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SHEMOTJEWISH GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN APRIL 2018, VOL 26, 1

Shemot.indb 1 09/02/18 8:38 AM

ContentsEDITORIALJessica Feinstein 1On the road they trod: a return to the land of our ancestorsRobin Aaronson 2Early history of the Jews of Stockton-on-TeesHarold Pollins 13The (Berko)wiczes of East Warsaw: Part 2. Using Google, Facebook and email to find living descendantsLeigh Dworkin 17The Austrian Synagogue, ManchesterDavid Conway 24American censuses and substitutes. Part 3: finding substitutes for the 1790 censusTed Bainbridge 26The death of Sir Francis Goldsmid Doreen Berger 28Long-lost familyHoward Kramer 30Saving Kinder Hirsch – an Edinburgh rescueJill Servian 32Albert Reuss in Mousehole – the artist as refugeeSusan Soyinka 38

Cover photo: The Red Synagogue in Joniskis. See Robin Aaronson’s article on page 2.

Shemot is the journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain. It is published three times a year and is sent free to members. We publish original articles, submitted by members or commissioned, on a variety of topics likely to be of interest to our readers. We particularly welcome personal experiences that include sources and research methodology, explanations of technological developments and innovations, articles highlighting archival material and the work carried out by volunteers to preserve our heritage, biographical or historical accounts, and practical research tips. We also publish book reviews and letters.

If you would like to write or review for Shemot, please contact the Editor at [email protected] to request our guidelines for authors.

This issue of Shemot was edited by Jessica Feinstein, typeset by Integra Software Services Private Ltd in Pondicherry, and printed by The Print Shop, Pinner, London.

The journal is published by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain.© 2018. ISSN 0969-2258. Registered charity no. 1022738.


EDITORIALJessica Feinstein

It is now three years since I took on the role of editing Shemot, and what an incredibly enjoyable time it has been! I would like to thank all of you who have written articles and also everyone who has taken the time to read each issue. Your comments and feedback are always welcome. I am very grateful to all of our contributors, who ensure that I receive a steady supply of material. Not only that, but the quality and variety of those articles is extremely impressive, and I think that we have a journal to be proud of. I hope that you continue to get as much pleasure from reading Shemot as I do from editing it.

I occasionally receive questions about writing for Shemot, so if you have a story to tell, here are my top tips!

1. Be original. We can’t publish anything that has appeared in print or online before.

2. Share the secrets of your success. If you’ve been lucky or persistent enough to obtain genealogical information from an archive, museum or repository, tell us how you did it. Who did you contact and how long did it take? What can we learn from your experience?

3. Respect copyright. Just because you have found a picture on the Internet, unfortunately that does not mean that we can publish it in your article. You’ll need to find out who owns the copyright and get permission (this may take a long time).

4. Use your own words. Accidental copying can happen when you are taking notes from a book or website, so please check that your words are your own. If you are including a direct quotation, please provide a reference.

5. Help us find the information. If you are mentioning sources or citing other people’s work, please provide enough detail so that others can find the information, including page numbers.

6. Include photos and images if you can. Illustrations make your article much more appealing, especially with the use of colour in the online version. But see number 3 above, and please include any acknowledgements or copyright information with your images.

7. Final means final. I’m very happy to receive a draft for comments, but after you’ve sent me your final version I will copy-edit it and send it to the typesetter. Please don't use the page proofs as an opportunity to rewrite your article.

8. Use social media. If you have written or enjoyed an article, mention it on any social media that you use. The more publicity JGSGB gets, the better!

Please contact me at [email protected] if you would like the author guidelines, or if you have any suggestions for articles you’d like to see in future issues. I look forward to receiving more excellent contributions in 2018.


On the road they trod: a return to the land of our ancestors Robin Aaronson

The origins of our journeyIn June 2017, I visited Lithuania and Latvia with my brother Mike. It was a short visit (we stayed four nights) but highly significant for both of us. We were born and grew up in the UK, offspring of the marriage of a Jewish father and a Welsh mother. Even to say that our father was Jewish requires clarification. He was also born in the UK and his family belonged to a conservative Orthodox Jewish sect known as Machzike Hadath. When he grew up, however, he turned his back on Judaism, changed his name from Eliezer Jacob to Edward John (Jack), and for many years had little contact with his birth family. Mike and I did not meet our paternal grandmother, or any of our uncles and cousins on that side, until we were in our teens (our paternal grandfather died before I was born).

We thus had little sense of Jewish identity while growing up. My father, perhaps because the break from Judaism had been more difficult than he realised, was very keen that his sons should follow some religion, and the Church of England was the easiest option. We saw far more of our Welsh grandparents, who were Nonconformists, than of any of my father’s relatives. I would ask readers who are closer to Jewish culture and religion than me to forgive anything in this narrative which betrays my ignorance.

We grew up cut off from my father’s past. He was quite reluctant to talk about his childhood, his parents, or any earlier generation. In part, this was because he did not know much himself. While his mother Sara’s origins were quite well known – her father, Mendel Chaikin, had a vineyard in what was then Palestine and imported wine into the UK under the brand Bozwin (Boz standing for Beauty of Zion) and she was born in Jerusalem – my father’s father, Samuel Wolf, was something of a mystery. Family memory (preserved particularly by my Uncle Michael) had it that Samuel came from Russia somewhere and had originally had the surname Hoppen. Apparently, he came to England in his teens (i.e., in the last decade of the nineteenth century). That was about all that anyone knew.

Thus, when I became interested in family history about ten years ago, it was my paternal grandfather and his forebears that I particularly wanted to know more about. The 1901 UK census revealed Samuel’s parents’ names as Lazarus (Eliezer) and Minnie. Knowing that Samuel had been naturalised as a British citizen, I applied for a copy of his naturalisation papers. These helpfully gave his place of birth as “Bausk, Government of Kurland”, that is, Courland in the Russian Empire. The area is now in Latvia and the town is known as Bauska. Samuel gave his parents’ names as Lazarus Jacob (so my father had clearly been named after his grandfather) and Chaie Minnie.

I then applied to the Latvian archives, who established that Eliezer Jacob (senior) was from Linkuva, Lithuania, with information on his wives (he was married three times) and children. These records also showed that the family mythology about the name Hoppen was well-founded – all the individuals found had that surname. By 1901, in London, Eliezer and his family were known as Aaronson.

That was as far as I got, until I made contact through the JewishGen website with a man named Alan Hoppen, who turned out to be my third cousin. He had conducted much more intensive research, tracing back from Eliezer to his father Shlomo (Solomon) and mother Feiga, Shlomo being the son of Orel (the son of Movshe), and Gera, all from Linkuva. I discovered later that Orel is a Yiddish form of Aaron.

Although several generations of my family lived in Linkuva (and we do not know how many more lived there before Movshe in the mid eighteenth century), it seems that, by my great-grandfather’s time, there was quite a family connection to Bauska. Although it is now in a separate country, it is only twenty-seven miles from Linkuva (under a day in a horse and cart). Courland was outside the Pale of Settlement1 – the area where Jews in the Russian Empire were allowed to live – but under Alexander II (1855–1881) Jews who practised certain crafts were allowed to live outside the Pale.

Thus an 1893 list of Jewish families living in Courland, but not originating there, shows Eliezer Jacob in Bauska, with a right of residence arising from his occupation as a tailor. The same document states that he had been there since 1863,2 but other documents put it at 1870. In 1876, the birth of a daughter, Hene-Tzipe, was recorded in Bauska, and two years later her death. In 1881, our grandfather’s birth is recorded, with the correct date of birth – 28 May in the Julian calendar.

Eliezer’s second wife, Mere Mendelson (mother of Hene-Tzipe), was from Bauska, the daughter of a potter. Intriguingly, his marriage to Rokhel Sheina, the first wife, took place in Bauska in 1855, so perhaps she was from there as well. The third wife, our great-grandmother Chaie Minnie, was from Zhagare, in Lithuania, but close to the border. Despite the above, Eliezer was issued with an internal passport (probably needed to travel between Lithuania and Courland) in Linkuva, in 1888.

Having done all this research, and having compared notes with Alan, I was keen to travel to the Baltics, to see for myself the land where my ancestors had lived. But one thing or another delayed the trip until, finally, my brother Mike and I found a time when we could go together. I think we were forced into action by the election of a new US President, who seemed at that stage not very interested in maintaining the independence of Europe from a newly expansionist Russia!


ON THE ROAD THEY TROD: A RETURN TO THE LAND OF OUR ANCESTORS 3

Figure 1. Kosher slaughterhouse and butcher, Bauska.

Latvia and BauskaOn 18 June 2017, we flew to Riga on an Air Baltic flight. Any preconceptions about small east-European airlines were quickly dispelled by the brand-new Bombardier aircraft and smiling stewardesses. The car hire staff were equally welcoming, warning us of the excellence and low price of the local beer, and the need to resist these temptations when planning to take the wheel. The car was as new as the aircraft. We had an hour’s drive to our hotel in Bauska, and did not arrive until after 1 a.m., but reception was open and we were again welcomed courteously. I reflected that all this smiling service might have something to do with the economic inequality between eastern and western Europe, prompting a desire to attract western tourists to come and spend their euros in the Baltic States. I thought how my ancestors might have been on the opposite side of this inequality – second-class citizens having to appease others in order to earn a living, or even to survive.

The next day, fortified by a substantial east-European breakfast, we explored the town. It is quite substantial, with a city hall in the centre, a Lutheran and a Catholic church, and a castle on the edge. It is not exactly bustling, but it is not run-down either. Many of the buildings in the centre looked as though they dated from the nineteenth century or earlier. A lot of the architecture is in an attractive red brick, with decorative shapes and colours in the brickwork. Other buildings are of timber construction and there are a few modern blocks. We started with the Tourist Information Office in the City Hall. The middle-aged woman there was friendly and clearly proud of her city, but did not seem to get the hint that we had come to look for signs of the Jewish community. She talked about the Lutherans and the Catholics, but when asked about the synagogue, simply said that there wasn’t one. She proudly showed us the exhibition of weights, measures and scales in the public area of the building. Bauska was an important trading centre for many centuries, and buyers and sellers would come to the City Hall to verify the quantities they were trading. She told us, with the authority of an encyclopaedia, exactly how many grams there were in a Latvian pound, a Russian pound, a German pound, and an English pound – all slightly different.

I left with a feeling of disappointment. In 1881, the year our grandfather was born, almost 60% of the population (which was about 6000) was Jewish. Yet the Tourist Office seemed to have no interest in that aspect of the town’s history. We fared rather better in the town’s museum, but we did not get there until a few days later, as it is closed on Mondays. For the moment, we had to be guided by a one-page list of buildings with a Jewish connection3 that I had printed off at home. We found most of the Jewish buildings, many of which have plaques to explain their history – the Jankelovich publishing house, where the town’s first newspaper was printed in 1894, the Hasidic prayer house, built in 1938 close to the bridge that carries the main road over the river, the kosher slaughter-house and butcher’s shop (Rokhel Sheina’s father was a butcher) (Figure 1) and a building referred to as “Mitvah” on the list (Figure 2).

Very close to the main square, we found the site of the Bauska synagogue, burnt down in 1941 at the time the Nazis invaded. The Jewish population (by then about 700, or 16% of the total) was slaughtered outside of town (we did not manage to find the site). Where the synagogue used to stand, trees have grown up, some of which look as though they might well be seventy-five years old (Figure 3). Behind, there is a clear view of the River Memele and a pleasant riverside


4 ROBIN AARONSON

Figure 2. The mikveh, converted to a residential house after the war.

Figure 3. Mike at the site of the destroyed synagogue, Bauska.

walk (Figure 4). It seemed strange to me that such a prime site had never been reused. Was there some sense of guilt, of respect, of fear about bad associations? Even stranger was the contrast between centuries: in the nineteenth, my grandfather and his family must have worshipped here. Maybe my great-grandfather was married here, or my grandfather had his bar mitzvah. They must have crossed a town square full of Jewish faces, heard Yiddish spoken all around them. Life was almost certainly hard, and full of injustices, but it was possible. Fifty or sixty years later, there were those with such hate in their hearts that they could slaughter ordinary people and destroy their place of worship. How could a way of life so established and long-lasting be swept away in a few weeks? Could my forebears have imagined such a catastrophe? Did some inkling of the possibility encourage them to pack up and leave the country for ever?



There are no answers to these questions, only an empty plot of land with a few mature trees, by a gentle green river. We left Bauska in the late afternoon and drove towards Lithuania.

The road to LinkuvaIt is at most an hour’s drive from Bauska to Linkuva. In fact, as there are no hotels there, we were headed for Pakruojis, a few miles further on. As we drove, I was struck by the beauty of the scenery. A broad green plain stretched in all directions, rich in crops, with little patches of woodland dotted around. It seemed to go on for ever. The sky was blue, with a few white clouds, and equally vast. There were occasional houses dotted around and we passed through some small villages. Wildlife seemed to be thriving – we spotted lapwings, several birds of prey, and were very excited when we saw our first stork’s nest (Figure 5). After a bit, it was “oh, another bunch of storks”: the locals put wide iron baskets on top of telegraph poles, for the storks to build their nests on.

Figure 4. River behind synagogue site, Bauska.

Figure 5. Stork’s nest.


6 ROBIN AARONSON

Generally, the impression was one of space, light and plenty – not at all what I had been expecting. My image of the Baltic States was of somewhere dark, wet, cold and impoverished, a land where the Jews were allowed because not many other people wanted to live there. Admittedly, it was midsummer and the visitor’s impression in winter might be closer to my original idea, but I was cheered by the thought that my ancestors had seen such beauty in the land, even if only for a few months of the year.

Checking the population that night, I found that Lithuania currently has about 2.8 million inhabitants. There were a little over two million when the country became independent after the First World War. Comparing this to the UK population of 65 million, on approximately four times the land area, confirms the impression of space. Lithuania is a very lightly populated country (Latvia, with 2.1 million inhabitants in a similar area, is even more so).

Both countries are in the Schengen area of the European Union, and when we came to the border we simply carried on driving. There were signs to mark the crossing, but no border control. For tourists from a country about to leave the EU, there was some irony in this. We were, as it happens, stopped by police a few miles further on, and asked for our papers, but this appeared to be random rather than routine. Perhaps it was arranged to give us that little tremor of fear that Jewish travellers must have had, making this journey 150 years ago, even when they had an internal passport to show. As I recall, there were borders in Europe in past centuries where taxes were cheerfully levied on Jewish travellers, but not on Christians. No embarrassment about discrimination in those days.

