Announcement: Exploring the Izmir, Turkey Census

Part of two of the pages of the register Waas discovered in the Ottoman Archives. This portion of the reggister was badly damaged and partly illegible.

Co-founder Michael Waas will be speaking on March 7, 2024 at 2 pm EST as part of the JewishGen Talk’s series about a discovery he made last year working in the Ottoman Archives: a surviving register from the first formal census of Ottoman Izmir in 1830s that contained a surprise: surnames of the Jewish community!

Read more about the lecture here and register for it. It is free with a suggested donation. This talk will be the first of many to come in Waas’s new capacity as a volunteer Associate Director of the Sephardic Research Division of JewishGen.

Jewish Genealogy in Greece: Reconstructing the Mijan Family

by Michael Waas

Kehila Kedosha Janina, the Romaniote Synagogue of New York City. Photo taken by author in May 2022.

Jews have been living in what is now Greece for over 2,200 years, since the time of the Second Temple.  The Romaniote (Ρωμανιώτες, רומניוטים) community claims this ancient Diasporic community as their ancestors. The name “Romaniote” originates with the period of the Roman Empire when Jewish diasporic settlement expanded in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean region, particularly during the time of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) in what is now Greece, Turkey, the southern Balkans, and parts of Southern Italy.

Of course, the story of Jews in Greece doesn’t end with Romaniote Jews. During the later years of the Eastern Roman Empire, small communities of Ashkenazi Jews also settled in the region, joining the rich tapestry of Jewish communities in the Empire. By the last century of the Eastern Roman Empire, significant changes in the political and socioeconomic landscape were occurring with the emergence of the Ottoman Empire. By 1451, the Ottomans had taken control of almost all of the Romaniote and Ashkenazi communities that had settled in the Aegean region.

A depiction of the Ottoman Empire and its dependencies in 1451 (map: Chamboz, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons, cropped in order to magnify the region.)

The 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople under Sultan Mehmet al-Fatih (the Conqueror, who ruled from 1444-1446 and again from 1451-1481) left a profound impact on Jewish history and genealogy in the region. As I explain in my presentation In the Lands of Osman: Jewish Genealogy in the Former Ottoman Empire, this marked a pivotal moment. The Sultan ordered much of the Jewish community in his realm to relocate to Constantinople, making Istanbul the largest community of Romaniote Jews in the Empire.

In the generations that followed, while the Romaniote population remained centered in Constantinople, many individuals and families returned to Greece, re-establishing communities in places such as Arta, Chalkida, Ioannina, Larissa, Trikkala, and Volos, and rejoining existing communities like Chania and Corfu.

The most dramatic demographic shift was still on the horizon: the arrival of the Sepharadim, the Jews of Iberia. While it is widely believed that Sultan Bayezit II (1481-1512), who succeeded his father Mehmet al-Fatih, supposedly stated upon the issuance of the Alhambra Decree:

“You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler,” he said to his courtiers, “he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”

in actuality, there is no evidence of this and the story likely originated in the mythmaking of the 400th anniversary of the Decree. In 1892, the Jews of the Empire marked the anniversary by honoring the ancestors of Sultan Abdulhamit II (who reigned from 1876 to 1909) for their role in providing sanctuary to the refugees during their time of desperation.

The truth, as reality often is, is far more complex. It was shaped by a period of cultural development during the 16th and early 17th centuries. Many diverse Jewish communities either migrated or were absorbed into the growing Ottoman Empire. These groups included Italian Jews (Italkim), Sepharadim (1492 refugees), Portuguese/New Christians, Jews from Sicily and Calabria, Jews from the Eastern or Arab world (Mustarabim), as well as the aforementioned Romaniote and Ashkenazi communities. Later, Jews of the Caucasus (Kavkazim), Yemenite Jews (Temanim), and Persian Jews (Parsim) would also be absorbed or emigrate to the Empire. During this time, these disparate communities would come to form a Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, speaking community in the Ottoman heartland (Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, and the Holy Land) with a shared origin story of 1492.

Jewish Genealogy in Greece

Pursuing Jewish Genealogy in Greece is rewarding but difficult. Unlike in Christian Europe where a modern civil registration dates to the early 19th century in most cases, civil registration in the Ottoman Empire really only dates to the Hamidian period (1876-1909), with standardization achieved more or less in the early 20th century. In modern Greece, outside of some exceptions, civil registration generally dates from 1925 onward (as per Gregory Kontos of Greek Ancestry). Prior to civil registration, the responsibility of maintaining any records fell on the Jewish community. Unfortunately, many of these archives were lost, destroyed, or fragmented during the Nazi Occupation or, in the case of Salonika, heavily damaged in the Great Fire of 1917.

Jewish genealogy in Greece can appear positively daunting. However, a lot more exists and is just waiting to be uncovered in your journey. Many communities have manuscripts or archives that have survived in places like the Jewish Museum in Athens, the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), Yad Ben Zvi, or countless libraries and private archives globally. Additionally there are the Ottoman Archives in Turkey and the State Archives System of Greece, both of which hold extensive documentation of Jewish history in Greece, spanning from the 15th century to the present day. There are also secondary archives like the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, diplomatic archives all across Europe, and, of course, records and documents produced by individuals from the communities globally that record names and information seemingly lost over time. Finally, DNA testing for genealogy (Y-DNA, Mitochondrial DNA, and Autosomal DNA) which can reconnect families and strengthen construction of family trees where the documentation no longer exists or is heavily fragmented.

In the next section, I'll dive into a fascinating case study utilizing my own family history to demonstrate the incredible potential of working with diverse archives, languages, and data sources in Greece.

The Mijan Family of Larissa

In order to grasp the full scope of this research journey, we must begin at the beginning. As a teenager, my great-uncle Morris told me that his mother, my great-grandmother Rebecca Angel, was born in Larissa, Greece. She was the only daughter of her mother, Mazaltov Mijan, and third child of her father, Moise Angel (whose family I will discuss in a future article about Jewish Genealogy in Greece). Rebecca, as I would come to discover, was named for her father’s first wife, Rebecca Sami, who had passed away. Mazaltov and Rebecca arrived in America on August 21, 1910 aboard the Martha Washington. Their arrival contact was their brother-in-law and uncle, respectively, Moise Kabeli.

Source: The National Archives and Records Administration; Washington, D.C.; Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at and Departing from Ogdensburg, New York, 5/27/1948 - 11/28/1972; Microfilm Serial or NAID: T715, 1897-1957, last accessed on Ancestry.com October 8, 2023.

Visiting her grave in November 2022.

My great-uncle also told me that his grandmother’s family originally came from Sicily, before settling in Greece (more on that later). He shared some hazy memories of his grandmother, who had passed away in 1926 when he was only three and a half years old. He also told stories about his parents, my great-grandparents, and how they, along with his brothers, Jacob and Alfred, my grandfather, would go picnic at her grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens and eat cucumbers.

Her grave, in the typical Sephardic style of a horizontal grave reads as follows:

Translation
Here lies
The honored woman
My mother, Mrs.
Mazaltov Angel
She died 2 Adar 5686
May her soul be bound in the bonds of life

Transcription
פ״נ
האשה הכבודה
מרת אמי
מזל טוב אנג׳יל
נפ׳ ב׳ אדר תרפו
ת נ צ ב ה

Source: Death Certificate of Mazeltov Angel, no. 6815, borough of Manhattan, New York City Municipal Archives.

The English text on the bottom reads “Mazaltov Angel, My Beloved Mother, Died March 6, 1926, aged 62 years”. While her grave does not reveal her parents’ names, her Manhattan death certificate does.

According to the death certificate, her father was Eliezer Mijan, and her mother was Bachora Cohen, both born in Greece. The informant was my great-grandmother, her daughter.

Additionally, my great-uncle introduced me to some cousins from this side of the family, and through them, I learned that her brother was a certain Samuel Mijan married to Mazaltov Zini Gatenio, and that they were survivors of the Shoah.

One piece of evidence that further confirmed Eliezer as their father’s name came from a list of contributors from Larissa to the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in 1894. In this list, he is identified as “Mijian [sic], Sam-Eliez.”

Source: ⁨⁨Bulletin de l'Alliance Israélite Universelle⁩, January 1, 1894, p. 158. Accessed through Historical Jewish Press database, National Library of Israel, last accessed October 8, 1894.

For many years, the only further information I could find about this family confirmed my great-uncle’s oral history. It turned out that her family did indeed migrate from Sicily to Greece. Rabbi Michael Molho of Salonika, a scholar and historian of the community, played a significant role in this revelation. He and Rabbi Isaac Emmanuel compiled a register of families associated with various synagogues in Salonika, organized mostly by their place of origin before settling in Salonika, where they maintained their own minhagim.

The Mijan family (also Mizan/Μιζάν and משען, מיזאן, מיז׳אן) belonged to the Sicilia Yashan (Old Sicily) synagogue in Salonika. Later in my research, I discovered that the family also had a presence in typically Romaniote communities like Ioannina and Arta, as well as in mixed Italian/Romaniote communities such as Corfu, Greece. This was due to the closely related approaches to halakha between Sicilian Jews and the Romaniote communities. Intriguingly, the name also appears among Syrian Jews, spelled as Mishan in English, and the Italian Jews, who write it in Italian as Misan or Misano.

Death Certificate of Abraham Eliezer Mijan, born in Larissa. Thanks to Gregory Kontos of Greek Ancestry for his assistance.

Earlier this year, I made a significant breakthrough through autosomal testing on FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage: I discovered an older brother of Mazaltov and Samuel named Abraham/Avraham. Subsequent research spanning diplomatic archives in Spain, naturalization records in France, and Avraham's death certificate in Greece confirmed his identity. Avraham Mijan was born in 1848 in Larissa, and it appears he may have been married twice. He was a merchant and died 1917 in Salonika.

Further investigation in the manuscripts of Yad Ben Zvi revealed an additional unnamed daughter of Eliezer Mijan and Bechora Cohen. During Pesach 5639 (April 7-15, 1879), the teacher Haim Shemuel Cohen of Larissa recorded the engagement of an unnamed son of Nissim Iosif to the unnamed daughter of Eliezer Mijan, writing (Hidushim velekutim, 23a, YBZ Ms. 3510):

Pessah [5]639

El ijo de Nisim Iosif kon la ija de Lazeratchi Mijan

פסח 639

איל איז׳ו די ניסים יוסף קון לה איז׳ה די ליזיראג׳י משען

With a combination of DNA analysis and extensive research in a diverse set of global archives, I achieved a groundbreaking revelation: Eliezer, nicknamed “Eliezeratchi”, Mijan and his wife Bechora Cohen had at least four children who survived to adulthood, three of whom who had families, with the fourth almost certainly following suit. Time will reveal whether we can uncover more about this unnamed daughter and her unnamed husband.

