Yichus

...photographs, and usually an honor roll, or yizkor list, of Holocaust dead...

...One of the senses I get in doing this research," he says, "is how easy it would have been for me not to exist...

...Kurzweil of Long Island, meanwhile, is writing a book that will "encourage readers to enter Jewish history through their own family history...

...You come from average stock...

...It's quite time consuming," he explains...

...As the narrative continues, its geographical scope widens...

...Why is the Mormon church interested in Jewish genealogy...

...A lot of material was preserved because of that...

...Marek Web, assistant archivist, cautions that in many shtetl folders, the records amount to little more than a few scraps of paper...

...With nine children to support, they ran a restaurant in their home, an all-purpose store in the village, and a cattle-trading business in the market...

...Accounts include those of a survivor who met Dicker's father in Auschwitz shortly before the latter's death, of another survivor who escaped the Gestapo seven times while rescuing Jews in Budapest, and of his mother who helped smuggle Slovakian Jews over the Hungarian border, but herself perished in the war...

...But for the Jewish people as a whole, the obsession that drove Haley, Rottenberg and Kurzweil back to their "roots" is part of a tradition that goes back as far as the Bible...

...And Jews themselves often anglicized their Hebrew and Yiddish first names (Moshe to Morris, FreidI to Frieda), making it more difficult to recognize records of their earlier lives in Europe...

...But it doesn't stop there, not when immigration records, ships' passenger lists, even European birth, death, and wedding records—not to mention tombstones—might add another name or date or a whole generation, to the family tree...

...He is also transcribing the resources of a number of American institutions, including the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati...

...In Israel, that's popular...

...explains Kurzweil, who also observes in a statement that is distinctly twentieth-century American, "I don't especially want to find out that my ancestors were illustrious...

...Unfortunately, the "road back" is strewn with pitfalls and, at the very least, entails painstaking work which will quickly discourage the merely curious...

...YIVO has an extensive library, including records of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), of landsmanshaftn, and of various European Jewish communities...

...We don't believe in ignoring our past misery, nor do we want to succumb to it...

...And weren't most European records destroyed in World War II...

...Many names have by now been Americanized, if not by the family itself then by immigration officials, who could rarely pronounce the sounds of East European tongues and almost never rendered them accurately into English...

...The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that during the Second-Temple period a special tribunal was responsible for the preservation of genealogical lists used to ensure the purity of the priestly line of Aaron's descendants, the Kohanim...

...Geographical names may also cause problems because many towns changed their names as often as they changed hands...

...That can be a clue in tracing back generations...

...Call it "roots...

...The 48 pages of The Dickers and Their Mates, a prototypical family history completed this year and illustrated with a map and family pictures, turns up no great rabbinical scholars or known descendants of any kind of royalty, but perhaps (as in Roots) that is its triumph...

...Dicker reports, have remarked on how much "closer to the family" they now feel...

...There is evidence, for example, that all Jews named Horowitz, Hurvitz, or some variation thereof, have ancestors from the Bohemian town of Horowitz...

...Steve Loewenstein, a member of the institute's staff, notes, "The Nazis were interested in Jewish genealogy, too...

...Likewise, 25-year-old Kurzweil compiled a yizkor fist of more than 75 names and numerous anonymous references to husbands, wives and children...

...Hillel, as we have noted, claimed he was a descendant of King David, as did Rabbi Yehudah Loew, the Maharal of Prague...

...But it is possible to circle the globe and still not find one's ancestors, for the simple reason that they might not have allowed their children's births to be recorded or census information taken—or they may have deliberately given misleading information to officials...

...Dr...

...Rottenberg, the author of Finding Our Fathers, a new how-to book that has already become a bible of sorts for Jewish ancestor hunters, has researched his own family tree back to Rashi, the great medieval scholar...

...Their motivation is a mixture of kibbud hamet, honoring the dead (in this case by remembering them), and the need to comprehend the collective ordeal in personal terms...

...The "last known relative" among Dan Rottenberg's European ancestors came to America in 1902...

