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A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Forum, by Dr. Chanan Rapaport

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Dr. Rapaport wrote, “I was searching for the origins of a known reputable Ashkenazi family, and I found them”.

About three years ago I was informed by my close friend, the late Mrs. Mathilde Tagger, about a book (written in Catalan) titled “Jewish Doctors in Majorca During the Middle Ages“. There on page 131, was a lawsuit lodged in 1345 by the court doctor ….”

 

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Dr. Chanan Rapaport, born in 1928, served as an officer in the underground of the Hagana during Israel’s War of Independence. When the war ended, he studied psychology and sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and thereafter continued his studies in the United States. Upon earning his degree as a Doctor of Clinical Psychology he completed a post doctorate in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and research.

Dr. Rapaport returned home to Israel as Chairman and Chief Scientist of the “Henrietta Szold Institute” – the national institute for the research in behavioral sciences. He held that position from 1965 to 1982.

During those years Dr. Rapaport additionally was an advisor on social matters to two Prime Ministers: Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin. He served as the psychology advisor to the Minister of Education and Culture and the head of all research at the Ministry of Education and Culture. Since the passing of Dr. Paul Jacobi, the renowned genealogist, he has been faithful to his scientific legacy.

Today he is the director of the Center for the Study of the Rapaport Family and a member of the board of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and Paul Jacobi Center of the National Library of Israel.

Chronicling America: Aaron Tissenbaum 1903, by Jeffrey Knisbacher

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Sometime late last year I was alerted to or offered a new app for my Android Samsung Galaxy 3 cellphone called Old News USA. I downloaded it and promptly forgot about it. A week ago I happened to notice the icon for it, a US map seemingly covered in newsprint with the word “News” in the center, and decided to try it out with one of my family surnames where I knew that Aaron Samuel TISSENBAUM, my gggrandfather, had arrived in Baltimore in 1900 (June 16 on the Dresden and died in Baltimore on June 6, 1907, just under seven years later). To my surprise I got two hits, one for 1903 in Baltimore from a German language newspaper I had never heard of, Der Deutsche Correspondent. It turns out that this was an important paper in its day, published from 1841-1918, when anti-German feeling at the end of WWI doomed it. See, for instance, the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Deutsche_Correspondent. The second hit was from a 1921 issue of the New York Herald, with a mysterious notation at the bottom: “tissenbaum not found in OCR text”. Since I knew this TISSENBAUM could not be Aaron, I initially ignored that hit but will come back to it below since it relates to an even more important find, the Library of Congress (LoC) digitized newspaper collection “Chronicling America.”

When I clicked on the 1903 find, it brought up a dense eight-column page of Gothic newsprint, with perhaps 70 or 80 lines of text in each column and nothing to indicate where my TISSENBAUM find was. (In other searches conducted since then, the search item is highlighted in green.) On the small cell phone screen, the full page was unreadable so I tried zooming in, but was put off by a seemingly endless process of moving the zoom window around to find what I was looking for, and what was supposed to be there, without success. So I moved to Plan B: download the app on my computer with its much more manageable screen size. But that turned out to be a dud, too. The app has, apparently, only been written for Android cell phones and tablets! See: http://revgenea.com/ and http://revgenea.com/features/.

Having learned that Revgenea’s app was apparently not available for my HP PC, I then moved to Plan C: find another source for these old newspapers. The first one that came up was Newspapers.com and I did, indeed, find Der Deutsche Correspondent there: https://newspapers.com/title_4198/der_deutsche_correspondent/. This site has the issues arranged by year, but you cannot search all years simultaneously. No matter, I already knew that the year I wanted was 1903. Starting from 1841, newspapers.com then skipped various early years before seeming to cover most later years in sequence. But then another gotcha: as I scrolled down to 1900, I found that the next year listed was 1904—they didn’t have the 1903 issue that Revgenea had.