Having found records of my great-grandfather’s presence in both Linkuva and Bauska in the second half of the nineteenth century, I speculated that he might have been a merchant, carrying goods from Linkuva up this very road to sell in the markets in Bauska (no doubt weighed using the splendid equipment in the City Hall!). It is not a long journey, and there was substantial trade from Lithuania into Bauska in, for example, grain, flax and animal skins. On the other hand, he is described as a tailor in the 1893 document referred to above, in a list of craftsmen in Lithuania, and indeed in the UK censuses of 1901 and 1911. Perhaps he supplemented his tailoring income with a little ad hoc trade.

However that may be, the only anxiety that troubled us on the rest of the drive was the fact that we had not filled up with petrol before setting off. Our road led through Linkuva, but we pressed on without stopping, having reserved the next two days for a full exploration. We found our hotel, after asking directions, did not run out of petrol, and stopped for the night. Our hotel was located on an estate that had been owned by German barons from the sixteenth century right up until the Soviet invasion of 1940. We stayed in a beautifully restored building described as the Miller’s House. There was indeed a mill next to it and our room looked out over a lake studded with waterlilies and patrolled by squadrons of terns (as my brother, who knows his birds, informed me). A young man with faultless English, which we established had been acquired during a year in Southampton, welcomed us warmly and gave us a glass of a liqueur made locally, which was apparently full of health-giving herbs. That evening, the hotel restaurant being shut, we ate well at a small restaurant by the main road and were able to confirm the excellence of the local beer. We also managed to refuel the car.

First visit to LinkuvaThe following morning, after buying some food for lunch, we made the short journey back to Linkuva and parked near the main square (though you can park pretty much anywhere in Lithuania). This time, we had photos and descriptions from linkuva.com to work from. I had tried from the UK to secure a guide with direct knowledge of Linkuva, but without success. However, I had made contact with Aubrey Blumsohn, whose family also originate from Linkuva, and he kindly directed me to the website and gave me other useful advice.

The square is large but functional (no grass or trees, though at one end there was a rather kitsch structure, in the shape of a butterfly made out of bedding plants). There was a small supermarket and a few other shops. We could see some buildings of decorated red brick like those in Bauska. Walking round the town, we found that most of the houses were made of timber, mostly painted, in yellow, red or green, although on some the paintwork was faded and peeling (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Wooden buildings, Linkuva.



The houses were of one or two storeys, with roofs of corrugated iron or tiles. It was all very pleasant, small and sleepy, a bit like a full-scale model village. Again, there was a feeling of space: the houses were detached and most had a garden or small plot of land around them. My belief that my ancestors had lived with large families in tiny houses turned out to be wrong. It is true that many of the buildings, though clearly old, had been built since my family left Linkuva. There was a serious fire in 1883, which destroyed many of the wooden buildings in the town, including 150 Jewish houses and the old synagogue.5 Many of the buildings we were looking at must have been built since then. But the last decades of the nineteenth century saw economic recession in rural Lithuania and it is unlikely that the replacement buildings were bigger or better than the old. So I remain of the view that my ancestors lived in relatively spacious houses.

According to Simon Civjan, a resident of Linkuva born around 1920, who escaped just before Lithuania was invaded, there was no running water or electricity until the 1930s.6 Each house had a well, though some households had water that was not drinkable and had to fetch drinking water from another well. But in the nineteenth century, this would have been the norm in rural areas in many countries. According to the records that have survived, my family were neither rich nor destitute. My great-great-grandfather Shlomo is described as a craftsman and “petit bourgeois, first rank”. As noted above, my great-grandfather Eliezer is described as a tailor.

We found the Jewish paint store at the end of the square – a substantial brick building that looked much too smart for the stated use. Some sort of business is run there now – there were credit card stickers on the glass entrance door. There was another fine brick building at the north-east corner of the square, but we could not identify what it was. It bore a plaque commemorating Lithuanian patriots killed by the NKVD (Stalin’s secret police) under the Soviet occupation. This must refer to the period 1940–41, or that just after the War, as the NKVD was renamed in 1946. We walked up to the church and back through a small park, then went to find the “new” synagogue. This is a large building of rendered brick built in 1890 to replace the wooden one (Figure 7). The date is shown on the gables in Hebrew and western characters. The structure is intact, although some windows appear to have been filled in. However, it is dilapidated, with parts of the rendering falling off. It is apparently only used as a store-room: through gaps in the shutters and doors we saw road signs and traffic barriers in one room and logs piled up in another.

Figure 7. Robin at Linkuva synagogue.


8 ROBIN AARONSON

There were a few people about in the streets, but nobody took much notice of us. A young man with a can in his hand tried to talk to us by the synagogue, but soon gave up when he found we spoke no Lithuanian. There is no café in Linkuva (unless you count the kebab shop, which has a couple of seats outside), but the supermarket advertised coffee from a machine. As we grappled with matters such as where to get your cup and which lid was the one that fitted it, a woman selling flowers next to the coffee machine gave us helpful advice. This seemed a good opportunity to ask for directions to the Jewish cemetery, which we knew was still intact. The flower-seller was as helpful with the directions as she had been with the coffee. She seemed to find it quite natural that two foreign visitors might want to visit the Jewish cemetery. Her English was limited, but, with the aid of my (also limited) Russian, we understood that we needed to take the Zeimelis road for three kilometres out of town. This turned out to be the road on which we had driven in from Bauska the day before.

We couldn’t see the cemetery as we drove out – there is no sign on the main road. We turned round and found it on the second attempt. If you are visiting, look out for the sign indicating that you have left Plentas (a suburb of Linkuva) and giving the distance to the next village, Ruponiai. A few yards before the sign, turn right (if you are coming north from Linkuva) down a farm track and you will see the cemetery in front of you, just 200 yards away. At the entrance, there is a sign in Hebrew, Yiddish and Lithuanian, commemorating the dead.

In the town, it had been hard to get any sense of the Jewish community that once flourished there. Even the synagogue was just a nondescript building useful for storing logs. But the cemetery was different: here were tangible signs of individuals who had lived their whole lives in this place, to some of whom – astonishing thought – I was related.

The graveyard (Figures 8–11) was not as it should be: the stones peeped out from grass and weeds, some were covered in moss, and substantial trees had grown up among them (if you look on Google Earth, what you see is a small copse).

Figures 8-11. Linkuva Jewish cemetery.



Nevertheless, the stones were there, the Hebrew lettering deeply etched, each one commemorating a different life. Mourners had come and buried their loved ones year after year. The dead were at rest in the earth: as Gray put it, albeit in a Christian churchyard, “the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep”. The place was at peace and, to me, the unplanned greenery added to its beauty (well-tended Jewish cemeteries are a bit too stony for my taste!).

There were perhaps 200 stones visible, some upright, some flat, some leaning at an angle. There were probably others hidden in the grass. Neither Mike nor I have any Hebrew, so there was no chance of identifying the grave of an ancestor, but we took copious photographs in the hope of getting a translation when we returned home. We laid some flowers, bought from the helpful woman in the supermarket, at the foot of a tree. There were wild strawberries growing in the graveyard and we offered these to one of the graves, as a representative of the whole company.

Ours were not the only offerings. There were a number of small candles in glass jars. We wondered who had put them there. Also, although the cemetery has clearly been neglected over the years (hence the mature trees), the grass had been cut recently. Indeed, on our last day, we called in again on our way back to the airport and found four men working with scythes, with whom we had a rudimentary conversation in Russian (the middle-aged and old have Russian as their second language, whereas the young have English).

That night, I emailed the organisation Maceva, which has a programme of cleaning, photographing, translating and cataloguing Jewish gravestones in Lithuania, to see if they knew who was maintaining the cemetery. Sandra Petrukonyte of Maceva gave me some helpful information. She said that municipalities in Lithuania have a responsibility to maintain Jewish cemeteries, though some are more diligent about it than others. It would be Linkuva town council that was organising the work (this was confirmed by the men with scythes). Sandra thought that the candles might have been left by local schoolchildren as part of a school project. Separately, I have established that pupils at the local secondary school have carried out research on the Jewish community of Linkuva. I have not yet been able to obtain this research. Since my return home, Sandra has informed me that Maceva intends to catalogue Linkuva cemetery in the autumn of 2017. This is a very exciting development, which I hope will enable us to identify the actual graves of some of my ancestors. We also photographed the sign. The Hebrew reads: “Old cemetery: may it be a memorial for the martyrs forever” and the Lithuanian: “Jewish cemetery of those who left long ago. The memory of the dead remains holy.”

We ate our black bread and pickled herrings and drove back towards Pakruojis. Halfway back, a prominent sign points left to a genocide site – one of all too many to be seen when driving around (apparently there is another at Dvarukai, four miles east of Linkuva). We turned off and drove down a straight road for a mile, only to come to a dead end, the road blocked by a barrier and gatehouse in front of a factory. The factory turned out to be a pig farm, but the sign had not led us astray. Just before the gate was a small enclosure in the trees, containing a memorial to 300 Jews; men, women and children murdered by “Hitlerites” on 5 August 1941. The memorial was well-maintained, free of weeds and with some decorative shrubs that looked recently planted.

We drove on to Pakruojis, where we found a rather different memorial – to soldiers of the Red Army killed during the Second World War. As well as a statue of a soldier waving a flag, there were individual named graves. Most of the fallen seemed to be very young. Next to the memorial, there was a sign like the one at Linkuva cemetery. The words were almost identical, at least in the Lithuanian version. Presumably there had been another Jewish cemetery here, which was destroyed by the Soviets in order to erect the memorial to their dead. We need not take this as a particular insult to the Jews: when Vilnius was under Soviet control, they bulldozed the graves of German soldiers killed in both world wars, as well as Jewish graves.

For the rest of the afternoon and the evening, we relaxed. We had an excellent meal in the hotel restaurant, but it did have its amusing side. We had been told that the restaurant shut at 8 p.m., and that some local specialities took almost an hour to prepare. Thus, we turned up at 7 o’clock and ordered soup as well as speciality chicken dishes. The soup came quickly, so we didn’t mind the wait for the main course, which appeared just before 8 o’clock. However, we were slightly surprised to be asked to leave as soon as we put down our knives and forks, as the restaurant was now closed! Happily, they had no objection to our purchasing another beer and taking it outside to drink at leisure by the lake.

Visit to Joniskis synagoguesOn the third day of our stay in the Baltic States, we visited the restored synagogues in Joniskis, twenty miles north-west of Linkuva. I had made contact from the UK with Linas Vinickas, who works for the Joniskis museum, and had arranged to meet him there. In contrast to Linkuva, Joniskis is quite substantial, busy and prosperous-looking. In 1880, a third of the population was Jewish and by 1897 the proportion was almost a half. Although the “museum” turned out to be merely an office, we made contact by phone and met Linas, plus a colleague named Darius, in the centre of town. Linas and Darius were most friendly and helpful. They took us to the synagogues, which stand side by side. They explained that the “Red Synagogue”, so-called because of the now-familiar red brick, was used in winter, as it had heating. It was built in the second half of the nineteenth century (Figures 12 and 13). The “White Synagogue”, which is rendered and painted white, with grey detailing, is slightly larger, but was unheated (Figure 14). Built in 1823, it was used in summer for major festivals when a big space was needed.


10 ROBIN AARONSON

Figures 12-14. Red Synagogue (exterior with Mike and Robin, and interior) and White Synagogue, Joniskis.

The exterior of both synagogues has been well-restored and they are both impressive buildings. To my eye, the red one looked more Jewish and the white one more like buildings one sees in Russia. We went in the red one first. It has been beautifully restored inside as well: there is stained glass in the windows and bronze panels for the Torah scrolls, with the Ten Commandments down each side. It consists of a single main space, with a women’s gallery at the back, under which is the entrance lobby and one or two small rooms. The interior of the White Synagogue is still in the process of restoration. There are some artefacts in glass cases, which are intended to form part of a museum collection. Once again, the main room takes up most of the building, with a women’s gallery at the back. Linas told us that the restoration had been funded in large part by a European Economic Area grant (Lithuania belongs to the EEA by virtue of its membership of the EU). This was a major undertaking, because in 2007 the eastern wall of the Red Synagogue had collapsed. We talked a little about Jewish life in the nineteenth century. Linas confirmed that there was substantial trade between this part of Lithuania and Latvian towns such as nearby Bauska. Much of this was small-scale, involving entrepreneurial Jews buying flax or leather locally and selling it for a profit in Latvia. I have speculated above that Eliezer might have been involved in such trade. If so, he may have inspired his son, Samuel (our grandfather) to follow in his footsteps. The latter built a substantial business importing citrus fruit from Palestine to Britain. We also asked Linas whether he felt any threat from President Putin. He replied that he was not worried, so long as people from the West were asking the question. Only if the West forgot about the Baltics and their recent history would there be any danger from Russia. President Trump, please note!

Return to the cemeteryOn the way back, we called at Linkuva cemetery again. I wanted to look for the Blumsohn stone described elsewhere on linkuva.com, but failed to find it. I took the opportunity to take some more photographs. We had a further duty to perform. Our father died in September 2015, at the grand age of ninety-seven. It was his request that he be cremated and that part of his ashes be mixed with my mother’s in an urn made by our cousin Adam, who is a celebrated glass-blower. But he did not specify what should happen to the rest. So we had brought a small pot of his ashes to Lithuania, in case we found a suitable place for them. It seemed to us that scattering some of our father’s ashes at the cemetery in Linkuva would be a way of bringing him home, and of making something whole again that had been sundered by the family’s wanderings around the world. Of course, cremation is not a Jewish practice and it may seem strange to some to scatter ashes in a place of burial. But that is what we did and our intention was good. We said a prayer for his soul and another for ourselves and went back into Linkuva. At Aubrey’s request, I photographed most of the houses in the centre of town. Then we returned to our hotel for a well-earned rest.