The late Ezra Moissis and Rafael Frezis chronicled the histories of the Jewish communities of Larissa and Volos respectively. These books contain invaluable pictures and historical accounts not readily available elsewhere. By the late 19th century, Volos had essentially become a daughter community of Larissa after it was reconstituted in the second half of the 19th century, and the families of both cities were and are deeply interconnected. The Mijan family's presence in both cities during the 19th and 20th centuries is documented in these books. The challenge, however, was in connecting the pieces of the puzzle.

It was during an examination of another close DNA match that the final fragments of the puzzle fell into place.

Autosomal analysis based on the DNA matches to the grandson of Mazaltov Mijan and Moise Angel. The total shared and the length of the longest segments are consistent with 2nd cousins, once removed for the great-grandchildren of Samuel Mijan and Zini Gattegno and Abraham Mijan and Flor Molho respectively, and with a 3rd cousin, once removed for the great-great granddaughter of Isaac Mijan and Sol.

The DNA match was to the descendant of an Eliahu Itzhak Mijan, born in the 1850s, and who passed away in Volos in 1931. For years, Eliahu had been on my radar, as one of his sons eventually made his way to New York. What made this discovery even more compelling was that this son’s naturalization documents contained a photo, and the resemblance to members of my Mijan family was striking.

As it turns out, the Volos Cemetery, which has been well preserved since the early 20th century, with some stones dating back to the 19th century brought over when the previous cemetery was appropriated for development, yielded a treasure trove of information. Not only does the grave of Eliahu survive, but so do the graves of his wife, brothers, sister-in-law, nephew, mother, and father!. This grave showed that Eliahu’s father, Itzhak, was the son of an Avraham Mijan!

Photo by Alexander Ventura, memorial 248056128, FindAGrave, last accessed October 9, 2023.

The epitaph on the grave contains beautiful poetry, but genealogical speaking, the most crucial details are that his name was Itzhak, son of Avraham Mijan; that he lived to be elderly in the Jewish tradition, and that he passed away on the 10th of Kislev, 5642, which corresponds to December 2, 1881.

In a register of the deceased kept by R’ Moise Simeon Pessah, the Grand Rabbi of Volos, Itzhak is recorded as the son of Malka. With the strength of the DNA match, suggesting a likely 3rd-4th cousin relationship to my great-uncle, the question arises: Can we find any other documentary evidence to confirm this hypothesis?"

On the 27th of Muharram 1263 of the Islamic calendar (14th of January, 1847 according to the Gregorian calendar), the male census of Yenişehir-i Fener (the Turkish name of Larissa), was conducted. File NFS.d 5185 specifically captured the census of the Jews of Yenişehir-i Fener, although it is only listed as the reaya defteri, or the book of non-Muslim taxpayers (though it can also be used to refer to the wider class of lower tax paying individuals), in the archives. The census was organized by household, albeit it records no surnames, only occupation, relation to the previous individual, and age.

On the second page of the census, the following household is found:

Household 4

1. Sarraf [Moneychanger/Banker]…Avram veled [son of] Ishak, age 60

2. His son Ishak, age 30

3. The other [son] Lazar, age 26

4. Grandson Avram [son of] Ishak, age 5

5. Grandson Raphael, born later that year [and added after the original census]

While surnames are, of course, absent, the names and ages, including those of the grandsons who were alive by 1847, align with the details found for both Eliezer Mijan and Itzhak, son of Avraham Mijan. In a region where cemeteries from this period do not survive, and documentation is highly fragmented, especially before the late 19th century, it is now very likely that the Mijan family of Larissa and Volos can be outlined as follows:

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Proposed family tree of the descendants of Itzhak Mijan, who lived during the 18th century as of October 9, 2023.

Through DNA testing, traditional genealogy methods, and a touch of luck, I've uncovered the intricate branches of my family tree in areas of Greece where it appears that little survives prior to the 20th century. This article has focused on the power of autosomal testing in piecing together our genealogical puzzle- but our journey doesn't end here. In an upcoming article, we'll explore the captivating story of the Mijan family's Y-DNA, a journey that stretches from Sicily to Syria, holding the promise of more discoveries and connections on the horizon.

Big Announcement

Hollander-Waas Jewish Heritage Services is thrilled to share that co-founder, Michael Waas, has been appointed scholar-in-residence for the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society (NYG&B). He will be researching “the documentation of Jewish families in the NYG&B’s materials and produce the first-of-its-kind survey of NYG&B resources available for tracing Jewish heritage from colonial times to the present in New York State."

Read more about the project here:

https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/nygb’s-new-scholar-residence

Between Technology and Ethics: The Case for Heritage

By Michael Waas

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Image of a 3D model of an Ottoman olive oil factory created by Michael Waas using digital photogrammetry. The model can be viewed here: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/olive-oil-factory-inside-3196d0dc5fda49909c6914507118dd41

In today's world, digital technologies are advancing at an increasing rate. As computer processors and chips become more powerful and programs are developed to take advantage of their increased speed and power, the possibilities are endless. With these technologies, advances in heritage and genealogy have been made that were unimaginable even twenty years ago.From being able to digitize and create 3D models using a digital camera or even an iPad, to teaching computers how to read centuries-old handwritten documents and make them searchable (such as with programs like Tranksribus), digital technology offers a whole new world in which to engage with personal and built heritage.

Despite the incredible advances these digital technologies have given us, there is also a darker side that threatens to make our ancestors nothing more than marionettes dancing on a computer screen . In recent years, several companies have started to provide services that enable them to record individuals and use artificial intelligence to develop an avatar that can interact with users and "learn” to converse. Other companies have used AI to make a photograph into an animated video that follows a pre-programmed series of movements, making it seem as if the person is in front of you and glancing all around as they wait for their portrait to be taken. When one looks at a single such animation in isolation, it may seem lifelike. However, if you consider the infinite number of photographs, each of which repeats the same, mindless series of mechanical movements, it becomes deeply unnerving. When these programs use artificial intelligence to assign a procedurally generated voice to an ancestor, it becomes even more disturbing.

This is not meant to target any particular brand or company, but rather to highlight a trend that has gained momentum in recent years. I genuinely believe that these programs are developed in response to what companies perceive the market to want. And in fact, some people do find it intriguing and even thrilling to watch AI turn our ancestors from static portraits into versions that appear to come to life on our screens.

I am here to make the case for Heritage.

Looking at an old family album. Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

The late historian David Lowenthal writes in his 2005 article “Natural and cultural heritage” that “Heritage denotes everything we suppose has been handed down to us from the past.” The image above of a family looking through an old photo album exemplifies this concept in a tangible way. The very act of holding family heirlooms such as this in your hands is itself an heirloom, an act which has been passed down from generation to generation. And although we may never have met the people in the albums, they played a significant role in the lives of our ancestors and in their world. In these images, we see the faces of our ancestors and their families long after they have passed into dust, and we discover anew in our time little bits and pieces of their world through their photos, albums, diaries, manuscripts, and documents.

For me, heritage is about how we engage with the past and how we tell the stories of those who came before us to the generations yet to come. The past is never dead; it lives on in all of us. There is something vital and timeless about this idea in that, even after our ancestors and loved ones are gone, we are able to keep their memories and stories alive by passing them on to the next generation. So it should come as no surprise that I believe that using AI to recreate their voices, alter their images, or recreate their thoughts would serve instead to remove their souls and voices and replace them with cheap imitations. It is the ultimate nihilistic conclusion to the processes of collecting names that can occur in the course of genealogy. My late great uncle told me a story of my great-great-grandfather; When my great-great grandfather asked him if he would come to America, my great great great grandfather replied that no, he wouldn’t because “the stones were too uncivilized”.

To me, using AI to recreate their voices, their images, or their thoughts removes our ancestors’ souls and their voices and in fact is the ultimate, nihilistic end of name collecting that can so often be a part of genealogy and heritage. My great-great grandfather, as told to me by my late great-uncle, is reputed to have told my great-grandfather when asked if he would come to America, that no, he wouldn’t because the stones were “too uncivilized”.

I don’t want a computer to approximate their voices and likenesses and have them repeat that story at me. I want that story to be passed down and become embellished and mythified. What makes genealogy so meaningful is that exploring the past through the micro-histories of our families and their journeys allows us to see the world for all of its complexity. We see that our ancestors were people like us, with hopes and dreams, with mistakes and failings. That they aren’t puppets guided by a computer’s idea of their humanity, but rather that they were individuals, with souls and their own unique voices, that time leaves bits and pieces to be passed down to us.

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An unexpected traveler in the Budapest Jewish Museum (photo taken by author).

In summary, this is not a case of the “Old Man Yells at Cloud” meme. AI can do wonderful things and make our collective and personal heritage more accessible. Instead, this is simply a personal reflection on the ethics of using AI to ‘breathe life’ into our ancestors’ portraits or to machine learn our loved ones’ thoughts into a video or hologram that we can interact with after their deaths. This is an argument for heritage and not its commodification. It is an argument that we should reflect on our past thoughtfully and critically, while being reflexive and knowing that we are only one generation in a long line of generations who have used and will use the past to tell the story of their present. This is an argument for Heritage.

The Triangle Factory Fire, 110 Years On

By Caitlin Hollander

Very rarely is a law enacted in anticipation of a disaster; they are almost always due to a tragedy that has already happened. Exit doors in the US legally must open outwards due to the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago, which claimed the lives of over 600 people- in part because they were trapped when the inward-swinging doors could not be opened due to the crush of the panicked crowd.

In 1911, the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Asch Building (now called the Brown Building) near Washington Park in Lower Manhattan were home to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which mass produced the on-trend women’s garment. The shirtwaist, which had risen in popularity in the late 19th century, was the woman’s answer to a man’s dress shirt. Mass producing them meant that this fashion trend was accessible to the lower income New Yorker. And just like much of modern-day mass-produced fashion, the workers involved in the creation of the garments were treated poorly, working long hours for little pay in unsafe working conditions. At the Triangle, the mostly young, female, Jewish and Italian immigrant workers earned between $7 and $12 per 52-hour workweek (or about $165-$318 in today’s money, or about $3.17 to $6.11 an hour). This job was coveted for another reason- fires were common in the garment industry, and the Asch Building had been described as “fireproof” (echoing the tragedy of the “unsinkable” Titanic a year later).

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This article was posted at 4:40pm EST, on March 25, 2021; exactly 110 years ago to the minute from the moment that a fire broke out on the 8th story of the Asch Building. This fatal fire, which would take so many lives, would forever change the way that American laborers were treated.

