The Suddenness of Life and Death

I posted this last year when the Jewish calendar and the Gregorian date lined up almost perfectly. This year, the High Holidays were earlier this month so I decided to keep this as close to it's Gregorian date instead. 

I’m taking a quick break from the boxes this week to talk about my mom’s side instead.

 

On her side, one of the stories that got passed down the generations was that Grandpa’s (my maternal grandfather’s) oldest sister died as a child. It was always told that she was the eldest child of her family and that she was either 7 or 9 when she died. Nobody ever knew what she died from. Her two brothers – both of whom grew up to be doctors – speculated decades later that she died from tuberculosis, like their father, but they weren’t sure.

 

A couple of times over the years I tried to find her death certificate. On the July 1912 immigration ship manifest with her mother and younger brother, it says her name was Rifka Zuljar. I tried searching for that. It didn’t work. I tried slight variations of her last name such as Zuliar and Zuler. Those didn’t work either.

 

Then I stumbled upon the Michiganology website. On a whim, I typed “Juliar” into the search bar of the Death Records 1897-1920 database thinking that the one death certificate I would find on there would be for Grandpa’s father. And there it was, above the name of Joseph Juliar (Grandpa’s father) (whom Mom and I call Joseph Zular to distinguish him from Grandpa).

 

Bekka Juliar. And a link to view the original certificate:

 

I was astounded. I couldn’t believe it! I had found her at last.

 

One of the first things I noticed was that the address was 426 Hastings St., Detroit, Michigan. This made perfect sense since her father died at the same address too. (It was where Grandpa’s father had a butcher shop.) Her age – 7 years, 5 months – threw me for a loop at the time. That didn’t make sense! She was listed as being 6 years old when she immigrated to America two years previously! How had she gained only 1.5 years in age over a 2+ year time span? However, I later realized that it could be because they didn’t know her exact age. This is because in those days, birthdays weren’t a big a big deal for Russian Jews. This also means – based on both the manifest and her death certificate – that she could’ve been born sometime between about the second half of July 1905 to April 1907. Which means that depending on when she was born, she could’ve been anywhere between age 7 and 9 when she died. And these are the two ages that are in the family lore. Which explains why nobody knew the exact age at her death.

 

Looking farther down the left-hand side of the death certificate, all of the birthplaces seemed correct – yes, as far as we know of, both Rifka and her parents were born in the Russian Empire, and her father’s name was correct too. However, her mother’s name made me pause. The death certificate says her name is Seiga Lingerman. It’s actually Feiga Singermanso something got lost in the translation or misheard or misunderstood somewhere. (By the way, I have never heard of the informant’s – H. Foreman’s – name before.)

 

On the right-hand side, it says that she died on September 28, 1914. That got me thinking. The High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)) always fall sometime between early September and mid-October depending on the year. Did she die around the High Holidays? Actually she did:

The 10 Tishrei is Yom Kippur day but like all Jewish holidays it starts the night before. Looking at the death certificate more closely, we see that she was buried the next day (29 September). This means that within hours of her funeral, her parents and siblings at least possibly, if not probably, had to go to synagogue for the Kol Nidre service (the first service of Yom Kippur) and her parents had to start a 25-hour fast if they were medically able to.

 

It’s just astounding to me to think of the suddenness of life. Rifka – Bekka – Juliar was alive and presumably healthy on Rosh Hashanah. By Yom Kippur, she was dead.

 

That’s only a ten day difference.

 

According to Mom – and this was in the 1950s! – she remembers attending Yom Kippur services with her paternal grandmother and during one of the confessionals, her grandma would cry as she beat her chest. For years I thought it was because her grandma was very religious so she was crying because she was thinking of all the bad things she had done wrong over that past year. Since finding that death certificate though, I’m now wondering if part of it had to do with grieving the death of her first-born child.

 

We will never know for certain.

 

If you observe Yom Kippur (which starts tonight), may you be written in the Book of Life and if not, have a great Sunday.

The Swiss Notebook

 The document for this week is this blue and white notebook.

As you can see, it’s in German. Initially I thought that Grandpa John (my paternal grandfather and Grandmargie’s husband) possibly bought it when he was in Vienna but it says that it was made in Zurich. While it’s still possible that he bought it in Vienna and used it before he escaped, it seems more likely that he bought it in Switzerland itself considering that Vienna was a much larger city than Zurich was. Secondly, another reason I think that Grandpa John wrote this while he was in Switzerland between 1938-1940 is because some of the dates are in the European style (as you’ll see in a moment). The first page looks like this:

 

My hypothesis is that these are all birth dates next to these names. The reason? Here is a picture of part of Margarethe “Grete” (Steinhaus) Kaiser’s (Grandpa John’s sister’s) birth record:

However, underneath Siegfried’s name, it says in German “Registr[ieren] alle 25. Nov. 1938” which means “all registered [on] 25 November 1938.” But why were they registered?