Shemot.indb 10 09/02/18 8:40 AM


Bauska museumOn our final day, we had an afternoon flight home from Riga, which gave us time to call again in Bauska to visit the museum. The collection is quite substantial, including a room devoted to markets and shops around my grandfather’s time, and rooms covering the Second World War. One room covers “forgotten minorities”, particularly Jews. We found someone who spoke English and asked some questions about our family’s move to Bauska in the second half of the nineteenth century. The museum holds no documents on specific families, but we had an interesting discussion about the relationship with Lithuania in that period. The museum staff told us that economically Lithuania was quite depressed,5 whereas Bauska was prospering, with the beginnings of industrialisation. There had always been much trade from Lithuania to Bauska and the disparity in living standards now encouraged movement of population as well. A statistical display showed that the number of Jews in Bauska rose from 2390 in 1864 to 3631 in 1881. The non-Jewish population must have been growing too, because the Jewish proportion stayed almost constant. The museum staff said that, historically, Jews had only been allowed to live outside the city, on land owned by the Duchy of Courland, but that at some time in the nineteenth century, the rules had changed, and the municipality permitted Jews to live in the town. We didn’t establish when this happened.

We looked at the displays in the minorities room. The staff were apologetic that it was not very representative – the photos and business cards only related to a few families, for whom these items had survived and been donated. But we found much to interest us in what was there. There were photographs of the synagogue and cemetery from the 1930s, of the Jewish primary school and of the famous rabbis Kuhk and Eliasberg, as well as a model of a rural Jew, quite scary with his long beard, lantern and heavy staff. There were photographs of Jewish shops – Jofe the horse-dealer and Hercenberg’s “good shop” – and factories – Feitelson (haberdashery for ladies and gentlemen, founded 1827) and Vulf Abramson. There were various papers to do with a large factory owned by Franz Klederman and business cards for Leibovics the bicycle maker, Hercenberg and Slamovic, also horse-dealers, Sankewizs and Leibowitschs, each a supplier of Massey-Harris ploughs, Joselevski’s ready-made dresses, Leibovics’ radio apparatus and an intriguing picture of a zebra on a card from R. Joffe. The business cards date from 1923 to 1940. There was a copy of the newspaper published by Jankelovic (from 1911, stated as the eighteenth year of publication), with a photograph of the family. There were several photos of prosperous-looking Jews in city clothes and fur coats. These were loosely dated as from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These memorabilia give the impression that at least some Jewish families were prospering in Bauska.7 Against this, we know that, from 1881 to 1917, persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire intensified, under Alexander III and Nicholas II. Anti-Semitism became very public and violent, provoking international condemnation. By 1897, the Jewish population of Bauska had fallen again, to 2745. Among those who left were our great-grandfather Eliezer, great-grandmother Chaie, grandfather Samuel and great-aunt Annie. After the Russian Revolution, the Jewish population continued to decline, sometimes through voluntary emigration, sometimes forced. A display records the names of Jewish families moved to Siberia in 1940–41 (the Soviets feared that they would side with the Germans when the latter invaded).

The museum contains a good deal of other material that I have not yet translated. But one other thought occurred to me while we were there. The name Hoppen has always been something of a mystery. It is not very Jewish-sounding (there is an English village with the same name). Apart from our relatives, there are no Hoppens in any records from Linkuva and I have never seen anyone in the Litvak SIG researching this name. The Bauska museum display includes several Joffes and a Hofsovics. When I rechecked the Linkuva records, I found the name Joffe/Ioffe there as well. The records from the Latvian archives give the spelling of our family name (allowing for the fact that an initial H would always be written as a G in Russian script) as Hofen, Hoffen, Hopfen or Hoppen, and once even Hoffmann. I wonder whether Hoppen might be a variant spelling of the same name that is sometimes rendered Joffe. In that case, we may have had other family members in Bauska. The business card with the zebra might have belonged to one of my relatives!

Did we find our ancestors?The road that leads from our father’s father’s family to us, back along which we hoped to travel, is blocked by two great rock-falls: the Holocaust and our father’s new start in life, outside the Jewish faith and tradition. There are no Jewish communities in the places we visited that might have preserved the memory of life before the Second World War, still less in the nineteenth century. We could not easily imagine our ancestors celebrating the Sabbath or making their matzos for the Passover feast, because these are not rituals of which we have direct experience. We had made our journey in the hope of travelling this road. How much did we learn?

In terms of hard fact, we would probably have to say “very little”. We did not add any names to the family tree or shed any light on the mystery of when and why our surname was changed from Hoppen to Aaronson. The most we did was to conjecture an earlier change from Joffe to Hoppen. We did not look in the archives for documents – doing such research on the spot is not the best way to gain information, unless you have a great deal of time and mastery of the right languages.

Nor did we see a single building which we could confidently associate with our ancestors: the houses standing in Linkuva are probably too recent and we had no idea of an address, either there or in Bauska. We saw one synagogue that was built too late, one that had been razed to the ground and two in an unrelated town. We identified no grave of a family member.

And yet, I do feel that I came closer to these roots of mine, in an indefinable yet persistent way. Seeing the landscape was a revelation: how my ancestors must have loved the bright light of the long summer evenings in the lush green fields and by the lazy rivers! Maybe too the dark, frozen winters were hard to endure (we will have to return at a different time of year to feel that). Their homes were not cramped, they had a little patch of garden to grow their vegetables and keep

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12 ROBIN AARONSON

their chickens in. The tightly packed and dirty streets off Brick Lane in London must have made them wonder if they had made the right decision to leave all that greenery behind (although, of course, they had). They had the slow pace of village life, in their quaint wooden houses, with the small preoccupations that seem so important in a village (Figure 15). And they had the bustle of a bigger town, markets, traders, factories. They did not travel far, but it seems they did travel a little, maybe engaging in some cross-border trade. No one could call them rich, but they had their crafts and their livelihoods. They were not at the bottom of the heap.

Figure 15. Linkuva.

For me, the strange thing is that I came to see my paternal roots as not so different, after all, from my maternal ones. I had always thought there was a huge gulf between my mother’s family, farming in a very small way in beautiful green Cardiganshire, with their chickens and vegetable garden, and my commercial, urban Jewish forebears. Go back a few generations and they start to converge again. Perhaps that is true for most families.

Finally, there were the gravestones. It didn’t matter that we could not identify anyone. We knew that there were real individuals, that their relatives had laid them in the ground with prayers and scratched their heads as to what to have inscribed on their stones. Just to see the Hebrew characters was a eureka moment: some physical trace had survived, after all, of the community to which my family belonged. Now there is the possibility that the stones will be cleaned and translated and we may get even closer to great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother and all the grandmothers and grandfathers before them (my great-grandfather and great-grandmother are buried in London, with my grandmother; my grandfather is buried on the Mount of Olives). It was good to stand in the graveyard with my brother and picture the satisfaction of all those previous generations that their light had not been snuffed out entirely, that the thread of life was still passed on intact. May they be tied into the bond of life forever more. The sun sets and the moon sets but they are not gone. A man does not die until his name is forgotten.

Robin Aaronson has recently retired from a career as an economist in Government and the private sector. He now lives in Devon with his wife Veronica and devotes most of his time to planting trees and creating wildlife habitats. He has a son, three step-children and four step-grandchildren.

NOTES1. Except for the period from 1799 to 1829.2. This seems unlikely, as the relaxation of the Pale rules made by Alexander did not occur until 1865. 3. See www.jewishmuseum.lv.4. See Nancy Schoenberg and Stuart Schoenberg (1996) The Lithuanian Jewish Communities. Northvale, NJ: Aronson. p. 176.5. Interview transcripts kindly supplied by Aubrey Blumsohn. Civjan says that most of the houses in the centre of Linkuva were Jewish-

owned, but in his day there were about 300 Jews out of a total population of 2000. The population now is about 1750.6. This is confirmed by Nancy Schoenberg and Stuart Schoenberg (1996) The Lithuanian Jewish Communities. Northvale, NJ: Aronson. p. 31.7. Much of the museum’s material is from the early twentieth century, but some is nineteenth.

Shemot.indb 12 09/02/18 8:40 AM

Early history of the Jews of Stockton-on-Tees Harold Pollins

Stockton-on-Tees was one of a number of Jewish communities in north-east England that came into existence in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but it was unique in two ways. While the new communities were associated with the immigration of eastern European Jews in that era, the first Jewish families in the town were British-born. And later, in 1906, when the synagogue was opened, it did so, unusually, debt-free (most provincial communities were saddled for many years with the financial burden of their synagogue’s construction). Here I discuss that history up to the formation of the synagogue.

A preliminary point is that Stockton, in County Durham, was located very close (some four miles distant) to Middlesbrough in Yorkshire, and the latter was in the Stockton registration district. The Hebrew congregations of both towns often worked together, but the history of Stockton Jewry can be studied separately. The first evidence of Jews living in Stockton was in the 1860s. Five Jewish children were born there in that decade, as well as another doubtful one. The father of three of them was Canterbury-born Isaac H. Hart, an outfitter, who had three children born in Sunderland before settling in Stockton where the earliest of the three, Mary Ann in 1862, was the first Jewish child born in the town. The other British-born settler was Joseph Lyon, a boot and shoe maker, born in Liverpool, whose first child, Flora, was born in Stockton in 1869. In the following year Lyon was summoned for assaulting a man who was distributing bills (‘flyers’?) and was struck by Lyon when passing the latter’s shop. His defence in court was that he was greatly annoyed by boys distributing the bills in front of the shop. Lyon’s foreman was unable to identify the plaintiff and the verdict was that the defendant pay 10s and costs.1

These two men, Joseph Lyon and J.(sic) H. Hart, were the first to be mentioned in the Jewish Chronicle. That was in 1872 when their contributions to the building of the Middlesbrough synagogue and schools were noticed, on two occasions Hart being the conduit through which contributions were made by non-Jews.2 They remained in Stockton for a period; in the case of Joseph Lyon the last of his eight Stockton-born children was Stanley Yates Lyon, born in 1885, before the family left for Hackney where they appeared in the 1891 census.3 Joseph died in 1895 aged sixty-seven.

The connection of the Hart family with Stockton was longer. Louisa, Isaac’s wife, was in Stockton in 1900 when she died, and one child, Henry Hyman Hart, remained in Stockton after he married in 1901. However, despite their longevity, neither man appeared to be active in the Stockton Jewish community. Neither did the head of the third Jewish family of the 1860s, Henry Shepherd, a Polish-born glazier, whose son was born in the town in 1869. The family disappears after the 1871 census.

The fourth family of the 1860s, headed by Gershon Groskop, is more problematic. There were many Groskops in Britain, who appear to be mostly non-Jewish. The Stockton one had a particularly Jewish forename (but it was changed to George in the 1881 census), was born in Russian Poland, and was initially a traveller, a Jewish immigrant trade. However, he married a non-Jew so would probably not have been part of a Jewish community.

Jewish communal activity began in the 1870s when apparently there was some form of congregation. It lasted for a century; when the synagogue was to be sold in 1972 the Jewish Chronicle reported, ‘An organised community was founded in the early 1870s’.4 This is confirmed by a statement in the obituary of Jacob Marks, who died in Birmingham in 1920 after forty-two years’ service there. It says that he had previously served as chazan and shochet in Middlesbrough and Stockton. The first reference I have found of him in Stockton is in a local newspaper of 1875. The item is headed ‘SLAUGHTER OF THE FIRST BULLOCK FOR THE USE OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE IN STOCKTON’. It states that on Wednesday the first bullock for the use of the Jews in Stockton was slaughtered by Rev. J. Marks, the newly appointed rabbi, assisted by Mr L. Crutch and Mr Fryer, in whose premises it was performed – Mr Fryer being selected by the congregation to supply the bullock and also to sell the hindquarters, etc.5 (Fryer was a butcher.)

Jacob Marks’s forty-two years in Birmingham began in about 1878, just about the time he was leaving Stockton where he had two children, Hiram Julius in 1876 and Cicely Sarah in 1878. It is noteworthy that the 1875 newspaper report refers to ‘the congregation’, yet there is no record of one being formed. He was followed by Samuel Gordon, who was described in the 1881 census as ‘Hebrew minister’.6 He is described in a Stockton court case of 1883 as ‘a scripture-reader to the Jewish community in the town’. The description continued that he was ‘the officially-approved slaughterer of every beast which is eaten by local “sons of Israel”’, and was also a vendor of Dutch clocks and old clothes.7 This means he was the shochet and probably the chazan, characteristic occupations of Jewish ‘ministers’ of the period.

It would seem that there was some sort of congregation, perhaps an informal one, and one needs to add that in 1879 ‘the Jewish Ladies of Middlesbrough and Stockton have established a Benevolent Society’.8 But this does not mean all was harmony among the community. In 1878 three men – Morris Myer, pawnbroker of Stockton, ‘Mr Cohen of Stockton’ [i.e. I. M. Cohen], and Jacob Marks – were summoned for non-payment of ‘pew rent’ by the Middlesbrough Hebrew Congregation. On Myer’s behalf it was said he only took the seat in order to get the meat killed by the Jewish slaughterer. Jacob Marks said that as an officer of the congregation he was entitled to a free seat. But it was shown that for a greater part of the time that he occupied the seat he did not hold the office of slaughterer. All three lost their cases.9 These three men belonged to the Stockton community and perhaps this means that at this early stage they worshipped in the Middlesbrough synagogue. Or it could be an error in the reporting, and Stockton congregation was meant.

A second example was in April 1881 when a Jewess named Hannah Gobbett (actually Gabbitt) appeared at Stockton Police Court in answer to a summons charging her with a breach of the bye-laws. It seems that a Hebrew glazier named Joel Block was ‘putting in a square’ at a house in Park-field when the defendant (whose husband was also a glazier)

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14 HAROLD POLLINS

happened to catch sight of him. She issued a ‘volley of fiery epithets’ and a crowd collected. When brought before the bench she said that Block had insulted her in the market. After hearing a vast amount of mostly unintelligible mumbling by Block and Gobbitt, the case was dismissed.10

However, arrangements were made for a cemetery. The wording of the report in the Jewish Chronicle is interesting. In February 1884 it noted that in December 1883 Mr I. M. Cohen, as the oldest member of ‘the Jewish congregation of Stockton-on-Tees’, addressed a letter to the Burial Board of the town applying for a grant of land and separate space in the cemetery for the burial of Jews, on payment of the same fees as by others. This was agreed, provided it was fenced off.11 This was the second reference to a congregation in Stockton, made just a few months before a meeting of Jewish residents at the Victoria Coffee Palace, in the autumn of 1884. The stated purpose was to form a congregation and it led to the creation of a formal congregation which had a long life. A report of the meeting announced that while there were poor families, and only about ten persons were in a position to contribute to a synagogue, the money required for a synagogue had been promised in the room. This was to pay for a ‘comfortable’ place in Skinner Street, which would be fitted up by Mr Sanderson, contractor, for a synagogue. The report noted that only a short time before, those same few members contributed £60–70 for railing around ground set aside by the Corporation for a Jewish burial ground. Clearly there were some members with means.