Thirty-nine year old Catherine Maltese (born Caterina Camino) was there at work on March 25, 1911, with her daughters, twenty-year-old Lucia and Rosaria, who at only fourteen years old, was one of the youngest employees of the Triangle. They were living at 35 2nd Avenue in Manhattan with Catherine’s husband and Lucia and Rosaria’s father, Serafino, and Serafino and Catherine’s other two living children, Vito and Paolo. According to the 1910 census (which records Rosaria as Sara and Vito as Tom), Catherine and their children had arrived in America four years prior from Italy. The first tragedy occurred shortly after immigration; Catherine and the couple’s youngest daughter, a girl named Maria, were detained at Ellis Island due to illness. While Catherine survived, four-year-old Maria perished before ever getting past this gateway to America. In total, the couple had lost three children; far from uncommon for the era.

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The Maltese family on the 1910 US Census. Image via FamilySearch

According to the fire marshal’s report, the fire likely began in one of the scrap bins under the wooden tables of the factory. These bins held several months' worth of highly flammable scraps of fabric. Beyond the issue of flammable rags, conditions in the Triangle were far from safe. The owners had ordered the doors to one of the two external staircases (despite three being required by law, the city allowed the fire escape to count as a third) locked to prevent employees from stealing. That fire escape was narrow and poorly anchored, and could not bear the weight of too many people- something which would prove fatal.

In addition to the dangerous working conditions, the owners of the factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were notorious for their anti-worker policies. When the garment workers union had ordered a strike in 1909, they paid off the police to arrest the striking workers. Upon the end of the strike, the Triangle refused to sign the union agreement. This would’ve guaranteed increased safety and worker protections. After the fire, the unions would have reason to strike again

At 4:45pm, the first alarm was sounded by a pedestrian passing by the building who noticed the smoke. The building had no fire alarms, and the 9th floor had no telephone; so when a bookkeeper working on the 8th floor saw the fire he was able to call up to the 10th to warn the employees there, but the employees on the 9th floor had no knowledge of the fire until it reached them. The employees there would make up the majority of those killed.

On February 5, 1911, six weeks and six days before the fire, a seventeen year old girl named Sarah Brenman arrived at Ellis Island. She was born in the town of Sharovka, now in Ukraine, and had come to America to live with her older brother, Morris (Moshe), who had come to America seven years earlier in 1904. Three other siblings had already come to America; another brother, Joseph, and two sisters, Rosie (Reizel) and Esther. Twenty-three year old Rosie or twenty-one year old Joseph most likely had gotten the job at the Triangle for their newly-arrived sister, as they were both employees of the Triangle and were both there that day.

The foreman with the key to the locked third staircase fled as soon as the flames began. The flames on the 8th floor made it impossible to descend the unlocked staircase, and so some employees used it to flee to the roof until it became blocked both ways. New York University students from neighboring buildings grabbed ladders and ropes; their efforts saved 50 of the trapped workers.

But now, the only staircase remaining that could be used to get out was the flimsy fire escape. The workers crowded it until it collapsed, sending about 20 people falling nine stories to their deaths.

The collapsed fire escape in a photo taken for the official report on the fire.

The only remaining way to escape was the elevators, operated by some of the factory’s few male employees- Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillaro. Even getting to the elevators was tricky, with the long, narrow corridor becoming easily crowded and the language barriers causing increasing confusion.

Joseph Zito, a twenty-seven year old new father had only been working at the Triangle for about six months. He braved the flames and extreme heat- heat which damaged Gaspar Mortillaro’s elevator so badly that it could no longer make the trip- to go twice to the tenth floor, loading his elevator with as many people as he could. When the fire became too great, he continued to go to the ninth floor, and then eventually just the eighth, each time overloading his elevator. On his last trip, he carried 40 people in an elevator with a capacity of 10. In desperation, people climbed on top of the car. The weight proved too great, and the cables snapped.

There was no way out. 62 people were witnessed jumping or falling to their deaths.

After the smoke cleared, the death toll began to mount. The circumstances of the fire made it hard to identify victims immediately; many were taken to Charities Pier by the East River for identification.

In total, 146 people, ranging in age from fourteen to forty-three were killed in the 18 minutes the fire raged. 

The bodies of Lucia and Rosaria Maltese were identified by their father the day after the fire. They had been found at the bottom of an elevator shaft in each others’ arms. But Serafino could not find Catherine, and kept returning again and again searching for her. 

Due to the state of Catherine’s body, she was not identified until June of 1911. She had, by then, been buried with the other unidentified victims. The Red Cross gave the family the money to have Catherine’s body moved, and she was buried with Lucia, Rosaria, and little Maria in Calvary Cemetery.

The Evening World, New York, New York, March 27, 1911.

The Star-Gazette, Elmira, New York, March 27, 1911.

Sarah, Rosie, and Joseph Brenman were all employed by the Triangle and were all present on the day of the fire. Only twenty-one year old Joseph escaped. Sarah and Rosie’s bodies were so badly damaged that they both were identified by their teeth; Rosie, by her brother with the assistance of a dentist on March 29, and Sarah, by their sister Esther on April 1.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn, New York, March 30 1911. Image via Newspapers.com

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn, New York, April 2, 1911. Image via Newspapers.com

Nineteen year old Esther had a nervous breakdown after, according to the Red Cross, who sent money to the family both there as well as to their widowed father, Chiel, and two younger sisters in the Russian Empire. Eventually, the family would be reunited in New York, when Chiel and his youngest daughters arrived in 1922. The girls are buried together at Baron Hirsch Cemetery.

The Triangle Factory Fire and its avoidable death toll elicited outrage, especially from unions, who took to the streets to protest. After the official report was issued, stating that if the doors had been unlocked it was entirely possible that no one would have died, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, both Jewish immigrants themselves, were charged with manslaughter. They were acquitted of criminal charges, but lost a 1913 wrongful death suit and were forced to pay $75 per victim to the families. This may sound just, but they had a $60,000 insurance payout from the fire, so when all was paid they had actually earned approximately $336 per victim.

But Max Blanck’s lack of remorse is clear when, the same year as the wrongful death lawsuit, he was caught once again locking the doors of a factory he owned to keep workers inside. There was a national outcry when he was fined a mere $20 for the crime.

This fire instigated major changes in American workplace safety law. As a result of the fire and the many union protests after, New York founded the Factory Investigating Commission. From 1911–1913, 38 laws for workers’ rights were passed in New York State.

The last survivor of the fire, Rose Freedman (maiden name Rosenfeld) died in 2001 at the age of a hundred and seven. She had been only seventeen at the time of the fire.

Smaller monuments dot the cemeteries where the victims are buried, sponsored by unions and families, but, despite funds being designated for the purpose by the state of New York in 2015, there is still no other memorial to the 146 people who died that day 110 years ago.

May their memories be a blessing and their legacy never forgotten.

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Further reading

The elevator operator Joseph Zito, who survived, saved over 100 lives that day. For more information about him, please read this story from WNYC. https://www.wnyc.org/story/119910-family-keeps-memory-triangle-fire-elevator-operator-alive/

Cornell University’s Triangle Factory website is an absolutely invaluable resource for primary and secondary source documentation https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/index.html

The Red Cross’s full disclosure on the emergency relief after the fire can be found here: https://archive.org/details/emergencyreliefa00charrich/mode/2up?view=theater

OSHA has a page on the fire here, which links to a number of excellent resources: https://www.osha.gov/aboutosha/40-years/trianglefactoryfire

People are People

By Michael Waas

In the world of history and genealogy we are relying on bits and pieces of paper once living memory ends and the shrouded mists of time begin. British author L. P. Hartley (1953) famously wrote in the opening to his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Hartley’s melancholy is a metaphor for how the past feels just beyond reach the further and further we traverse time. For me, genealogy in particular serves to give context and nuance to history, allowing me to follow characters in a story as they navigate the world around them. Sometimes, these characters have left an incredible wealth of materials for us to see how they maneuvered through their world. Oftentimes, though, we are left with but pieces and scraps, a mention here, a signature there, and have to methodically piece the puzzle back together again. 

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The past is never a straight line as living memory fades and documents remain. Photo by Ricardo Frantz on Unsplash.

This is the story of a man, a Portuguese Jew living in Amsterdam who left only a fleeting trace on the world other than his bones buried in the Portuguese Jewish Beth Ahaim (House of Life) at Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, just outside of Amsterdam. There is almost nothing known about this man beyond an epitaph and a few ephemeral documents. Yet the precious few clues that remain tell a rather remarkable story of just how similar our world today is to the one he once inhabited in the 17th century.

People are people.

On March 29, 1662, a 70-year old man named Abraham Vaes testified in Amsterdam in front of notary Hector Friesma. Alongside him also appeared 26-year old Eliau de Liaõ and 23-year old Eliza Israel. All three were testifying about a certain incident they had witnessed in the “op Vloijenburgh” (the Vlooienburg island, where the early Jewish community was centered in Amsterdam. In the 19th century, it was connected to the neighboring island, where the Portuguese Synagogue is today). But who was Abraham Vaes?

(Before I continue with the story, I must give you the disclaimer that the name is spelled multiple different ways, depending on who was recording it, but it’s all the same name. So you will see Vaes, Vas, and Vaz in this and all of them are correct.)

The signature of Abraham Vaes to the left and Eliau de Liaõ to the right.

Searching the deep archives of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam, there is almost nothing recorded about this man. Yet, drawing from the financial registers of the community we can begin to draw a picture. On the 9th of Heshvan 5418 (October 16, 1657), the community recorded which people in the community received peat for the coming winter, and the amount that they received.

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Beginning of the sedaca list. You can see to the left the religious leaders of the community at the time, Haham Saul Levi Morteira and Haham Isaac Aboab. This is page 241 of Manual (5413- 5436), a financial register of the community.

At the beginning of this list are religious leaders and teachers of the community, receiving this portion of their salary. After them are the poor members of the community in need of Sedaca (charity). The list is in alphabetical order and can be quite helpful when trying to track individuals and families. At the end of the list, are all of the new people admitted to sedaca, including an “Ab[raham] Vas o velho”. In Portuguese, o velho means “the older”. 

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Two pages later, on page 243, we see Ab Vas o velho for the first time. He is three rows from the bottom.

This is significant because that means that there was another man named Abraham Vas in the community who was younger. The Portuguese community added descriptors such as name of the father, age indicators, and sometimes even a descriptor like o cego "(the blind) to differentiate between people within the community with the same name. And in another story for another day, I will discuss Abraham Vas “the younger”.

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Page 250 of the same manual.

From this point on, we see Abraham Vas o velho on the various sedaca registers in the community until his death. The first time that Abraham Vas o velho received portions of massot from the community was the 11th Veadar (Adar II) 5418 (March 16, 1658). He received 8 portions, indicating he was the only member of his household, with no wife or children.

