Susan Soyinka has written a remarkable book on her search for the survivors of her mother’s family who fled Nazi Germany. A Silence that Speaks: A Family story through and beyond the Holocaust describes her 18-year search for those members of her mother’s extended family who were now scattered around the world.


Ref: Refugees flee as war between Germany and Czechoslovakia appears to be inevitable, 1938, Sir George Grey Special Collections

For someone who is searching for their ancestors, dispersed through war and tragedy, particularly with Czech Jewish ancestry,  Susan’s book is a goldmine with its sources of information and step by step descriptions of her search.

When she gives you her sources, Susan will say how this information was useful to her and with whom she spoke. For example: Czech District and Regional Archives. Research was carried out for me in the Uherske Hradiste and Vsetin District Archives, and in the Moravian Regional Archives in Brno by Martin Kocarik and his wife Sarka Kocarikova. Martin and Sarka work for a private company whose details are available at the Czech Family Tree.

One of Susan’s appendices is a Note on Czech Jewish genealogy, where she explains the network of archives the Czech Republic holds and the different Jewish records held. She has helpfully included a table showing the names of towns and cities in the Czech Republic, with their spelling now, and then, and the German form used during the Habsburg Empire.

Following her own search, the chapter in her book The Nazi machine in Austria contains different sub chapters with one headed Forms and standard letters used during Aryanisation, which explains, as an example, what a Request for approval of sale was. She also lists the Offices, departments and organisations involved in or dealing with Jewish matters, such as,  ‘the Office for the calculation of surcharges, who were charged with the task of working out the fee for the “dejewification” process’.

This book is a family history and a biography,  giving an insight into the workings of the Nazi regime in Austria which may help other historians struggling to piece together their own Jewish story.

For more helpful information on finding your Jewish ancestors, search the Auckland Libraries catalogue by the call number 1 GEN REL JEW for more resources held in the family history collection.

Regards

Bridget

Jewish ancestry?

“Why New Zealand? Some had heard of Australia but New Zealand? 
For me it was absolutely the right decision – there was no where further away from Germany...”

- Hansi Silberstein in Promised New Zealand



 The eight-day Jewish holiday, Hanukkah (the festival of lights) is celebrated this week, in commemoration of the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

This year, Hanukkah runs from Saturday December 8th until sunrise on December 15th and while there has never been a large Jewish population in New Zealand, there are certainly resources to help you start your research if you think you may be able to lay claim to Jewish ancestry.



Gary Mokotoff’s Getting Started in Jewish Genealogy (we have the 2011 edition in our collection) is recommended by New York’s Museum of Jewish heritage (and their www.jewishgen.org website).

Mokotoff shows how you can trace ancestry on line and he describes a search he conducted on a family (going back 200 years) using familiar sites such as www.ancestry.com with its Ellis Island databases.

While Kiwi Jewish ancestors are less likely to have travelled via Ellis Island, in our collection we do have several books to mull through, such as guides to cemeteries and how to read headstones (in Auckland, both Symonds Street and Waikumete have Jewish sections), and especially relevant to our country, stories of post World War 1 Jewish immigration (such as Freya Klier’s Promised New Zealand.)

Interestingly, a couple of our prime ministers can lay claim to Jewish roots– Sir Julius Vogel was a practicing Jew, and John Key has Jewish ancestry via his mother, an Austrian immigrant.

If you’re looking for aids to begin your research, use the Central Auckland Research Centre call number on the catalogue, which is... 1 GEN REL JEW.

Bring on the potato latkes and Mazel Tov in anticipation of some excellent finds.

Joanne

The Central Auckland Research Centre has 13 new family history eBooks on CD-Rom about South Africa including:

Brothel, lunatic house and slave lodge – the building at the top of Cape Town’s Adderley Street’s many functions under British and Dutch rule are explored in this eBook. It also includes the register of the slave lodge census of 1714, and the death register of lodge slaves spanning 60 years.
This eBook documents British pioneers who made the Cape their home during the first British occupation 1795-1803, and the second occupation beginning in 1806 - after which the country remained a British Colony until the Union of South Africa came into being in 1910.
This first South African Jewish Year Book includes over 700 biographies as well as documenting many aspects of Jewish life such as The Jewish Gold Pioneers, United Hebrew schools, Jews of Griqualand West and Bloemfontein Jewry.


These eBooks come from online publishers Ancestry24, (no connection to Ancestrydotcom) who also have a very large amount of online South African genealogical records.


LR