Unexpected "will" in book from Shmuel's mother Shulamit

[Update: Following Walter's call with Shmuel Elhanan, we know there are errors in the original post, which I will leave to preserve the context for future posts. Yitzhak Rabinowitz did not change his name; his sons change theirs. Shulamit's family should be Rosenblum. Other spellings are in error.]

So after reading YES' will several times and reflecting that our family maybe held up his hopes in item 3 if having failed him in most of item 2, I began leafing through the other chapters of the book. Imagine my surprise in finding as the last item in the Holocaust section the text of the letter written by Shmuel's mother Shulamit Rabinowitz from Kovno on June 6, 1944 to her two older children just days or hours before she expected to perish along with her husband Yitzhak and eight-year-old son Shmuel.

This letter (and a shorter one that follows by Shmuel's father Yitzhak Elhanan Rabinowitz) is incredibly moving. She remains proud, though she is accepting of her likely fate. Her biggest regret is that Shmuel (whom she calls by the pet name Muka) will have his life cut short. Beyond that, rather than summarize I will let you read for yourself.

We know that in fact Shulamit, Yitzhak and Shmuel did not perish in Kovno. At this time, I do not know the full story of how they escaped and made their way to Palestine. I believe that Walter knows at least a short version of the story and perhaps he can fill us in. He may also follow up directly with Shmuel for more of the details.

What I do know based on Shmuel's 1996 correspondence with Morris Spector is that Yitzhak Elchonan (he later dropped the Rabinowitz name) died in Tel Aviv in 1992, Shulamit died in March 1996 in Haifa, and that Shmuel is alive and well in Rehovot at age 78 with his wife Zippora. They have two sons Benjamin and Ofra.

The two older sons to whom the letter was written both went to Israel as well. They were not in the United States when Shulamit wrote to them, but in Palestine. Benjamin was felled in the Israeli war of independence in 1948. Amos lived until 1965 and died in Tel Aviv of natural causes.

Here are the two documents, three pages by Shulamit and one page by Yitzhak. (Click to enlarge.)

By the way, Riemer's introduction to Shulamit's letter contains several errors. First, Shulamit became a Rabinowitz when she married Yitzhak, who was a great-grandson, not a grandson, of YES. Shulamit's last name was Rozenbloom before she married. When she mentions "your grandfather, grandmother and Aunt Jennie" in the letter, those are Rozenbloom family members.

Isaac Elchanan Spektor ethical will

There is much that can be said about this document. Perhaps readers will want to contribute their reactions in the comment section.

(For legibility, I have cropped in as tightly as possible on the text. You can click the images for a larger view.)

"Ethical Wills: A Modern Jewish Treasury""

Well, we had heard some time ago from Shmuel Elchonan, our third cousin in Israel, that the Rabbi Spektor's "ethical will" had been published in the 1980s in a book titled "Ethical Wills: A Modern Jewish Treasury." I finally got around to tracking down the book and ordering a copy.

Here's a quick plug for Alibris.com, a online book source that aggregates the used book collections in independent bookstores around the U.S. (maybe the world). When I went looking for this title on Amazon, they had it listed but no new or used copies were available. Then I tried Alibris, and found at least six copies available at a range of prices. My copy cost $14.15 plus shipping and was actually sent from Sea Shell Books, a bookseller in Clearwater FL. It is in very good condition with a handwritten inscription by the previous owner.

Anyway back to the contents of the book. It is a collection of Jewish ethical wills, categorized into four groups for Traditional Wills (mostly written by rabbis), Wills from the Holocaust, Wills from the Land of Israel, and Wills of Modern and Contemporary American Jews.

The book was edited and annotated by Jack Riemer with translations by Nathaniel Stampfer. The frontispiece is shown below. Rather than try to summarize the Rabbi Spektor will, I will post images of the full translation in the next post, and then after that tell about the other surprise that awaited in the book.

Schulim Kaufler death record

Schulim Kaufler was born in 1798 or 1799, son of Izaak and Beili (Bayla) Kaufler. He married Reisel Bluma Singlust in 1825 (see their marriage record in a previous post). They were very prolific, producing 10 children, including Abraham Mojzesz Kaufler, their third. Abraham was the father of Feigla, our great grandmother.

Schulim passed away in 1847 at age 48 or 49. Here is his death record.

Bayla Kaufler death record

Bayla, also called Beili in some records, goes way, way back. She is Feigla's great-grandmother, thus our GGGG grandmother. She was born in 1773, married Izaak Kaufler, had four children including Schulim Kaufler, and she died at age 58 in 1831.

Here is her death certificate, full size and detail.

Schulim Kaufler and Reisel Bluma Singlust marriage record

This is from June 20, 1825. Separately, there is also a marriage bann (a pre-marriage legal announcement) that I am not posting for now. The marriage record fills a full ledger page, as opposed to birth and death records that are partial pages.

The complete page appears first, followed by a detail section with the names of the bride and groom highlighted.

Advances on several fronts

Yesterday was another red-letter day for me, so I want to get some updates in here before other news arrives. I have to hurry, because there is lots to do today for Festival Preview.

Okay, first in the morning I got email from Marian Rubin of the Rzeszow Research Group that she has some of our Ringel birth records, including Schija's, and that she is making copies and sending them to me by mail. She warns in advance there is no new information beyond what is in the index data we have already seen. Even so, it will be exciting to have images of those records. I'll wait to discuss them in more detail after Marian's mail arrives.

Next came a delivery from Alibris.com of a book I had ordered, Ethical Wills: A Modern Jewish Treasury. I was thrilled to finally read the words written for posterity by Isaac Elchanon Spektor in 1888, but found an even greater treat elsewhere in the book. I will report in the next post.

In the evening, I visited the Mormon Family Research Center again, ready to locate and scan images of the Kaufler family vital records (described here in previous messages—use the label tags at right to find related posts). There are quite a few records to capture, so here I focused on a few "high-value targets."

The following images include the 1825 marriage certificate of Feigla Kaufler's grandparents, Schulim Kaufler and Reisel Bluma Singlust; the 1831 death record for Schulim's mother Bayla (also Beili), who was born the daughter of Abraham in 1773; and Schulim's own death certificate from 1847. All of those mentioned are our direct ancestors.

In each case, I will show the full size image and one or more detail sections of the image. Note that these are second-generation scans. I printed them at the LDS and scanned them at home—next time I will bring a thumb drive with me to the temple and save the scans directly, so the quality will get better when I redo them next time. But these are good enough to post now.

To keep things manageable, I will post the images in separate posts.

My genealogy calling card

I needed something other than my Festival Preview business card for meetings like today and for my upcoming Chicago trip, so I put this together this morning before going to the meeting.

I couldn't find the more recent headshot I have been using, so this one is my old New Media column photo. The research names and towns are meant to make it easier for people to connect me with researchers interested in the same subjects.

Sunday afternoon at the SF Bay Area JGS meeting

Today I attended my first SF Bay Area JGS meeting and had a wonderful time putting faces with names of people I have met online, plus meeting new people I will want to follow up with in the future. The guest speaker for today was Schelly Talalay Dardashti, the blogger who runs the Tracing the Tribe blog.

The meeting was held at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in the lower Fillmore area of San Francisco. The society alternates its meetings among sites in San Francisco, Berkeley in the East Bay and Los Altos on the peninsula.

There were about 25 people attending, and I got a chance to chat with several of them over instant coffee and cookies before the meeting got underway. Jeremy Frankel, the president of the group whom I had met a month ago at the Oakland Mormon research center, greeted me warmly and began to introduce me around.

I was especially pleased to see Dave Howard, with whom I have corresponded a good deal about his Rezekne research. We found that we had as much or more to share in person than by email.

I was wearing a nametag, and as I waited for a chance to introduce myself to Schelly, she read my tag and said, "So here's the famous Dan Ruby." I guess that is a case of one's reputation leading the way, which surprises me since I feel like such a neophyte in this world.

Also in attendance were luminaries in the Jewish Gen world such as Steve Morse, Judy Baston and others. After the meeting, I chatted some with Judy at the Jewish Community Library, just down the hall. She is an leader of both the Litvak and Poland JRI interest groups, and I hope to get to know her more in the future.