Frustrated, but determined not to give up, I then noticed something at the bottom of the Old News USA search screen that I had missed before when I was totally absorbed in searching for my gggfather. There was this notice: “This app makes it easy to find interesting articles in the Chronicling America collection of historic newspapers.” I had never heard of “Chronicling America” before, and had assumed that Old News had digitized this collection, wherever it originated, and made it available to the user. But lo and behold, not so! That collection was created and digitized through the auspices of the United States Library of Congress (LoC) which makes it freely available to anyone, including software developers, so long as they attribute the source. Of course Old News did not provide a link to the Library of Congress site because, as it turns out, it is perfectly possible to do all your searches directly from there. What Revgenea has done is merely to provide a front end to the LoC collection, albeit a very nice one, that makes it very easy to manage and save your searches. For the millions of users who mainly or exclusively use Android devices for their computing needs (especially if they have a larger screen tablet), Old News USA is a very acceptable solution, but not necessarily the final one as I will explain below.

The Chronicling America web site at: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.  is both visually attractive and easy to use. At the top you have a search bar very similar to what Old News USA gives you, with a choice of viewing all states at one time or limiting your search to a particular one, and searching over the entire date range of 1789-1924 or limiting the time to any shorter period you choose. The bar below the search bar provides four more choices on the right: Print, Subscribe, Share/Save, Give Feedback. The first and last of these are self-explanatory. The Subscribe option allows you to be notified by email or RSS feed as new titles are added to the collection. The Share/Save option allows you to share your find via several of the most common social networking apps, or directly email it to someone, or save it to your Website or blog. On the left side of this bar is the current total of pages available–as of March 29, 2107: 11,790,560.

Most of the page below these two bars is devoted to showing large thumbnails of three pages from historic newspapers of exactly 100 years ago, which, of course, you can zoom in on to read at your leisure. A very nice touch! Other options at the left side of the screen lead you to more information about the collection. From some of these you learn that the site was created as a joint venture between the United States National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the LoC. Grants are applied for by state institutions to participate in the project: http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/awards/index.html  “In 2004, the NEH announced guidelines for annual cycles of two-year [National Digital Newspaper Program] NDNP awards to enhance the study of American history. These awards enable cultural heritage institutions to join the NDNP for the purpose of selecting, digitizing, and delivering to the LC approximately 100,000 newspaper pages per award. Following a competitive application process, the NEH made its first awards in 2005. No awards were issued in 2006. The application process resumed in 2007, and since that time the NEH has annually solicited proposals for both initial awards to new institutions as well as continuing awards to returning partners.”

The institution that provided the digitizing of the early Maryland newspapers that appeared in my search was the University of Maryland at College Park. Considered a state partner of the NEH, it received a new grant in 2016. Currently 43 states and one territory are represented with the goal being to have early newspapers from all 50 states. There are now over 2,000 newspapers in the collection, and the digitization project is to be expanded to cover newspapers from 1690-1963.

Back to Aaron TISSENBAUM. It turns out that he was one of five incorporators of the Baltimore Hebrew Colonial Association, that was later supported by Baron de Hirsch. This was one of several attempts to set up Jewish agricultural colonies in the U.S.  See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Colonization_Association. The Jewish name for the Baltimore colony was “Ya’azor Town” (from the Hebrew ya’azor ‘God will help’), but at the time it was colloquially referred to as “Jew Town” and lasted up until the early 1940s. See the Baltimore Sun article from 2008: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2008-03-30/news/0803300241_1_commune-colonial-society-shtetl. Until this find, we knew very little about Aaron apart from the story that he had once passed a child out the window of a building to safety during the great Baltimore fire of 1904 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Baltimore_Fire) and that he had a dairy farm in Ya’azor Town with a horse named Daisy.

My initial find of this information was via the Android-only app Old News USA. For me its most useful feature was a .pdf download option, the fourth of five options at the right of the search bar. If you open the .pdf file in Microsoft’s Edge browser you can select text for copying and pasting just as you would in a word processor document. For my document, where the original was in the old Gothic German script, the pasting of the relevant text into my word processor (Libre Office Writer) came with a surprise: the pasted text came out in a Roman script, Liberation Serif. Here is the way MS Edge transcribed the selection along with my translation of it:

Die ”Hebrew Colonial Association” wurde ohne Aktienkapital von Harry Weinstein, Abraham Weinstein, Max Weinstein, Tobias Goodman u. Aaron Tissenbaum incorporirt.

