Archives on a 20th-Century Diaspora

[Aman A.K.A. Ahamburger]

If anyone is interested in reading some Jewish history there have been some archives uploaded to pour over...

Archives on a 20th-Century Diaspora Are Being Put Online
www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/nyregion/jewish-archives-on-20th-century-diaspora-are-going-online.html?_r=1

Jews are known for their wanderings, even if those have not always been at their own instigation, and one of the most sweeping chronicles of their migrations has been stored at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief and rescue organization that is almost 100 years old.

Its archives are sought after by scholars and genealogists and most intimately by descendants of war refugees and disaster survivors hoping to find out what bittersweet adventures their ancestors endured. But delving into those records has itself sometimes been an adventure, requiring searches through indexes, microfiches, file cards and folders in Midtown Manhattan; Long Island City, Queens; and Jerusalem. In a digitized world, that kind of effort has seemed increasingly archaic.

Now the organization, which is widely known as “the Joint” and has helped Jewish communities in 79 countries with food, schooling and job training, is about to put a large chunk of those archives online. There will be a searchable index for every document, photograph and record card, an essential tool considering that the Joint’s archives contain over 500,000 names and 100,000 photographs.

“The thing about online is you basically broaden the audience phenomenally because people don’t have to come to New York,” said Marion A. Kaplan, a professor of modern Jewish history at New York University. She used the organization’s paper records for a 2008 book about a little-known farming settlement of 800 refugees in Sosúa, Dominican Republic, during World War II.

Among the Joint’s treasures: a photograph of a young Leonard Bernstein conducting a concert performance of “Rhapsody in Blue” for concentration camp survivors at a refugee camp in Feldafing, Germany, around 1948; a photograph of a young Marc Chagall taken in 1921 when he taught at a home near Moscow for World War I orphans and pogrom victims; letters from Hirsch Manischewitz, of the matzo and wine manufacturing family, arguing for the need to send matzos to the beleaguered Jews of Russia; letters chronicling the odyssey of Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Nobel Prize winner in literature, who was part of a of a Joint-organized convoy of Sephardic Jews through Nazi-occupied Europe to neutral Lisbon.

This reporter was shown an index card stored in Jerusalem providing documentation of the presence of his father, Marcus; mother, Rachel; brother, Joshua; and himself (then known as Israel) in a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany, in 1949; they left in 1950 for America.

“People who were children when these events took place have a hard time putting the pieces together — who did what, how did we get to the D.P. camp, how did we get from the D.P. camp to America,” said Linda Levi, the archive director.

At first, only written records from 1914 to 1932 will be available, but the whole rich repository of modern Jewish history will eventually be scanned through a process known as “optical character recognition,” which converts typewritten words into text that can be edited and searched by computer.

The Joint archive will join other troves of historical data about Jews also available online, like Yad Vashem’s compilation of three million Holocaust victims and a searchable database of victim records compiled by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Web site Ancestry.com.

David Bezmozgis, 38, a Canadian fiction writer who was chosen by The New Yorker magazine in 2010 as among the 20 most promising writers under 40, is working on a novel about the Jewish experience in Crimea. He has tapped the archives to research a Joint-sponsored movement in the 1920s and ’30s to turn penniless shtetl and ghetto Jews into farmers on Soviet collective farms. Mr. Bezmozgis said he found photographs of the apprentice farmers on John Deere tractors, and letters tracing the history of the project, which ended after Stalin turned against foreign influence and 17 employees were killed.

Mr. Bezmozgis has a special feeling for the Joint because his family was helped by that organization in their journey from Latvia to Italy to Toronto.

Harry Bialor, 82, a retired Brooklyn businessman who survived World War II with a sister by hiding on a Polish farm but who lost his parents, two brothers and a second sister, learned about the photographs of Leonard Bernstein from an article he had read and, since he had been at Feldafing as a teenager, wanted to see if his face appeared in some pictures.

“Conduct?” he said of Bernstein’s concert. “He played! He was at the piano playing! And it was hot. No air-conditioning. Bernstein said, ‘We’ll sweat together in Yiddish.’ He played marvelously on a lousy piano.”

Mr. Bialor did not find his face in the photographs.

Gary Mokotoff, a genealogist in New Jersey, has often scoured Joint records for his work and once discovered the existence of a distant cousin, Charles, who was sending money to his mother back in Poland before he died in the influenza epidemic of 1919.

Bob Belenky, 80, a psychologist living in New Hampshire, found an old passport and letters in the Joint archives that helped him make a trip to Ukraine last spring to learn more about his father’s work as a tractor expert on the collective farms Mr. Bezmozgis has studied.