Some new people I met who are active locally were Dale Friedman from Berkeley and Kathryn Doyle, who works at the California Genealogical Society and Library in Oakland and lives in my town of Piedmont. In fact, she thought I might have been the husband of the more famous Ruby resident of Piedmont, Eileen Ruby. (Eileen is the mother of Mike Ruby, who works for me part time at Festival Preview, but is otherwise unrelated.) I explained to Kathryn that the other Ruby family are Rubinsteins and we were Rabinowitzes.

Anyway, I'll look forward to seeing several of these people in Chicago next month, and at future meetings of the Bay Area group.

I enjoyed Schelly's presentation, even though a lot of it was pretty elementary. I was surprised that when she asked who in the room was writing a blog, mine was one of just a couple that went up. This in a room of people who have made considerable contributions to online Jewish genealogy, and also are tech-savvy Bay Area residents.

For example, Steve Morse's One Step page is commonly acknowledged as among the most useful online research tools anywhere. But blogging is evidently viewed as more of a young person's medium, and most of these folks make web sites or publish to email lists or moderate bulletin boards — online formats that may be friendlier to the generally older crowd that is interested in genealogy.

Nevertheless, I got some good ideas and leads from Schelly's talk. Her suggestions about the leading genealogical blogs will point me in some useful directions. I was interested to hear the story of how her blog got started as a project of the Jewish Telegraph Agency, and thus its relationship to the wider world of Jewish media.

Schelly came to blogging from a career in publishing, so I wasn't surprised to hear of her sometimes bumpy adjustment to the style and voice of blogging versus newspaper journalism. I have made that same transition. She sees her role as mainly a "just the facts, Ma'am" informational blogger, rather than what she calls a "muser," someone who riffs in a more personal style.

She described her caution about covering possibly controversial subjects and her discomfort in voicing her personal views. While I'm sure such discretion is a useful survival skill in the world of Jewish journalism, I quietly urged Schelly after the meeting to embrace the blogging ethic and let loose with her opinions.

Of course, I have the luxury of writing a blog hardly anybody reads, whereas Tracing the Tribe is the most widely read blog about Jewish genealogy, so that's easy for me to say. In my other life, though, I run a group blog and news aggregation service about music festivals, so I have some expertise about online media. When I next see Schelly, perhaps in Chicago, I'll look forward to exchanging ideas some more.

What we learn from Einseidler, Part 3

In part 1, I summarized the Einseidler papers. In part 2, I covered Einseidler's discoveries about the descendants of Moshe Joseph Spektor. Here, I will do the same for the descendants of Jacob David Spektor.

The most surprising thing we learn about Jacob David is that he marries a woman 31 years his junior (to be continued).

What we learn from Einseidler, Part 2

But back to Einseidler. What is new and different that we learn from the papers? Most of the new information relates to two brothers of Isaac Elchanan. We know from Shimoff that Isaac had two older and one younger brothers. Of second brother Abraham Aaron, Shimoff writes that he was accomplished in the rabbinate, but he died young before having children. Shimoff tells us Spektor was deeply affected by his brother's death.

According to Einseidler's reading of the literature, the eldest Spektor brother, Moshe Joseph, then married Abraham's widow, in observation of the law of chalitza, in which an unmarried brother of a deceased married brother is obligated to marry the widow (unless he is released from the obligation in a ceremony involving the taking off of the brother's shoe).

In this case, Moshe kept his shoe and married the unnamed widow and they later had a daughter Shifra. From here, things get a bit surprising as Shifra marries a man named Aryeh Spector. This could be an example of a husband assuming the wife's name, if she had an honored name they wanted to carry on, or it could be coincidences of two unrelated Spektors finding each other, or it could be some kind of intermarriage.

In any case, Shifra and Aryeh have at least two children, Chaim Shmuel and Meir (born in 1884). Meir goes to Palestine in 1910, marries Esther and has three children, Jacob, Emanuel and Rachel. Rachel later marries David Belkin.

His older brother, Chaim Shmuel, also appears to marry another Spektor, Frieda daughter of Shlomo. The same possibilities apply here as above, though in this case Einseidler indicates that Chaim and Frieda are indeed cousins.

These possible Spektor-Specktor marriages would be one way for the family to expand to support claims of other Spektors to a relationship with the rabbi. We'll have to look more closely at the origins of Aryeh Spektor and Frieda Spektor to determine what other Spektors can claim a relation by marriage to the family of Isaac Elchanan's older brother.

Whatever turns out there, we know from the Pioneers book that Chaim and Frieda have another son Aryeh in 1909 in Halle, Germany, his grandfather having evidently previously passed away. Aryeh also goes to Palestine in 1933, and has two children Chaim Samuel (named for his predeceased father) and Simcha.

If all that is right, then we have five descendants of Moshe Joseph Spektor living in Palestine in the pre-war years. If we are next able to track Jacob, Emanuel, Rachel, Chaim Samuel and Simcha Spektor, we will be closer to identifying living descendants from that line.

Okay, on to part 3 for the information on brother Jacob David Spektor.

What we learn from Einseidler, Part 1

While Morris keeps feeding me more information, I am trying to catch up with his earlier fax transmittal of the David Einsiedler papers. These include not just the three installments of the researcher's handwritten reports but also copies from nine source documents that are cited in the research.

I've now had a chance to process the information and will do my best to sift out what is new to us. Einsiedler draws on mostly published information. The most well known are the Shimoff biography and Lifshitz's Toldot Yitshak. But there are four or five different biographical encyclopedias that have listings for members of the Spektor/Rabinowitz family. Several are comprehensive works of important rabbis in history. There is one for Lithuanian rabbis only, and another for the rabbis of Novogrodok. David Tidhar's encyclopedia of pioneers of Israel is especially helpful, with three substantial biographies of Spektor descendants in Israel.

There is one problem. They are all in Hebrew. I have been able to identify which document is which using Einsiedler's list as an index. With a number of the documents, I have been able to see where words like Spektor and Rabinowitz appear. I was actually pretty pleased with myself that I was able to call on my inferior Hebrew skills to sort through the papers.

As far as I know Morris does not have translations for the documents. If not, we should think about economical strategies to get that done. There are probably about 40 pages that we would want to have translated. I just found a Bay Area Hebrew translator listed on Craigslist. She charges $39 a page. I hope we can do better than that.

There is one source that is of greatest interest to me — the page from the Novogrodok book with entries for Isaac Elchanan Spektor and his successor Baruch Mordecai Lifshitz. (I don't know the relation, if any, between that Rabbi Lifshitz and Spektor's later secretary and biographer Jacob Halevi Lifshitz.) Anyway, the Spektor entry on that page also mentions Zvi Hirsch Rabinowitz. Zvi was born the year Spektor took up the rabbinical post in Novogrodok.

Perhaps we can find a way to get this one page translated as a way to get the ball rolling on the whole set.

In addition to the Einseidler collection, there is another important Hebrew document in our collection, Shmuel Elchanan's compilation of his family information that he sent to Morris Spektor in 1996. While I am unable to decipher most of it, it appears that it is the source of all of the detail information for the descendants of Benyamin Spektor that is in Morris' Spektor descendant chart. Surely I will want to get a full translation, but for now I will assume that the key information in it has been reflected in that chart.

Actually, as a further reality check, I have an annotated version of the Morris descendant chart that was marked up by Shmuel Elchanan. This mainly corrects spellings in the English translation of names and places that Morris must have rendered from the original Hebrew.

Since there is a lot to write about the Einseidler papers, I will continue in the next post.

Big surprise: Joseph Rabinowitz had a brother

Morris Spector and I spoke on the phone again today after he had sent me another important document — six pages of information about the SPEKTOR/RABINOWITZ/ELCHANAN family faxed from Shmuel Elchanan to Morris Spector in 1996. It is in Hebrew, mostly typed but some hand written, so it gets added to the stack of papers that need Hebrew translation — the top of the stack since Shmuel's family knowledge is more complete and reliable than anyone's.

Morris is excited because news of our Rabinowitz family has revived a research project that he thought he had taken as far as he could a decade ago. What he didn't understand at the time was the importance of some of the Spektor descendants using the Rabinowitz name. Even savvy David Einseidler doesn't know what to make of it when he writes "Again that name!" after noting Zvi Hirsch and Joseph are both named Rabinowitz instead of Spektor. (I have not yet introduced the Einseidler research, but this is one of the few places the LA genealogy researcher misses the mark. I'll have more on this in the near future.