...Within the family, reaction has been favorable, not only among the younger generation, but also among their parents who, Dr...

...Rabbi Malcolm H. Stern, genealogist for the American Jewish Archives, and author of Americans of Jewish Descent, makes the point that "Eastern Europe is a tough place to find this kind of information, because Jews were trying to avoid persecution and life-long military duty...

...Herman Dicker, a librarian who handles many genealogical inquiries at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City, has taken a similar approach to his own family tree...

...They were interested in knowing who had Jewish ancestry...

...You're proud of the people who struggled and that you're here in America, and you're part of their success," says Dr...

...Is the interest in ethnic genealogy merely a fad, fated to last no longer than Bicentennial nostalgia about ethnic "roots," or the popularity of the book and television series of that name...

...What Alex Haley did for his own family, and thereby for black history, Rottenberg, Kurzweil, and an increasing number of family chroniclers are doing for theirs, and thus for their fellow Jews...

...The Jewish people believe in the tradition of remembering," Herman Dicker says...

...Well, what's Jewish royalty...

...I want to find out who my ancestors were...

...Most large public libraries have genealogy rooms with such useful material as pre-telephone-age city directories, census records, and death books that are put out every year...

...The names Jews took came from places (Sulzberger = from Sulzberg), animals (Alder = eagles), physical traits (Klein = small), trades (Schneider = tailor), acronyms (Katz = kohen tzeddek), etc...

...Even social scientists find the old folks important enough as sources to visit nursing homes and golden-age clubs where rusty memories can be prodded for the tape recordings and videotapes that will be called history...

...But why go through all the American records if you want to know about your great aunt in the Ukraine...

...Two daughters ran off to America...

...Among the younger researchers whose families presumably were spared by turn-of-the-century, or earlier, immigration to America, a similar preoccupation—almost a morbid fascination—manifests itself in a search for distant relatives who stayed behind and perished...

...One such is the Leo Baeck Institute, a New York institution devoted to the history of German Jewry...

...Two sons and two sons-in-law were drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. One son, David, did not return...

...But another custom that has not survived in the new world can be a hindrance...

...Rottenberg of Philadelphia just now is trying to prove descent from Meir Ben Baruch of Rothenberg, a thirteenth-century rabbi who died in prison rather than allow his fellow Jews to pay ransom...

...Going back only as far as 1828 (but noting that the Dickers are Levites), the booklet describes the life of Dicker's grandparents, the late Zalman and Branza Dicker, in the Ruthenian village of Jasina...

...Danny Siegel, yet another Jewish writer in search of his ancestors, calls it "Mishpochol-ogy...

...Priestly descent is usually recorded on tombstones...

...Only 10 communities have extensive files, and even then, unless one's ancestor was "of a certain standing in a community— political, cultural, religious—the name probably will not appear in the records or the literature...

...As Rottenberg himself admits, not all Jews with the same name are related...

...Kurzweil and Steven Siegel recently started Toldot, a Journal of Jewish Genealogy...

...We want to remember how we overcame it...

...Nor do names with geographical origins necessarily simplify the search...

...In non-Jewish families, the big thing was always royalty...

...we believe in the validity of it," explains Kahn...

...When a person was seriously ill, in many Jewish families his or her name would be changed in hopes of fooling the Angel of Death...

...Well, we are trying to link up all of the people who have lived on earth," says Kahn, outlining the church's belief in "the Eternal Family" and "baptism of ancestors by proxy...

...and if the self-appointed historian is ambitious, a book may be printed that will preserve for posterity family stories, Jane Saladof, an assistant in the Office of Public Administration of the Jewish Theological Seminary, has published in the Long Island Press and the Bergen Record...

...You must know who you are researching and where you are researching before you can begin to comb through the surviving records that are scattered among the original town or state archives, Israeli research centers, and libraries in this country which specialize in European-Jewish history...

...If you settled in Frankfurt, they would call you Simon of Wert-heim...