The last time that Abraham Vas o velho appears in the sedaca registers is in another volume, known as the Livro Longo. His name has been crossed out and he is no longer receiving sedaca from the community.

Page 246 of the Livro Longo for ~1663-1670

It appears that our Abraham must have died a short time later. The last mention of him is his epitaph in the Portuguese Jewish cemetery. David Henriques de Castro, an absolutely fascinating character in his own right, took it upon himself to uncover the sunken tombs of the cemetery, record and map their locations, and document their epitaphs for posterity.

Found on page 151 of his Henriques de Castro’s first register (Kartons 1-20).

The epitaph reads:

Sᵃ

do honrado velho

Abraham Vaes

que faleceo em

2 de Tamus de

5428

Grave

of the honored elder

Abraham Vaes

who died on

2 of Tamus of

5428

So now we understand that our Abraham Vaes was born around 1592 according to his testimony and that he died on June 11, 1668. He may or may not have had a family, but by the time we meet him, he is an old man and living on communal support. Like many Portuguese Jews at the time, it is rather likely that he was born in Portugal or Spain before escaping northward and returning to Judaism. He may have even been related to one of the other Vaz families in Amsterdam at that time. Whatever his precise origins were, we may never know.

People are people.

On March 29, 1662, Vaes and the two other witnesses testified about a fight they witnessed on the street between two Portuguese Jews. One was a certain Abraham da Souza Mendes. Vaes and the other two witnesses all testify that they did not see him draw a knife during the fight with Isaac Baruch.

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Folio 62 and 63 of Friesma’s inventory 3072.

Did I mention that people are people?

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Translation provided by our friend and colleague of Sephardic Genealogy, Ton Tielen.

Folio 62

Today, 29th of the month of March of the year 1662 appeared before me Hector Friesma, public notary appointed by the Court of Holland residing in Amsterdam and the witnesses to be named hereafter, Abraham Vaz, circa 70 years old, Eliau de Liaõ circa 26 years old and Eliza Israel, circa 23 years old, all living in this said city, attested, witnessed and declared at the request of Abraham da Sousa Mendes with true Christian words and according to their conscience instead of a solemn oath – which they promise to follow up with a sworn oath to be the sincere truth when invited first the said Vaz and Liaõ, that the said witnesses on the twenty first February of this running year, were present at and saw that on Vloyenburgh the appellant was in a fight with Isaac Baruch, which the witnesses saw until the end, but did not notice nor heard that the appellant drew a knife or had one on him the reason they know this is that the said Vaz arrived with the said appellant and the said Eliau had been sick and – from his window – had seen it all happen. Signed by Abraham Vaz, Eliau de Liaõ. 

Folio 63

And the said Eliza Israel declares that the witness saw the said appellant and the said Baruch came out of the said house on Vloyenburgh and that as long as the fight took place, the witness was present, the appellant drew no knife and the witness noticed no action of the appellant that (betrayed that) the appellant had a knife on him, with which he, witness, finally sustained that this is the truth. Done in this City of Amsterdam in the presence of the witnesses Barent Hermans and Hendrick Everts this is the mark put by Eliza Israels declaring that he could not write.  Signed by B. H. Appeldoorne and H. Everts

The Boy with the Beautiful Grave

By Caitlin Hollander

Last November, I participated in a cemetery indexing project in one of the sections of Mt. Zion Cemetery in Queens, New York that had become overgrown and neglected when the burial society that owned it had gone defunct. There, a grave caught my eye- while the motif of a young tree cut off before its prime is a common one in Jewish cemeteries, symbolizing a young life that had ended too soon, this particular grave was one of the most beautiful, intricate examples I had ever seen. Only a few graves in this massive cemetery- totaling over 210,000 burials- were in the same unusual style. But this grave, of a young man named Solomon Schreiber, captured me. And so I decided to research who this boy was and what caused him to meet such an untimely end- and who the family was that memorialized him in such a poignant way.

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The grave of Solomon Schreiber at Mt. Zion Cemetery in Queens. Photo by the author.

All I had to go on was his name, age, date of death, and his father’s name from the Hebrew on the grave: Aron. At first, I couldn’t find any death record for him, nor any census. But then I widened my parameters, and sure enough, I found a misindexed 1900 census record. And there he was.

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Solomon Schreiber. Born in New York, only a year old. The youngest of the seven living children (there had been eleven total as of this census) of Aron Schreiber and his wife Kate. Aron was a butcher and Kate, a housewife. His older siblings- Ida, Annie, and David, all born in Austria, and then Jacob, Harry, and Louis, born in New York. Another Jewish immigrant family living on the Lower East Side. The family seemed fairly well off; of the children, only Annie, age 18, worked. So, I followed the trail forward to see what had happened to this boy with the beautiful grave.

Here was the first tragedy- by the 1905 New York State census, the family dynamic had changed quite a bit. The household consisted of Kate, and her children David, Jacob, Harry, Louis, Solomon, and another daughter, Fannie. Kate is listed as a widow. And while in 1900, the only child working was over 18, in 1905, not only 18-year-old David but also 15-year-old Jacob are working- a sign of the family’s changing fortunes. A quick search provided the reason- 48-year-old Aron’s death after a four year fight against tuberculosis. Solomon would have been not yet six when he lost his father.

The 1910 census is much the same, except for a tragic note beside Kate’s name. This is the last census in which women were asked the delicate questions of “how many children have you given birth to?” and “how many are now living?” (something that would be unthinkable for the census to ask today). Kate’s answer to the former is fourteen, and the latter is eight, meaning that she had lost two children since 1900 in addition to having her youngest daughter. Jacob, Louis, Harry, Solomon, and Fannie are all at home. Louis, at 14 years old, is no longer in school but working as an office boy. His two older brothers are also working; only Solomon and Fannie are in school. 

So then the question: how did this young man die?

I finally found a death certificate for one Samuel Schreiber, dated for the same date on the grave, a naval enlistee who died in the naval hospital in Great Lakes, Illinois- the location of the navy’s only boot camp. His body was shipped back to New York. No parents were given on the death certificate. And yet, I was sure that this was Solomon. So I pulled the WWI Naval Casualties record. Even though he did not die at war, or even graduate boot camp, he would be there. This gave me a next of kin: a John Schreiber in Freehold, New Jersey. Looking at Solomon’s siblings, Jacob was the most likely candidate to anglicize to John, and I had the name of his wife. And sure enough, on the 1920 census, he is living in Freehold. Over the years, he alternates between Jacob, John, and Jack. But this was a solid confirmation that Samuel Schreiber and Solomon Schreiber were one and the same.

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As is all too common in genealogy, the answer to that question only gave rise to more questions. Why did Solomon join the naval reserves in Philadelphia? Why was his next of kin his brother, and not his mother? Had he run away to join the navy? Sadly, these are the type of questions that cannot be answered, and while I can speculate, we will never know for certain. If Solomon had run away, with only his brother knowing, did Jacob blame himself for his brother’s death?

This article was originally going to be about symbolism in Jewish graves. I had a collection of graves with the same cut off tree motif, short biographies of each of them. But something about Solomon/Samuel Schreiber kept drawing me back to him.

And then, four months after I first saw his grave, I got COVID-19. I had a bad case and I was sure I was going to die. Far from my family and where I grew up, sick in a pandemic, and absolutely terrified.

And I thought of Solomon.

He, too, was far away from home when he became ill in a pandemic. I survived, he did not. 102 years separated our respective illnesses; he, from the Spanish Flu, me, from COVID-19. And while I can only imagine how he felt in that hospital in Illinois, over 800 miles from home, I think I know a little bit. That fear that you will never see your mother again, never hug your siblings. That every time you close your eyes, you might not wake up. The shivering from fever, the gasping for air. Every hacking cough that feels like your chest is going to crack. And that deep, eternal fear that something terrible is lurking around the corner, and the profound loneliness of going through it all without a familiar face or hand to hold.

I wonder about Kate, and how she handled her youngest son dying so far away from home. One look at this grave tells you how deeply this young man was loved. His family was not wealthy, but his grave is beautiful, designed with care. From the American flag on the upper left to the phrase “my beloved son and our dear brother”, every bit of it is designed with care. For a family that would not have had much money, they scraped it together and ensured that Solomon would have a fitting grave.

Kate would lose another child the following year in the same pandemic – Solomon’s older sister, Ida, a 39-year-old married mother of ten children. Ida’s eleventh and youngest child, a boy named Samuel in English but Solomon in Hebrew for his uncle, had died at only four months old that May. Kate herself would die a decade after her son at 70 years old.

Despite him having many nieces and nephews, and they most likely having innumerable descendants of their own, it seems that Solomon is all but forgotten. The only online trees that have his name in them do not record his death- he simply vanishes. His grave does not have perpetual care, and so, when I returned to Mt. Zion in August after recovering from my own illness, the walk to Solomon’s grave was impassible- unlike my November visit, the snow had not yet cleared the weeds. I was able to walk on the path behind him, though, and leave a stone on his grave.

I do not want to be the only person to remember him, the boy with the beautiful grave, and so I bring his story to you- a story befitting of pandemic times of a young man, the New York-born son of immigrants, who joined the navy and died too young of the Spanish Flu, so far away from home.

May his memory be a blessing.

New Christians, the Inquisition, and Genealogy

by Michael Waas

1492.

It was the eve of the onset of modernity. The old elementary school ditty,

“In fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”

belies the enormity of this date not only for the native peoples of the Americas as the beginning of their genocide at the hands of European Colonial powers, but also the end of open Jewish and Muslim life in Iberia as they knew.

For the parents and grandparents of surgeon Gregório Lopes, this date would also be one of life-changing consequences. This article tells the story of Gregório, his wife Catarina, and their two daughters Helena and Beatriz. Gregório, who was born around 1521 in the first or second generation after 1492, would be tried just over a century later in the Inquisition Court of Lisboa, along with both Helena and Beatriz. Catarina would be tried in the Inquisition Court of Evora (a photo of which is right below). But context and background are needed to fully understand their story.

So, I invite you to come along and join me for this journey into the past.

The building where the Court of the Inquisition sat in Evora, Portugal. Photo taken by the author in June 2018.

1492 is an easy date to assign as the beginning of the Inquisition and the terror of the auto-da-fé (burning at the stake for heresy) because it ties in nicely with Columbus departing on his journey to the New World and with the Expulsion from Spain, and leaves our tale nice and neat with a bow on top. Like most easy dates in history, this is not the case.