We don't really have an explanation for why some Spektor children and grandchildren became Rabinoviches. Walter says that Shmuel told him it was an accident of the census — that a census taker wrote Rabinovich when told that the children playing outside were sons of the rabbi. By the way Zvi Hirsch and Joseph are close to the same age, even though they are a generation apart, so they might likely be the sons playing outside. I am going to check and see what census was being taken in Grodno guberniya in the late 1850s.

Anyway, in our conversation you could almost hear the wheels turning in Morris' head as he tried to place several pieces of dimly remembered Rabinowitz information that he has encountered over recent years. One is that he thinks he was contacted by another Rabinowitz other than us with questions about a connection to Rabbi Spektor. Since he didn't know of Joseph's family at the time, he didn't give the claim credence, but now it is likely that the other Rabinowitz would be family of ours. If this is a descendant of one of Walter Ruby's siblings, then we'll have found a new American second cousin. If it is an Israeli Rabinowitz, then we'll have another third or fourth cousin to visit on an upcoming trip.

That assumes that Morris is right and he did receive such a message, and also that he is able to find it. He said he would look for it.

The other Rabinowitz thing bothering Morris was something about Tel Aviv cemetery records. I didn't pay too much attention to that when he mentioned it, but a short while later, he followed up with an email containing a most startling revelation. He found a 1929 burial record for Eliyahu Isser Rabinovich, who was born in Kovno in 1859. His father was Rav Chaim Aryeh.

In the comments field of the record is written: "From the family of Rabbi Elchanan Spector of Kovno and Rabbi Yosef of Slutzk. Merchant. Came to Israel in 1923." Here is the link to the relevant page in the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry.

So here we have the first indication that Joseph Rabinowitz had a younger brother. There is only one Rav Chaim Aryeh married to the daughter of the Rabbi of Slutsk, so now it could be that there would have been three Rabinowitz boys playing in the yard.

Now it may well be that Eliyahu's existence is covered in Shmuel Elchanan's Hebrew document. I hope so. He has already told us about another sibling Bluma Rabinowitz who was a school teacher in Kovno. That he did not also tell Walter about Eliyahu may suggest that he does not know about him.

Eliyahu's burial record doesn't mention anything about a wife or children. Hopefully with more searching we will be able to learn more about his life and even turn up living descendants, another possible batch of Israeli third cousins.

Much to digest here, but one thing I am thinking is that of all the Spektors and Rabinowitzes who left Kovno before the Holocaust, almost all went to Israel. Only Joseph Rabinowitz that we know of came to America. We would like to learn how and why it was decided by Joseph and his grandfather Isaac Elchanan that he and wife Lena should set sail in 1875 for a new life in New York.

Feigla birth record deciphered

It was a big day today. I will save the most exciting news for the next post. First I want to report on a further exchange I had with Dan Hirschberg, the Krakow historian whose work led us to a trove of information about the family of our great grandmother Feigla Kaufler.

After Achikam Finkel used Geni recently to update information on the family of our mother's first cousin Zeev Sharon, I thought I should pass that information along to Hirschberg. He tracks all the descendants of Krakow Jewish families until 1945. So I wrote to him with the information that Feigla's daughter Rose Ringle's husband was named David Shatner. Also, that the surname of Rose's son Ze'ev's wife Penina was Dorfman.

Dan wastes no time. Within minutes, he replied that his Kaufler family page has been updated with the new information.

So then I took a chance and asked him in another email if he would take a look at Feigla birth record and tell me the types of information it would contain. This time his reply took a couple of hours to come back, but with more help than I had expected. He gave me the following translation from the Polish of the important information contained in the record. Here it is:

The date of the document: Apr 23, 1854
Reporting witness (also is the father): Abraham Mojzesz KAUFLER, age 25
is a dayworker or laborer,
residing in district 9, house number 189
Birth of daughter at: Mar 29, 1854 (3:00 am?/pm?)
Mother: Hai Ester GRUNBERG, age 24
Name of daughter: Faigla

So this gives us several new things — an occupation and exact address of her father, a time of day for Feigla's birth, age confirmations for her father and mother, and alternate name spellings for Feigla and her mother. Nothing very surprising but nice to know. Thanks again to Dan Hirschberg.

Playing catchup with the Spektor files

Thanks to Morris Spector and also to Jeff Spector of Colorado Springs, I now have my hands on the famous first chapter of Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spektor — Life and Letters by Rabbi Dr. Ephraim Shimoff published in 1959 by Yeshiva University.

Also in hand are a dozen pages of hand-written research results prepared in 1990 by David Einsiedler of Los Angeles, who was engaged by Morris Spector to research the family of Isaac Elchanan Spektor. There are also various Hebrew source documents that Einsiedler provides, which will further document the Israeli descendants of R. Spektor's brother Jacov David Spektor.

These documents are rich with new information — or I should say information that is new to me and my attempts to synthesize all available sources to document the immediate family members and descendants of R. Spektor. On first read, I see several brand new pieces of information and several other things that will help us interpret facts we already know.

To do that will require line-by-line reading of the new materials that is likely to take me a few days to accomplish. The Hebrew translations will take longer (any volunteers?).

Until I report back on my analysis of the new papers, here is a glimpse at a section of page 24 from Shimoff in which he mentions our great grandfather Joseph Rabinowitz.

Moshe Spector's barbershop

Our new friend Morris Spector from Hamden CT has quite a range of talents — professionally he is a graphic designer, he is an accomplished genealogist (read his account of his roots journey in Poland), and he has a devilish sense of humor.

Here he combines those skills by giving Isaac Elchanan Spektor a Photoshopped haircut and beard trim, and then dispensing a Spektor-like Halachic responsa on the question of whether Photoshopping of facial hair is permissible under Jewish law.

The bottom line: "Since Moshe Spector didn't use a razor it is definitely permitted."




COMICUS RESPONSUM AD NAUSEUM

by Moshe DeFoliant Spector

She'elot u-Teshuvot
Here is my response to the Photoshop trimming dilemna. Actually, I was removing the beard to see what he looked like sans beard. However, the neat look made him look younger so I stopped with the airbrush. But . . .

Here is my opinion.
My understanding is the prohibition against shaving was something to do with the Egyptians who practiced the clean Savalas image. Also, another reason was you wouldn't risk cutting yourself. To overcome this, there are some of the orthodox community who use some type of powder to defoliate the punim.

Here is the "official" opinion.

"Ye shall not round the comers of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the comers of thy beard" (Leviticus 19:27) is understood by the talmudic rabbis not to mean that it is wrong for a man to be cleanshaven, but only that facial hair must not be removed with a razor. The standard code of Jewish law, the [16th-century work by Rabbi Yosef Karo,] Shulhan Arukh (Yoreh De'ah, 181:10) rules that it is permitted to remove all facial hair with scissors even when this is done as closely as if with a razor. On the basis of this, many Orthodox Jews shave with an electric razor on the grounds that technically this machine, with its two blades, is not to be treated as a razor.

The reason for the prohibition of shaving is not stated in the Bible, but [the 11th-century Spanish/North African sage] Maimonides understands it as a protest against idolatry, conjecturing that the heathen priests shaved their beards. Others have seen it as a means of distinguishing between males and females. Neither of these reasons would explain why the distinction is made between shaving with a razor and by other means, but this distinction still holds as a matter of law, although some later authorities do invoke both reasons not as a matter of law but of piety.

Consequently, it has been the practice among many Jews to wear a beard and sidelocks (pe'ot). The Talmud describes the beard as an "adornment of the face" and implies that a beardless man cannot be said to be handsome.

In the kabbalah [mysticism], the beard is said to represent on earth the "beard of the Holy Ancient One" on high, that is, the stage in the unfolding of the sefirot [divine emanations] at which the divine grace, symbolized by the strands of the beard, begins to flow throughout all creation. In kabbalistic circles the beard becomes a sacred object and some kabbalists would not even remove a single hair from their beard. The statement that, according to the kabbalah, there is no need to wear a beard outside the Holy Land, is unwarranted. Hasidism follows the kabbalah and all Hasidim wear long beards and sidelocks.