Whatever the earlier arrangements of the 1870s (for example, who appointed the shochet and who determined the prices he could charge? Was there a board of management with named officers?), now there was a proper structure, so at least there was an organisation. At the 1884 meeting a board was elected: President Mr I. Cohen, Treasurer and Certified Hon. Sec. Mr A. Michelson, Committee M. Myers, I. Alston, and M. Jacobs. Moreover, Mr Solomons (sic), at present temporary shochet in Middlesbrough, was elected as chazan, shochet and Hebrew teacher. There were twenty-five to thirty children able to go to school but who got no religious instruction.12 The work on the synagogue was done quickly and it was opened for divine service on 19 September 1884. The service was conducted by Rev. B. J. Salomons and Isaac Alston.13

The five men who were the officers and committee elected in 1884 were all new to Stockton. The first to arrive was Morris Myers, a pawnbroker, who had been in Scotland, where a daughter was born in 1870. The first child born in Stockton was a son, born in 1875. Morris Jacobs, a clothes dealer, born in about 1817 in Russia, was in Stockton for the 1881 census. Isaac Cohen, a general dealer, was in Russia in 1881 when a daughter was born, then came straight to Stockton where another daughter was born. The remaining two men, Asher Michelson and Isaac Alston, both lived in neighbouring Middlesbrough. Michelson was a pawnbroker and clothier and moved to Stockton late in the 1880s, where a daughter was born in 1888. He was to become an important figure in the community. He remained in the town and died there in 1918 aged seventy-three. Several of his children were married, in Stockton and elsewhere, by his eldest son, Rev. Benjamin Nathan Michelson, BA.

Lewis Olsover, the historian of north-eastern Jewry, pays particular attention to Isaac Alston, a financial agent (i.e. moneylender), saying he played an important part in Stockton’s history. It is true that Alston was on the board, and assisted in the service at the opening of the Stockton synagogue in September 1884. His wife was also involved with the Ladies’ Benevolent Society. Olsover speaks of a disagreement with the Middlesbrough authorities, resulting in Alston moving to Stockton. He certainly was in business in Stockton in 1887 and perhaps he had moved there but he left for Australia the next year, so one cannot be sure of his role. In October 1888 a service was held in Middlesbrough to receive a Sepher Torah with silver and mantle which was being presented by Isaac Alston on his departure. There was a large attendance including most of the Jewish inhabitants of Stockton.14

It was appropriate that a formal congregation was formed in 1884 as the community had increased in size in the meantime. The 1881 census listed eleven new Jewish families and two boarders as well as the ‘old’ families of Isaac H. Hart and Joseph Lyon. Clearly some of the new families had arrived in Stockton during the 1870s. One of the new households, headed by Joseph Lando, includes his daughter-in-law and her four children, the father being the absent Lewis. He appears in 1891 in Cardiff with two more Stockton-born children, in 1882 and 1884. Most of the children were below working age but one, the son of Joel Block, glazier, was also a glazier, and three of the children of Isaac H. Hart were a music teacher, an accountant, and a tailor’s apprentice, thus indicating a small movement into white-collar jobs.

The Jewish population in 1881 was now seventy-seven. That number includes two Jewish lodgers but excludes the ten in the family of George Groskop. The occupations of the heads of the eleven new households included three clothes dealers (one being a second-hand clothes dealer), three glaziers, a general dealer, a picture framer, a pawnbroker and a retired pawnbroker, and a minister. The lodgers were a glazier and a traveller. There are references to two other Jewish families and a single man who were temporarily in Stockton. Jacob Marks, already mentioned, was in Birmingham in 1881, his occupation being recorded as ‘official inspector of meat to Hebrew congregation’. Samuel Finn, a draper, spent most of his time in South Shields but had a daughter in Stockton in 1877. Louis Samuels made a temporary appearance in this history, appearing in court after being accused wrongly of theft.15

The early history of Stockton congregation was, as it were, confirmed by the appointment in 1884 of Asher Michelson as secretary for marriages, and by the first wedding in the Skinner Street synagogue, in January 1885. This was of Joseph Stones of Darlington and Sarah Gordon of Stockton.16 Among the numerous newspaper reports of court cases were two which attracted attention. One was entitled, ‘A Stockton Jew who fell Among the Gentiles’. It concerned Joseph Lando, a dealer in old clothes. Richard Flattery was charged with robbery of a coat from Lando’s shop. Flattery and another were in the shop and one of them ran out with a pair of trousers. Lando chased and caught him. Some time later the two men came back and Flattery ran off with a coat. Lando called a policeman and apprehended him. Lando had had a case before the court not long before, and needed an interpreter. This time his English was better. The second case gave some information about a glazier. A young man named Frederick Richardson was before the Stockton magistrates on a charge of assaulting

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EARLY HISTORY OF THE JEWS OF STOCKTON-ON-TEES 15

Isaac Levy, of breaking a quantity of glass, and of being drunk in the streets. He had accosted Levy and asked him for ‘the price of a pint’. Levy refused, and the prisoner struck him, knocking him down, and ‘breaking all the glass which he was carrying in a rack upon his back’. Richardson was fined 2s 6d and costs for being drunk, ordered to pay Levy 12s for compensation for damage to glass, and 4s 6d in connection with the charge of wilful damage.17

Rev. B. J. Salomons did not last long, leaving for Chatham in 1885. He was succeeded by Rev. Benjamin Cohen who served for many years. The new minister served an expanded population. At the 1891 census, seven households had left Stockton, leaving six, but they were replaced by as many as fifteen new households plus seven single male lodgers. The occupations of the fifteen heads of household and the seven lodgers were characteristic immigrant ones. They included a minister (Rev. Benjamin Cohen), two picture framers, two pawnbrokers, one bill discounter, and a money broker, five drapers or drapers’ assistants, a glass merchant, four glaziers, a general dealer and four hawkers. Generally, those children old enough to be in employment were in the same trades as their fathers and were perhaps working for them. But the daughter of Abraham Levy, a money broker, was a music teacher.

Judging by the birthdates and birthplaces of children (where there were any), a number of the newcomers settled in Stockton on arrival, but others lived in several places before being in Stockton in 1891. These earlier residences were generally in the north of England. In 1891 the population was about 120.

In the 1880s the financial state of the synagogue was generally satisfactory, except that in October 1886 it was reported that a number of families had moved out, yet a year later the congregation was said to be increasing. Otherwise it settled down and expanded its activities. A branch of the Anglo-Jewish Association was formed, as was a connection with Chovevei Zion. In 1886 Rev. H. P. Levy began his role as Visiting Minister and as early as the following year there began the regular complaints of the inadequacy of the synagogue premises. In particular, the internal steps were said to be dangerous, which the Chief Rabbi, on his second visit in 1892, particularly mentioned.18

By the next census of 1901, eight families had gone, along with three single men, replaced by seven new families and two single men, the total population remaining about the same (one of the new families having ten children). The occupations of the newcomers were the familiar migrant ones – tailors, a commission agent, pawnbroker, draper, picture framer, and glass merchant. But among the second generation (of all families) were new occupations – commercial clerk, chemist’s assistant, and a solicitor’s articled clerk.

An indication of integration into British society was the election to the council of the Stockton Literary Institute of Abraham Bloom of Middlesbrough. In 1904 it was reported that he was re-elected unanimously for the sixth time. It was pointed out that he was the first Jew elected to the council of a non-Jewish literary society in Stockton.19 In 1890, at a meeting on 29 July, the Stockton and Middlesbrough congregations united for the purpose of organising a branch of the Zionist Association, to be entitled the Middlesbrough and Stockton Zionist Association.20

Three major features occupied the community at this time and into the early twentieth century. First, there were the regular reports of the examination of the Hebrew Classes by visiting ministers, including the Chief Rabbi. Invariably the examiners expressed satisfaction at the children’s performance. The second feature was the annual charitable balls instituted by members of the congregation. They resumed in 1893 and the local paper reported one of these at length. It was held under the patronage of the Mayor and Mayoress and was attended by some fifty couples from various places, including as far away as Newcastle and Bradford. Dancing went on from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. and at midnight supper was provided by the Jewish ladies of Stockton. Any surplus was to be divided between a Stockton charity and poor Jewish families in Stockton. However, the most significant event was the opening of a new synagogue. In 1893, at the congregation’s annual meeting, the president congratulated the members on having got through the High Festivals without any accident occurring in the ‘incommodious’ synagogue. They have had notice to quit and, although small in number and having passed through a trade crisis, they should build a synagogue.21

The problem was the lack of finance. In 1906, at the laying of the foundation stone, the history was described. Mr Maurice Jacobs, MA, of Brighton, who represented Stockton at the Board of Deputies, laid the foundation stone on 22 March 1906 for the new synagogue, of which there was a detailed description in the Jewish Chronicle. Mr Michelson said the synagogue started in 1884 in a temporary synagogue in Skinner Street and only when the Ephraim Levin Fund became available in 1894 and Dr Adler assigned £150 to Stockton could anything be done, and it was used for purchasing land. They had to wait eleven more years until 1905, when the F. D. Mocatta Fund provided £100 and £550 was raised. £400 was now required.22 The proposed synagogue had been described as follows: it was 76 ft deep, 26 ft wide, situated in the centre of Hartington Road. There would be a ladies’ gallery for fifty ladies. The ground floor would be arranged for seventy-four sittings. In the rear of the synagogue would be a classroom 24 ft 6 in by 13 ft. The cost of building, without land, was expected to be a little over £800. The contractor was Mr William Doughty of Yarm-on-Tees.23 The architect was Mr T. W. T. Richardson of Stockton. At a general meeting of ladies, a committee was formed for providing the necessary vestments. Mrs Michelson was President, Mrs H. Cohen was Treasurer, and Mrs A. Hartman was Honorary Secretary. About half the necessary funds and a few gifts were subscribed by the ladies present.24 The new synagogue was consecrated by the Chief Rabbi in October 1906 and was formally opened by Samuel Spitzel, who provided the balance of the money to enable the synagogue to commence debt-free.25

Finally, the year 1906 also saw three other events which are worth recording as they had an impact upon the relationship of the Jewish community with the town as a whole. Joshua Goldston, the first Jew to contest a seat for the Town Council, was elected to it. He remained a member for thirty-nine years and was Mayor from 1927 to 1929. Reuben Cohen, who was the first Jewish solicitor in the area, was apparently the agent at the 1906 General Election for Frank Rose, the Labour candidate for Stockton.26 And Reuben Cohen’s wife gave birth to a son, Clifford, who not only was awarded the Military Cross in the Second World War but ended up a judge.

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16 HAROLD POLLINS

Harold Pollins was formerly a Senior Tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford. Since his retirement in 1989, he has researched the history of a number of provincial Jewish communities and also of Jewish soldiers in the First World War. He has published several articles in Shemot.

REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 21 November 1870, p. 3. Note that this newspaper was consulted online at Findmypast. It included

news of Stockton. I was unable to find a Stockton newspaper online. 2. Jewish Chronicle, 25 October 1872, p. 402; and 8 November 1872, p. 441. 3. Strangely, in this census, the birthplace of Stanley Hart is wrongly given as Clerkenwell. 4. Jewish Chronicle, 23 June 1972, p. 32, ‘End of Stockton Synagogue’. 5. Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 18 December 1875, p. 3. 6. Jewish Chronicle, 17 September 1920, p. 14 (Jacob Marks); Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 8 January 1880, p. 3 (Gordon). 7. Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 17 January 1883, p. 3, Samuel Gordon v Morris Jacobs. 8. Jewish Chronicle, 31 January 1879, p. 4. 9. Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 21 May 1878, p. 3.10. Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 25 April 1881, p. 4.11. Jewish Chronicle, 8 February 1884, p. 5.12. Jewish Chronicle, 5 September 1884, p. 7. ‘Solomons’ was Rev B. J. Salomons.13. Jewish Chronicle, 26 September 1884, p. 7.14. Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 9 November 1887, p. 1, advert by I. Alston to lend money, 5a The Square, Stockton; Jewish Chronicle,

12 October 1888, p. 11, leaving for Australia. 15. Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 24 February 1879, p. 4 and 29 September 1879, p. 3.16. Jewish Chronicle, 21 November 1884, p. 11 (Marriage Secretary); Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 3 January 1885, p. 4 (first marriage).17. Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 6 April 1878, p. 3 (Lando) and 24 September 1879, p. 3 (Levy [Levi]).18. Jewish Chronicle, 8 October 1886, p. 13 (families leaving); 7 October 1887, p. 11 (increasing); 18 March 1887, p. 8 (Anglo-Jewish

Association); 19 June 1891 (Chovevei Zion); 17 August 1888, p. 3 (Levy); 7 October 1887, p. 11 (inadequacy of synagogue); 22 July 1892, p. 15 (Chief Rabbi on synagogue deficiencies).

19. Jewish Chronicle, 11 March 1904, p. 33.20. Jewish Chronicle, 3 August 1900, p. 20.21. Jewish Chronicle, 29 September 1893, p. 16.22. Jewish Chronicle, 23 March 1906, p. 42.23. This was William Merryweather Doughty, builder and contractor, born and living in Yarm, Yorkshire.24. Jewish Chronicle, 16 March 1906, p. 41.25. Jewish Chronicle, 26 October 1926, p. 34.26. National Archives, ‘Reuben Cohen (Frank Rose’s Agent) Stockton Election a/c’ 1906. LP/LRC/30/234.

Shemot.indb 16 09/02/18 8:40 AM

The (Berko)wiczes of East Warsaw: Part 2. Using Google, Facebook and email to find living descendantsLeigh Dworkin

In Part 1, we found out how American genealogical research – specifically use of New York passenger manifests, the US federal censuses and US naturalisation documents – enabled the discovery of two unknown sibling BerkowitZ families in the US, and from this identified a common ancestor, “Lo’se Berkowicz”, who was the mother of both American BerkowitZ siblings, Max and Isidore, and also my UK-based great-grandfather Harris/Gershon Bercovitch. (See the family tree in Figure 1 as a reminder.)

Figure 1. The Warsaw Berkowicz family.

