Is Cherry Garcia Kosher?

One young Hispanic man left a booth at Denver's 2008 Cinco de Mayo Festival exclaiming, "No way! I'm Jewish?" He evidently had not attended Michael Gonzales' presentation.

On one side of the booth were poster boards that displayed articles and images designed to educate spectators about the Spanish Inquisition and the violence poured out on the Sephardic Jews. On the other side of the booth was a list of 5,220 Sephardic Jewish surnames. The list contains most of the common Spanish surnames like Garcia, Rodriguez and Martinez. "However," explained Gonzales, "if your name is on the list it doesn't necessarily mean that you are Jewish. If your name is not on the list it doesn't mean you are not. Come to the presentation to find out more." [Link]

Time for Grandma to Come Out of the Closet

Many of the Cape Verdean families of New England have a hidden Jewish past.

[Gershom] Barros didn't know his father had Jewish roots until after he died.

"My mother told me she used to call my grandmother a crazy lady for lighting candles in the closet," he said, suggesting that she practiced secret Jewish customs passed down for generations, as has been noted among other descendants of Portuguese and Spanish Jews who were forced to hide their identities. [Link]

A Vanished Village

Today's Washington Post has a fascinating story about a unique Polish town.

Trochenbrod, founded in the early 19th century as a way for Jews to avoid long mandatory service in the Russian army, was one of a kind. While there were large Jewish communities in many cities and tiny Jewish farming villages scattered across Eastern Europe, Trochenbrod was an all-Jewish town the likes of which had not existed since ancient times.

The town prospered until the Soviets invaded in 1939, followed two years later by the Germans.

A handful of skilled tradesmen were taken to other towns by the Germans and worked to death or executed. A Jewish historian writing in April 1945, shortly before Germany surrendered, said only 33 of the town's residents were still alive by the end of 1944. By then, the town had returned to Soviet control.

The survivors had nothing to return to. Germans and Ukrainians had burned some of the buildings in the village. Other houses had been looted, disassembled and destroyed by partisans and farmers in the area. After the war, the Soviets bulldozed what remained and turned the land into a collective farm.

Trochenbrod had ceased to exist. [Link]

Sean From the Shtetl

Schelly at Tracing the Tribe writes today about the old "They changed our name at Ellis Island" myth. The linked article tells the apocryphal story of a Jewish immigrant who ending up with the name "Sean Fergusson."

“It’s like this,” the second Jew said. “My name was Moshke Rabinowitz. The first time I arrived at Ellis Island, I failed the eye test, so the doctors sent me back to Europe. There my eyes were treated and cured, and I decided to try again. But what would happen, I thought, if I turned up a second time as the same Moshke Rabinowitz? They’d already know me and send me back again. And so I decided to call myself Yankl Katzenstein. Still, what if someone recognized me? And so there I was, standing in line at Ellis Island and getting more and more nervous all the time, and when it’s finally my turn I’m so flustered that I can’t remember my new name. The immigration official asks me what it is, and I can’t think of it; it’s simply escaped me. ‘Oy, kh’hob shoyn fargesn!’ I say. ‘Sean Fergusson?’ the official repeats, and writes it down on the form.”

In Yiddish, of course, kh’hob shoyn fargesn means “I’ve forgotten.” [Link]

The Pebbles Pile Up

An article about the grave of Oskar Schindler in Jerusalem mentions that the custom depicted at the end of Schindler's List continues.

It is a traditional Jewish practice to place small stones on gravestones - and the piles of stones on Schindler's grave attest to a large number of visitors.

The piles of stones and wreaths of dried flowers that have been placed on Oskar Schindler's simple gravestone conceal part of the inscription. It mentions that he is a Righteous Gentile who rescued 1,200 Jews. On top of the pile of stones this week was a small shard on which someone had written in ink: "Toda, Gracias, Danke, the Jews remember and do not forget," signed: Mark Holtz, Baltimore, U.S.A. [Link]

I love this tradition of leaving behind a "calling card," though excavation may sometimes be required to read epitaphs.

[Photo credit: Untitled by DDanzig]

The Good Brother

Albert Goering despised everything his brother stood for, but was able to put the family name to good use by simply writing it on official documents.

In this way he saved countless Jews from certain death in his role as a deliberately inept director at the Skoda armaments factory. The Gestapo were on to him, but he managed to slip through their clutches.

The tragedy of Albert Goering was that the surname that allowed him to make a stand during the Third Reich’s rise was the surname that condemned him following the Reich’s collapse. After he surrendered to the Americans, the interrogators refused to believe his protestations. He faced years in prison until his claims were finally verified. Following his release, his marriage collapsed and he eked out a miserable living as a translator. Nobody wanted to honour his name. He died, in obscurity, in 1966. [Link]

Making Do With Too Few Jews

Poland boasted a Jewish population of 3.5 million before the Holocaust, but only about 10,000 Jews live there now. Nevertheless, Poland is experiencing a Jewish revival.