Most westernized Jews do not wear beards, including many Orthodox rabbis, who shave with an electric razor but sometimes sport a small goatee beard as a bow in the direction of the tradition. Yet it can be observed that the wearing of a full beard is coming increasingly into fashion among the Orthodox. Reform Jews do not consider the prohibition on shaving with a razor still to be binding.

So all that stuff is what Rabbi's argue about. However, I'm certain if I were to ask R. YES for a ruling, he would say: "After careful consideration and a lot of beard stroking here is my ruling."

"So Photoshop or Barbershop. That is the question. Since Moshe Spector didn't use a razor it is definitely permitted. That's my carved in stone haluchic ruling. Furthermore, I order you to lay this meshugas to rest and keep your eye on the ball. The suspense in unbearable. Anyone for DNA?"

R. Spektor portrait with signature

Another treasure from the files of Morris Spector.

Ahikam Finkel expands our tree

Woo hoo for second cousin Ahikam Finkel, who accepted Joanne's invitation to our family tree on Geni and has input family information for our Sharon relatives in Israel. This fills in some important details on our Ringel side and adds wonderful new details about our Israeli cousins.

Rosa Ringel's husband, the father of Ze'ev Sharon, was David Shatner, also the brother-in-law of our grandparents Hermann and Elly. That name might help me in future research about our family in Berlin.

We also get previously unknown details about Ze'ev's wife Penina. She was born Penina Dorfman Feb. 15, 1919 in Poland. Her parents were Izik Dorfman and Sara Bahat.

Ahikam is the son of Raya Finkel, the daughter of Ze'ev and Penina. He is 33 years old, married to Gali and has a daughter Neta.

To view our tree on Geni, contact me for an invitation to join our family group.

New Spektor family information

These images are courtesy of Morris Spector, who I found through an old post on the JewishGen discussion board. They are a rare photo of Rabbi Spektor and an image of his and his son Zvi Hirsch Rabinowitz's gravestones in Kaunas.

Morris also sent his extensively researched family tree for the Spektor family, reproduced below. Notice that our great grandfather Joseph Rabinowitz is listed but without any descendant information.

I am in the process of going through his information to see what can be added to our tree. I will also be sending Morris (and also Jeffrey Spector, another Spector historian he knows of) our full data about Joseph's family.

Descendants of Elchonan Spektor

1 Elchonan Spektor b: Abt. 1761
.. +Rachel
....... 2 Israel Isser Spektor b: Abt. 1789
........... +Rachel b: Abt. 1789
................ 3 Yitzhak Elchonan Spektor b: 1817 in Rossi (Rus), Grodno Gub., Russia d: 06 Mar 1896 in Kovno, Poland
.................... +Sarah Reisel Yezerszki d: 1882
.......................... 4 Rachel Spektor b: in Isabelin, Poland d: 09 Jul 1876
.............................. +Zvi Hersz (Chiam) Sultzovsky
................................... 5 Zlota Sultzovsky
.......................... 4 Zvi Hersz (Rabinowicz) Spektor b: in Nishvez, Poland d: 1910
.............................. +Hena Saltz d: Abt. 1893
.......................... *2nd Wife of Zvi Hersz (Rabinowicz) Spektor:
.............................. +Hannah Rottner b: in Grodno, Poland
.......................... 4 Chiam Aryeh Spektor b: 1831 in Isabelin, Poland d: 02 May 1874 in Kovno, Poland
.............................. +Unknown b: in Slutsk
................................... 5 Joseph (Rabinowicz) Spektor
.......................... 4 Benjamin Spektor b: 1852 in Nowogrodek, Russia d: 1896
.............................. +Devorah Baer d: 1929 in Kovno, Poland
................................... 5 Meshulem Fishel Spektor d: 1940 in Kovno
................................... 5 Yisroel Isser Spektor Rabinowicz d: 1933 in Kovno, Poland
....................................... +Fruma Frankel b: in Verbalis, Lithuania d: 1944 in Stutthof Concentration Camp, Gdansk, Danzig
............................................. 6 Yitzhak Elchonan b: Jan 1900 in Kovno, Poland d: 1992 in Tel Aviv, Israel
................................................. +Shulamit Rozenbloom b: 1901 d: Mar 1996 in Haifa, Israel
...................................................... 7 Amos Elchonan b: 02 Jul 1925 in Berlin, Germany
.......................................................... +Sarah Davdobni
...................................................... 7 Benjamin Elchonan b: 30 Aug 1926 in Berlin, Germany d: 18 Jul 1948 in Bet Afa, Israel
...................................................... 7 Shmuel Elchonan b: 12 Feb 1930 in Kovno, Poland
.......................................................... +Tzeporah Gromet
................................................................ 8 Benjamin Elchonan b: 12 May 1958
................................................................ 8 Ofra Elechonan b: 25 Jan 1961 in Rechovat, Israel
............................................. 6 Shlomo b: 1901 in Kovno, Poland d: 1992 in Israel
................................................. +Lena Rappaport b: Abt. 1902 in Kovno, Poland d: Abt. 1989 in Israel
...................................................... 7 Gabriel Isser Elchonan b: Abt. 1940
.......................................................... +Marina Stolbova b: Abt. 1942 in Moscow, Russia
................................................................ 8 Maxim b: Abt. 1977
.................................................................... +Irina
...................................................... *2nd Wife of Gabriel Isser Elchonan:
.......................................................... +Polina Lubetsky b: Abt. 1945 in Vilnus, Lithuania
................................................................ 8 Anat Isser Elchonan b: Abt. 1977 in Jerusalem, Israel
................................................................ 8 Yael Elchonan b: Abt. 1980 in Jerusalem, Israel
............................................. 6 Miriam (Mira) b: 1904 d: 1943 in Stutthof Concentration Camp, Gdansk, Danzig
...................................................... 7 Israel Isser b: 1933 d: 1943 in Kovno
............................................. 6 Bella b: 1909 d: 1941 in Stutthof Concentration Camp, Gdansk, Danzig
................................................. +Selig Volvisky d: 1941 in Kovno, Poland (killed by partisans)
...................................................... 7 Daniel Volvisky d: 1941 in Staathof Concentration Camp, Germany
................................... 5 Yetyl Spektor d: in Kharkov, Russia
....................................... +Yacov Kahanov b: in Lubny, Ukraine
................................... 5 Blooma Spektor d: in Tel Aviv, Israel
....................................... +Louie Solomonson b: in Riga, Latvia
................................... 5 Moshe Spektor
....................................... +??Perling
................................... 5 Eliash David Spektor
................................... 5 Gershon Spektor
....................................... +Ita Fridlander
............................................. 6 Henritte Spektor
................................................. +Yacov Kahanov
................ *2nd Wife of Yitzhak Elchonan Spektor:
.................... +Hannah Meizlsz
................ 3 Moshe Joseph Spektor b: Abt. 1814
.......................... 4 Aryeh Spektor
.......................... 4 Meir Spektor
.............................. +Esther
................................... 5 Jacob Spektor
................................... 5 Emanuel Spektor
................................... 5 Rachel Spektor
.......................... 4 Shifra Spektor
.............................. +Aryeh Spektor
................................... 5 Chiam Shmuel Spektor
................................... 5 Simcha Spektor
................ 3 Abraham Aaron Spektor b: Abt. 1816
................ 3 Jacob David Spektor b: 1827
.................... +Sheindel Klein b: 1858
.......................... 4 Abraham Aaron Spektor
................................... 5 Jacob David Spektor b: 1904
................................... 5 Shoshona Spektor
....................................... +Sholom Yoval
................................... 5 Rachel Spektor b: 1886
....................................... +Israel Kahn
................................... 5 Tzpora Spektor
....................................... +Yacov Mendelson
................................... 5 Leah
....................................... +Munie Meridor

Meet Rezekne expert Dave Howard

In my researches into the Tulbowitz family, I came across the well-documented work by Dave Howard, a descendant of the Gurwitz family of Rezekne who has done a great deal to discover and publish information on our ancestral town. The photo shows Dave on one of the residential streets in the old Jewish part of Rezekne.