1492 marks the Alhambra Decree and the formal expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from the newly unified and created Spain. The Inquisition in Spain began 14 years before in 1478 to ensure doctrinal uniformity of a new Catholic Spanish national identity. 101 years prior to 1492, persecution of the Jews in Iberia began in earnest with increasing numbers of converso families, many of whom were forcibly converted under threat of death. These conversos were treated with suspicion by many as not true Catholics and hounded as heretics.

Plaza Mayor in Madrid, where many auto-da-fés were held. Photo taken by the author in August 2019.

Most of the Jewish population of Spain fled with the Expulsion in 1492. Some went to North Africa, some went to the Levant, some went to the rising Ottoman Empire, and some went to the city-states of the Italian Peninsula. However, many went across the border into Portugal. Gregório’s parents and grandparents likely may have been amongst these refugees, crossing the border from Spain into Portugal. 

The sea journey was dangerous and replete with rumors and news of pirates kidnapping Jewish refugees and holding them for a king’s ransom, or even selling them into slavery. Many of the Jews in newly unified Spain, instead, went to Portugal, believing that while times were difficult, the Alhambra Decree would soon be rescinded. Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares in their authoritative work, Os Judeus em Portugal No Seculo XV (The Jews in Portugal in the 15th Century), estimates the number of Jews in Portugal in 1496 at a maximum of 30,000 people based on the sisão poll tax collected that year. This is where our story truly begins.

In 1496, in order to marry the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, King Manuel I of Portugal had to extend the Alhambra Decree to his domain as part of the dowry agreement. King Manuel, of course, was not interested in expelling a large part of his population. Instead, he enacted the decree but forcibly baptized all of his Jewish subjects in 1496 and 1497 to Catholicism and thus, as new converts to the faith, they were not allowed to leave Portugal. In Spain, the Inquisition had already been active for almost 20 years, but a grace period had been instituted – no Inquisition was established for these new converts, now called the Cristãos Novos (the New Christians). This only formally ended with the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal, 40 years later.

Because there wasn’t a formal Inquisition, there was no formal mechanism for prosecuting heretics and ensuring adherence to Catholicism. As a result, a distinct and enduring Crypto-Judaism developed among the New Christians. Furthermore, even though the forced baptism was meant to assimilate the New Christians by making them indistinguishable from the Old Christians in name, discrimination by Old Christians and preferences among New Christians to stay within trusted networks led to lasting divisions between the two communities.

In Spain and Portugal, in order to enter into society for powerful positions, usually one had to prove that one was of “Pure, undirtied Iberian blood” (Christian). The so-called limpieza de sangre (in Spanish)/limpeza de sangue (in Portuguese), required the person to testify as to their genealogy through their grandparents and show that they were neither of Muslim nor Jewish blood. These genealogies, while often true, could just as easily be falsified. In many cases, these genealogical examinations could go even deeper.

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Letter testifying about Gonçalo Mouro from Tangier.

Here are two examples of these documents, one from Portugal and one from Spain. 

The first one, from 1653, involves a Gonçalo Mouro from Tangier, testifying about his clean blood in order to join the military order, the Order of Christ. The Order of Christ was the surviving order of this little known group, you may have heard of, the Knights Templar (see Mesa da Consciência e Ordens, Habilitações para a Ordem de Cristo, Letra G, mç. 6, n.º 152 from Torre do Tombo, Portugal).

The second is a register of powers to members of the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso de Alcalá de Henares to carry out the Limpieza de Sangre examination and also notes on the examinees from 1601-1608 (see Archivo Histórico Nacional, Universidades, L.706). This page includes two such examinations and their listed genealogies. The genealogies have “Father….Mother…Paternal Grandparents…Maternal Grandparents...” and the applicant testifying to their “untainted” blood.

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Folios 72v, 73r of this register from the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso de Alcalá de Henares of Limpieza de Sangre examinations.

However, this article is not about Old Christians and Blood Purity – it’s about the fact that genealogy was not only used as a tool of entrance into high society and opportunities, but as a tool to persecute “to the ends of the Earth”. While everyone expects the Spanish Inquisition, did you know that it was, in fact, the Portuguese Inquisition that was the most brutal and targeted the Jews/New Christians the most? 

As part of an Inquisitorial prosecution, most defendants had to testify to their genealogy to the best of their knowledge. And so we return to the surgeon Gregório Lopes, his wife Catarina Lopes and their two daughters, Helena Lopes and Beatriz Lopes da Silveira. All four were imprisoned by the Inquisition, Catarina (in 1587 in the court of Evora, where she died in prison), Gregório (1594-1597 in the court of Lisboa), Helena (1593-1597 in court of Lisboa), and Beatriz (1594-1597 in court of Lisboa). Each of the files except for Catarina’s are available for full reading. 

Folio 41r, Processo de Gregório Lopes. See the end of this article for an example transcription of this page.

Gregório was born in the first or second generation after the forced conversion in Portugal. According to his processo, he was born in Beja around 1521 to Manuel Afonso “o Grande” and Helena Lopes, both New Christians. At the age of 10, with a brother Henrique Lopes, he began to study to become a surgeon. At 15, together with Henrique and a Martim Rebello, they went to Lisboa to continue their studies. By the age of 19 he obtained the office of surgeon and moved to Evora and at 25, he left Evora for Beja. This is a family of surgeons; his daughters Helena and Beatriz both married surgeons. The processos of all three mentioned relatives who also are surgeons, but were unclear how they fit on the basis of reading just the genealogy section of the processo. In addition, in the typical naming pattern of Portuguese and Sephardic Jews, the daughters of Gregório and Catarina are named first for each of their mothers.

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Tree created by the author on the basis of Gregório’s, Beatriz’s, and Helena’s processos. The notation “xn/xv” (New Christian/Old Christian) was added to the spouses of known. In the processos, the wife of Diogo Manuel, Catarina Goncalves, was unclear whether she was Old or New Christian. Beatriz and Helena disagreed about which maternal aunt was married to Luis Mendes and which was unmarried. Duarte Dias em Beja and Manuel Lopes, sirgueiro, were mentioned as relatives but currently unable to tie them to the tree.

When researching Sephardic history and genealogy in the Inquisition Courts, these genealogical interrogations can be enlightening, helping to build out a fuller picture of the ways these families networked and, in some cases, can show varying levels of integration with Old Christian families. My own ancestry has examples of this, a da Veiga family from Montemor-o-Velho near Coimbra, that was either wholly or mostly of Old Christian ancestry, that married with New Christians in the city of Viseu. In part 2 of this article, I will explore tracing one such family from various sources, using Inquisition, parish, notary, and Jewish communal archives to showcase what is possible with careful research.

Transcription of F. 41r, Processo de Gregório Lopes

1: de a dizer. Perguntado he cuidou em

2: suas culpas como nesta mesa lhe foi mandado

3: e se as quer acabar de confessar pera com-

4: isso ser tratado com misericordia. Disse 

5: q[ue] si cuidou e q[ue] naõ he de mais lembrado 

6: e logue lhe forão feitas as perguntas

7: seguintes de sua genealogia perguntado

8: como a nome de q[ue] idade e nação he donde

9: natural e ao presente m[orad]or e as mais pergun-

10: tas gerais. Disse que elle se chama Grego-

11: rio Lopes de idade de setenta e quatro anos

12: naceo em Beja na rua davis freguesia

13: de Sancta Naria, e q[ue] morava agora na

14: granja termo desta cidade en casa de

15: Josea chanoca e ahi o prenderão e que 

16: não tem avos né avoos e q[ue] seu pai

17: se chamava Manoel Afonso o grande xrão

18: novo q[ue] fazia mantas e sua mai se

19: chamava Helena Lopes xrã nova q[ue]

20: morava na dita rua e freguesia ambos

21: defunctos e q[ue] não tem tios nem tias da 

22: parte de seu pai nem de sua mai e que

23: tem alguns parentes em Beja como he

24: Duarte Dias q[ue] tem irmaõs e alguns filhos

25: e Manoel Lopes cirgueiro, e q[ue] tem

The Epidemic That Wasn't

By Caitlin Hollander

A 47-year-old leather importer and his wife arrived in New York City on a business trip. Most likely exhausted from the long journey from Mexico, they checked into a midtown hotel where the businessman noticed that he had a headache. He took some medication and went to sleep, probably thinking it little more than a side effect of the stress of the trip. But he started to feel worse and after developing worrying symptoms, went to the hospital. They transferred him to another hospital, one more able to handle a potentially contagious condition. There, he was determined to be having an adverse reaction to the headache medication he had taken - nothing serious. The appropriate medication was administered; yet, his symptoms worsened. After 8 days in New York City, he was dead. The cause of death was ruled “erythema multiforme with laryngotracheobronchitis and bronchopneumonia” - essentially, the allergic reaction plus bronchitis and pneumonia.

Then, two patients who had also been in the hospital at the same time as the businessman became ill with the same symptoms:, a young man in his 20s and an infant. Both had already been discharged and returned home to their families. More tests were performed - after all, allergic reactions are not contagious - and it was discovered that they had something far worse than anyone had imagined.

Smallpox

The year was 1947. Eugene LaBar was the first smallpox fatality in New York City in 35 years. The two additional patients had gone home to crowded apartments; it would be discovered later that the young man, Ismael Acosta, had infected his wife, Carmen, who would be the second fatality in this outbreak. Carmen Acosta was 27 years old, eight months pregnant, and the last person to die of smallpox in New York City.

Ever

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Page 2 of Eugene LaBar’s death certificate, dated March 10, 1947, indicating that he had died of “erythema multiforme with laryngotracheobronchitis and bronchopneumonia”

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Page 2 of Carmen Acosta’s death certificate, dated April 12, 1947. Her cause of death is one word- Variola, the medical name of smallpox. She was 27 years old, and had died within 6 days of showing symptoms

But how was this possible? How was such a communicable disease halted in its tracks in a city where, ten years prior, 165,000 families living in tenements still did not have access to private toilets? How did the outbreak only last two months and only infect 12 people?

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From the The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Mon, Apr 14, 1947

The answer is what became the most ambitious and aggressive public health campaign to date at the time, perhaps in all of history. Quarantines were issued, travel histories were tracked, and most importantly, the mass vaccination of the residents of New York City began. In under a month, 6,350,000 people were vaccinated. 5,000,000 of them were vaccinated in the first two weeks. 179 locations across the city, from police stations to doctors’ offices to public schools, were opened up as free vaccination clinics. WWII air marshals were remobilized to go door-to-door, letting people know where they could be vaccinated.

In short, the entire city was mobilized to stop the progression of the disease.

But who led the charge? Who saw the danger, acted, and saved the lives of hundreds, potentially thousands, of New Yorkers?

This is the story of Dr. Israel Weinstein, a man nearly forgotten to history, who saved the lives of countless men, women, and children in the smallpox outbreak of 1947.