While this was an exciting breakthrough, there were questions over the deciphering of the handwriting on the passenger manifest (Figure 2), as I had never heard of the given name “Lo’se”.

Figure 2. Passenger record for Itzka Berkowitz.

In a plea for help, I decided to use the power of Facebook genealogical groups to confirm my interpretation. There were many strong views from the JGSGB Facebook Group1 and the “Tracing the Tribe” Group.2 Sadly, they did not agree with each other or me. I had to choose between Rose, Lore (Laura), or Sore (Sarah) to replace my chosen “Lo’se”. It was not an easy decision. No way Jose. But it could possibly be “Jose” too! The most passionately argued case was for Sore, and this was my new working hypothesis, requiring meticulous proof.

Another mystery was to identify another American BerkowitZ sibling, L. BerkowitZ of 199th St. New York, NY (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Passenger record for Itzka Berkowitz.

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18 LEIGH DWORKIN

This was the same address that Luby (actually “Lilia”) and Rose had on their passenger manifest, when they travelled a year later, as you might expect, but they would be visiting their “husband and father” there.

Who was the mysterious S. Stein and how was he Louis’s brother-in-law? One way would have been if S. Stein had married Louis’s sister. Another would have been if S. Stein was the brother of Louis’s wife Luby/Lena/Lilia. This was quickly solved by finding a birth record of a Celia Stein on FamilySearch,3 with parents Samuel Stein and Goldie BerkowitZ Stein (Figure 7).

I had failed to find him on the 1910 census, shortly before brother Max had stated him to be the relative with whom he would be staying in America when he immigrated in 1910. Again, I threw myself on the mercy of the excellent Tracing the Tribe Facebook Group. After months of trying to search the 1910 census by address, a lateral thought hit my adviser, guided by the fact that there was no house number 222 on that street. In fact, the solution was to realise that this was actually 109th Street, and that the tail of the middle 9 was part of the handwritten line below. There at East 109th Street was Louis BerkowitZ, with his wife Luby and young children, Rose (born in England) and Sam (born in New York) with an immigration date of 1907 (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Census entry.

It was easy to watch the family develop over time, with the 1915 New York state census and the 1920 and 1940 federal censuses, showing a family growing to have seven children and for Louis’s wife’s name to change to the more American Lena. They also moved from New York to Springfield, Massachusetts. Sadly, they could not be found in 1930, which is an exercise for the reader.

More important than finding every census was finding their New York passenger lists. They did not travel together, but I managed to find a Leib BerkowitZ alone on the SS New York in 1907. Given the large number of BerkowitZes that travelled to New York I needed further proof that this was the right Leib/Louis. That was definitive from his last address (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Passenger record for Leib Berkowitz.

Again, my great-grandfather Gershon was hosting a brother’s travels, just as he later did for brother Max in 1910. This is the same known address where my grandfather David was born in 1909, as stated on his birth certificate. The passenger list for Louis’s wife Luby and daughter Rose was also found. They travelled on the SS Philadelphia in 1908. Again, they had been staying with Gershon in Whitechapel at the same address, prior to travel. More interesting was the other address on Louis’s passenger manifest that stated where he would be staying in America (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Passenger record for Leib Berkowitz.

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THE (BERKO)WICZES OF EAST WARSAW: PART 2. 19

Figure 7. Birth record for Celia Stein.

This proved the existence of another BerkowitZ sibling, a sister Goldie. So now research switched to finding out about this Goldie and Samuel Stein, via the usual techniques of finding them on the censuses, finding their New York passenger lists and trying to find any naturalisation documents.

In summary, from these documents, Sam was a weaver from Warsaw. He travelled to the US under a false name on the SS Philadelphia in 1905. Rather than using his real name, “Shmuel Eisenstein”, he claimed that he had travelled as “Jeak Spinak”. His wife Goldie and two children Harry and David had travelled to the US the year afterwards, she under the name of Sarah G. (for Goldie) Isenstein. Much of this came from naturalisation documents, available on Ancestry US,4 including a rather swarthy picture of Sam along with exact birth dates of the children (Figure 8):

Figure 8. Naturalisation record for Samuel Stein.

See how the daughter matches the birth record found above, although “Celia” is now known as “Sadie”.I like to call the technique of using the addresses on New York passenger lists “genealogical ping-pong back in time”.

It feels like going back in time to find the relative who travelled to the US before you, and with whom you stayed when you first arrived. How were they related? Where was it? What families can be found on the census at that address? Then repeat until you get stuck.

For Sam Stein, I did manage to ping-pong back one more person. However, as he claimed he had travelled under a false name, I needed to be sceptical about the accuracy of the data he was giving to the authorities. Neither the naturalisation authorities nor I could find “Jeak Spinak”, because this was not in fact the name that Sam travelled under. Usually there is a Certificate of Arrival in with the naturalisation documents but this was conspicuous by its absence. I did, however, doggedly pursue Sam, and managed to find a “Yankel Spinner” travelling on the SS Philadelphia in the right month, also a weaver of the right age. It had to be Sam Stein/Shmuel Eisenstein. He went to stay with a “brother” in Paterson, New Jersey, yet another weaver called “Roman Spinner” – but I decided that this relationship must be fictitious.

I managed to trace the Stein family in the various censuses quite easily, leading up to the 1940 census. Sam and Goldie didn’t add to the three children shown above. They seemed to flip between New York and New Jersey, but Sam was always working as a weaver in a silk mill. In the 1925 New York state census, they were living in the same house as brother Isidore and his family. However by 1940 Sam and Goldie were living in California with daughter Sadie, her husband Sam Welner and two Welner children, Estelle (seven) and Jerry (three) (Figure 9).

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20 LEIGH DWORKIN

In Part 1 of this story, I had discovered a plethora of living relatives descended from the American BerkowitZ siblings, but only one of them (Rachel Rader, a granddaughter of Max through his eldest daughter Helen) had been interested in talking to me. I had heard nothing from Isidore’s descendants despite reaching out via Facebook many times. Even Rachel had begun to tire of all my genealogical questions and had fobbed me off on her cousin Stacey who didn’t respond. Out of the blue, I received an email from the elusive Stacey, to whom Rachel Rader had introduced me about a year previously. My message in Facebook had remained hidden, and it was not lack of interest but Stacey had no idea I was desperate to speak to her.

What followed was a glorious exchange of old family photos and family information. It turned out that Stacey was indeed the granddaughter of Max and Sadie BerkowitZ, but her mother wasn’t the middle sister Theda but the youngest sister Shirley Jean BerkowitZ. Although Stacey didn’t know much about our common ancestors, she was willing to learn how to find out and equally desperate as I was to seek out the truth. I became her genealogical mentor. Not only did she become my mentee, but she acted as my feet on the street in terms of visiting cemeteries, ordering New York records and visiting American relatives. Stacey is my mother’s second cousin, but she and I are close in age and we became fast friends.

Not only did Stacey provide me with family photos of Max and Sadie, but also their children and grandchildren. So their eldest, Helen, became a Rader and there were many Rader family photos. The middle daughter Theda remarried a Hal Street and I had pictures of the two Street daughters to share with my mother, from her former pen pal Theda. The youngest daughter, Shirley Jean, married a Spindel and from them Stacey was descended. I also received many pictures of the younger generations, including Stacey’s only daughter.

But the best pictures (for me) were the ones that Stacey could not identify (Figure 10).

Figure 9. 1940 census record for Samuel Stein and family.

Figure 10. Gershon, Barney, Sid and David Bercovitch; Barney Bercovitch; Carole and Barry Burke, 1944.

Firstly Gershon, my great-grandfather, with his three boys. Secondly, Barney Bercovitch in a tuxedo as a young man. Thirdly and finally, my mother and uncle, as young children. I love it when such mysteries can be solved. This shows that there had been a decent level of contact between the families while the Berkowicz siblings were alive.

Stacey also ordered her grandfather Max’s naturalisation documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to confirm a lot of details. This was something I had never tried before so added to my American genealogical knowledge. She also tried to order his death certificate. This turned out to be only possible for a direct relative such as a granddaughter, however surprisingly difficult without supplying all of the details that you were trying to find

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out by ordering the certificate in the first place! Also the service takes at least twelve weeks which in this day and age is ludicrously slow, especially when they tell you in the end that they can’t find it and then refund your payment. Very frustrating!

Visiting Max and Sadie’s graves for the first time was very moving for Stacey. Her floods of tears were matched by my own when she sent me pictures of the tombstones. Rather than Max being Mendel ben Rev Avraham, he was Mendel ben Rev Shmuel. This was a bombshell. I was certain that my great-grandfather Harris’s father was Avraham from his tombstone! How could Max and Harris not be brothers after all my research? It was not fair. I came up with many theories to explain this away. Perhaps they shared a mother but not a father, and the two fathers had been brothers? Perhaps Shmuel was “Sam Abraham” in full? Perhaps Abraham was wrong but it was a good Jewish name in the absence of knowing Harris’s father’s name when Harris was buried? I decided to leave all my doubts to one side and continue the research.

On the positive side I had discounted a number of BerkowitZ records where the father had been Sam or Samuel and now they fitted the new evidence. In particular, I ordered Max’s brother Isidore’s marriage certificate from the New York archives (Figure 11).

Figure 11. Marriage record of Isidor Berkowitz and Fanny Cohen.

When Isidor married Fanny his parents were noted as Sam BerkowitZ and Shosha Gegor. Suddenly it all made sense. It wasn’t Lose/Lore/Rose but “Shosha”, a well-known derivative of Sarah/Sore as in the title character of an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, that I of course ordered immediately and devoured. (Not my Shosha, but definitely close).

Going back to the Steins on the 1940 census, I suddenly realised that Jerry Welner (aged three) was the same age as my mother, born about 1937, and could quite easily still be alive. I Googled “Jerry Welner” and up popped a page of results. Although there were many, one of them was for a violin aficionado website, whose bulletin editor was a Californian Jerry Welner. Violin playing runs in my family, although it has not passed down to me. It just felt right. I sent a “You don’t know me but …” email to the address provided, asking if this Jerry Welner might be the grandson of Goldie and Sam Stein. Within thirty minutes I received a happy “How did you find me?!” email and Sam Stein’s naturalisation certificate was sent to me as proof. What followed was a snowballing of emails as Jerry introduced me to the entire Stein clan; all six generations,

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22 LEIGH DWORKIN

although Sam and Goldie and all of their children were no longer alive. Quite a few of the Steins were interested in family history and genealogy, and were delighted to discover my unknown Bercovitch branch of the family from across the pond in the UK. You can imagine that I would ask them thousands of questions, but early on I discovered something amazing.

In 1976, Sam Stein was ninety-five years old. He had been interviewed by one of the younger generation and the audio tapes still existed and had been converted from cassette to a digital format. These were emailed to me and, despite shaking with excitement, I managed to click “Play” and was rewarded by quite a few hours of first-hand testimony from Sam Stein himself. This covered Sam’s parents, grandparents, siblings, immigration and stories of his life in Warsaw and in New Jersey. It also covered his wife’s family, which for me was like Goldie dust as I am related to the BerkowitZes rather than the Steins. Sam spoke of getting married at almost eighteen, how Goldie was two years older, and how he had been conscripted into the Russian army. He had deserted, aided by Louis BerkowitZ (who was a revolutionary) after just one year and fled to America. This explained all the subterfuge and use of false names and also the closeness between Louis and Sam Stein and why Louis had stayed with Sam when he first arrived in America – payback time.

The section on Goldie’s family was the most revealing for me. It listed Goldie’s siblings: Harris/Gershon, Louis, Max and Isidore. There was even one other sister, Freydl, who had remained behind in Poland. She may have travelled to Argentina, but there was some confusion over exactly who became Argentinian. Similarly someone died during the Second World War in a bombing raid. Apparently it was my great-grandfather Harris, but I knew that not to be true. I don’t have proof, but could this be why Isidore is missing from the 1940 census? There was talk of Goldie’s parents. Shmuel Berkowicz had died in Poland, after an accident at the meat factory where he worked (he severed a thumb and the whole arm had become fatally infected). However, his wife Shusha/Shosha had eventually made it to the US in 1924, after the quota system had allowed her to travel from Warsaw. To me, this was definitive proof from first-hand testimony that Harris/Gershon was a true sibling of all of the others, and that his father must be Shmuel Berkowicz and not Abraham Berkowicz as stated in the patronymic on his gravestone. Also my great-great-grandmother’s name was confirmed to be Shosha.

It just so happened that a couple of Sam Stein’s descendants were visiting the UK. They diverted their business trips to meet me and hand-delivered an information pack. This was put together by a granddaugher of Sam Stein and included DVDs of Sam’s audio interviews that I had already heard, but also photos, stories and family trees. The stories were mainly reminiscences of Sadie Stein, Sam’s daughter.

Elizabeth Shown Mills5 instructs us genealogists not to be “Tree Climbers”, just finding out names and dates, but “Generation Historians”, gathering stories and social context too. The stories that Sadie Stein captured by talking to her grandmother Shosha in America in Yiddish evoke a real feel of the existential angst that existed in early twentieth-century Warsaw: avoiding pogroms, being a revolutionary, deserting the army, fleeing the country and being afraid to talk about it. For example, see Figure 12:

Figure 12. Sadie Stein’s reminiscences.

There are certainly too many photos to show here, but the cream of the crop are a family group of Sam and Goldie Stein with their young children (Figure 13), and the only known photo of my great-great-grandmother, Shosha Berkowicz née Gegor (Figure 14). More than that, this is the only picture I have of any of my “great-greats”.

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Figure 13. Sam Stein and Goldie Berkowitz Stein with children David, Harry and Sadie, c.1908.

Figure 14. Shosha Berkowicz née Gegor.

In Part 3, learn how I managed to trace Shmuel Berkowicz and Shosha Gegor back in time, using Polish genealogical research techniques, all the way back to the late eighteenth century in the eastern parts of Warsaw.

Leigh Dworkin is the current Chairman of the JGSGB. He has been researching his mainly Polish family for the last thirty years, but also tries to research into Lithuania and Belarus, from where his surname originates. He regularly presents at JGSGB Regional Groups, Special Interest Groups and Conferences.