We've been in touch several times in the last few weeks, with the result that he plans to include our Tulbowitz information in the JewishGen ShtetLink for Rezekne that he is currently compiling. Until that is ready, here is Dave's Rezekne page on his FamRoots.org site. Much of what we will see when we visit Latvia next year is already available for view on these pages. Thanks, Dave.

First LDS document arrives

I'm very far behind in blogging. A lot has happened that I will try to fill in while I begin to catch up. One angle is that I have begun to order facsimile documents of existing vital records where available. The first of these has arrived: It is the Polish language document from 1854 that records the birth in Krakow of Feigla Kaufler, the mother of our grandfather Hermann Ringel.

I'll do my best to display the document in the confines of this blog. Here is a view of an entire ledger page that includes three birth records. Feigla's is the second entry, number 188.



Most of the text is indecipherable (to me, and so far), but this close up highlights some of the interesting parts.



Here are the four detail sections. The first is the name of Feigla's father Abraham Mojzesa Kaugler. Then her mother's maiden name, Chaya Esther Grunberg. Then her given name, Feigla.





Finally, I have included the Hebrew transcription that appears at the bottom of the record, beneath the official signature. Any of our Hebrew speakers want to take a crack at translating that?



Our next step is to get a full translation and I have begun to investigate Polish document translation services. I plan to send in a scan and ask for an estimate. I hope it is not too much because it is very likely that I'll soon have similar birth records for all of Feigla's siblings and other family members. These are all on order from the LDS research center in Salt Lake City, and should be available to me soon at the Oakland branch.

Abraham Ratner & Sons in Albany business directory

Walt, you should get a kick out of this because of the other entries under Bottlers—Carbonated Beverages, including Albany Coco-Cola Bottling Works and Orange Crush Bottling Co. This is interesting in light of the family story that Abe turned down the opportunity to become a Coca Cola franchise.

Rabinovich surname

Here's an excerpt from Beilen on the surname Rabinovich, which he treats as a special case of rabbinical surname. If you can't make it out in the image, go here for a full size version.

Katz name derivation

Oh boy, I have a lot to catch up on here. I visited the Mormon Family Research Center in Oakland, where I met Jeremy Frankel, the president of the SF Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society. More on that, and what I learned about ordering LDS records, in an upcoming post.

Also, I connected online with Dave Howard, who is the leading researching about the Jewish community in Rezekne. His FamRoots.org and HorwitzFam.org sites are a treasure trove of information. I will be posting highlights and links to the most relevant stuff in an upcoming post.

For now, I thought I would post this excerpt from Alexander Beider's Dictionary of Jewish Surnames From the Russian Empire. Howard has a few small parts of the work available to view on his Horwitz site. Here is a section dealing with the surname Katz.



Since it is hard to read, I will summarize. Katz originates from the name Kohen, which means priest in Hebrew, possibly the same as Goan. Kats or Katz is an acronym for Kohen Tsadek (Kohen of righteousness). The name was common throughout the Russian Empire. Of course, our great-grandmother was Bette Katz, the wife of Julius Wolgemuth of Koenigsberg.

By the way, Beider has another volume on Jewish surnames in Galicia, which are likely to contain informative entries for Ringel and Kaufler. The books are published by Avotainu and are very expensive. I will be looking for where I can find them in a library.

Cannold loose ends

From various U.S. census records from 1880 through 1930, I now have a better picture of the Cannold family. Most of this is only marginally of interest to us, since the only Cannolds that had any relation to us were Lester, who was married and divorced from our great aunt Meta, and their two children, Thad, who committed suicide in 1946, and Harrison, who appears to have lived until at least 1965 and could have had children. Should that be the case, those children would be our second cousins.

Lester was the second of five children of Samuel and Sarah Cannold, who were both born in Poland but met and married in New York. By 1910, Lester is 23 and working as a public school teacher. Three years later, he marries Meta Rabinowitz and they start a family.

We know the outlines of the sad story after that. Lester rises in his career as a administrator in the Newark school system, but emotional problems begin to have an impact. By the time of the 1930 census, he and Meta have divorced. In 1942, we have him registering for the WWII draft from his mailing address at a Connecticut sanitarium.

On his registration card, he lists his sister Harriet Klein as "Name of person who will always know your address." And his home is given at an address on Seabreeze Ave. in Coney Island, Brooklyn.

So to tie up loose ends I went back and looked at Lester's siblings. At some point the family had moved from Manhattan to Coney Island, the same address Lester would later use. Of the daughters, one stayed single and continued to live with her mother, and two others married. One of those was Harriet Klein, who did not appear to have children. The other was Pearl Gerst, who had two or three children.

So that's all on the Cannolds, a family we are related to only by marriage but one with some tragic twists that seem to echo events in our family. Only Harrison and Thaddeus Cannold are of direct interest to us, so the hunt for Harrison goes on.

Revisiting Cannold 1930 census record

In an earlier post I wondered about Harrison Cannold birth date and decided to take a new look at the 1930 census record I had previously found for our great aunt Meta Cannold nee Rabinowitz.

First, it was hard to locate the record on Ancestry.com because they have the name listed as Connold, not Cannold. But I persisted and found the right census document. On the age question, it shows that Harrison was 14 and Thaddeus 13 in April 1930. So on the earlier question, if living, Harrison would be 92 plus or minus.

There are some other interesting facts from the census record, which I will list here:

The family consisted of Meta (head of household) and her two sons. They lived in an apartment building at 236 Renner Ave. in Newark NJ. At the time 43 years old, Meta is indicated as having been married at age 26 but her "Marriage Condition" is listed a "D" for divorced. Under "Occupation" she is listed as "Teacher," and under "Industry" it says "Public School." Both boys are noted as having been born in New Jersey to parents born in New York. Meta is shown as born in New York to parents born in Russia.

Ruby family tree is posted on Geni

I signed up with a new genealogy social networking site called Geni and have uploaded a recent version of my Ruby Family GEDCOM file, which now includes 325 names of our ancestors and living relatives.

Geni appears to be a really cool system with loads of great features for displaying information about the family as well as connecting with living family members. To get it rolling, I invited immediate family members and so far Walter, Joanne and Twyla have now signed up. I hope they will be active users by updating their profiles and adding new information to the tree.

If that happens, then let's start inviting various cousins to join in and see what kind of network we can create. If you want to get started on your own, go to www.geni.com and create a free account. Then do a search for any family member you can think of. Once you find the person, you should also be able to find yourself in the Ruby family tree. Link your account to that listing and you will become part of our social network.

Or here's a simpler solution: Write to me at druby@sprynet.com and I will sent you an email invitation to join.

To give you an idea how the program works, here is a sample screen shot:

Harrison Cannold's letter to the editor

Well, here's good news, a letter to the editor of the New York Times written by Harrison Cannold in November 1965. This is our first sighting of Harrison after WWII, and it opens up likely avenues for learning more about his life and possible descendents. It is even remotely possible that he is still living. I don't have his birth date handy, but will look for it on the 1920 or 1930 census record that we have.

That Harrison was interested in the political situation in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, is not surprising for a member of our politically attuned family. Here is the clipping:

Thad Cannold's obituary

Still following up the Cannold family, I decided to look in the NY Times article archive. Here are the two items I turned up for Thaddeus Cannold--his February 1939 graduation notice and his December 1946 obit notice.

A childhood friend checks in

Okay, so it has already been an amazing day, learning of 10 new direct ancestors and three times that many new relatives. Also, I didn't mention the general reading I did on the history of the Jewish community of Rzeszow, and the cursory reading on the same subject in Krakow. (This was to help gather resources for Walter's upcoming trip, in which by chance he will have two days in Krakow.)

So it was an amazing day and then an email arrives in my inbox from my long-lost childhood buddy Derek Jeffers. Now, I have been Googling Derek on and off for 15 years, or I should say I was Alta Vista-ing or Lycos-ing him. Remember those search engines from the pre-Google days?

Derek left very few tracks. The best lead I had found was an article about a French auto workers' strike from the early 1980s. That sounded like Derek, who had gone on from our youthful activism to become a committed Socialist. I had thought that since I hadn't found his biline in the Socialist Worker Party newspaper, that maybe he had fallen out with that group and taken another direction.