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New York Times, April 9, 1947

To the left, an image from the New York Times of Dr. Weinstein vaccinating his staff. Above, a recording of one of his many public health messages. Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection

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The ship’s manifest of the ship bringing Rosa (later called Freida), Dina, and Josef Weinstein into the US- they are entries 34-36

On October 30, 1890, the SS Augusta Victoria departed from Hamburg bound for New York City. In steerage was a young mother named Rosa Weinstein and her two children, Josef and Dina. They were travelling to New York from Brest (now Belarus) to meet their husband and father, David, who was living in a tenement on the Lower East Side. They reunited, and in 1891 another son, Alexander, was born. Another son would follow on May 26, 1893: Israel. All of the Weinstein children were born at home; Alexander, Israel, and Marie in tenements on the Lower East Side, and the youngest two, Milton and Gilbert, in Bronx tenements. And although he was only two when his younger sister Marie died, when his brother Gilbert died, Israel was nine – old enough to remember. Both children died of pneumonia.

Israel went on to graduate with his Bachelor of Arts from City College in 1913, followed by a Masters in 1915 at Columbia, and a 1917 D.Sc at NYU. During this time, he was working as a biology teacher at Morris High School. His life would be interrupted by something far greater than his education, however: the First World War.

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Israel Weinstein’s WWI service card, detailing his officer’s service; his enlisted card is far shorter and only covers the months before his commission.

At 24 years of age, Israel Weinstein delayed medical school and instead enlisted into the US Army in December of 1917. He was commissioned as a first lieutenant the following February and served in the Army Expedition Force, seeing action during the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. He finally came home and returned to his job teaching biology, where he would stay until 1922. It was during WWI, however, that he designed his first public health campaign, directed at soldiers to reduce venereal diseases.

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From Israel Weinstein’s Jewish Serviceman’s Questionnaire, from the records of the American Jewish Committee. This portion details his service, including his work in charge of the educational campaign to reduce VD

In 1920 Israel’s father David died of heart disease. Perhaps this event changed the direction of Israel’s life because he entered Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons not long after, graduating in 1926. During this time period, he began working for the New York City Department of Health giving public health lectures.

In 1930 Israel received his PhD from Columbia, his last in a series of advanced degrees. He was unmarried and living with his oldest brother Joseph and his family. Tragedy would strike the Weinstein family yet again, however, when Joseph died in 1938. Israel was forced to move and live with his older brother Alexander and their widowed mother. But their mother Freida (once called Rose) would die in an accident while visiting Israel’s sister Dina in Michigan in 1942.

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From The Daily Register. Red Bank, New Jersey, Thu, Oct 29, 1942

As for Israel? He had once again signed up for the army with the outbreak of WWII, now as a major. Once again, he was giving public health lectures.

With the end of the war, Israel found himself in a new position. He was released from the army on May 18, 1946, and by May 27, was officially New York City’s new health commissioner.

Less than a year later, Eugene LaBar would come to New York City with an undiagnosed case of smallpox and spark the health campaign that marked Dr. Weinstein’s career.

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Above: An article about Dr. Weinstein’s appointment (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 26, 1946).

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Above: The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (April 15, 1947)
Below: The Daily Messenger, Canandaigua, New York (April 18, 1947)

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According to Dr. Weinstein’s writeup after the fact (which I have included at the end of this article), smallpox was officially confirmed in Ismael Acosta on April 4th; nearly a month after LaBar’s death on March 10th. Immediately, the Health Department sprang into action. The laboratories producing the vaccination began working 24 hours a day. 179 city buildings were used for vaccination stations:schools, hospitals, police and fire stations. Hundreds of thousands of doses were sent by the army and navy. Mayor O’Dwyer was among the first to be vaccinated, and even President Truman was vaccinated in order to give a speech in New York City. To quote Dr. Weinstein:

“In a period of less than a month, 6,350,000 people were vaccinated in New York City, over 5,000,000 of them within the two week period following the appeal for universal vaccination by the Mayor. Never before had so many people been vaccinated in such a city and on such short notice.”

The task was monumental. But somehow, when the city was declared smallpox-free in mid-April, only 12 people had been made ill and only two had died. To contrast, in a 1945 outbreak in Puget Sound, Washington, 65 people caught smallpox and 20 died. Again, to quote Dr. Weinstein:

“During the period 1900 to 1929, epidemics of virulent smallpox were reported throughout the United States. Notable among these were the outbreaks in 1921 in Denver and Kansas City, when the former city reported 924 cases and 37 deaths, and the latter 943 cases and 160 deaths. In 1924, Detroit reported 1,610 cases and 163 deaths. In 1901, an epidemic of smallpox in New York City resulted in 1,959 cases and 410 deaths. Had the same rate prevailed in the 1947 outbreak, there would have been 4,310 cases and 902 deaths.”

To give an idea of the magnitude of this achievement, in 1972 there was a smallpox outbreak in what was then Yugoslavia. 175 people would be infected, and 35 would die. This was a fraction of what happened in New York City a quarter of a century before. One would think that Israel Weinstein’s name would be shouted from the rooftops, that there would be schools, hospitals, and streets named after him. But there are not. 

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Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 10, 1948

Seven months after the outbreak ended, so did Dr. Weinstein’s time as health commissioner. He resigned Nov 3rd. He briefly served as the director of the Bureau of Health Education until 1949, when he retired.

From here, he would fade into something resembling obscurity. Except for the rare newspaper mention of public lectures he was giving (as close as Brooklyn and as far as Tel Aviv), very little is said of Dr. Weinstein or the 1947 outbreak until his death in 1975. He never married and had no children; he outlived his parents and five of his six siblings. All that he merited was a brief obituary, summing up his life into one short column in the New York Times.

So what can be said of this man?

He was the middle child of Jewish immigrants. The son of a man in the garment industry in New York City, as so many were. He devoted his life to education and to public health. He served in two world wars, and while he did not serve in combat positions his contributions were no less vital.

And he most likely saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives. Despite many saying after the fact that he overreacted, or acted too soon, he did what was needed at a time when the lives of many hung in the balance.

For this, at the very least, he should be remembered. 

Israel Weinstein’s single column obituary in the New York Times

Further reading:

Dr. Weinstein’s writeup of the smallpox outbreak- discusses the situation and his response in his own words.

Women From Nowhere

By Caitlin Hollander

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Rose Glickstein (born Rose Feldman)’s application to take the oath of allegiance

In April 1950, a Russian citizen named Rose Glickstein applied for American citizenship in the United State District Court located in Newark, New Jersey. She was 49 years old, a divorcee; her divorce having been finalized only four months prior. Her now ex-husband had naturalized in 1931, but as per the law at the time, her citizenship had not followed his and she remained a Russian citizen. This, however, had not been the case thirteen years prior when a then 17-year-old Rose Feldman married a Russian citizen named Charles (born Aron) Glickstein. In every way, the naturalization paperwork appears to be that of just another Russian Jewish immigrant. There is one glaring detail, however, that makes this situation unusual —  Rose Feldman was born a US citizen in Newark, New Jersey and this document exists as a relic of a little known era in which American women had no right to a nationality of their own. 

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Lucy Guarino (born Lucy De Falco)’s application to take the oath of allegiance. She was 13 years old at the time of the marriage that stripped her of her US citizenship.

The paperwork for these reclamations of citizenship — a process that began in 1936 — reveals an interesting demographical note. Most of these women are Italian or Jewish. Many of them are divorced from or widows of their foreign-born husband — some have even remarried American citizens. Most were born to immigrant parents, but some are second or even third generation American. Some were immigrants who had been naturalized as children through their fathers, lost citizenship upon marriage, and then regained it as adults. Some of the women were shockingly young at the time of the marriages that lost them their citizenship — Lucy Guarino was two months shy of her 14th birthday at the time of her marriage to an Italian citizen. She had also been born in Newark, and in December of 1950, petitioned the same court as Rose Glickstein in order to regain the citizenship that she had lost due to a decision made at only 13. 

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Sarah Shevak (born Weinberg)’s 1950 application to take the oath of allegiance — signed over a century after her grandparents had immigrated to America.

Both Lucy and Rose had been born to immigrant parents. Both women lost their American citizenship due to teenaged marriages to men substantially older than them — Rose Feldman was only 17 at the time of her marriage to 23-year-old Charles Glickstein, and Lucy DeFalco’s husband was 19, six years her senior. This was not the case with Sarah Shevak, nee Weinberg, who applied for United States citizenship in that same court in Newark. She was only two months younger than her husband Solomon, who had been born in what is now Belarus. Sarah had been born in Manhattan; her father, Isaac, had been born there as well, and her mother, Zillie, was born in Pennsylvania. And yet at 63 years of age, this second generation American was not technically a US citizen, despite her grandparents coming to the US over a century before her 1950 citizenship application. 

The law that stripped these women — most of whom who had never left the United States — of their citizenship had been enacted on March 2, 1907 as part of the Expatriation Act. As a result of their loss of citizenship, these women could be subject to deportation. Many were forced to register as enemy aliens during WWI and WWII. 12 years after this law was enacted, another implication was discovered — despite the nineteenth amendment granting women the right to vote, women like Sarah Shevak would not have been able to, despite being born in the United States. And even when the law was technically repealed in 1922 as a part of the Cable Act, women married to aliens “ineligible for citizenship” (typically used to refer to Asians but also to draft dodgers or those who had deserted the US military) still lost their American citizenship upon marriage, as did women who married a non-citizen and then lived abroad for two years. 

From the Chicago Eagle, Oct 28, 1922 — the story of Virginia Roth, who became effectively stateless due to this law.

At its core, the law was deeply sexist and xenophobic; similar to arguments against the female vote, arguments against women retaining their US citizenship upon marriage to a noncitizen husband centered around the idea that women could not have loyalties or opinions separate from the husbands. In fact, these laws took that idea one step further, tethering a woman’s identity to her husband’s. Even when the husband’s country of origin did not offer reciprocal citizenship to his wife upon marriage, she would lose her citizenship, rendering her stateless. Tying a woman’s citizenship to her husband’s also meant that if he did not wish to naturalize, she had no path to citizenship — a married woman could not file for citizenship on her own account. Even if she was estranged from her husband, the courts would require a divorce before she could pursue citizenship.

To further complicate the matter, divorce laws of the era were notoriously strict, and in some states, a non-citizen could not file for divorce — effectively holding non-citizen women hostage to their estranged husbands. Even though women’s citizenships became their own — in most cases — following the passage of the Cable Act in 1922, it was not until 1931 that no woman lost her citizenship upon marriage (even if her husband was ineligible for citizenship) and then finally only 1936 that these women were given a path to regain their citizenship — and even then, only if the marriage itself had ended either through death or divorce.