...And, after seven years of research, he is pleased to have identified not only his great-great-great-grandfather, Chaim Yosef Gottlieb, the Strop-kover Rebbe, but also "a man who played the fiddle at my grandparents' wedding...

...and teachers, accountants, and college students scattered elsewhere in the country...

...Why make the effort...

...Or one could go to the nearest branch library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormon church...

...The American records often will give towns of origin, dates of birth, and most important, names of parents...

...I even refused to do my wife's family...

...Is he satisfied...

...On the other hand, with the flowering of interest in the subject, help in a variety of forms has become available to those prepared to make the attempt...

...However, Dr...

...In many families, it won't last even that long...

...I'm not about to be the one to reject all this, to be the end of the line...

...It is this tradition which is embodied in the Passover Seder...

...Dicker, a native of Czechoslovakia who studied in a Berlin rabbinical seminary until forced to flee to Switzerland in 1936, then emigrated to America in 1938...

...This happened slightly later in Eastern Europe...

...But on a much wider scale, from ancient to modern times, Jewish families (especially rabbinic families) have maintained elaborate family trees...

...Whether or not the Angel was confused, the researcher will be quite befuddled to find in the family tree a Ya'akov born in 1860 who never died—at least not on any record—and a Chayim dead years later but never officially born...

...In 1945, Irving Martin Preschel, a relative by marriage, was killed while serving with the U.S...

...But that does not mean they should start their search there...

...Hillel, the ancient sage...

...There, the concern with toldot (lineage) is pervasive, sometimes taking up whole chapters of the text...

...Most of this material is American rather than European, but, as Frank Bradley of the New York Public Library's Genealogy Room, explains, "What we have is the technique, the know-how, that enables the seeker to proceed from the known to the unknown...

...may be all there is to go on...

...Rabbis...

...Box 126, Flushing, N.Y...

...Presumably, if the Angel was coming for Ya'akov he would not want to take someone named Chayim (life...

...Included are such useful tidbits as how to get census returns and ships' passenger lists from the National Archives, naturalization records from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and copies of birth, death, and wedding certificates from the few foreign governments that will provide them, usually for a fee...

...Finally, the family "arrives" in present-day America: doctors, dentists, lawyers, and a professor of Oriental history in New York...

...Usually the name of a town was not taken until a person lived somewhere else," explains Steve Loewenstein...

...The largest toll, of course, was taken by the Holocaust...

...Because most European Jews named their children after dead relatives (the Sephardim honor the living), first names tend to repeat in family trees...

...Jews don't have to accept the church's teachings to use the microfilms, which are sent to branch libraries upon request...

...Many Western European Jews did not have family names until they were emancipated by Napoleon in 1808...

...11367) that gives advice free of charge, but will not do anyone's research, not even for pay...

...And when the identifiable dead, Jews with your name, your ancestors, your ancestors' traditions, begin to outnumber your family in America, what happened a generation ago in Europe becomes all too immediate...

...Novices would do well to consult the Rottenberg book, which provides general guidelines and much specific information...

...If the Dicker study seems preoccupied, almost overwhelmed, by the Holocaust, it is all the more accurate as a reflection of twentieth-century Jewish history...

...In 1948, Judah Spin-del, a cousin, was killed in Israel's War of Independence...

...son of...

...He plans to visit Poland, the world of his greatgrandfathers, to ply his last-surviving relative there for family information...

...Precise lines trace the generations linking Adam to Noah to Abraham to Ruth to David and beyond...

...Kurzweil also operates a Jewish Genealogy Research Service (P.O...

...Significantly, the Dicker family-history project was launched at just such a Seder, when several brothers, European-born and of middle age, asked themselves how they could pass on to their children a family heritage already somewhat obscured by historical events, the Holocaust in particular...

...If eventually, after years of probing, a family historian makes his way back to the eighteenth century, say, the first name and "ben...

...Speaking of all his forebears, the workmen as well as the scholars, he says, "Through their struggle and their faith they survived as Jews...