The Joint was founded in 1914 by wealthy German-Jewish families — with names like Schiff, Warburg, Morgenthau and Lehman — to help struggling Jews in Palestine who were cut off from European sources of aid by the outbreak of war. It has since helped Jews desperate to leave Germany during the Nazi era, landless Holocaust survivors gambling on the young nation of Israel, and Jews isolated behind the Iron Curtain. The Joint played a key role in Operation Solomon, in which thousands of Ethiopian Jews were covertly airlifted overnight to Israel in 1991.

The Joint has also provided assistance for non-Jews after natural disasters, like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Today, according to Amir Shaviv, assistant executive vice president, the Joint, with a budget of over $333 million, provides food, medicine and other assistance to 200,000 Jews in the former Soviet Union and to smaller communities in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Egypt, where, according to Joint officials, perhaps 80 Jews are left.

The Joint gets 850 research requests a year and expects many more once its archive goes live online, which should happen within days. Still, digitized archives will not help everyone.

Mr. Bialor, who sometimes sounds like Mel Brooks’s 2,000-year-old man, points out that though his wife uses their computer for e-mail, he no longer bothers with the thing. “When I first got it, I fooled around,” he said, “but I ran into so many problems I gave up.”

[❤ mollymouser ❤]

Interesting. Thanks.

[Aman A.K.A. Ahamburger]

NP Molly, I think it's important to note who was helping out...

The Joint was founded in 1914 by wealthy German-Jewish families — with names like Schiff, Warburg, Morgenthau and Lehman — to help struggling Jews in Palestine who were cut off from European sources of aid by the outbreak of war. It has since helped Jews desperate to leave Germany during the Nazi era, landless Holocaust survivors gambling on the young nation of Israel, and Jews isolated behind the Iron Curtain. The Joint played a key role in Operation Solomon, in which thousands of Ethiopian Jews were covertly airlifted overnight to Israel in 1991.

[Aman A.K.A. Ahamburger]

I read the article below a couple days back and the first thing that came to my mind was how small Israel is. If you look at it on a map it's a speck, and it's never been more than that anytime it has existed.

However, the concept of the God that Abraham talked about started in just this little speck of a place and now it is the basis for the biggest Religions on earth.

Considering that the earth is billions of years old and its only taken 2000yrs for this movement to grow out of a slave religion into what it is today; for me, it really puts it into perspective just how much of a change that young Jewish lad had on this earth.

Educator gets chance to travel to Israel to study Holocaust(This is the whole article. The Star Phoenix is bad for deleting old stories. The bold and underline are what are important to my point)
www.thestarphoenix.com/news/Educator+gets+chance+travel+Israel+study+Holocaust/7148705/story.html

This past summer, Saskatoon resident Larry Mikulcik spent three weeks in Israel at a Holocaust-themed seminar.

Mikulcik, who teaches high school history at William Derby School in Strasbourg, was one of 42 educators from around the world - and the only applicant from the Prairies - chosen to participate in the seminar offered by the International School for Holocaust Studies at the Yad Vashem Centre in Jerusalem.

The purpose of the fourcredit master's-level course was to help educators at all levels understand and effectively teach about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.

"The course began by examining the history of the Jewish people and understanding what anti-Semitism is and how it evolved through the ages," Mikulcik says. "The term anti-Semitism hasn't changed, but its nature and foundations have. Initially anti-Semitism was strictly about religious differences between Jewish people and Muslims and Christians. It eventually shifted to political arenas where Jews were blamed for the rise of democratic ideas and even communism. The most recent change was the morphing of anti-Semitism into a racial/economic foundation where Jewish people were blamed for all the economic woes of the world."

The Yad Vashem Centre in Jerusalem is an international school for Holocaust studies. Mikulcik says it has a tremendous archive of documents, films and resources, including a list of scholars and survivors who teach classes there. The centre also has an impressive museum and a wall of remembrance.

"Israel has a high concentration of Holocaust survivors and their descendants," he adds. "The main reason is that at the end of (the Second World War), returning to their homes in Europe was out of the question for Jewish people. There was nothing to return to. Their properties had been confiscated. Other people were living there and neighbours were gone. Many realized that their security could not be guaranteed in any other nation and their only chance for survival and self-governance was to have their own country. The Zionist movement grew out of that."

While the whole subject of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism is dark and emotionally troubling, Mikulcik says organizers of the course continually kept the focus on life. The teaching was about surviving, learning about a way of life that has disappeared, yet survives through artwork, literature and music. "People in the ghettos had theatre and concerts, and they kept their culture alive despite the monumental odds stacked against them."

One of the important things Mikulcik came away with was admiration for the courage of the survivors. Course participants heard from 10 Holocaust survivors. All spoke about the choice survivors have to make - whether they wanted revenge or justice. The best revenge, they said, is survival. Holocaust survivors could either remember the crimes of the Nazis or survive and celebrate the memory of the victims.