"Jewish-style" restaurants are serving up platters of pirogies, klezmer bands are playing plaintive oriental melodies, derelict synagogues are gradually being restored. Every June, a festival of Jewish culture here draws thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish dances. The only thing missing, really, is Jews.

"It's a way to pay homage to the people who lived here, who contributed so much to Polish culture," said Janusz Makuch, founder and director of the annual festival and himself the son of a Roman Catholic family. [Link]

Angelina Awaits

There's a new Web 2.0 genealogy site called Famillion whose founder hopes to have "the world's Jewish population mapped out by the end of the year, and the entire Western world mapped out in two years." I'm more interested in mapping out a path to Brad Pitt's girlfriend.

Famillion is the only genealogical system that allows you to find unknown pathways to any other person in the world. You might discover family members you never knew you had or find connections to the world's Albert Einsteins, Madonnas and Bill Gates. You may find yourself chatting with Angelina Jolie. As the Famillion family grows, your possibilities become limitless.

Spider-Mensch

It was debated in an episode of Seinfeld Friends whether "Spiderman" is a Jewish name. Now comes confirmation.

“Peter Parker’s a nerd who grew up in Forest Hills, his middle name is Benjamin and he’s motivated by guilt…I see a connection,” jokes Rabbi Simcha Weinstein, author of “Up, Up, And Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero."

Weinstein’s suspicions about Spider-Man were confirmed when he came across golden age comic book illustrator Patti Cochran, who told him that the Marvel Comics editorial staff always worked off the belief that Peter Parker was Jewish. [Link]

Hitler's Favorite Jewish Filmmaker

In his new biography of Leni Riefenstahl, Steven Bach claims that "Hitler's filmmaker" was even more Jewish than her patron.

[She] had her mother’s birth records falsified. There could be only one reason for that, theorized Bach: Leni Riefenstahl had Jewish ancestors.

“Intimate friends who knew her mother swore that she was Jewish,” said the author. “It shows the depths of her ambition, if true, that nothing, not even her own genetic heritage, could stand in the way of that ambition. She was not a deeply emotional anti-Semite, but she was most definitely an opportunistic anti-Semite: One of those people who goes along wholeheartedly once it became the temper of the times.” [Link]

Fiorello's Fascinating Sister

Here's something I didn't know: The mother of New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was Jewish, and his sister—born in Greenwich Village in 1881—was interned by the Nazis. The memoir Gemma LaGuardia Gluck wrote after her return to the United States in 1947 has been re-released 46 years after its first publication. It sounds like a great read for biography buffs.

While Gluck details her time at the Ravensbruck women's concentration camp with great clarity — she is believed to be the only American-born woman interned by the Nazis — the book is about more than that. Her life spanned the great wave of immigration to the United States in the 1880s to the presidency of John F. Kennedy. She grew up in New York City and the Old West, later led a cosmopolitan life in Budapest and lived her last years in a municipal housing project in Long Island City, Queens, built during her brother's term as mayor of New York City. [Link]

Winston's Tribe: Jewish or Iroquois?

DavidB at Gene Expression tackled the question yesterday of Winston Churchill's purported Jewish ancestry. A check of secondary sources revealed no such lineage.

The only serious gap in the official records of Churchill's ancestry is a long way back in the female line, which cannot be traced beyond his great-great-grandmother, Anna Baker. According to family legend, she was part-Iroquois Indian, which the family believed accounted for the prevalence of dark eyes or complexion in the family. This does have a certain whiff of cover-up, but if so the cover-up may be of something other than Jewish blood. According to one account, Churchill himself believed there was a drop of black somewhere in his ancestry (see Elisabeth Kehoe, Fortune's Daughters: The Extravagant Lives of the Jerome Sisters (2004), p.4). In any case, the usual claims of Jewish ancestry concern Churchill's mother's father, Leonard Jerome, and not the female line leading back to Anna Baker.

He concludes that the claims stem from a parenthetical comment—probably tongue-in-cheek—in a 1993 article by Moshe Kohn.

Director: Good Odds It's the Son of God

Those caskets found in Israel contained the bones of their occupants, and mitochondrial DNA was reportedly extracted from the boxes labeled "Yeshua" and "Mariamne" (better known as Jesus and Mary Magdalene). Critics argue that the names on the ossuaries were common among Jews of the era, to which Lost Tomb of Jesus director Simcha Jacobovici responds, Consider the odds.

"There are really only two possibilities," says director Jacobovici. "Either this cluster of names represents the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family. Or some other family, with this very same constellation of names, existed at precisely the same time in history in Jerusalem."

To calculate the odds, Mr. Jacobovici took the data to University of Toronto mathematician Dr. Andrey Feuerverger. Factoring in the commonality of these names in first-Century Israel, Dr. Feuerverger puts the odds of this tomb not belonging to Jesus and his family at one in 600. [Link]

Columbus Sailed a Spanish Jew in 1492?