Translation: “The Hebrew Colonial Association was incorporated without share capital by Harry Weinstein, Abraham Weinstein, Max Weinstein, Tobias Goodman and Aaron Tissenbaum.”

I will not go into further detail of the Android app since the Chronicling America site also provides the .pdf option for viewing or saving, as well as a large .jp2 format. Furthermore it provides a highlighting of the search term, where, in this case, at least, Old News USA did not. That highlighting also made it easy to find the second hit for TISSENBAUM, the one I mentioned at the beginning with the mysterious notation: “tissenbaum not found in OCR text.”  And here on the LoC site was additional information that would explain the comment. In addition to the .pdf and .jp2 formats, the LoC site also has a Text option, based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR is a technique for recognizing and discriminating the individual characters or words in a photographed or scanned image of text, so that the text can be searched by computer. In the second hit that I first got for “TISSENBAUM,”  from the New York Herald of October 3, 1921, p. 18, in the first column under Miscellaneous Leases was this text (obtained by OCR, but only provided on the Chronicling America site):

  1. M. Hirsch & Co. leased floors as
    follows:’ For Cross & Brown in 38-42 |
    Fast Twenty-ninth street to Cohn &
    Holt, in 32 Kast Thlrty-tirst street to
    the Smart Set Dress Company, in 144
    West Twenty-seventh street to Haus- j
    man & Brickman, in 44-50 tCast Thirty- j
    second street to Semmel, Bash & Tissenbaum.

I know of a whole family of NewYork TISSENBAUMs who are distant cousins. But from the last name alone in the item above there is no way to tell which specific person is referred to. Possibly the only way to find out (unless someone alive today remembers that company name) would be to search New York incorporation records. In any case this is not a major preoccupation for me, but this citation provides the explanation for the OCR comment on the Old News hit for the same item.

OCR is rarely perfect depending on the size and condition of the original image, spelling variations, punctuation marks, the discriminatory power of the software, etc. In the text above several errors are immediately obvious. In the third line “Fast” should be “East”, with E and F being hard to discriminate. Similarly in the next line “Kast” should be “East” and “Thirty-tirst” is likely “Thirty-first”. It would also appear that there were seven (7) previous Leases discussed under the Miscellaneous Leases heading on the page. But when I checked the original image, there was no numbering of the various leases listed. Most likely the number “8” here at the beginning of the citation is a misreading of a capital S, so that the leasing firm was S.M. Hirsch & Co. As shown above TISSENBAUM is correctly identified, but when I checked the original page image, the search term was hyphenated and spread over two lines: ”Tis-senbaum”. The OCR search algorithm used by Old News could not make the connection; apparently the LoC software used a stronger algorithm that could!

The bottom line here is that the Chronicling America collection of digitized early American newspapers is a valuable new resource. If you have ancestors who were in the United States between 1789 and 1924, it is definitely worth looking into. But even if you use the user-friendly and intuitive Old News USA interface to access it, be sure to go back and check with the LoC website so that nothing is missed.

The original .pdf page from Friday, May 22, 1903 of Der Deutsche Correspondent is shown below.

 

 

 

Jeffrey (Yitzkhaq Moshe) KNISBACHER was born in 1941, Baltimore, Maryland of Galician descent on his father’s side and Ukrainian, on my mother’s. His education includes a BA from Johns Hopkins University, BHL from Baltimore Hebrew College, MA and PhD from Brown University.

He has worked at the IBM Research Center, University of Pittsburgh, and as a teacher and analyst for the US government. Jeffrey has published widely.