...Every generation, the Haggadah tells us, must regard itself as having once been enslaved in Egypt, then redeemed...

...Hitters Lexicon and the Columbia-Lippincott Gazetteer of the World are among the volumes recommended when cities or shtetlach seem to disappear from the map...

...Jasina (now in the Soviet Union) was near the Galician border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and, according to a relative, Zalman Dicker successfully appealed to the court of Emperor Franz Joseph when he was accused unjustly of smuggling...

...Some call it roots, by us it's Yichus Jane Saladof Ask Dan Rottenberg or Arthur Kurzweil what's new, and chances are he'll tell you what's old: old photographs, old documents, the old shtetlach where each has, figuratively speaking, dug up old relatives from old graves...

...the family never learned where or when he was killed...

...Another major repository for Jewish documents from Europe is the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, also in New York City...

...Still more data can be found, of course, in Israel, where Yad Vashem and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, both in Jerusalem, have extensive collections of documents, including yizkor books commemorating Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust...

...Call it genealogy...

...Throughout the narrative, the family travels...

...If an individual believes there's no validity in this, that's fine...

...Family names, the most obvious leads, pose many problems...

...As late as the sixth century, the encyclopedia continues, a Kohen who wished to protect the future of his line would marry only his sister's daughters...

...Army in Europe...

...There are also a tax official, a dean of Jewish studies, a kibbutznik in Israel, and more relatives in Argentina and France...

...It is easier to identify with a martyred second cousin, martyred because his grandfather happened to stay in Europe when your own grandfather came to America, than with six million...

...and thus, in effect, King David, to whom Hillel himself traced his ancestry...

...Personal gratification is not the only answer...

...For himself, he adds, "You know, at last, what makes you tick...

...It gives me a very personal sense of Jewish history," he says in dramatic understatement...

...In 12 years of research on his family tree, the native-born 32-year-old journalist found at least 58 relatives who were slaughtered during the years surrounding his birth...

...They think we have files with pictures of each family," he reports, advising that if a person really wants to dig up his past, "he has to go where Alex Haley went, back to the ancestral home...

...Sooner or later, the tree is charted on paper...

...No one would call you Wertheimer in Wertheim itself...

...In Israel, the Jerusalem Post reports on a new organization determined not merely to collect family data from every Jew in the world, but also to make genealogy as popular as archaeology...

...a first oboist with the Denver Symphony...

...a businessman in California...

...Their grandchildren plead for the very same stories that their children all too often refused to hear: stories about poverty and pogroms, about traditions and superstitions, about second-cousins-once-removed who never came to America...

...You're proud of the many...

...As a result, old people (especially those who would have called it yichus) are in demand...

...Whether in flight from the Nazis or in search of a better life, the list of places they passed through belies any suggestion that the "wandering Jew" is a mere literary myth...

...There is also the age-old imperative inherent in being a Jew: to know who you are and where you come from...

...Finding Our Fathers includes an index to approximately 8000 Jewish names which offers some clues but little hard evidence for individual families...

...Jeff Kahn, director of the church's Jewish genealogy division in Salt Lake City, has microfilmed Jewish records in Hungary and several other European countries where Jewish institutions do not have easy access...

...An honor roll lists the author's parents, Joshua and Sara Dicker, among 21 relatives murdered by the Nazis...

...Clearly, tracing one's lineage can involve years of work if taken seriously...

...People go away discouraged...

...More than this, he feels strengthened in his determination to continue the family—and Jewish—chain that Hitler tried so hard to break...

...The deep personal meaning which Jews like Kurzweil have derived from their search could well serve as an incentive to others to make similar efforts...

...The custom seems to have gone out of vogue, but the tradition of the Kohanim and the Levi'im (Levites, a whole tribe charged in ancient times with assisting the priests in the conduct of the Temple cult) still surfaces every time a Jew identified as a Kohen or Levi is called to the Torah...

...Certain governments, such as that of the Soviet Union, will almost certainly not be helpful, but may collect a fee anyway...