REFERENCES1. https://www.facebook.com/groups/JGSGB/2. https://www.facebook.com/groups/tracingthetribe/3. https://www.familysearch.org/4. https://www.ancestry.com/5. https://www.evidenceexplained.com/

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The Austrian Synagogue, ManchesterDavid Conway

Observant Jewish immigrants to Manchester in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to meet for worship, study and mutual support with fellow countrymen in small chevroth (religious societies), often in private houses.1 The Ashkenazi Austrian chevra, later synagogue, was established at 39 Briddon Street, Strangeways, Manchester by 1905.2 The 1907 Jewish Year Book lists the Austrian chevra as a “minor synagogue” with no details of membership numbers or executive.3 In 1909 the building was shared with Myer Sherman, tailor.4

In the early days, the congregation retained an interest in Austrian affairs, as evidenced by the holding of a special service in 1908 to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph, who had bestowed equal civic and political rights on Jews.5 In 1910 the shul celebrated his eightieth birthday,6 and in 1912 his eighty-second.7 Rabbi David Kohn-Zedek conducted a memorial service for the Emperor’s nephew Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife after their assassination by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo.8

In August 1914 the congregation moved to 68a Waterloo Road, Manchester, previously the home of the Roumanian Synagogue, which had moved to 2 Ramsgate Street, Cheetham. In 1916 the synagogue re-elected Mr Joseph Hamwee as its representative at the Board of Deputies of British Jews.9 The 1929 Jewish Year Book again included the Austrian Synagogue among minor synagogues, with no details given.

My maternal great-grandfather Mendel Feingold10 left Kolbuszowa,11 then in Austria (now in Poland), at the end of the nineteenth century and was a founder member of the shul.12 In 1931 he was elected synagogue treasurer and his Manchester-born son Philip (my maternal grandfather) warden (or gabbai) at the shul’s annual meeting.13 The Board of Deputies has deposited lists of shul members in 1937, 1940, 1943 and 1946 with the London Metropolitan Archives,14 and they are accessible with written permission.

The Jewish Year Book of 1937 records Mendel Feingold as synagogue president. He was one of eight Feingold shul members out of a total of forty-six that year. His brother Joseph was warden, and my grandfather secretary. The minister at that time was Rabbi Isaac Golditch, later Dayan Golditch of the Manchester Beth Din.153 Figure 1 shows an invitation to the rabbi’s weekly lectures.

Figure 1. An invitation to the community inviting them to a weekly shiur (lecture) on Ethics of the Fathers by Rabbi Golditch each Shabbat at 5 p.m.

Synagogue membership was forty-five in 1940, fifty in 1943 and forty-five in 1946, so numbers were small but stable. During the Second World War, Rev. Chaim Halpern served as minister, thus allowing his exemption from military service.16

There is a synagogue marriage register at the Manchester Register Office,17 inaccessible to the public. Another copy is kept by the Board of Deputies. The first marriage took place on 21 February 1909, and the last in the synagogue was on 27 April 1941. My late parents married in the Manchester Great Synagogue, Cheetham Hill Road, in 1945. I have a silver becher (Kiddush cup) engraved “Presented to Miss Gita Feingold on the occasion of her marriage Aug 1 1945 from the Austrian Synagogue, Manchester”.

The London Gazette of 25 October 1955 recorded that the Austrian Synagogue, 68A Waterloo Road, Cheetham had ceased to be used as a place of worship and the building was therefore no longer certified for such use.18 It was demolished in about 1956. It seems that the congregation could not obtain another building so the members dispersed. I do not know what happened to the sifrei torah, rimonim (torah ornaments) or shul records. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find photographs of the building in the Manchester Local Image Collection.19 Any information would be welcome.

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THE AUSTRIAN SYNAGOGUE, MANCHESTER 25

The author is a retired gynaecologist living near Glasgow. Email [email protected]

REFERENCES 1. Williams, B. (1988) Manchester Jewry. Manchester: Archive Publications. 2. www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/England.htm 3. Reproduced in Dobkin, M. (1994) More tales of Manchester Jewry. Manchester: Richardson. 4. Slater’s Manchester, Salford and Suburban Directory, 1909. 5. Jewish Chronicle, 11 December 1908. 6. Jewish Chronicle, 26 August 1910. 7. Jewish Chronicle, 23 August 1912. 8. Jewish Chronicle, 24 July 1914. 9. Jewish Chronicle, 19 May 1916.10. Conway, D. (2009) Kolbuszowa to Manchester, Shemot, 17(3–4), pp. 22–24.11. Conway, D. (2009) Kolbuszowa family connections, Shemot, 17(1), p. 7–8.12. Obituary, Jewish Chronicle, 3 March 1939.13. Jewish Chronicle, 30 October 1931.14. London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Road, Clerkenwell, London EC1R 0HB, tel: 0207 332 3820.15. Obituary, Jewish Chronicle, 22 May 1987.16. Obituary, Jewish Chronicle, 30 May 2008.17. Manchester Register Office, Heron House, 47 Lloyd Street, Manchester M2 5LE, tel: 0161 234 5005, ref 519.18. For a description of Jewish Waterloo Road, see Dobkin, M. (1998) Rothschild in Manchester and other tales from the history of Manchester

Jewry. Manchester: Richardson.19. www.manchester.gov.uk.

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American censuses and substitutes. Part 3: finding substitutes for the 1790 censusTed Bainbridge

About one-third of the 1790 United States census has disappeared. Genealogists partially compensate for these losses by using other records as substitutes.

Records we have or don’t haveIn the states whose census pages have been preserved, you can hunt people by going to Ancestry.co.uk, selecting Search and then Card Catalog, typing census 1790 in the keywords box, and then selecting 1790 from the hit list. When searching the 1790 census, keep the following in mind:

1. Only heads of households were named.2. When a woman was head of house, she often was listed as “Widow” or “Mrs.” or “Goodie” (good woman) without

her first name being shown.3. Between that year and now many place names have changed and many boundaries have moved.4. Names might have been spelled very differently from modern spellings.

We have no returns for Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Virginia. To find substitutes for the missing parts of the 1790 census, do all of the following:

Hunting substitutes on Ancestry.co.ukAncestry.co.uk is a subscription site but you can use it for free at any library or LDS Family History Center (FHC). (You can locate FHCs near you by visiting https://familysearch.org/locations/.)

Go to Ancestry.co.uk, hover on Search, then click census and voter lists. On the right of the screen you can select censuses by location or by date. You also can select state censuses that were taken in years different from those of the national censuses.

Go to Ancestry.co.uk, hover on Search, click Card Catalog, then set “Keyword(s)” to census united states. The hit list will include the 1790 and other national censuses, some state censuses, other similar documents and schedules, and a variety of census substitutes. Sometimes a search will not reveal relevant data sets that exist, so search again with different terms, synonyms, or less specific adjectives.

Hunting substitutes – the Dollarhide booksConsult the Dollarhide books. Some libraries and some LDS FHCs have William Dollarhide’s two-volume Census Substitutes & State Census Records. These books describe what records are available for each U.S. state and where the records are located. The books describe Internet access for many of the items listed. If such access is not described, FHC staff still might be able to help you find that material on the Internet. If no library or FHC near you has these books, find them on worldcat.org and ask your library to borrow them for you through the Interlibrary Loan Service.

Hunting substitutes – Internet subject searchDo an Internet search for “1790 census substitute”, and (optionally) the name of a state. Also search for tax lists, voter lists, city directories, other directories of residents or businesses, and land ownership records in the area you want. Ask appropriate state and county genealogical and historical associations if they can guide you to any such resources. (All of these searches should be done in the county that had jurisdiction over the area of your interest at the dates relevant to your research. Please read the section called “Finding essential maps” in Part 1 of this series of articles.)

Some substitutes for specific statesAncestry’s Reconstructed 1790 Census Schedules at https://www.ancestry.com/wiki/index.php?title=Reconstructed_1790_Census_Schedules describes some substitutes for each state whose 1790 census records are missing.

New Jersey: try Ancestry’s New Jersey, Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1643–1890 at http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3562. Some Monmouth County substitute records are described at https://co.monmouth.nj.us/page.aspx?ID=4477. The Genealogical Society of New Jersey has Revolutionary Census of New Jersey: An Index Based on Rateables of the Inhabitants of New Jersey During the Period of the American Revolution, by Kenn Stryker-Rodda.

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AMERICAN CENSUSES AND SUBSTITUTES. PART 3: FINDING SUBSTITUTES FOR THE 1790 CENSUS 27

Delaware: the state’s 1782 tax and census lists, and other substitutes, are described at http://www.tomgfreeman.com/dgs/publications/taxassessment.php, https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Delaware_Taxation, http://guides.lib.udel.edu/c.php?g=85348&p=548475, http://www.amazon.com/Delaware-1782-Assessment-Census-List/dp/1887061045, and http://files.lib.byu.edu/family-history-library/research-outlines/US/Delaware.pdf. The Delaware Historical Society has a reconstructed census for 1790.

Georgia: try Ancestry’s Georgia, Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1790–1890 at http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3542 and their The Reconstructed 1790 Census of Georgia at http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=48008&cj=1&netid=cj&o_xid=0001231185&o_lid=0001231185&o_sch=Affiliate+External. Background infor-mation is at http://www.georgiaarchives.org/research/census_records. Some substitutes are described at http://www.amazon.com/Reconstructed-Census-Georgia-Substitutes-Georgias/dp/0806311118, http://www.genealogical.com/products/ The%20Reconstructed%201790%20Census%20of%20Georgia/1410.html, http://www.genealoger.com/genealogy/states/georgia.htm, and http://www.familytreemagazine.com/article/Georgia-records-details-resources. The Georgia Historical Society has The Reconstructed 1790 Census of Georgia: Substitutes for Georgia’s Lost 1790 Census, complied by Marie De Lamar and Elisabeth Rothstein, which was recreated from tax records.

Kentucky: Kentucky still was part of Virginia in 1790, so its census was lost when the Virginia census was lost. Information is in 1790 First Kentucky Census at http://www.kykinfolk.com/carroll/1790census.htm. Try Ancestry’s Kentucky, Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1810–1890 at http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3549. Links to some sites that might help are at http://www.genealogy.org/state.asp?state=KY. Try tax records, muster rolls, passport applications, army enlistment registers, marriage records, and probate records.

Tennessee: Tennessee wasn’t a state in 1790; it was part of the Southwest Territory. Some information is at http://tn-roots.com/tncrockett/censusfacts.html. Try Ancestry.com’s 1770–1790 Census of the Cumberland Settlements at http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3006&cj=1&netid=cj&o_xid=0001231185&o_lid=0001231185&o_sch=Affiliate+External. “The Reconstructed 1790 Census for Tennessee” is an appendix to Afton Reintjes’ Tennessee Research, which is available from Arlene Eakle at [email protected].

Virginia: Heads of Families at the First Census 1790 is a substitute available at http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1790m-02.pdf. That document was compiled from state enumerations of 1782 through 1785, plus some county tax lists for 1783 through 1786. Probably half of Virginia’s households are represented. This document also is a substitute for the Virginia census of 1800, which is missing. Try Binn’s Genealogy at http://www.binnsgenealogy.com/VirginiaTaxListCensuses/ and Ancestry’s Virginia, Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1607–1890 at http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3578. For information about missing Virginia census records and substitutes read the Library of Virginia’s 1790 Virginia Census (VA-NOTES) at http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/guides/va2_1790census.htm. Several lists are available in New Horizons Genealogy’s Virginia State and Colonial Census Records Online at http://www.newhorizonsgenealogicalservices.com/va-census.htm. Try some of the links in Virginia Census 1790 - 1840 at http://www.ahgp.org/census/virginia-census-1790-1840.html. John Robb’s Virginia Taxes & Tax Lists for the Colonial and Early Federal Period at http://www.johnbrobb.com/Content/VA/VA-Taxes.pdf offers detailed information on this subject and a few useful links to sources. Available Virginia land and personal property tax records begin in 1782, and have been arranged chronologically and by county. Those records on microfilm are available from The Library of Virginia through interlibrary loan. More information is available at http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/using_collections.asp#_guides-TaxRecords. Some of Virginia’s land records that can serve as census substitutes name a family and show zero occupants. That might be an error, but more likely indicates an absentee owner.

Ted Bainbridge’s genealogical and historical articles are published throughout the United States. He can be contacted at [email protected]

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FOOTSTEPS IN THE PAST The death of Sir Francis GoldsmidDoreen Berger

It was the day after his seventieth birthday and Sir Francis Henry Goldsmid, Baronet, the Member of Parliament for Reading, lawyer and communal leader, arrived at Waterloo Station at 7.45 p.m. and behind time. He was returning home from a meeting of trustees of parish schools on his estate. The carriage door opened before the train had stopped and the baronet, unthinkingly, stepped from the first-class carriage. The result may be imagined.

Francis Goldsmid was born at Spital Square, London on 1 May in the year 1808 to the financier, philanthropist and first baronet, Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, and his wife, his cousin Isabel. He was born the year after the death of their eldest son, Benjamin, and thus at his birth became heir to the house of Goldsmid. The home that he grew up in was often filled with original and unorthodox thinkers of the day, and his father was at the forefront of the fight for the removal of civil disabilities, alongside the family of Rothschild. Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, indeed, was founder of University College and one of the founders of the West London Synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street, the first Reform Synagogue in this country.

Figure 1. Sir Francis Henry Goldsmid, 2nd Bt by John Watkins. albumen carte-de-visite, 1860s. NPG Ax17782 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

When Francis was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn at the age of twenty-five, he refused to take the Christian oath and was allowed to use the Hebrew Bible to be sworn in, becoming the first professing Jew to be admitted as a barrister. He married his first cousin, Louisa Sophia Goldsmid, on 10 October 1839 and in 1858 he was appointed a Queen’s Counsel, but gave up his legal practice on the death of his father a year later when he succeeded to the baronetcy.

In 1860 he entered Parliament as the Liberal Member for Reading and represented this constituency until his tragic death. He was greatly esteemed in the House as spokesman for Jewish affairs, but was suspected of putting these interests before party considerations, supporting Benjamin Disraeli against William Gladstone himself in the case of the Balkans. He joined his father in his support for the establishment of the West London Synagogue, established the Jews’ Infant School and played an important role in the formation of the Anglo-Jewish Association.

The funeral cortège of this eminent man consisted of a hearse drawn by four horses, forty mourning coaches and about fifty private carriages. Every shop in Reading was either partially or completely closed on the morning of the funeral, and almost every window had its blinds drawn, while the church bells were tolled. In the afternoon, the Mayor and Corporation assembled, the mace and insignia being draped in crepe, and a note of condolence to the widow was unanimously sent.

