Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain April 2018, Vol 26, 1
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SHEMOT JEWISH GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN APRIL 2018, VOL 26, 1 Shemot.indb 1 09/02/18 8:38 AM Contents EDITORIAL Jessica Feinstein 1 On the road they trod: a return to the land of our ancestors Robin Aaronson 2 Early history of the Jews of Stockton-on-Tees Harold Pollins 13 The (Berko)wiczes of East Warsaw: Part 2. Using Google, Facebook and email to find living descendants Leigh Dworkin 17 The Austrian Synagogue, Manchester David Conway 24 American censuses and substitutes. Part 3: finding substitutes for the 1790 census Ted Bainbridge 26 The death of Sir Francis Goldsmid Doreen Berger 28 Long-lost family Howard Kramer 30 Saving Kinder Hirsch – an Edinburgh rescue Jill Servian 32 Albert Reuss in Mousehole – the artist as refugee Susan Soyinka 38 Cover photo: The Red Synagogue in Joniskis. See Robin Aaronson’s article on page 2. Shemot is the journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain. It is published three times a year and is sent free to members. We publish original articles, submitted by members or commissioned, on a variety of topics likely to be of interest to our readers. We particularly welcome personal experiences that include sources and research methodology, explanations of technological developments and innovations, articles highlighting archival material and the work carried out by volunteers to preserve our heritage, biographical or historical accounts, and practical research tips. We also publish book reviews and letters. If you would like to write or review for Shemot, please contact the Editor at [email protected] to request our guidelines for authors. This issue of Shemot was edited by Jessica Feinstein, typeset by Integra Software Services Private Ltd in Pondicherry, and printed by The Print Shop, Pinner, London. The journal is published by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain. © 2018. ISSN 0969-2258. Registered charity no. 1022738. Shemot.indb 1 09/02/18 8:38 AM EDITORIAL Jessica Feinstein It is now three years since I took on the role of editing Shemot, and what an incredibly enjoyable time it has been! I would like to thank all of you who have written articles and also everyone who has taken the time to read each issue. Your comments and feedback are always welcome. I am very grateful to all of our contributors, who ensure that I receive a steady supply of material. Not only that, but the quality and variety of those articles is extremely impressive, and I think that we have a journal to be proud of. I hope that you continue to get as much pleasure from reading Shemot as I do from editing it. I occasionally receive questions about writing for Shemot, so if you have a story to tell, here are my top tips! 1. Be original. We can’t publish anything that has appeared in print or online before. 2. Share the secrets of your success. If you’ve been lucky or persistent enough to obtain genealogical information from an archive, museum or repository, tell us how you did it. Who did you contact and how long did it take? What can we learn from your experience? 3. Respect copyright. Just because you have found a picture on the Internet, unfortunately that does not mean that we can publish it in your article. You’ll need to find out who owns the copyright and get permission (this may take a long time). 4. Use your own words. Accidental copying can happen when you are taking notes from a book or website, so please check that your words are your own. If you are including a direct quotation, please provide a reference. 5. Help us find the information. If you are mentioning sources or citing other people’s work, please provide enough detail so that others can find the information, including page numbers. 6. Include photos and images if you can. Illustrations make your article much more appealing, especially with the use of colour in the online version. But see number 3 above, and please include any acknowledgements or copyright information with your images. 7. Final means final. I’m very happy to receive a draft for comments, but after you’ve sent me your final version I will copy-edit it and send it to the typesetter. Please don't use the page proofs as an opportunity to rewrite your article. 8. Use social media. If you have written or enjoyed an article, mention it on any social media that you use. The more publicity JGSGB gets, the better! Please contact me at [email protected] if you would like the author guidelines, or if you have any suggestions for articles you’d like to see in future issues. I look forward to receiving more excellent contributions in 2018. Shemot.indb 1 09/02/18 8:38 AM On the road they trod: a return to the land of our ancestors Robin Aaronson The origins of our journey In June 2017, I visited Lithuania and Latvia with my brother Mike. It was a short visit (we stayed four nights) but highly significant for both of us. We were born and grew up in the UK, offspring of the marriage of a Jewish father and a Welsh mother. Even to say that our father was Jewish requires clarification. He was also born in the UK and his family belonged to a conservative Orthodox Jewish sect known as Machzike Hadath. When he grew up, however, he turned his back on Judaism, changed his name from Eliezer Jacob to Edward John (Jack), and for many years had little contact with his birth family. Mike and I did not meet our paternal grandmother, or any of our uncles and cousins on that side, until we were in our teens (our paternal grandfather died before I was born). We thus had little sense of Jewish identity while growing up. My father, perhaps because the break from Judaism had been more difficult than he realised, was very keen that his sons should follow some religion, and the Church of England was the easiest option. We saw far more of our Welsh grandparents, who were Nonconformists, than of any of my father’s relatives. I would ask readers who are closer to Jewish culture and religion than me to forgive anything in this narrative which betrays my ignorance. We grew up cut off from my father’s past. He was quite reluctant to talk about his childhood, his parents, or any earlier generation. In part, this was because he did not know much himself. While his mother Sara’s origins were quite well known – her father, Mendel Chaikin, had a vineyard in what was then Palestine and imported wine into the UK under the brand Bozwin (Boz standing for Beauty of Zion) and she was born in Jerusalem – my father’s father, Samuel Wolf, was something of a mystery. Family memory (preserved particularly by my Uncle Michael) had it that Samuel came from Russia somewhere and had originally had the surname Hoppen. Apparently, he came to England in his teens (i.e., in the last decade of the nineteenth century). That was about all that anyone knew. Thus, when I became interested in family history about ten years ago, it was my paternal grandfather and his forebears that I particularly wanted to know more about. The 1901 UK census revealed Samuel’s parents’ names as Lazarus (Eliezer) and Minnie. Knowing that Samuel had been naturalised as a British citizen, I applied for a copy of his naturalisation papers. These helpfully gave his place of birth as “Bausk, Government of Kurland”, that is, Courland in the Russian Empire. The area is now in Latvia and the town is known as Bauska. Samuel gave his parents’ names as Lazarus Jacob (so my father had clearly been named after his grandfather) and Chaie Minnie. I then applied to the Latvian archives, who established that Eliezer Jacob (senior) was from Linkuva, Lithuania, with information on his wives (he was married three times) and children. These records also showed that the family mythology about the name Hoppen was well-founded – all the individuals found had that surname. By 1901, in London, Eliezer and his family were known as Aaronson. That was as far as I got, until I made contact through the JewishGen website with a man named Alan Hoppen, who turned out to be my third cousin. He had conducted much more intensive research, tracing back from Eliezer to his father Shlomo (Solomon) and mother Feiga, Shlomo being the son of Orel (the son of Movshe), and Gera, all from Linkuva. I discovered later that Orel is a Yiddish form of Aaron. Although several generations of my family lived in Linkuva (and we do not know how many more lived there before Movshe in the mid eighteenth century), it seems that, by my great-grandfather’s time, there was quite a family connection to Bauska. Although it is now in a separate country, it is only twenty-seven miles from Linkuva (under a day in a horse and cart). Courland was outside the Pale of Settlement1 – the area where Jews in the Russian Empire were allowed to live – but under Alexander II (1855–1881) Jews who practised certain crafts were allowed to live outside the Pale. Thus an 1893 list of Jewish families living in Courland, but not originating there, shows Eliezer Jacob in Bauska, with a right of residence arising from his occupation as a tailor. The same document states that he had been there since 1863,2 but other documents put it at 1870.