Jewish genealogy conference in Los Angeles, part III
The last talk that I attended was “New Developments in the Research of Balkan Jewish Genealogy,” by Yitchak Kerem. It ran from 5:00PM-6:30PM on Wednesday, July 14th, and there were still things happening when I left; since most of the people attending the conference are staying in the hotel itself, they have sessions going pretty much from first thing in the morning till midnight.
As soon as I stepped in the room, during the few minutes before the talk began, I met someone whose ancestors, like mine, lived in Constantinople. As she and I were talking with Kerem before the talk, I mentioned that, though I didn’t have any source for the family in Constantinople, I had used the LDS microfilms to check out civil records in Thessaloniki; this is when I found out that those microfilms may have gotten lost when sent for duplicating (I’ll have to try ordering some, to find out whether this problem was temporary or still persists, since the time when they were found to be unavailable was several years ago, and the time when I used them several years before that).
Professor Yitchak Kerem is associated with the Foundation for Jewish Diversity, which focuses on the heritage of Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaism.
Few books have been written on Balkan Jewish genealogical sources. Even Jeff Malka’s book on Sephardic Jewish genealogy has very little on the Balkans. In his talk, Kerem focused only on the newer sources, both books and archives, ones that had just become available in the past few years. He covered several countries: Greece, the several countries of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, and Turkey.
Greece: Aure Recanati has published a book of early 1943 Salonikan property declarations and Greek deportation lists. It’s a good source, but has some limitations, since the deportation lists in this case are not ones that were made at the time, but rather ones that are based on the later reports of survivors, from memory, as preserved by Yad Vashem. Some of the dates of death, Kerem said, can’t be right; for instance, we know that all Jews were deported from Salonika between March 15 and August 2, 1943, that only one shipment went from Salonika to Treblinka, and that all of the people on that particular shipment were killed immediately on arrival. For this reason, a date that shows someone dying in Treblinka in 1944 is in error. On the other hand, he pointed to other death times, on a list on the projector, that were likely accurate.
The cemetery in Salonika was destroyed, by Nazi order, in December 1942, and we only have three registers.
Greek Jews were Sephardic, Italian, or Romaniote. Ioannina, for instance, had Romaniote Jews. (LG: Here I’ll interject that my father was living in Ioannina when Greece got sucked into WWII. Because his father was an officer, the family got relocated, and was supposed to wind up in Athens, but stuff happened that prevented them from making it to Athens, and they wound up spending the war in Volos. Ioannina is near the northern border of Greece.) There is a New York Broome Street Romaniote Musem, and Katherine Elizabeth Fleming and Annette B. Fromm have both come out with recent books on Romaniote Jews in Greece.
Later in the talk, Kerem got back to Greece in response to a question about Jews in Athens. Many Jews in Athens came either from Asia Minor or from Ioannina. Athens has microfilmed Jewish newspapers. Most Jewish community records in Athens, though, were destroyed during WWII. Some of them were destroyed early in the occupation when a Jewish center was attacked, and others were destroyed later by the chief rabbi so that they could not be used in rounding up Jews. However, Soviet archives are a source, and, though most are still in Russia, some are at the US Holocaust Museum.
If the last talk I had attended, about the lost Jews of Poland, had an unlikely righteous Gentile in the form of a previously anti-Semitic priest who became a rescuer of Jews, this talk, too, had its interesting righteous Gentile story. Boats taking Jews out of Romania were run by two Greeks, originally underworld figures who became righteous Gentiles. Kerem had also at one point talked with the daughter of Metaxas, who was the fascist dictator of Greece at the time of the Italian invasion (and the German invasion after the Greeks chased the Italians out), and she told him that they had about twenty Jewish refugees in their house. Turkey took a bunch of Jewish academics, and Shimon Peres’ father found refuge in a monastery in Greece.
Former Yugoslavia: There are three new books on Monastir, including one by Mark Cohen. After WWI, many Jews left Monastir for the US and Chile. Those in the US settled in Rochester, Minneapolis, NYC, and Cincinnati. There is a registration of Jews of Monastir in 1942 by Bulgarians, and new books about Jews in Belgrade and Macedonia can be found at Avotaynu.
Kerem described more archives in former Yugoslavia than I could keep up with, including the Sarajevo Ottoman Archives, Jewish community centers or museums in Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade, the National Archives in Skopje, Bitola municipal archives, and Jasenovic death camp archives. Unfortunately, some of the recently published material is by Holocaust revisionists, and so false and useless. Somewhere in here there was a discussion of who the Holocaust revisionists were in this particular geographic area, but I didn’t get this into my notes. My notes do mention a new book of Jasenovic Holocaust testimonies and a Sarajevo Haggadah.
I remember, but don’t have in my notes, that some archives (presumably the ones in Sarajevo Ottoman Archives?) were in Ottoman Turkish. In the Ottoman period, written Turkish was a more formal version of the language, a distinction that I gather was somewhat similar to the difference between Katharevousa and Demotic Greek. It was also written in Arabic letters. Since the days of Kemal Ataturk, Turkish has been written with a Western alphabet, and, just as in Greece now there’s no longer the sharp distinction between written Katharevousa and spoken Demotic, so also in Turkey. None of this stuff about language comes from the talk, though; it comes from a conversation years ago with a Turkish friend who is able to read the old Ottoman writing (not all Turks now can).
Bulgaria:
Michael Studemund Halevi published a guide to Judeo-Spanish holdings in the Bulgarian archives. Mathilde Tagger created MACSTA, an online dictionary of Jewish Bulgarian surnames.
Albania:
Bracha Rivlin wrote an article for Yad Vashem on the former Albanian Jewish communities. Most of them were Sephardic Jews, but some were Romaniote. Other sources include Weinstein, Kotani, and the History of the Jewish Community of Valma in a file at the YIVO Institute.
Romania:
Romania is the least researched of the countries covered in this talk, according to Kerem. However, the 19th century protocols of the Bucharest Sephardic community can be found at Bar Ilan University. (This is also the point where we got the story about the Greek boats rescuing Romanian Jews.)
Turkey:
Though Kerem didn’t have any new sources for Istanbul, since he’d been asked about it, he mentioned, as a not so new source, an online index and some very partial English translations of Jewish community records from Istanbul. I don’t have a URL for where this information might be.
Some newer sources are available for the Izmir Jewish community. This community has a publication called Digalog. The primary source on the Izmir Jewish community is circumcision records.
There is also a new Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Brill).
At the end of my notes, after all the questions, I have the Central Zionist Archives listed as a source. I didn’t note for which country, perhaps all of them?
And here ends my account of the Jewish genealogy conference. I met Joel after this talk, and would have had him drop his raffle tickets in the box for the Yizkor necrology translation, but the glass wall of the atrium surrounding a drop to the first floor had caused his acrophobia to kick in, so we went straight for the elevator, and then to dinner. We left along one of those LA sidewalks festooned with names of stars, in this case Grammy Award winners.