The Daily Telegraph, in a leader, commented that the deceased gentleman held a prominent place in society and was universally respected and, by those who knew him intimately, beloved.

At the inquest, his death was graphically described by his valet, who was riding in the same train as his employer. He had seen Sir Francis fall and described how he was dragged along the platform by the train, the carriage then having to be detached from the train. A railway porter in the employ of the South-Western Railway gave evidence that the train was

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THE DEATH OF SIR FRANCIS GOLDSMID 29

about twenty minutes late. A medical student at St. Thomas’s Hospital, Mr F. W. Giles, confirmed that the deceased had told him, “This happened through their throwing open the door before the train stopped.”

The Superintendent Inspector at Waterloo Railway Station said that he did not consider six inches was too wide a space between the carriage and the platform and that the rules of the Company stated “No carriage door should be opened before the train stops or after the train starts.” Mr W. Napier, surgeon, said he was the medical attendant of the deceased. Since the accident, he had been to Waterloo Station, measured the distance between the floor off the platform and carriages and had found it was 31 inches in a direct line. There were two steps, but the lower one was useless, being on a level with the platform or below it, and the higher one was a short iron step. The deceased was a short-sighted man, and Mr Napier believed he was probably under the impression the platform was of the usual depth, as he rarely travelled on the South-Western line. The foreman of the jury said they were of the opinion that the practice of opening carriage doors by porters was calculated to contribute to accidents. They recommended no portion of the train should be higher than the other, and the space of six inches between footboard and platform was greater than it should be. Such was the sad death of a very great man. After the tragic death of Sir Francis, the President of the Board of Trade was asked in the House of Commons if he was prepared to obtain from Parliament powers to compel railway companies to so construct footboards of passenger carriages as to prevent a recurrence of such an accident.

The baronetcy devolved upon his nephew, Julian Goldsmid, MP. A drinking fountain to his memory was erected at the lower end of Leman Street, Whitechapel, in 1879, bearing the following inscription:

This fountain was erected by Emma, wife of Nathaniel Montefiore, in memory of her brother, Sir Francis Henry Goldsmid, Bart., M.P. for Reading. Born May 1, 1808. Died May 2, 1878. Write me as one who loved his fellow men. – Leigh Hunt.

SOURCESGeoffrey Alderman (2004) ‘Goldsmid, Sir Francis Henry, second baronet’, In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University

Press.Doreen Berger (1999 and 2004) The Jewish Victorian: genealogical information from the Jewish newspapers. 1871–80. Robert Boyd.Doreen Berger (2003) ‘The first Jewish Queen’s Counsel’. In: The Family and Local History Handbook. 7th edn. York: GR Specialist Information

Services.Chaim Bermant (1971) The cousinhood: the Anglo-Jewish gentry. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.

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Long-lost familyHoward Kramer

This is an account of how l reunited a family after seventy years. Real names have not been used in this account, in order to protect the privacy of those members of the family who are still alive. In addition, references for birth, marriage and death records have been omitted.

An au pair in Israel eventually left the family she was working for, and returned to her native Germany. Some years later she married, and her husband recounted to her his family’s history as far as he knew it, with lots of gaps. There was an Israel connection, so the au pair contacted the Israeli family that she had worked for to ask if they could help trace her husband’s family (known as Son A). They were unable to help. There was also an English connection, so the Israeli family asked a UK friend if she could help. She couldn’t assist but said that she would talk to me. Having looked at the details that l was given, I advised the family in Germany that they needed to obtain UK birth, marriage and death certificates in order to try and trace the family. I explained that genealogy involved tracing ancestors rather than searching for current family members, and that I had no experience of trying to find living members of a family. They asked whether l would undertake the research and said they would pay for my time. We all like a bit of detective work, so l agreed but advised them that l had no idea if l would be successful. I also said that l didn’t want any payment other than for certificates that l had to order.

In Berlin in the 1930s a Jewish doctor had an affair with a non-Jewish nurse, and a baby girl was born. The doctor’s parents were aghast and arranged for the doctor to be sent to Israel, so that there would be no further contact between the doctor and the nurse. There was also no contact from the doctor’s parents with the nurse. However, the doctor’s sister (we will call her Helga) took pity on the nurse and her baby and provided food and clothes.

In the late 1930s Helga and her husband fled Germany and moved to the UK. The family in Germany have since told me that Helga’s husband regularly travelled to England on business, taking a boat from Bremen. In 1938 he was staying at his usual hotel in Bremen awaiting the boat to take him to the UK, when he was handed a letter by the hotel manager which advised him that under a new bye-law, Jews were was not allowed in the dining room and had to eat in their room. He realised that Germany would not be a safe place to stay, so immediately returned home, got his belongings together and left for England with his family.

Son A knew the married name of Helga, but nothing else. I thought that the combination of first name and surname would be unusual so I entered the name on Findmypast and discovered that there was just one person, so much easier than l thought! l now had something to go on. I discovered an alien card for Helga in the National Archives at Kew which gave vital details (husband’s occupation, dates of birth, etc.) and an address in Hampstead, London.

I then researched various directories and found that Helga and her husband had moved three times between 1939 and 1979, but all the addresses were in the Hampstead area of London. I also found business addresses from the directories for Helga’s husband, all in central London.

I found naturalisation papers dated 1947 at the National Archives for Helga and her husband and these told me that they had a daughter born in Germany in November 1931 (l will call her Dawn). I discovered that Helga died in London in 1978 and Helga’s husband died in 1982 in Windsor, Berkshire.

Dawn married in 1957. Her husband died in June 2006, also in Windsor. l needed to trace any children. Findmypast produced too many results to identify any children with accuracy, so I turned to FreeBMD which has a facility to enter not only the surname of the child but also the maiden name of the mother. This produced three children; two boys and a girl. I decided to concentrate on researching the eldest son (I’ll call him John). Looking at Findmypast and entering the birth year of John, thirty-one marriage entries came up and only four were around the London area.

With two family deaths in the Windsor area, l decided to concentrate my search around there. I found a 2002 local register online, and there was John living with his wife (I’ll call her Diane) and at the same address was Dawn and her husband – SUCCESS! I went back to Findmypast and looked through the John marriages until l came across a marriage to a Diane. This gave me Diane’s maiden name, which was a French-sounding surname. Then, using social media, l tracked two possibilities, one in France and the other in the UK. l sent emails to both Johns and explained that l was looking for descendants of Dawn, and l got a response from the UK John saying that Dawn was his mother.

I contacted Son A (in Germany) and asked if l could disclose his story to John. He agreed. I asked John for his phone number and called him. He was very suspicious at first, but when l explained the story about the doctor and the nurse, he knew of the facts and said that he was happy for me to disclose his details to Son A. He also advised that he was in contact with the doctor’s descendants in Israel, although the doctor had passed away some years previously.

In due course Son A contacted John and, after seventy years or so, the family was reunited, and trips were made to Israel and London to greet the long-lost family. Son A said that if l was ever in Berlin, we would have to meet up. A couple of years later, l did go to Berlin and met Son A who was overjoyed at the effort l had put in and the successful conclusion. Son A is a producer for one of Berlin’s radio stations and whilst l was in Berlin, he recorded me telling the tale of my research on his family. Since then there have been at least two broadcasts detailing the circumstances. I never managed to listen to

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LONG-LOST FAMILY 31

the broadcast, so l don’t know if my recording was used or if the programme was wholly in German (which l would not understand).

It made me happy that the investigation proved so successful and a family was reunited. I did have assistance from a fellow member of JGSGB for which l am grateful; and that person would prefer to remain anonymous.

The author is a retired chartered accountant and has had an interest in genealogy for twenty years. In 2011 he won the Ronny Brickman award for an article entitled ‘A victim of the Coronation Avenue Bombing’.

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Saving Kinder Hirsch – an Edinburgh rescue Jill Servian

In April 1939, my Brown family of Edinburgh and Manchester took in three Kindertransport children, two of them siblings called Hirsch. With the crisis in Germany following Kristallnacht in November 1938, efforts were made to take Jewish children out of danger zones, and to find homes in safe havens. Advertisements appeared in the Scotsman and other papers, and Jewish communities in Britain were asked to provide sanctuary.

My great-aunt Asnah (known as Nessie) and her husband and first cousin Victor Brown (my grandfather’s younger brother) attended a public meeting for potential hosts. Here they were given details and shown photographs of children seeking guarantors or families to look after them. A £50 bond could be paid for children to be taken in by families or Jewish communal hostels organised by the community in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Uncle Victor saw the photograph of the three Hirsch children and he offered himself and Auntie Nessie as hosts, as well as his parents-in-law Arthur and Annie Brown, his widowed father Benjamin who was looked after by his unmarried sister Lily Brown, and also Nessie’s brother George Brown who was a doctor in Manchester. Nessie and Victor were in their forties with a disabled son, and their respective parents were elderly and had not looked after children for many years, apart from grandchildren.

Much of my information came from accidental contact with one of the Hirsch children, Gerhard (born in 1932), who is writing his memoirs. He is now known as Gary Hilton (Figure 1) and I found him on the Internet in late 2016 after he joined the US branch of the Kindertransport Association with the intention of helping Syrian refugees. He spent the period 1939–45 in Edinburgh with Annie and Arthur Brown, and then when Arthur died of a heart attack in an air raid in 1943, just Annie, with support from Nessie and Victor. Gary’s sister Madeleine (born in 1933) spent the period 1939–1943 with Nessie and Victor and then rejoined her mother Dr Hanna Hirsch in New York. The youngest sister Gabrielle (born in 1935) never reached Edinburgh after becoming separated from her siblings, and spent the war years unexpectedly and unofficially in Kent, with a non-Jewish family, but we think she was scheduled to go to Benjamin and Lily.

Figure 1. Gary Hilton.

Arthur Brown had arrived in Edinburgh in the early 1870s as a small child, with his widowed mother and a younger sister. They were the last in a wave of Brown family emigrants from VishtinetZ in north-east Poland to Edinburgh that had started in the late 1860s. Arthur’s elder sister Janet (Sheina), my great-grandmother, had arrived in Edinburgh in 1870, aged eleven, with her first cousins Benjamin (aged fifteen; he would later become her husband), Lewis (aged eight) and Philip Brown (six). They appear to have been unaccompanied. These past experiences would have resonated with the family in 1939, when asked to take on Kindertransport children.

Arthur and Benjamin’s children Nessie and Victor had “form” as far as taking in or guaranteeing refugees from Germany and Austria was concerned. In the 1930s a steady stream of top scientists came to Edinburgh, when they were no longer able to work due to Nazi decrees.1 At first, the British government put a cap on those who applied to come, but eventually they relented, owing to the important fields such men and women were working in, and the growing political problems in Europe. The scientists – who were world leaders in their research areas – had to take a further one-year course at Edinburgh University to qualify for employment.2 Their growing numbers not only meant prestige for Edinburgh University but also a flowering of middle European Jewish culture in the city, with well-known names holding salons or opening their homes to others in the Edinburgh Jewish community (and beyond) to discuss the scientific and political issues of the day. Nessie and Victor not only supported these scientists, but enjoyed their open-house events and cultural soirées.

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SAVING KINDER HIRSCH – AN EDINBURGH RESCUE 33

Ernest Marchand (born in 1929) was a Kindertransport child whose recollections were recorded by the British Library sound archive in the “Living memory of the Jewish community” series (ref c410/061).3 He came from Berlin to Edinburgh and then Glasgow, following the intervention of his mother’s cousin FritZ Muller, who was a paediatrician who had come to Edinburgh in 1933. Muller requalified there, and then went to practise in London. Ernest recalls, “When he [FritZ Muller] was in Edinburgh he stayed with a family, Mr and Mrs Brown [almost certainly Nessie and Victor] whom I met many years later. My uncle thought it would be easier for my mother and myself to get a visa to enter Britain if it was guaranteed by locals. In effect the Browns got a family in Edinburgh, Oppenheim, to guarantee that we would not be a burden on the state.” (The Oppenheims had come from Kybartai, the next town to the Browns’ Vishtinetz (now Vistytis) in Suwalki in Poland, now in Lithuania.)

Walter Kellerman, in his biography A Physicist’s Labour in War and Peace, recalled that:

The majority of my co-refugees in Edinburgh were medics. We often met at the house of the sisters of Eric Turk, of Dr Martha and Miss Betel Turk. At the Turks’ house I met doctors who had just (re)qualified or were about to, like Mr Sugar the ENT specialist, Dr E. J. Levin the neurologist, Kate Hermann the physician and Dr Billingheimer, father of three promising sons who would eventually decide to take their mother’s Mrs Bodmer’s name [including famous geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer]. I also met Dr F. Goss the famous Vienna biologist, Dr Schneider the dental surgeon and of course Dr Gal who at the Turks’ home would often sit down at the piano and treat us to a recital.4

Gary Hilton specifically recalls visiting Dr Martha Turk and her sister for tea once a month, and to play in their house and gardens at Gordon Terrace. Martha Turk was born in Frankfurt in 1885, and her claim to fame was that she was the family paediatrician of Otto Frank and his daughters Ann and Margot Frank when they lived in Frankfurt.5 She never practised in Edinburgh when she came over in 1933 but she had been a well-regarded doctor in Germany, qualifying in Heidelberg and Berlin during World War I. She was particularly known for her promotion of the Montessori method of education, research into infant nutrition and the impact of scarlet fever on children. In 1935 she published “A response to the atrocity and boycott of Jews in Foreign Countries”. Alas Martha died in 1942 of cancer and Gary Hilton recalled her and her sister as austere women – no doubt their personal experiences weighed large.

Gary and his sisters Madeleine and Gabrielle attended the Caputh Jewish boarding school at Potsdam near Berlin before leaving on the Kindertransport.6 In 1938, Caputh contained about a hundred pupils aged between six and nineteen. It was self-contained and was housed in idyllic wooded grounds with a lake. The school was abruptly closed by the Nazis in November 1938 and its head, Gertrud Feiertag, died in Auschwitz in 1943. The children were given three hours to leave before the Nazis burnt the school down, and they made their way to an uncle who owned a department store in Berlin, and who was making plans to emigrate to Brazil. It was he who made the Kindertransport arrangements.