The idea of him as a strike leader in Paris was certainly romantic. If so, surely he was an international provocateur, riding closed trains across the continent. Such had Derek devolved into a mythic idea in my mind that I nearly jumped out of my seat when I saw the message arrive in my inbox.

Yes, it turns out he has been living in Paris for 30-plus years and he actually is an auto worker, though he mentioned the Peugeot plant is currently shut down waiting for parts from Portugal. He filled me in about his three children and wife Esther, an economics professor. They are coming next month to San Diego, where Derek's father had owned a condo before recently passing away.

(Digression: When I would sleep over at Derek's house when we were 11 and 12 years old, his dad would always start the day with a bang by playing Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" at top volume on the living room stereo.)

Since they are French, they will have six weeks for the vacation, which means there is every likelihood that I will be able to meet up with my old buddy during his sojourn in California. Plus, he mentions that Esther has an upcoming sabbatical in New York, so there will be more meetings after that.

Earlier today, I expressed my delight at hearing from him but begged off from a lengthy reply because I was getting ready to take off on a festival trip. Well, neither Twyla or I were ready to leave at a reasonable hour this evening, so we decided to go in the morning instead.

Thus, I was able to spend the last few hours updating this blog. Perhaps Derek will check it again before I get back. If so, he can enjoy this post until I have a chance to write to him directly.

One last thing and I am off to bed. Unlike Derek, I'm fairly easy to find on the Internet, though you have to avoid the red herrings like the legislator in Fargo and the sportswriter in San Jose. Walter the prolific author is even more discoverable. Now, with this blog, both of us are popping up even more.

I find it interesting that this blog lands high up on the first Google results page for searches on terms like "rabbi spektor" and "ruby family." After this item posts and Google spiders have taken note, we'll also show up among the first hits on "Derek Jeffers."

Adding our two cents

After absorbing the news about the four new generations of Kauflers, I felt I should communicate what we knew about Feigla's descendants to the Hirschberg knowledge base. So I found Dan Hirschberg's email address at University of California at Irvine, where he is a mathematician.

I sent him details of Feigla's marraige to Schija, their child Hermann, his wife Elly, their child Helga, her husband Stanley, and their three children, us. He wrote back within 15 minutes, having already added all the info to his listing.

Here is the updated family tree, where you will now see much of that information in place. Note that he does not include people born after 1945. Also note that a few of the dates I gave him were off the top of my head and still need to be corrected. I will do that when I contact Hirschberg again next week, also with information on Hermann's siblings Rosa and Bette.

Major breakthrough: Kaufler family tree

Yay! This is the first time one of our names has matched someone else's family tree. After my nice find of Schija Ringel's family in Rzeszow, I thought I would see what more I could dig up on the Kauflers of Krakow.

As noted from a few days ago, I had already found the birth record for Feigla Kaufler. This time I did an ordinary Google search on kaufler, and, lo and behold, I hit the mother lode. A gentleman named Dan Hirschberg has done a tremendous service by compiling extensive family trees for 600 Jewish families from Krakow, including the Kauflers.

According to Hirschberg's research, the family name goes back to a Nachman Kaufler, born 1755. Yes, 1755. That is as far back as we have traced any branch of our family. Nachman's son Izaak (born between 1771 and 1775) married Beili (1773-1831, daughter of Abraham, last name unknown) and they had a son Schulim (1798-1847). Schulim married Reisel Bluma Singlust (born 1805-1877) and they parented Abraham Mojzesa Kaufler (b. 1829).

Hang in a little longer. Abraham married Chaja Ester Grunberg (b. 1825) and the second of their three children was our great grandmother Feigla.

Here is Hirschberg's full listing of Kauflers:


Izaak KAUFLER 1771-75 (Nachman b.1755) {census family 503}
m:Beili 1773 - 1831 #148 (Abraham)
|o Chane Zlate KAUFLER 1783-93
|x Schulim KAUFLER 1798-99 - 1847 #638
| m:Reisel Bluma SINGLUST 1805-06 - Mar 23, 1877 #130
| ! married Jun 20, 1825 #27
| !o Dressel KAUFLER 1826 #116 - 1826 #62
| !o Taube Reila KAUFLER 1827 #154 - 1830 #14
| !x Abraham Mojzesz KAUFLER 1829 #357
| ! m:Chaja Ester GRUNBERG 1825 #31
| ! | bann 1892 #10
| ! |o Rifka KAUFLER Sep 27, 1852 #492
| ! | M:Wolf Leib BIRKNER 1843 #418
| ! | married Jul 11, 1888 #81
| ! | FAMILY LISTING
| ! |o Feigla KAUFLER Mar 29, 1854 #188
| ! |x Jakob Kopel KAUFLER
| ! | m:Chawe Bluma EHRLICH
| ! | bann 1892 #1
| !o Bayla KAUFLER 1832 #239
| !x Aron Hirsch KAUFLER 1834 #347 - 1835 #132
| !x Markus Jakob KAUFLER 1836 #435
| !x Lipman Tobiasz KAUFLER 1839 #79
| !o Haja KAUFLER 1841 #292
| ! M:Juda HOCHBERG
| ! |x Moses Hirsch HOCHBERG 1873 #451 - after 1929
| ! | m:Ruchel SPINGARN 1872 #483
| ! | bann 1915 #199
| ! |o Sara Rifka HOCHBERG Nov 3, 1875 #793 - Dec 15, 1877 #538
| ! |x Dawid HOCHBERG Aug 9, 1879 #609 - Aug 1, 1881 #393
| !x Dawid KAUFLER Dec 26, 1843 (1844 #27) - 1847 #543
| !o Sara KAUFLER Dec 23, 1846 #555 - 1847 #62
|o Sussel KAUFLER 1803
| M:Akiwa BERGER 1794-96 - 1831 #360
| married May 1, 1820 #15
| FAMILY LISTING
|x Isser KAUFLER Jun 17, 1804 - 1847 #227
| m:Gela Rebeka KOLBERG 1813 #139 - Apr 13, 1888 #111
| ! married 1829 #57
| !x Markus Hersch KAUFLER 1830 #378
| !o Bayla KAUFLER 1832 #238 - 1839 #87
| !x Abraham Mozes KAUFLER 1835 #225
| ! m:Fraydel RAUCHINGER 1842 #173
| ! | married 1906 #109
| ! |o Szeindel KAUFLER
| ! | M:Dawid SINGER
| ! | !x son SINGER Apr 29, 1887 #225 - Apr 29, 1887 #166
| ! | !o Gela SINGER May 27, 1888 #327 - Jun 2, 1888 #185
| ! | !o Gusta SINGER Aug 9, 1889 #534
| ! |x Isser Hirsch KAUFLER 1871 #759
| ! |o Beile Hendel KAUFLER Apr 16, 1876 #374 - May 5, 1877 #193
| ! |o Rachel KAUFLER Sep 19, 1878 #621
| ! | M:Izaak KAUFLER Jul 9, 1879 #473
| ! | bann 1908 #187, married Aug 9, 1908
| ! | FAMILY LISTING
| ! |x Szachna KAUFLER Oct 10, 1881 #702 - Jan 19, 1884 #34
| ! |x Izaak KAUFLER Sep 30, 1890 Krakow
| ! | m:Chana LANDAU Feb 7, 1891 Krakow
| ! | married Aug 3, 1915 Marienbad
| !o daughter KAUFLER 1837 #555 - 1837 #352
| !o Chaja KAUFLER 1839 #237
| !o daughter KAUFLER 1842 #122 - 1842 #70
| !x Moyzesz KAUFLER 1842 #181 - 1842 #89
| !x Aron KAUFLER 1843 #244
| ! m:Jachet LIEBFELD 1841 #241
| ! | married 1897 #174
| ! |o Reisel KAUFLER Aug 31, 1869 Krakow
| ! | M:Salomon KLEIN
| ! | !o Gela KLEIN Jun 18, 1894
| ! |o Breindel KAUFLER Dec 1, 1871 #753 - 1924
| ! | M:Pawel/Saul GISSER
| ! | ! bann 1914 #216, married Sep 15, 1914
| ! | !x Gustaw GISSER Aug 10, 1902 #601
| ! | !x Maks GISSER Nov 29, 1904 Krakow
| ! | !x Aleksander GISSER Jul 24, 1908 #592
| ! |x Motel KAUFLER Aug 8, 1874 #466
| ! |o Hinda Rachel KAUFLER Nov 9, 1875 #666
| ! | M:Abraham FINDER
| ! | bann 1902 #251
| ! |x Mojzesz KAUFLER Feb 1, 1878 #61 - Sep 26, 1878 #398
| ! |x Izaak KAUFLER Jul 9, 1879 #473
| ! | m:Rachel KAUFLER Sep 19, 1878 #621
| ! | ! bann 1908 #187, married Aug 9, 1908
| ! | !o Stefania KAUFLER Sep 10, 1908 #661
| ! | !o Roza KAUFLER Mar 31, 1911 #178
| ! | !x Marcel Arnold KAUFLER Oct 13, 1913 Krakow - after 1944
| ! | ! m:Chaja MANASIEWICZ
| ! | ! married Nov 26, 1949
| ! | !x Salo KAUFLER Oct 3, 1917 #398 - after 1944
| ! |x Szaja KAUFLER Jun 12, 1881 #339 - Nov 25, 1881 #576
| ! |o Gitel KAUFLER Apr 7, 1883 #218
| ! | M:Izak ZIMERSPITZ Feb 23, 1879 #278
| ! | bann 1908 #162
| ! |x Alter KAUFLER Oct 15, 1885 #608
| m:Ruchel KOHL
| !o Regina KAUFLER Apr 29, 1914
| ! M:Rubin TRAUM
| ! married Feb 14, 1948
| !x Litman KAUFLER Apr 18, 1846 #174

