
lazy. He had come to the end of the line when he wrote the groom's name
and, not having enough room, arbitrarily hyphenated the name. The
groom's name was "Szaja Efraim." According to the yizkor book article
about Eliezer Mokotowski, his father's name was Yehoshua; The Shtetl Finder noted a Yehosie Efraim Mankitow from Karczew; the marriage
record found at the LDS library had the name Szaja Efraim. Yehoshua,
Yehosie, Szaja: All these names are Yiddish and Hebrew variants of the
name Joshua. All the documents referred to the same man! The marriage
record had the name of the groom's parents. The father's name was Iczek
(Isaac). The progenitor of the Mokotow family had a son Isaac. Through
an incredible set of slender threads, I had linked the Mokotowskis of
Otwock to the Mokotow family tree. Sarah Landau's father, Eliezer
Mokotowski, was the son of Joshua Efraim Mokotow, son of Isaac Mokotow,
son of Tuvia David Mokotow.
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