 

Zefat, 16th and 17th Century CE Epitaphs from the Jewish Cemetery, by Yosef Stepansky

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In loving memory of my mother, Batsheva Friedman Stepansky z”l, whose forefathers arrived in Zefat and Tiberias 200 years ago and are buried in their ancient cemeteries

 

Introduction

In recent years a large concentration of gravestones bearing Hebrew epitaphs from the 16th and 17th centuries CE has been exposed in the ancient cemetery of Zefat, Among them are the gravestones of prominent Rabbis, Torah Academy and community leaders; well-known women (such as Rachel Ha-Ashkenazit Iberlin and Donia Reyna, the sister of Rabbi Chaim Vital); disciples of Rabbi Isaac Luria (“Ha-ARI”); as well as several until-now unknown personalities. Some of the gravestones are of famous Rabbis and personalities whose bones were brought to Israel from abroad, several of which belong to the well-known Nassi and Benvenisti families, possibly relatives of Dona Gracia. To date (2018) some fifty gravestones (some only partially preserved) have been exposed, and that is so far the largest group of ancient Hebrew epitaphs that may be observed in situ at one site in Israel. Stylistically similar epitaphs can be found in the Jewish cemeteries in Istanbul (Kushta) and Salonika, the two largest and most important Jewish centers in the Ottoman Empire during that time.

Since 2010 the southernmost part of the old cemetery of Zefat  (Fig. 1 above; map ref. 24615/76365), seemingly the most ancient part of the cemetery, has been scrutinized in order to document and organize the information inscribed on the oldest of the gravestones found in this area. This is in the wake of and parallel with cleaning-up and preservation work conducted in this area under the auspices of the Zefat religious council. The documentation (readings of the epitaphs, photography and text-writing) is voluntarily being done by archaeologist Y. Stepansky and former cemetery caretaker E. Ben-Tovim, within the framework of the Association for the Preservation and Heritage of Zefat and on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). They have had the constant assistance of Prof. Y. Ben-Naeh and Dr. E. Davidson (epigraphical and historical consultation and editing). Prof. Yitzchak Kerem, Prof. E. Reiner, the late Dr. D. Amit, Z. Sehayek, Z. Erlich; other prominent historians and archaeologists were also occasionally consulted. Dr. E. Engel (paleographic analysis of the ‘Rabanit  Gracia’ epitaph); Rabbi M. Stepansky (translator of the epitaph of Meir Benveniste); Dr. Y. Shivtiel (Zefat Academic College) Dr. M. Souroujon and Y. Saness (descendents of deceased members of the Zefat cemetery ‘community’), and Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists D. Avshalom-Gorni, A. Hillman and H. Bron (antiquities inspection) have also all been very helpful in promoting this project. The IAA Conservation Department, Education Department and the Eastern Galilee and Golan District, together with the Municipality of Zefat, livnot u’lehebanot Institute, Ministry of Housing and residents of Zefat – are all partners in the project for the preservation of Zefat.

to access the complete article please download it here:

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Bio:

Yosef Stepansky is a field archaeologist (M.A., Tel Aviv U.) working for or with the Israel Antiquities Authority since 1979; he is a resident of Zefat and is currently (2017) an independent researcher, lecturer and certified tour guide. Yosef has authored four books and more than one hundred professional and popular articles relating to Zefat, Tiberias, Kivrei Tsaddikim in the Galilee, and to archaeological surveys and excavations he conducted throughout Eastern Galilee.

E-mail address: Stepansky@bezeqint.net   cell. 052-4589009

Website (Hebrew): www.stepansky.co.il

From the Israel Tour Guides Website:

http://israeltours.baruchhaba.com/guides/yosef-stepansky/

Jewish Life in Bessarabia Through the Lens of the Shtetl Kaushany, by Yefim A. Kogan

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Very little, if anything, is written about mestechko, the small towns or townlets in Eastern Europe with fewer than two thousand Jewish residents.  There is almost nothing about such places in Jewish scholarship.  If lucky, one may find that Jews lived there in a certain year, and that a synagogue or a burial society was created in another year.  For some small towns, there might be a line about Nazi atrocities.  There are some exceptions, for example an 800-page book There Once Was a World.  A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, written by Yaffa Eliach[1].