Dr. Cecil Roth discusses in an interview evidence that Christopher Columbus was a Spaniard and a Jew:

There was an old gentleman in New York who noticed that on the right-hand side on the top of some of Columbus’s letters there was a little squiggle, and he remembered that his father used to write Baruch HaShem at the top, right-hand corner of all his letters. He tried to read these marks as B’ezras HaSham and thus to show that Columbus tried to reveal his Judaism by putting two Hebrew letters at the top of every letter he wrote. He wasted quite a considerable fortune on this rather pathetic and ludicrous attempt.

His interviewer, Rabbi William Berkowitz, adds this excellent bit of apocrypha:

Whenever the name of Columbus comes up, I recall the story of the Jewish immigrant who appeared before the examiner and was exceedingly nervous. After he gave his name and address the next question was about when he had arrived in America. Instead of saying 1941, he said 1491. The examiner turned to him and said, “Why didn’t you wait another year; you could have come with Columbus!” [Link]

She Left No Rabbi Unturned

From the Appleton (Wisc.) Post Crescent of June 27, 1931:

GENEALOGIST SEEKS BURIED PARCHMENT

Washington—(AP)—Exhuming the body of an eighteenth century rabbi in a cemetery in Czechoslovakia will be the next step in the ancestor hunt in which Viola Root Cameron, international genealogist, is almost continually engaged.

Mrs. Cameron, blonde, small, quiet-mannered, hopes to find with the body a parchment which will supply some missing branches on the family tree of a wealthy New York client. She will go to Europe this summer personally to oversee the exhumation.

Such parchments, she says, were buried with the rabbis in the eighteenth century. The one she seeks was written between 1750 and 1800. If procured it will open a whole new field in tracing ancestry, she believes.

Kissing is Cultural

This quotation is from a brief article in Ancestry Magazine on the Kissing Post at Ellis Island—the spot where new arrivals were reunited with their families.

The Italian kisses his children but scarcely speaks to his wife, never embraces or kisses her in public. The Hungarian and Slavish people put their arms around one another and weep. The Jew of all countries kisses his wife and children as though he owned all the kisses in the world and intended to use them all up quick.

—Maud Mosher, 1910, matron at Ellis Island

Non-Celebrity May or May Not Have Jewish Ancestors

Radar Online has undertaken some in-depth genealogical research to establish the Jewish ancestry of Britney Spears' estranged husband Kevin Federline.

According to Ancestry.com, a genealogy website, "Federline" is an Americanized form of the German "Federlein," a German and Ashkenazi Jewish name derived from the German word for feather. A spokeswoman for Federline could not immediately say whether he has Jewish ancestors. [Link]

All I can say about this is—Kevin Federline has a spokeswoman?

It Was a Spur-of-the-Moment Idea

Lone Stars of David is a collection of essays about the Jewish presence in Texas, but gives handy baking tips as well.

Consider Helena Landa, matriarch of the only Jewish family in New Braunfels in the early 1850s. She used a spur – the kind that make horses go fast – to put air holes in matzo she baked for a Passover Seder. [Link]

Steve Finds an Actual Factual Error

A Canadian columnist offers these examples of people having their names changed by immigration officers. Too bad they're fictional.

A Chinese gentleman whose name is Jacob Rosenberg explained how he came by this name. “When I entered the country, the immigration officer asked me my name. I said Saim Ting. So he wrote down the name of the Jewish man who was in line ahead of me.”

An elderly Jewish gentleman when asked for his name at immigration had a senior moment and replied, “Shoin fargessen (can’t remember).” So that’s how he got his name — Shaun Ferguson! [Link]

This last example reminds me of a recent post by Steve Danko, in which he examined the marriage record of Joseph Koscinczyk.

What’s so interesting about this record? Well, Joseph’s mother’s maiden name is listed as “Niewiem”, which is not a Polish surname at all. “Nie wiem” is a Polish sentence that means “I don’t know”.

It appears that, when asked for his mother’s maiden name, Joseph answered in Polish, ”Nie wiem”, and the clerk dutifully recorded that response in the register.

Converso Conversations

One historian's introduction to New Mexico's "crypto-Jews" came by way of a whisper campaign.

Within weeks of becoming New Mexico state historian, Stanley Hordes started receiving some odd visitors. They would enter his Santa Fe office, close the door -- and gossip about their neighbors.

"So-and-so lights candles on Friday nights," they would whisper.

"So-and-so doesn't eat pork," they would say.

The young historian was intrigued. Though the people Hordes spoke with were clearly Catholic, they reported following an array of Jewish customs. They talked about leaving pebbles on cemetery headstones, lighting candles on Friday nights, abstaining from pork and circumcising male infants.

When Hordes asked why they did such things, some said they were simply following family tradition. Others gave a more straightforward explanation.

"Somos judios," they said. We are Jews. [Link]