Schija Ringel's birth record

Rzeszow 1835,41-1866 Births
Lwow Wojewodztwa / Rzeszow Province
Located at 50°03’ 22°00’
Last updated February 2001
Surname Givenname Year Type Akt Page Sex Father Mother Mothersurn Date Witness House Town Died Comments
RINGEL Jermias 1845 B 2 22 Hirsch Beile unknown illegible
RINGEL Golde 1849 B 18 40 Hirsch Beile unknown 2
RINGEL Schija 1856 B 9 80 Mos. Rose blank 299
RINGEL Juda 1859 B 10 105 M Moses Rose Lea REICHMAN 16-Feb-1859 299
RINGEL Hirsch Löb 1860 B 11 119 Abraham Witte KLEPEL 48
RINGEL Jakob Schia 1861 B 5 140 Moses Lea REICHMAN 299
RINGEL Reisel 1864 B 2 193 Hersch Rose REICHMAN 441
RINGEL Basze Sure 1866-1876 B 383 1870 55 F Moses RINGEL Roise REICHMAN


I know it is hard to read because the columns don't align, but of the various Ringels here, Hermann Ringel's father Schija is shown in this index of the LDS microfilm records to have been born in 1856. His parents were Moses Ringel and Rose Lea Ringel (nee Reichman) and he had siblings Juda, Jakob, Reisel and Basze Sure.

Actually, there is a mystery here in that Reisel Ringel appears to have the same mother but different father from the other three. First I thought Moses might have died and she remarried before having her third child, but then Moses is back as the father of the fourth child. Something to figure out.

I learned that I can obtain copies of these and any LDS records where we have the index listings by visiting an LDS family history center, such as the one nearby here in the Oakland hills. I have meant to visit there for some time, but now I have a concrete reason to go.

Rabinowitch death records

An email update about Washington DC death records from the Tracing the Tribe blog this morning got me looking at the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry for the first time. I couldn't find Harrison Cannold, my first search, but then I tried Rabinowitz in New York, and hit a small mother lode.

Below are the burial records for Joseph and Lena Rabinowitch (note the spelling), their son Julius and his wife Annie (nee Cohen), and their son Abner Robbins and his wife Judith.

The Joseph record does not include any information on his parentage, but I am confident that a visit to his gravesite in Plot 10R 5 at Mt. Carmel Cemetery Queens, NY, will confirm that he was the son of Chaim, and possibly reveal other interesting information. The burial dates indicate that Joseph and Lena lived to age 85 and 86, respectively, and that they both outlived their son Walter, who we know died by suicide in 1939.

The information on Julius, Annie, Abner and Judith gives us another likely avenue for identifying new living close relatives. Our other best possibility for living descendants of Joseph and Lena is Harrison Cannold. We don't know yet what became of him after the war or if he married or had any children.

Here are the various death records I discovered today:

Name
(Other Surnames) Place of BirthPlace of Death Date of BirthDate of Death Hebrew NameHebrew Date AgeBurial Date
RABINOWITCH, Lena 18-Jun-1944
No Image Available
Plot Spouse FatherMother Comments Cemetery NameCity / Country
10R 5 Mt. Carmel Cemetery Queens, NY / USA


Name
(Other Surnames) Place of BirthPlace of Death Date of BirthDate of Death Hebrew NameHebrew Date AgeBurial Date
RABINOWITCH, Joseph 18-Feb-1940
No Image Available
Plot Spouse FatherMother Comments Cemetery NameCity / Country
10R 4 Mt. Carmel Cemetery Queens, NY / USA

Name
(Other Surnames) Place of BirthPlace of Death Date of BirthDate of Death Hebrew NameHebrew Date AgeBurial Date
RABINOWITZ, Julius
(LINCOFF / ROBBINS / COHEN) Bronx, NY 08-Nov-1940 64
No Image Available
Plot Spouse FatherMother Comments Cemetery NameCity / Country
Annie COHEN Joseph Lena LINCOFF beloved husband and dear father/father of Abner J. ROBBINS Montefiore Cemetery Queens, NY / USA


Name
(Other Surnames) Place of BirthPlace of Death Date of BirthDate of Death Hebrew NameHebrew Date AgeBurial Date
RABINOWITZ, Annie
(COHEN / BERGER / ROBBINS / CO / EN) Manhattan, NY 01-Jan-1942 60
No Image Available
Plot Spouse FatherMother Comments Cemetery NameCity / Country
Julius Solomon H. COHEN Rebecca BERGER our beloved mother/mother of Abner J. ROBBINS Montefiore Cemetery Queens, NY / USA


Name
(Other Surnames) Place of BirthPlace of Death Date of BirthDate of Death Hebrew NameHebrew Date AgeBurial Date
ROBBINS, Abner J.
(RABINOWITZ / COHEN) 13-Aug-1958 53
No Image Available
Plot Spouse FatherMother Comments Cemetery NameCity / Country
Judith? Julius RABINOWITZ Annie COHEN Montefiore Cemetery Queens, NY / USA

Name
(Other Surnames) Place of BirthPlace of Death Date of BirthDate of Death Hebrew NameHebrew Date AgeBurial Date
ROBBINS, Judith 03-May-1965 47
No Image Available
Plot Spouse FatherMother Comments Cemetery NameCity / Country
Abner? Montefiore Cemetery Queens, NY / USA

Lester Cannold registered for WWII draft

Lester Cannold was 55 and residing in a Connecticut sanitarium in 1942, but he still had to register for the draft in WW2. Here is his draft registration record. Click to enlarge.

Cannold family confirmed

Searching NY vital records for Rabinowitz events at http://www.italiangen.org/ ...

Meta Rabinowitz married Lester Cannold June 29, 1913 in Queens NY.

Cannold was my best guess of Meta's married name based on the 1930 census handwriting, so this is a definite match. Lester was the unhappy schools superintendent. Meta was Walter Ruby's sister.

Then I did an Ancestry.com search on Meta's son's Thaddeus and Harrison Cannold (Stan's first cousins) and found both their U.S. Army enlistment records. The data follows. Check out their occupations.