Many Yizkor Books were written in the 1950s about the larger towns, with stories about Jewish life from the beginning of the 20th century throughout World War II.  Most of them were published in Israel by societies connected to a town or a region[2].  These books are great testimonies to Jewish life in Eastern Europe.  One of the major Jewish genealogical sources, JewishGen.org[3], affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, has thousands of volunteers creating a memorial for the Jews who once lived all across Europe.   A section of JewishGen, KehilaLinks[4], includes websites for many towns, sometimes very small communities in Ukraine, Lithuania, Moldova, Hungary and other countries.  All these websites were developed by volunteers with connections to these places; they usually include a history of the town, a history of the Jews in that town, old town photos and maps, memoirs of the residents, testimonials from the survivors of the Holocaust, reports of recent visits to these places, discoveries of cemeteries, or synagogues hidden close by and more.

I have a special interest in the Bessarabia[5] region because I was born in Kishinev[6], which was once the capital of Bessarabia oblast and gubernia[7].  My parents, grandparents, and great grandparents were all born and lived in Bessarabia.  In my 2006 Hebrew College course “Through Their Eyes” with Professor Jay Berkovitz, I engaged in a study of Jewish life in the whole region of Bessarabia/Moldova.  My final paper for the course was “A geo-historical and cultural overview of Jewish life in Bessarabia/Moldavia region up to the beginning of the 19th century.”

In addition, I have an interest in pursuing my own Jewish heritage.  Because of the political situation of the 1940’s to 1980’s I had been unable to pursue that interest when living in Kishinev and in Moscow.  Only after emigration from the Soviet Union in 1989 was I able to study Jewish subjects and be involved in historical and genealogical Jewish research.

to read full article please download: http://genealogy.org.il/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Kaushany.pdf

 

1 Eliach, 1998 Eliach, Y. (1998). There once was a world. A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok. Boston, New York, London: Little Brown and Company.

[2] Many of the Yizkor Books are available online at NY Public Library: http://yizkor.nypl.org.

[3] http://www.jewishgen.org

[4] http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org

[5] Bessarabia is a region between Rivers Prut, Dniester, Danube and the Black Sea.  The name originally applied only to the southern part of the territory, and only in 19c under Russian rule the whole region was named Bessarabia.

[6] Capital of Moldova,  the republic of the Soviet Union, and currently the capital of Republic of Moldova.

A large part of Bessarabia was included after WWII into the Republic of Moldova, and southern and northern parts became part of the Ukraine.

[7] Oblast, gubernia – province in Russian Empire.

 

Yefim Kogan was born in Kishinev, Moldova. After he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1989 he did extensive genealogical and historical research. In 2012 he received Master of Jewish Liberal Studies from Hebrew College, Boston with focus in Jewish Cultural History.  He is active in Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston. Yefim taught classes on Jewish Genealogy for the local Jewish and Russian communities of Brookline and Boston. He developed a website for the towns of Kaushany, Dubossary and Kamenka, Moldova and Tarutino and Serpneve (Leipzig) in Ukraine. In 2011 Yefim organized Bessarabia Special Interest Group, developed its website: www.jewishgen.org/bessarabia.  Most important projects he was leading and coordinating are the Bessarabia Revision List, where already 145,000 records are translated, and the Bessarabia Cemetery project, where 76 cemeteries were located in Bessarabia/Moldova where Jews are buried and 45 of them are already photographed and indexed with more than 45,000 Jewish burial records.

Since 2009 Yefim presented at the International Jewish Genealogical conferences.  Here are several highlights (find excerpts at http://www.jewishgen.org/Bessarabia/Conferences.html)

2016, Seattle, “When, Why and Where did the Jews arrive to Bessarabia/Moldova”,

2015, Jerusalem, “The Jewish Surnames in Bessarabia / Moldova. What makes our Surnames Unique”

2012, Paris, “Estate and other categories of Jews in Bessarabia, Russia in the 19th century

2009, Philadelphia, “History of Jews in Bessarabia (Moldova) in the 15th to 19th Centuries. Geography, History, Social Status”.