In many cases, resistance was the only weapon Jews in the ghettos and camps had. Resistance was regarded as any action that helped preserve life, preserved the memory of others or passed on a tradition. It might be a very small act, but it gave strength to the individual and denied the Nazis what they craved, which was elimination of the Jewish people or reducing them to sub-human status.

"The revenge of surviving," Mikulcik says, "has been achieved. Never again."

As a result of the seminar at Yad Vashem, Mikulcik plans to overhaul his own teaching of the Holocaust and then endeavour to make other teachers, including elementary teachers, more aware of the subject. He will present a workshop to Saskatchewan social studies teachers and plans to make a public presentations in the Strasbourg community.

The underlined part is moving to me, however, the bold part is very important to everyone. I had to do a bit of digging, and I found an article from 2003 that is pretty interesting when it's broken down a bit...

Mahathir is right: Jews do rule the world
www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EJ28Aa02.html

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's allegation that the "Jews rule this world by proxy" on October 16.....

.....Europeans who turn up their noses at Malaysia's leader should recall that just 60 years ago, Europe's official ideology (under Nazi conquest) agreed with Mahathir's claim that the Jews "invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy". That is where Mahathir doubtless got the idea in the first place. Not only Adolf Hitler, but the highest circles of the Catholic Church believed that communism was a Jewish plot, as a Swiss priest, Father Martin Rhonheimer, documents in the November 2003 issue of First Things.

Not since Hitler has the leader of an important country claimed that democracy itself was a Jewish invention, at least in the modern period. Let us however not engage in what Leo Strauss called "reductio ad Hitlerum," rejecting ideas merely because Hitler invented them, and take Mahathir's claim at face value.

[/i]

The Jews did indeed invent democracy, in its modern form, although not quite in the way he imagines.

Modern (as opposed to ancient Greek or Roman) democracy stems from the Protestant motto "solo scriptorum", "only the Bible", by which every man must interpret scripture for himself. To begin with, Protestantism was unimaginable without Jewish theologians (who exposed the incompatibilities of free will and original sin), not to mention Jewish bible translators. In such a world, congregations must elect their church elders (Presbyterians) or even their pastors (Congregationalists), rather than accept church hierarchy. If democracy rules ecclesiastical affairs, why not then secular affairs as well?
[/size][/quote]

This is where it get really interesting...

Only Anglo-Saxon Protestantism had the opportunity to take on a political form, thanks in large part to the colonization of America. America's so-called revolution was in fact a second English civil war, in which the Whigs supported the American rebels against the Tory government. England's democratic impulse came from the extreme wing of its Protestants, from such sects as the Separatists who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, or the Quakers who founded Pennsylvania. Only on American soil did radical Protestantism flourish unimpeded by monarchy and established church.

America's founders set forth with messianic ambitions. They saw themselves as a new Israel setting out to found a new Jerusalem, as in John Winthrop's famous sermon "On Christian Charity". "We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when 10 of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations, the Lord make it like that of New England. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us."

How about that? Sounds a lot like this to me..

Exodus: God Blessed America?
notmsnmoney.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=religion&action=display&thread=21263

The Asia Times article continues and this is towards the end of it...

Why, Arabs (and many Europeans) ask themselves, should the greatest power in the world care about the fate of a few million leftovers from an ancient past, colonizing a corner of the Mediterranean in order to preserve their battered nationhood? Why would America make so many enemies and lose so many friends over the Jews? Can anything but a vast and insidious conspiracy explain such irrational behavior?

That is a fatal error. America may be a great power, but it is composed of individuals who consider themselves weak.(His opinion not mine )

They want the respect of their leaders and the protection of their laws even when they are weak, poor and despised. Their ancestors came to America in the hope of finding such a haven. Fairness and sympathy for the underdog are not merely a sentimental issue in the US; they are woven into the fabric of America's being. America is the political realization of the slave-religion, the cult of the creator of heaven and earth who cannot help but answer the cry of the widow, the fatherless, the poor, and the stranger. The more you tell Americans that they should abandon their friends in the interest of political advantage, the likelier they are to reach for their guns (and most of them own guns).

They want a Jewish sort of God who hears the prayer of the widow and the fatherless, and they want a government that protects the widow and the fatherless from the powerful and the arrogant. Through America's inherent sense of justice, Jews do rule the world, just as Mahathir believes, although not of course in the way he imagines it.

I find it all very interesting anyway..

[Aman A.K.A. Ahamburger]

The great article below is filled with an amazing amount of historical data. It really is amazing how many times Jewish people were brought in to help fix things, then persecuted later on by the people they helped. It's also interesting to note that in the article it talks about how Judaism really grew because of America, and the separation of Church and State. Which we know came from the founding fathers, many of which were Freemasons, who were of course funded in part by the early Jewish banking houses.

This Day, August 22, In Jewish History by Mitchell A. Levin

Good Sabbath.