 

According to the Leo Beck Institute’s 1938 Project’s chronology webpage, on 12 November 1938, the Nazis instituted the “Order of Elimination of Jews from Economic Life” decree that declared that all Jews had to register their retail businesses so that they could be “Aryanized.” On 3 December of that same year, they had to register all of their real estate. There are two other potential registrations it could be: 

1. The registration of their financial assets; however, that was instituted back on 26 April 1938.

2. There was an order on 23 July 1938 stating that German Jews were required to register with the police by 31 December 1938 in order to receive special ID cards that would be used in dealing with government officials. I wasn't able to find out if this was true for Austrian Jews. However, since the Anschluss (mid-March 1938) meant they were subject to Nazi rule, there is at least a distinct possibility that this was also true for them.

2. 

In essence, due to the registration date listed on the document above, the two most probable registrations that it refers to is either the registration with the police or the registration of retail businesses.

 

Farther down the page are the names of Rebecca and Rosalia Rothenstein and Adolph Neumann. According to the English translation of Dear Federico: The story of a Jewish family by Lotti Goliger-Steinhaus (the wife of one of Grandpa John’s first cousins) (known as Caro Federico in Italian and Mein lieber Federico in German), it says:

 

We also learned from Hans [Grandpa John] that the Nazis had forced their way into his relatives’ house, ripped the diamond earrings from his aunt’s ears and then, after brutally beaten her and his uncle, they had dragged them off. Prior to the occupation of Austria, this uncle had been editor-in-chief of the ‘Wiener Tagblatt’.

        - Lotti Goliger-Steinhaus

 

Could this aunt and uncle that Lotti mentioned be Rebecca or Rosalia Rothenstein and/or Adolph Neumann? Could it be a couple from Grandpa John’s father’s side? I don’t know yet. More research will have to be done first.

 

Lastly, here are the two other pages in the notebook (plus an insert) that has writing on them. I have not been able to correctly identify any of these people:

Genealogy Boxes

Back in 2007 when we were clearing out Grandmargie’s house to get it ready to sell, Aunt Jeanne gathered up every document and photo that could potentially be of genealogical interest and put them into these cardboard boxes.

 

About a year-and-a-half later, I came home from my first semester of college. I was ready to spend a month relaxing, sleeping in, and hanging out with friends.

 

Then I got a call from Aunt Jeanne.

 

Essentially she said, “Hey Rebecca. I have three big cardboard boxes from Grandmargie’s house full of genealogical information. I don’t want them anymore; they’re taking up too much space. Do you want them?” Most people would’ve said no. I, on the other hand, enthusiastically said yes. Within days (if not sooner than that) Dad and I drove over and picked them up. As you can see, they’re massive.

 

 

 

I’ll be fully honest: I have never actually fully, completely gone through the boxes. They’ve defeated me before. But this time, I’ll defeat them. I hope you’ll join me for the first item next week.

Catching the (genealogy) bug

 First off, don’t worry; I’m not sick. However, I did catch the genealogy bug.

 

It all started when I was 10. One day, I walked into the office to ask Mom what she was doing. She told me she was doing genealogy. I said, “Ok,” and walked out.

 

I didn’t think much of it until two years later when I found the passenger list for one of my great-grandfathers and his siblings. I got addicted; I spent the next year or two conducting some genealogy research in between the times I was hanging out with friends and trying to get middle school homework done.

 

In September 2005, when I was 16, Grandmargie (my paternal grandmother) identified numerous photographs for me and told me family stories that were attached to them. She enjoyed it. Roughly three months later, Grandmargie was dying. In the early days of that when she was still lucid and could still speak (and frankly, I could still stand to see her), I interviewed her. I asked her about her parents and her grandparents. And from then on, I’ve been doing genealogy research on-and-off ever since.

 

That’s what I want to do with this blog. I want to focus on my family history in the U.S. and in Central and Eastern Europe. I also want to explore the photos and the objects that were left behind in those boxes and to question, tease, and tell the story behind them. Why do we have them? Who are they from? Where are they from?

 

Welcome to my blog.