The Hirsch children had been born in Dessau, a city to the south-west of Berlin, known as the home of Moses Mendelsohn, Kurt Weill the composer, and the Bauhaus school of architecture founded by Walter Gropius.7 The Hirsch family was solidly middle class and acculturated into German life – their mother Hanna was an ophthalmologist and their father Georg was a dentist. Their father was not Jewish (although Hirsch is often thought of as a Jewish name) so he was able to practise dentistry until his early death of natural causes in 1937 in the Berlin Jewish hospital. Gary recalls the visit of Hitler to Dessau in 1938 when he was six years old, and peeping out of the curtains to see him in an open-top car on the main thoroughfare, without understanding what the shouting of slogans and saluting was all about. Later in 1938, Hanna was visited by the Gestapo in Dessau to inform her of a new ordinance that Jewish physicians practising privately could only treat Jewish patients. Hanna had to leave, so she decided to track down some distant relatives in the USA, but could not do this with three young children in tow. They were left at the boarding school at Potsdam and, as we know, they made their way to an uncle in Berlin, and joined the Kindertransport, taking the train to Rotterdam.

Three of the Browns’ Kindertransport children came on the same Berlin transport that had arrived in Southampton on 21 April 1939.8 George Brown’s charge was older than the others, a fifteen-year-old girl called Irene Schneimann, who stayed for eight years until 1947, when she left for the USA aged twenty-three. She said in later years how happy she had been living with George’s family in Manchester, and being treated as one of the family, unlike so many of the Kindertransport children who were treated as unpaid servants. Irene married a survivor of AuschwitZ, and they both died in 2012. Gerhard and Gabrielle were on the same transport as Irene, but became separated (so ended up in different places), whilst Madeleine arrived a week later due to problems with her identity papers.

Gerhard Hirsch was seven in 1939 and was looked after by Arthur and Annie. His sister Madeleine was six, and was looked after by Nessie and Victor. They lived in homes in neighbouring roads in Newington in Edinburgh, with opportunities to mix at home and school, and in a religious context. (See Figures 2–5 for photographs.) At first Annie tried to speak to the children in Yiddish, but as they were brought up in Germany and not Poland (unlike Annie) they did not understand this language. Then she tried Scottish-English which was just as hard to understand, until the children went to school and mixed with the locals. The children attended the local Preston Street primary school, rather than the fee-paying George Watson’s Ladies College which had been attended by my mother and her sisters. The children also received rabbinical instruction from Rabbi Salis Daiches. This was in contrast to many Kindertransport and refugee children in Edinburgh who were placed in the Whittingehame Farm School (a boarding school) in the Lothians, and taught agricultural skills, irrespective of their places of origin, their parental occupations or religious status.9 But even so, Gerhard had to stand up for himself at primary school as an immigrant child subject to local prejudices, although there were other refugee children in his school who could provide each other with support.

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34 JILL SERVIAN

Figure 2. Gerhard and Madeleine in Edinburgh.

Figure 3. Gerhard in Edinburgh.

Figure 4. Gerhard, Madeleine and Gabrielle in New York.

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Figure 5. From left to right, Phyllis, Nessie, Victor, George (son of Nessie and Victor) and Irene Brown. Phyllis and Irene were Nessie and Victor's nieces.

What was life like for the two children in Edinburgh? Gerhard and his sister had to withstand new experiences in Edinburgh, especially during the war. In 1943 Arthur died suddenly of a heart attack during a German air raid. Ironically, at this time my mother Phyllis Brown (Nessie and Victor’s niece) was in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and monitoring radar to check for German attacks across the North Sea. On one occasion she shot at a German airman’s parachute and brought him down. Gerhard still has a piece of the parachute. But he did not let the war deter him from exploration and he enjoyed cycling in the Lothians, travelling on fishing boats to local coastal villages (probably not allowed during wartime blackouts), and holiday visits to scenic places in Kirkcudbrightshire (where my aunt Doris was in the Women’s Land Army). This prepared him for a later career in the US Coastguard in the Mediterranean (during the Korean War), as a geologist and teacher of earth sciences, and influenced his later choice of Oregon as a place of retirement, because it reminded him of Scotland.

In 1943 Madeleine, aged ten, left from Liverpool for a new life in New York with the mother she had not seen since 1939. This could have been dangerous, with the war raging in the Atlantic. Gerhard was due to leave with her but he could not be found (he was at the cinema). If a boat passage became available then children had to pack at once and go then and there – there was no advance announcement for security reasons. If they were not ready then they lost that passage and had to wait a long time for the next one (in Gerhard’s case another two years). Nessie and Victor always remembered Madeleine, keeping in touch with her for many years. Madeleine’s sister Gabrielle left for the USA in 1944 when she was nine, and Gerhard left in 1945 via Canada. He was thirteen when he went to join his sisters, having spent six years in Edinburgh and been educated there (moving onto the Boroughmuir Secondary School briefly), as well as having his bar mitZvah in Scotland.

Dr Hanna Hirsch, the children’s mother, had left for the USA very shortly after Kristallnacht in November 1938. She travelled alone and her US arrival recorded that she was a widow.10 The speed with which she acted seems to show that she had a plan of action if something happened to the family. Her last address was in Dessau, but she left her children in Berlin, before she departed, with the hope she could bring them to the USA soon. She was able to support herself en route by smuggling out some jewellery which could be exchanged for money. Hanna did not come from Dessau, but lived and practised there, and she received her medical training at the University of Heidelberg in the 1920s. She had been born Johanna Sittenfeld in Simmenau in Germany in 1897, a place which is now Szymonkow in south-west Poland, near Breslau (Wrocław).11 This was in an area that had previously been part of the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Simmenau was a small, poor community and Hanna’s way out was through education and gaining a place at a prestigious university. This was more usual for women in Germany in the 1920s than in Britain, though according to her son Gary she was refused admittance to some university classes because she was a woman. She was lucky, as her university education was paid for by a relative who saw her potential.

When Hanna arrived in New York she was refused entry by the US authorities along with a small group of other women travelling alone. She went on to Havana in Cuba, and re-entered the USA through Florida. Once in the USA she lost no time in marrying a Jewish American, Abraham HorvitZ, who came from Kolno in Łomża gubernia in north-east Poland, not far from the Browns’ place of origin. In 1940 Hanna and Abraham were enumerated in the New York census12 and she started petitioning for naturalisation, not only for herself but also for her three children back in the UK. This was granted in 1942. From this date she then tried to get her children back home, which she succeeded in doing between 1943 and 1945. Sadly, the marriage did not last long, but it served her purpose of entering the USA and getting citizenship for her children.

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36 JILL SERVIAN

The reunited family spent the remainder of the 1940s and 1950s in New York where their mother once again practised as an ophthalmologist, and where they were educated, Gerhard (now Gary) attending an academic high school, and later university. Madeleine went to an arts high school and became an industrial designer. Gabrielle (Gaby) showed a talent for languages and eventually married a record producer, Tony D’Amato,14 coming back again to England during 1960–1978, where Tony worked for Decca, producing Mantovani, Ted Heath and Edmundo Ros, and also on classical recordings featuring Benjamin Britten, Leopold Stokowski and Malcolm Sargent.

During this time, Hanna came to live with her daughter Gaby in Surrey and she died in the Epsom area in 1972 (just five miles from where my mother Phyllis Brown was living, unknown to her).15 Hanna did not feel comfortable in England – her first husband Georg Hirsch had fought for the Germans in WWI – but it was the UK that saved her children through the Kindertransport scheme. Despite being rescued, and in Gary and Madeleine’s case being billeted with the understanding Browns in Edinburgh, this brought inevitable stresses in being uprooted from the family home, not once but twice (from Dessau to Edinburgh to New York). Gary and Madeleine had each other to rely on for much of the time they were over here, but Gaby was on her own, without anyone from her cultural background to sustain her.

Figure 6. Aufbau advert.

Figure 7. Hannah’s photo in her naturalisation petition.

In January 1942 Hanna advertised her medical practice in a New York Jewish German publication called Aufbau which had been founded in 1934 for German refugees and became a leading anti-Nazi newssheet (see Figure 6).13 Her clinic was based at 865 West End Avenue, which is still a medical hub today. Hanna’s photo in her naturalisation petition of 1942 shows a world-weary woman, who had crossed the world away from the troubles in Europe, but was still doing all she could to keep her family together (see Figure 7). Aufbau contained a mix of articles and adverts, and was written in a hotchpotch of German and English. The page on which Hanna’s advert appears also contains information about fundraising for children in Great Britain, Russia and China – the US National War Relief Committee had a target of raising $1 million per month.

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Those refugees who went to the Whittinghame Farm School in Lothian were reported to have needed therapy to adjust to normal living after the war. It is possibly no accident that my great-aunt Nessie Brown, a former music teacher, retrained and became a social worker in 1945.

I would like to thank Gary Hilton, formerly Gerhard Hirsch, for sharing his memories of wartime Edinburgh.

Jill Servian is a retired social research manager whose great-grandparents all came from the Suwalki Łomża gubernias in north-east Poland to Scotland or northern England between 1865 and 1875. She has been researching them for twenty-five years, and is on the editorial board of the Suwalki Łomża Interest Group’s magazine Landsmen.

REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. From 1933, Jewish doctors, dentists and scientists could not work in the state-controlled German Health Service or universities any

longer, but they could work in private practice until 1938. 2. Around 350 Jewish medical and scientific personnel came to Scotland in the 1930s, where it took one year to requalify, compared to

two in England. 3. British Library Sound Archives can be found at www.Sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Jewish-Holocaust-Survivors. The Scottish Jewish

Archives Centre (SJAC) in Glasgow (www.sjac.org.uk) contains the Irene and Ernst Marchand collection of papers. The SJAC is gathering stories of Jewish refugees who came to Scotland in the 1930s and 1940s. They are planning a new Scottish Holocaust-era Study Centre at the SJAC, a project which is being backed by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Association of Jewish Refugees.

4. E. Walter Kellermann (2007) A physicist’s labour in war and peace: memoirs 1933–1999. M-Y Books. The Lothian Health Service Archives (Edinburgh University) has papers relating to Dr. E. (Ernst) J. Levin.

5. Martha Turk details: Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité, Berlin, 2015. https://medizingeschichte.charite.de/.

6. Caputh school: Bits and pieces: a Jewish teenager’s recollections of the pogrom of November 9/10 1938 in Caputh and Nuremberg by Ann Gerzon-Berlin. www.rijo.homepage.t-online.de/pdf_2/EN_DE_JU_berlin_ann.pdf.

7. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5113-dessau. 8. Southampton Port Health Authority (Ministry of Health), 21 April 1939. GBOR-KINDER-MH-704-0-0101.jpg (letter), also 0102 (list of

girls including Irene Schneimann and Gabriele Hirsch) and 0103 (list of boys including Gerhard Hirsch). Madeleine arrived a week later.

9. Frances Williams (2014) The forgotten Kindertransportees: the Scottish experience. London: Bloomsbury. 10. Ancestry and Findmypast records show UK exit and USA entries for Hanna Hirsch and her children.11. Information about Hanna’s origin from USA Declaration of Intent for naturalisation (from Ancestry.co.uk). 12. New York 1940 census from Ancestry.co.uk.13. Aufbau 1942 publication found on Ancestry.co.uk.14. Independent (2006) Tony D’Amato. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/tony-damato-6232438.html; “A fireside chat with

Phase Four producer, Tony D’Amato” by David M. Green (1997) http://www.bernardherrmann.org/articles/interview-damato/ 15. Death record for Hanna Hirsch on Findmypast.co.uk.

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BOOK REVIEWAlbert Reuss in Mousehole – the artist as refugee Susan Soyinka

Albert, the subject of this biographical work, was the son of Ignaz Reisz, a kosher butcher living in the Austrian Empire. His mother, Sidonia née Freund, had to cope with her regular pregnancies while catering to her exclusively male family, without a daughter who customarily would have taken up the strain. Albert, the fourth son, born in Vienna in 1889, was an awkward, nervy child who gave his parents particular problems. His failure to apply himself, either at school or in the succession of jobs that followed, made his father despair.

On Ignaz’s death in 1913, Julius Reisz, the oldest brother, saw that Albert’s heart lay in his drawing and painting and steered him towards a career in art. Using the name Albert Reuss for his artistic career, the talented young man soon won plaudits and commissions for portraits in pre-WW2 Vienna. (The translator has clearly struggled with the art-speak of the Austrian newspaper cuttings from this time, quoted in the second chapter.)

To compound his luck, he met the beautiful Rosa Feinstein, who became his wife in 1916. Rosa was to act as a buffer between her husband and the world, and several lyrical portraits of the young Rosa are included among the reproductions of Reuss’s remarkable paintings and drawings. Interestingly, one painting, apparently dating from 1930, is already in the simpler style of his later English work.

Upon Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany (the Anschluss) the couple decided in 1948 to emigrate to England. Initially they only received a six-month residence permit, which had to be extended with the help of Reuss’s friends in the English art world. In England only on sufferance, the pair had lost their status, their money and their possessions. Reuss’s talent, however, appears to have benefited from his life in cramped lodgings as a penniless foreigner. In austerity England he adopted his new simpler style, using a limited colour palate for bleak, intense compositions. The line is spare, like that of the satirical cartoons of 1930s Germany, which Reuss may well have seen.

Albert and Rosa Reuss became British nationals in 1947. They moved to a cottage in Mousehole, Cornwall, which became their permanent home. Some artistic success followed, although Reuss was never quite accepted by the thriving Cornish artists’ colony. The cover image (from the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead), dating from 1948, is called ‘The Poet’,

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ALBERT REUSS IN MOUSEHOLE – THE ARTIST AS REFUGEE 39

but it is likely that this martyred icon was meant as a self-portrait. Reuss’s work, however, became widely exhibited and admired in England as time went on.

After a struggle, Reuss received very limited monetary restitution from the post-war Austrian government in the 1950s. He lived to see his paintings exhibited again in his native Vienna, and to correspond on friendly terms with gallery owners there.

The biography has been enhanced through official documentation of Albert Reuss’s Austrian origins, including records of his change of surname and his marriage. Equally important to the story were the testimonies of surviving family and friends, while an archive of Rosa’s letters provided an insight into the events and the people affecting their lives.

Susan Soyinka has written a fascinating life history in well-documented detail. Her meticulous research, a lesson to all historians, has resulted in an intriguing case study of the impact of refugee status on a remarkable European artist.

Reviewed by Eva LawrencePublished by Sansom & Company.

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