Finally, in 1940, Congress passed a law allowing even married women to regain their lost citizenships — 33 years after they had declared that women had no right to their own nationality independent of their husbands, 18 years after they had declared that only some women had that right depending on who they had married, 9 years after they had declared that all women would retain their citizenships upon marriages, and 4 years after they had declared that the women stripped of their citizenship could regain it regardless of their marital status. 

This era of American history — spanning 33 years from its inception to end — is rarely spoken about or taught today. It is little known, even in genealogical circles. And yet, these petitions for repatriation continued long into living memory. In December 1969, a 79 year old widow named Lillian Weber took her oath of citizenship. She was 5’3 and 130lbs with grey hair and brown eyes, the mother of two grown sons — and like Sarah, Rose, and Lucy had been born in America.  

Further reading: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1998/summer/women-and-naturalization-1.html

On Sephardic Surnames

By Michael Waas

When Spain and Portugal approved their “Right of Return Citizenship” laws in 2015 for descendants of the Jews expelled in 1492 from Spain, who converted to Catholicism in the preceding century beginning with the persecutions in 1391, or who were forcibly baptized in 1496 and 1497 by rule of the Portuguese King Manuel I, interest in Sephardic genealogy grew. Many people, interested in the possibility of an EU passport, started to ask questions about if they were eligible or not by looking into their genealogies. Along came a list that purported to be an authoritative register of all Sephardic surnames, claiming that anyone who had a name on this list would be automatically eligible for Spanish citizenship through this pathway. 

Photo of the old town of Vinhais, Portugal, a place where many Sephardic Jews lived after being forcibly baptized. One of the famous Amsterdam, Livorno, and London families that came from there was the Lousada family and all of their branches. Photo taken by the author in June 2019.

Problem solved, right? “Was my ancestor Sephardic?” could be answered by this expert list, stating conclusively that your family’s surname had belonged to known Sephardic communities.

However, there was one slight issue: that list was fraudulent and a poor copy of indexing work done by the late Harry Stein, who didn’t claim that all of the surnames he indexed were belonging to Sephardic families; just that the books he consulted on Sephardic genealogy and history, had some kind of reference to the surname. Furthermore, not all of the surnames he indexed even belonged to Jews or were in exclusive use by Jews.

In genealogy, history, anthropology, and archaeology, it is always critical to ask questions of the sources you are reading, even if it is a primary source.

Unfortunately, because of lists like that, myths perpetuated by heritage tourism (“Jews forced to convert took the names of fruit trees, Catholic themes, and plants in order to ‘hide’” being one such popular legend routinely sold by tour guides and books in Spain and Portugal), and, quite frankly, inadequate teaching about the history of Sephardic Jewry, a lot of confusion exists today about Sephardic genealogy and history. With this series on Sephardic genealogy and history, I hope to shed some light and encourage people to ask questions about the past in order to better understand the present and future.

A Pear tree, which in Portuguese is “Pereira”. According to the legends, a sure sign of hidden Sephardic Jewish ancestry. In reality? Just a pear tree with hopefully delicious fruit. Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

So, what is a ‘Sephardic surname’? To put it simply, it is any surname used by someone in the Sephardic community. For the purposes of this series, I will be using the term Sephardic, exclusively meaning those with a genealogical tie to expulsees and conversos/New Christians, as well as those who joined later on. This does not necessarily include other Jewish populations who follow Sephardic traditions and approaches to Jewish law and identify as Sephardim/pan-Sephardim as well, who do not have a genealogical connection.

Unlike most other Jewish communities, surnames have a longstanding usage and tradition amongst Sephardic Jews. In the Iberian peninsula, surnames began being used in the 10th century CE, reaching popular usage by the 15th century. Jews in the Peninsula, like Catholics and Muslims, took to this new tradition readily and thus, the tradition of familial surnames predated the end of Iberian Jewry. Famous surnames like Abarbanel, Benveniste, Zacuto, ibn Yahya, and Palache could be found amongst Iberian Jews in the centuries preceding the persecutions, Expulsion, and forced conversion.

So, to return to the original question, “What is a Sephardic Surname?”

There are two main categories of surnames:

Pre-Expulsion Surnames

These surnames could be toponyms (names related to the place), Arabic names, occupations, Hebrew names, and more. Some pre-expulsion surnames include:

Abarbanel, Abensur, Aboab, Almosnino, Alsheikh, Altaras, Amarillo, Barzilay, Benaroya, Benatar, Benbassat, Bendalec, Ben Ghiat, Bensousan, Benveniste, Faraggi, Franco, Haleva, Herrera, Marcos, Nahmias, Palache, Pardo, Pesso, Policar, Saporta, Saltiel, Senior, Sion, Toledano, Valensi, Zacuto

A tax receipt from 1388 of Samuel Amarillo of Tudela from the archives of the Kingdom of Navarre (thanks to Maria Jose Surribas for sharing it). The Amarillo family after the Expulsion and forced conversion, mainly settled in Salonika, where they produced important rabbis and leaders of the community. The author is a descendant of a branch of this family, including the Hahamim Shelomo Amarillo, Moshe Hayim Amarillo, and Shem Tov Amarillo, all of whom were Chief Rabbis (Shelomo and his son Moshe Hayim in Salonika, Shem Tov in Korfu and Larissa, all today in Greece).

New Christian Surnames

These surnames were given to Jews who were forcibly baptized to become New Christians in Portugal, otherwise known as Conversos in Spain. The acquisition of surnames was simple: They were the baptismal surname of the Old Christian godparents of the Jews in 1496 and 1497. This was done in order to assimilate the New Christians and make them indistinguishable from the Old Christians. In practice, this was not really done at all, and through stigma and discrimination New Christians remained a community apart. Some examples of surnames include:

da Costa, da Fonseca, da Veiga, Delgado, Fernandes, Gomes, Henriques, Nunes, Lopes, Marques, Mendes, Pinto, Pereira, Rodrigues, Vaz…

From the Inquisition of Lisboa processo for Judaizing of Gaspar Fernandes o Gallego. In Portuguese it states “Disse que elle se chama Gaspar Frz gallego, mercador, e que christão novo de idade de sesenta e dois annos…” which means “[the Defendant"] stated that his name is Gaspar Fernandes Gallego, merchant and that he is a New Christian, aged 62 years old”. You can see the rest of his processo, here: https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=2312336

What’s important is that New Christian surnames are indistinguishable from non-Jewish, Old Christian surnames because they are the same. Furthermore, you can have innumerable combinations of names, including siblings with different surnames entirely, as long as the family names existed within the recent genealogy of the family. In my own research, I have a set of siblings born in Viseu, Portugal, and Bayonne and Bordeaux, France who moved to Amsterdam, London, Barbados, and possibly Newport, Rhode Island that have the surnames Mendes, Mendes Sereno/Serrano, and Nunes Mantensa. All the same generation!

Some examples of double surnames found among Portuguese Jews include:

Aboab da Fonseca, Franco da Costa, Franco Mendes, Gomes da Costa, Henriques Nunes, Lopes Pereira, Mendes da Costa, Mendes Seixas, Nunes Vaz, Rodrigues Pereira, Pardo Roques, Sarfaty Pina, Vaz Dias, Vaz Lopes, Vaz Nunes, Vaz Villareal

To sum it up, Sephardic surnames have a long and storied history. Many family names are ancient and have deep roots in Sephardic genealogy and history. Yet, the appearance of a surname in your genealogy that was used by a Sephardic family in the past and today is not an indication of an actual Sephardic genealogy and connection. Each case must be studied critically, understanding all of the data points including communities, oral histories, archives, and genetics. In my own family, we discovered that our surname’s origin lies not in a creation of Dutch Ashkenazim for the Napoleonic surname registration in 1811, but is actually a Dutchification of a Portuguese surname, Vaz, uncovering a previously forgotten and unknown history of a family that became Ashkenazi in the mid-18th century in Amsterdam. This story was only uncovered due to a deep study of YDNA and the archives of Amsterdam. 

If you think you have Sephardic heritage, please feel free to reach out to us and we will be happy to provide a consult and develop a plan for researching your ancestral past. For an amazing further resource on Sephardic surnames, please see the excellent Dicionário sefaradi de sobrenomes by Guilherme Faiguenboim, Paulo Valadares, and Anna Rosa Campagnano, which gives an extensive list of documented surnames of Sephardic Jews and the communities they came from across the world, including archival sources. In the next blog in this series, I will discuss more on who the New Christians were, their genealogies, and their impact on Sephardic history.

No, Your Ancestors’ Names Were Not Changed at Ellis Island: Part 2, The Truth

By Caitlin Hollander

So, having read Part 1, you may now be asking a few questions:

When did my family name change? 

Why was I told it was changed at Ellis Island? 

You might even be asking the question I ask when I encounter this: 

Why did these name changes happen?

As much of the immigrant experience, especially the Jewish immigrant experience, is centered around New York, many of my answers and much of my reasoning will also revolve around New York. So, while the reasons and general social attitudes I cite may be ubiquitous to the Jewish experience, the mechanisms by which the name changes occurred are not. In New York, there were a few routes to legally change one’s name. First, as I explained in part 1, one could change their name during the naturalization process (as my own great grandfather did). Secondly, one could change their name through a legal process: either through the county clerk of where the person resided or through New York Civil Court. Or thirdly, one could change their name by simply using the new name in everyday use. To this day, as long as the intent is not to defraud or present oneself falsely, someone in New York still has the right to adopt any name they like without legal procedure. 

This last option was extremely common, especially among poorer immigrants around the turn of the century. Why go through the time, expense, and complication of a lawyer and court when one could simply wake up and decide “now I am John Smith”? The second most common would be through naturalization; a convenient thing for genealogists, where the name changes are noted on a document that is typically easily obtained. The final route, through a court order, is the most interesting for our purposes, as these name changers had to provide reasoning as to why their name needed to be changed. 

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The books containing the index for many of the name changes processed by the New York County Clerk

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A page from the 1911-1923 New York County Clerk name change index book, showing the name change of the Rubenstein family, who became Robins in late 1919

While researching for her fantastic book (which I highly recommend), A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America, Kirsten Fermaglich pulled a large number of name change applications from the courts in New York City. As these records are fairly accessible for me, I decided to do the same. And as she did, I found a wide variety of reasons. Many were to simplify a name; they cited that no one could spell or pronounce it (as was the case with the Lucivjansky family, originally from Slovakia, in 1950; their name was changed to Lawson). But, in many cases, they cited that the name was an obstacle to employment prospects- a reflection of antisemitism. I saw this reason cited by Isidore Abramowitz in 1913; he became Theodore Arnold; the same with Carl Abrahamson, later Carl Auderson, a year later in 1914. This reason was, I suspect, an unstated motivation behind many of the changes I saw; David Lubitz to Gerald Lloyd, the Levy family to Leyson, Hyman Lifschitz to Hal Leeds, Morris Goldberg to Morris Gilbert. Want ads of the era appear to support this; many state that they are a “Christian company”, or outright state “Christian preferred”. Meanwhile, help wanted ads from the same time period that mention Jewishness seem to do so almost apologetically; stating that the family seeking to hire a cook needs one who understands kashrut, or that the hospital seeking a social worker is a Jewish one. 