Name: Harrison S Cannold
Birth Year: 1915
Race: White, citizen (White)
Nativity State or Country: New Jersey
State: District of Columbia
County or City: District of Columbia

Enlistment Date: 21 Jan 1943
Enlistment State: Virginia
Enlistment City: Fort Myer
Branch: Branch Immaterial - Warrant Officers, USA
Branch Code: Branch Immaterial - Warrant Officers, USA
Grade Code: Private
Term of Enlistment: Enlistment for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law
Component: Selectees (Enlisted Men)
Source: Civil Life

Education: 2 years of college
Civil Occupation: Bandsman, Oboe or Parts Clerk, Automobile
Marital Status: Single, without dependents
Height: 64
Weight: 132


Name: Thaddeus Cannold
Birth Year: 1916
Race: White, citizen (White)
Nativity State or Country: New Jersey
State: Pennsylvania
County or City: Philadelphia

Enlistment Date: 25 Sep 1941
Enlistment State: New York
Enlistment City: New York City
Branch: Air Corps
Branch Code: Air Corps
Grade: Private
Grade Code: Private
Component: Regular Army (including Officers, Nurses, Warrant Officers, and Enlisted Men)
Source: Civil Life

Education: 4 years of college
Civil Occupation: Actor (Motion picture actor. ) or Director, Motion Picture (Motion picture director.) or Entertainer
Marital Status: Single, without dependents
Height: 69
Weight: 140

Feigla Kaufler's birth record

Krakow Births 1798-1855,71-89
Krakow Wojewodztwa / Krakow Province

Surname Givenname Year Type Akt Film Indexfilm Date House
KAUFLER Feigla 1854 B 188 718917


The right name, location and year. Photocopies can be obtained from a collection in Israel, and I sent in an order.

Abe Ratner was from Minsk

In the 1920 census form for the Ratner family, the enumerator first wrote down Minsk and then crossed it out and wrote Russia for Abe's birthplace. Similarly, Rose is noted as born in Rostof, which is also crossed out and replaced. I'm not going to put up the image, since the quality is very bad and will not be legible at blog size and resolution. If you want to check for yourself, look up the 1920 census in Ward 5 of Albany NY.

So then I did a quick look for the name Bloch in the JewishGen Belarus database. What pops up are lots of people named Blokh in the Minsk guberniya. On a first pass, I didn't find a Abram Blokh born in May 1869, but I think it is pretty likely we now have the original home region for another of our eight great-grandparents.

To recap:

Selma Ratner's parents came from Rostov by way of Rezshita in Latvia (Rose) and the Minsk area of Belarus (Abe).

Walter Rabinowitz's parents came from Lithuania probably Kovno (Joseph) and unknown but probably also Kovno guberniya (Lena).

Hermann Ringel's parents came from the Rzezow area of Poland (Schija) and Krakow (Feigel).

Elly Wohlgemuth's parents Julius and Bette resided in Koenigsberg but we don't yet know where they were born.

Family attends Twyla's Barnard graduation

Also late, but congratulations are in order for the latest member of the family to pass through the gates of academe and step into the so-called real world. Twyla completed her undergraduate degree from Barnard College at Columbia University, the same institution (Columbia) where her grandfather Stanley was an undergrad and graduate student.

We had a big turnout of Rubys and Eilertsens to celebrate the occasion in New York City. Among Ruby kin, Danny, Joanne, Walter and Tanya, Gene, Janis Brenner and her husband Mitchell Bogart, and Sandy Brenner were on hand for some or all of the festivities. On the Eilertsen side, Kate and Allen, Ed, Judy, and Susie went all out to make the experience special, including at the several special celebratory meals. I was so sad that Stan and Helga could not be there that I broke up trying to say that in a toast at the first celebration dinner.

The graduation ceremony was plenty interesting, with featured speeches by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, David Remnick, Anna Quindlen, Judith Shapiro, and others. Billie Jean King was among those who received the Barnard Medal. Twyla walked with the Anthropology department as she was recognized for her double major in Anthropology and English.

At a couple of departmental receptions, Kate and I had the opportunity to meet two of the professors who advised Twyla's senior project—Ross Hamilton of the English department and Brian Larkin, the chairman of the Anthropology department. Both had lovely things to say about our graduate. Her thesis, "Made Visible: Scientific Constructivism Through the Lens of Hooke's Micrographia, received a 'A' grade from the two professors.

Graduation morning, there was a screwup because I failed to get word to Sandy on where we would meet. She came anyway—solo on the train with Mel in the hospital recovering from a knee operation—but we never managed to find each other. Janis was getting ready to leave for Asia that morning, and the last thing she needed was my frantic call looking for her mother. She ended up missing her flight while Mitchell worked the phones trying to track her down.

Turns out Sandy was there for the graduation ceremony and post reception. Then, not finding any of us, she sensibly went home, where she discovered everyone had been looking for her. My apologies for my part in the screwup. Thankfully, everything worked out okay and Joanne took the next day to visit with Sandy and help get Mel home from the hospital.

Translation reveals Hermann's parents were unmarried

I should have posted this in March, but better late than never.

The German translator came through and we now have more information about Hermann's parents, including something unexpected. Here are the highlights:

Hermann Ringel's birth record shows he was born November 5, 1885 in Berlin, that his parents were Schija Ringel and Feigel Kaufler. Kaufler was Ringel's unmarried Jewish housekeeper. A notation on the birth record from two and a half years later indicates that Schija and Feigel married on July 2, 1888.

Feigel's death certificate from November 28, 1921 (three years before her granddaughter Helga's birth), describes her as 67 years old, a shopkeeper, born in Krakow and residing at the same address in Lothringstrasse as her son Hermann.

Hermann's death record from June 25, 1938 is pretty spare, and does not appear to tell us anything new.

Rezekne Family List turns up trove of Tulbowitz kin

Walt, I just looked again at the 1900 U.S. census record for Solomon and Sophie (and Edward) Tulbowitz, and noticed a couple of interesting things. First, the census includes information for "Mother of how many children" and "Number of those children still living." In Sophie's record, the responses are 5 and 3. Second, Solomon and Sophie are both listed as having been married 34 years.

That's a lot of years. Since they were 52 and 49, respectively, at the time of the census, they would have been 18 and 15 at the time of their marriage. I don't remember what we know of exactly when and why they left Rezhitsa. Can you remind me?

On the number of children, I have Rose, Gavriel, Edward and Yitzhak (who died young). That's four, not five. I'm not sure where my information is from, but I have both Gavriel and Edward with a birthday in September 1876. Were they twins? Also, little Yitzhak (Isai) is 3 years, 5 months at the time of his death in August 1879, which does not compute. There are some mysteries there.

Twyla got me started on this today trying to talk up a trip to the Baltics in September. Intriguing idea. She'll have been in Finland with Kate, so maybe I would meet her in Riga and try to take in a circle from Rezhitsa to Kovno to Königsberg.

Anyway, that's what got me looking up Rezekne information today and I surprised myself with what I turned up. I'm not sure why I hadn't found the Tulbowitz stuff before. I guess because I hadn't searched the Latvian SIG. By the way, the info that came from Maxim on Tulbowitz in the all Russia census is also in Jewish Gen, but I have a hard time matching those names with the ones from the Rezekne Family List that I sent earlier.

My working theory is that our ancestor Sholom Ahron Tulbowitz' father Gavriel had a brother Leiba. The two brothers had sizable families that accounted for most but not necessarily all the Tulbowitz population of Rezhitsa.

On Gavriel's side, there were four sons (information is less available about daughters)-- Peisach, Salman, Eliasch (the eldest) and Abram. Peisach married Sara (not Sora?) and had Sholom Ahron, apparently an only child or at least only son. (From there, in our direct lineage, Sholom Ahron married Schifra Ita, also known as Sophie and later Bubbie, and they had Rose Ratner nee Tulbowitz as the first of their five children.)

Piesach's three brothers produced a total of five other sons and at least five grandchildren. Thanks to the Rezekne Family List, I have complete birth dates and spouse names for all of them. Same for Leiba's three sons and their offspring. One reason that branch is interesting is that two of the names Manzik (or possibly Manzin) Tulbowitz (son of Mowscha son of Leiba) and his wife Beila are also on another list of people in Riga with travel documents in 1900.

So that establishes that other Tulbowitz relatives of ours made the journey to America, and presumably accounts for the number of Tulbowitz sightings in places like Bayonne NJ and Wilmington DE. Not all came to the U.S.--a Sergio Tulbowitz is a musician and Marcelo Tulbowitz a professor, both in Montevideo.

The Jewish history of Rezekne is pretty well documented and memorialized, and there is an archivist who seems to be the major expert. He also does videos about Jewish historical subjects. Here is the catalog.