From The Canadian Jewish News, 2001 SS commander Otto Moll had a tooth-ache, and so visited the dentist of Auschwitz, a Jewish inmate from Dobra, Poland named Berek Jakubowicz. Settling into the chair, the pulled out his revolver and pointed it at the emaciated attendant. “Don’t try anything stupid, dentist,” he warned. “Herr Hauptscharfuhrer,” the…
Tag: Poland
Medical condition leads to genealogy breakthrough
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Stanley Diamond, a semi-retired Montreal businessman who ran a company that manufactured decorated ceilings, has become a medical-genealogical detective in a bid to defuse what he calls a “ticking time bomb” and prevent potential suffering and death caused by thalassemia, a genetic disease. Common among Sephardic Jews, Greeks, Italians and other Mediterranean peoples, the gene…
On the Warsaw Ghetto
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In the decades before the Holocaust, the Jews of Warsaw believed that they were on the eve of a great positive transformation, according to an Israeli professor of Jewish history who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Jews of Warsaw were poor, often living in one-room flats where lively discussions of religion, politics…
Restoring Jewish heritage sites with Sam Gruber
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The first time Sam Gruber stepped inside the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, Poland, he was “incredibly moved” by what he saw. Considered the lone surviving example of the great 19th-century synagogues of Poland, the sumptuously decorated Moorish-Gothic structure had been built as a Reform synagogue in 1862. It had been enlarged in 1892 and again…
Profile: folk artist Mayer Kirshenblatt (1916–2009)
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For most of his adult life North York resident Mayer Kirshenblatt’s hobby was sailing and taking camping trips into the bush. But at his family’s repeated urging, the retired paint-and-wallpaper merchant took up the painter’s easel about 1990 to record on canvas the many colorful scenes he remembered from his boyhood in Poland. Kirshenblatt was…
Finding your Jewish roots in Galicia
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In the 19th century, as author-historian Ronald Sanders once observed, Jews in Tsarist Russia tended to perceive their cousins in Galicia as almost a breed apart, “with their strange Yiddish accent and irksome quality of seeming coarseness combined with Germanic airs of cultural superiority….” I can’t (or won’t) comment on the relative truth of this…
In Poland, a modern blood libel
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Tarnobrzeg, Poland, formerly known as Dzikow, cannot be accused of being a pretty town. With a population of 40,000, it is perched on the eastern bank of the Vistula, in a region known for the production of sulphur. One pictures a dreary, blighted place, surrounded by dark denuded hills. In 1757, a 15-year-old Christian boy…
Translation guide spurred my Glicenstein breakthrough
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Two centuries ago, as part of a wave of reforms that swept Europe after the American and French revolutions, the locks were removed on the ghettos in which the Jews had been confined since medieval times, and the inhabitants were permitted to move freely in and out at all hours as they pleased. Whereas previously…
Postcards from the past
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A picture, according to proverb, is worth a thousand words, but sometimes the power of a photograph to illuminate a setting seems to go well beyond the descriptive abilities of language. Genealogists are often keen, therefore, to find good generic photographs, illustrations and other visual materials to enhance their family tree research. As defined by…
“Why I left the Old Country”
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In 1942 the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which had only recently relocated from Vilna to New York City, sponsored a contest for the best autobiography by a Jewish immigrant on the theme, “Why I Left the Old Country and What I Have Accomplished in America.” More than 200 autobiographical essays were submitted, written mostly…