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A marked difference can be seen in this pair of ads that appeared beside each other in the March 5, 1920 edition of the New York Herald; the former is seeking a young man to make himself “generally useful” in the office of a large manufacturing firm, and proudly states that they are a Christian company. The latter seeks a young man to work nights in an office and states that he must be “good at figures, willing worker, understanding Jewish [Yiddish]”. The former ad all but outright states that they are seeking a Christian employee; the latter, simply an employee who understands the language. Even in these cases, in which the desire for a Christian employee is not outright stated, it is understood. And so, one can easily picture Hyman Lifschitz becoming Hal Leeds for further economic opportunity, especially as he rose in the white collar world. Similarly, prestigious educational institutions practiced widespread, well-known discrimination against Jews; Emory University Dental is well known for this practice continuing into the 1960s, and Harvard had a famous quota on Jewish students. In the professional world or for those seeking to rise into it, a surname indicating Jewishness could serve as a significant handicap.

But don’t simply take my word for it. In February 1948, an anonymous Jewish American published an article in the Atlantic Monthly (now The Atlantic) entitled “I Changed My Name”. He describes the reasons why he and his brother changed from their birth surname, which he describes as “forthrightly Jewish”, to a name he describes as “both neutral and euphonious”. Citing a lack of religiousness, a lack of connection to his Jewish heritage, and a desire for safety (one that was paramount in the minds of Jews everywhere after the Shoah) he says:

“I just wanted to fool them [antisemites] into the impression that I was human”.

At the same time, though, you see many examples of a name remaining “Jewish”, but simplified in a way to make pronunciation and spelling easier for people in America. Louis Cohen in 1915 became Louis Diamond, Nachum Churelutszky to Nathan Cohen, Rubin Lupchansky to Rubin Lubin and Abraham Chait to Abraham Friedman in 1913. The motivation was not always a reaction to antisemitism, but often (as stated in the petitions) one of simplification. This is also often the case in the only situation that can be found where names were indeed consistently changed for an immigrant- in schools. Even today, international students will often be pressured to use an “American” name that is easier for teachers and peers to pronounce. 

A page from the 1911-1923 New York County Clerk name change index book; at the top, you see the entry for Abraham Chait, who became Abraham Friedman. Midway through the page is an entry for Chaim Chasanowitz, who became Hyman Cohen.

Sometimes, this name change happened before even boarding the ship to America; if one had a brother, husband, or uncle in America who had already gone from Rabinowitz to Robins (as David Rabinowitz of New York did in 1921), the immigrant would often adopt this new, shortened name before even boarding the ship. This is why you often see a husband immigrate under one surname, and his wife arrive a year later with their children under the new, shortened name. 

So now for the biggest question: If all of this is true, then why was I told that my ancestor had his or her name changed at Ellis Island? Was I lied to? 

The answer is, as most answers are, not so straightforward. There are many elements at play; The idea of the name change at Ellis Island is deeply ingrained in American culture from movies such as The Godfather Part II. That image of Ellis Island being the place where name changes occurred permeates our culture – it is why this myth is so pervasive. Ellis Island was often a shorthand for “when we immigrated”; immigrants who did not pass through Ellis Island would often use it as shorthand, even when different ports and even different cities were at play. Often their descendants are shocked when I find a missing passenger manifest that reveals their ancestors entered not through Ellis, but through Boston, San Francisco, Tampa, New Orleans, Galveston, or even into a Canadian port followed by a land border crossing. 

As for the idea that “the name was changed for us,” this too comes from a mix of causes. There is, at its essence, an element of shame. In April 1948, a writer named David Cohen responded in the Atlantic Monthly to Anonymous's aforementioned article with one of his own, entitled “I’ve Kept My Name”. He states, in his first sentence, what the examples above showed so well “The most frequent reason for name-changing among Jews is to get jobs in areas where there is marked economic discrimination against them.” But he answers Anonymous’s reasoning with defiance, stating:

“Bearing an unmistakably Jewish name, I am spared the crude comments of virulent anti-Semites, for even they retain a modicum of manners in my presence; and, there being no possibility of mistake, I am not asked to join groups that do not "take" Jews. I am accepted by my fellows as a human being, or I am rejected as a Jew.” 

This attitude towards name changing, especially in the Jewish world, grew over time with the counterculture and anti-assimilation movements seen in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond. Attitudes changed too, as laws were created to forbid discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and religion. No longer was a “Jewish name” as much of a social handicap; and when something is not currently a threat, we have a harder time imagining a world where it could be one. And so people, aware that their name had changed at some point, invented a reason why. It could not be their ancestor, after all, they were proudly Jewish, but must be some powerful antisemitic, xenophobic entity. 

And so the image of the callous Ellis Island inspector, changing the names of poor immigrants without a thought to their heritage, was born, whitewashing a world in which that proudly Jewish immigrant must change his or her name from Horowitz to Harris, from Goldberg to Gilbert, not out of shame of who they were, but as a strategy to survive and thrive in their new home.  

No, Your Ancestors' Names Were Not Changed at Ellis Island - Part 1, The Myth

By Caitlin Hollander

There is a joke that I am almost required to begin this with- and so I will, because I cannot resist a joke, especially not one so well-worn as this:

A Jewish man arrives at Ellis Island. He has been told by his brother, who is already in America, that one should take a new name for their new country. He thinks and thinks, and finally settles on Sam Cohen- it is American, but still Jewish.

Pleased by his choice, he begins his walk up massive flights of stairs carrying his heavy bags. He runs his new name through his head as he walks, committing it to memory. He finally reaches the top of the stairs and is overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle. An immigration officer barks out to him, “NAME?”

The Jew is caught off guard, and flustered, replies “Shoyn fargesin” (“I’ve already forgotten” in Yiddish).

And so the immigration official dutifully writes down his answer, and Sean Ferguson begins his life in America.  

We know this scene very well- it’s ingrained in our culture from movies like The Godfather Part II to jokes like the one I related above. Likewise, we are told by our grandparents “oh, the name was changed at Ellis Island”. And at first glance, it seems to be true- from mobsters (Meyer Lansky was born Meier Suchowlanski) to actors (Jack Benny was Benjamin Kubelsky), everyone seems to have come to America with a different name. This story is an accepted part of the early 20th century immigrant experience- that immigration officials changed the names of immigrants due to racism, misunderstandings, an attempt to “Americanize”, or simply because they did not care.

 But none of it is true- simply put, it is one of the greatest urban legends ingrained in the modern American psyche. The commonly given reasons behind these supposed name changes do not hold up to the historical facts of immigration through Ellis Island. 

The names recorded at Ellis Island were taken directly from the passenger manifests, which were made up at the port of departure. In addition, Ellis Island employed a number of interpreters who spoke the immigrants’ native languages. In 1911, Commissioner William Williams wrote to Washington, providing both the number of interpreters for each language and asking for funding to hire more.

“Languages known by interpreters: Arabic (2), Albanian (2), Armenian (2), Bohemian Czech (4), Bosnian (1), Bulgarian (5), Croatian (7), Dalmatian (2), Danish (2), Dutch (1), Finnish (1), Flemish (1), French (14), German (14), Greek (8), Herzegovinian (1), Italian (11), Lithuanian (2), Macedonian (1), Hungarian (4), Montenegrin (4), Moravian Czech (1), Norwegian (2), Persian (1), Polish (6), Portuguese (1), Rumanian (4), Russian (6), Ruthenian (4), Serbian (6), Slovak (7), Slovenian (2), Spanish (2), Swedish (3), Turkish (6), and Yiddish (9).”

 And in 1914, the chief medical officer, Dr. L.L. Williams wrote to Washington describing his requirements for new interpreters:

 “The languages with which they should be familiar are named below in the order of their importance, viz.: Italian, Polish, Yiddish and German, Greek, Russian, Croatian and Slovenian, Lithuanian, Ruthenian and Hungarian.  Each of the five interpreters should be able to speak at least two of the languages named and it is very desirable that all of those named should be spoken by the fine interpreters collectively, if practicable.

 In addition to these languages, knowledge of Portuguese, Spanish, French, Turkish and Syrian, and Scandinavian languages would increase the usefulness of any of the candidates.”

In short, especially for Jewish immigrants, there was absolutely someone at the port of entry who not only spoke their language but were specifically assigned to interpret for them- often immigrants or children of immigrants themselves. In addition, the manifests were made up at the port of departure, not at the port of entry, and the names were copied down directly from said original manifests- not written down by a clerk at the port of entry. 

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Passenger manifest for the SS Kroonland, arriving at Ellis Island on September 16, 1913. On the third, fourth, and fifth line are passengers listed as Chaie Lubstein, and her children Mordche and Abram.

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The author’s great grandfather, Murray Laubstein’s 1936 petition for naturalization, where he notes that he entered the US as Abram Lubstein.

But a more practical barrier existed to a permanent name change being made at Ellis Island in the early 20th century, and one that we do not think of in the age of digitization. Once you left Ellis Island, there was nothing indicated what name you had entered under, at least nothing that would matter in your day to day life. Depending on the era in which they had come to America, the immigrant might never see what name they had entered under. Alien Registration Forms were only created in 1940. Even when applying for citizenship, you provided first, the name you went by and second, the name under which you entered the US (as seen in the petition for naturalization above). The assumption was that the former was now your legal name. After 1906, when nationwide standardization of the process was instituted, you had to simply provide affidavits from witnesses that had known you in the US for 5 years- later on, proofs of arrival were included in petitions for naturalization, but this part of the process was only slowly adapted. And no ID existed at the time for a job, school, or housing to require. If the immigrant from the joke at the beginning of this article walked out of Ellis Island and introduced himself as Sam Cohen, no one would stop him- because who would know? 

Part 2 of this blog post will give examples of situations in which immigrants’ names were changed, and discuss why this myth became so prevalent in the collective American consciousness

Further reading:

https://www.uscis.gov/history-and-genealogy/genealogy/immigrant-name-changes

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-island

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ask-smithsonian-did-ellis-island-officials-really-change-names-immigrants-180961544/