We strongly encourage you to watch new series of Finding Your Roots on PBS (starting from today! at 8 PM). This fall Steven King, Gloria Ruben and Courtney Vance will be featured among others. Jewish Family Search collaborated with Find Your Roots team on one of the episode. We can’t say which one before it’s broadcasted.

Preview series on Finding Your Roots website

Life in archives can be is dangerous. Work with many old historical files may be a health threat to researchers. We are exposed to dirt, dust and, the most dangerous, fungal mould. The threat is serious and should not be neglected — door to in the Tarnow Archive reminds it to everyone who enter the stacks.

Biohazard threat in archives is not a joke. My friend worked once with 16th-Century rabbinic book in the Vilnius Archive. On his way back to Warsaw his body begun to swell. He got anaphylaxis response immediately after living his train was taken to quarantine for two weeks.

Obviously anaphylaxis response to fungal mould is rare case, rashes happens much more often. Antibiotic ointment is must have for every researcher, just like pen and piece of paper.

Pinkas Natkes tombstone, Lviv

Recent roadworks in Lviv revealed a Jewish tombstone hidden beneath one of the streets. The stone “belonged” to Pinkas Natkes son of Yosef Tsvi. As Pinkas died on 7th of February 1927, most probably he was buried on the new Jewish cemetery, Yanivsky.

The workers who found the tombstone didn’t know what to do with it, so they just brought it to the Jakub Glanzer Synagogue .

During 1950′ Soviet authorities often re-used tombstones (Jewish and German) for pavement. Such was the fate of the cemeteries in Lviv, Dobromyl and other towns in Galicia.

Yesterday we came back from a research trip to Rozhniativ (Рожнятів, pol. Rożniatów, rus. Рожнятов, Rozhniatov), called in Ukrainian official nomenclature “village in type of town”. We’ve been asked to find out whether there is anyone who can still remember the war times and the story of a person called Misko Jagelavitz, who hid Jews in his cottage during the war. The only scrap of information we had came from Ben Zion Horowitz’s testimony published in ספר זכרון לקהילת רוזניאטוב, פרהינסקו, ברושניוב והסביבה (Tel-Aviv 1974) and translated to English thanks to Yizkor Book Project.

One of the righteous gentiles was Misko Jagelavitz. I do not have sufficient words to praise, laud and extol this man and his deeds, and how he endangered his life in order to save and hide Jews from their persecutors. He was goodhearted and did all of this solely due to his conscience. […] Misko hid eighteen Jews, and concerned himself with their safety and sustenance. Among others, the following Jews were hidden by him: Mendel Landsman and his wife Chana who were miraculously saved from the Kalush ghetto during the time of its liquidation; Shalom Shapira, his wife and child; as well as another child from Kalush. Misko sent Stas Jurczko and Dozi Didoko to the Bolekhov ghetto in order to rescue a few Jews. […]
Misko was very generous. He never refused to do a good deed or to fulfil the request of one of the group of hidden people. He cared for them as a faithful father with great dedication, even if he did not receive money from them.

We had been staying in Rozhniativ for several hours asking for the Jagelavitz family before we met Mr. Abramovich, a son of Mahda Yurechko, Jagelavitz’s helper. It turned out that Misko Jagelavitz should be rather called Michał Jagiełłowicz (in Polish) or Mykhailo Jahyllovych (in Ukrainian) and he, together with Ostap Yurechko were recognised as Righteous Among The Nations in 2006.
We were not sure, however, where Jagiełłowicz’s cottage stood. Mr. Abramovich suggested to go in the direction of Stara Ves on the southern outskirts of Rozhniativ. In Stara Ves we’ve been redirected north, to the bazaar area. Only in the last house we were going to visit before our departure, not far away from Duba river, we met Ms. Shplak, probably the last eyewitness of Jagiełłowicz’s generosity and bravery. Jagiełłowicz’s home and shelter where he hid Jews during the war is just opposite her house.

Soon we’ll come back to Rozhniativ with a film crew from the US to work on a documentary movie on Jagiłłowicz’s story.

Update 2016: the movie is finished. It’s called “The Barn”.

Michał Jagiełłowicz’s house in Rozhniativ, a shelter for eighteen Jews during the war.

Official opening of the conference

Day one is over. For me it’s the first genealogical and not academic conference. The latter ones are usually very formal, no one leaves during the lectures, no one comes in late. Those who do, are considered as outlaws. People here doesn’t care so much. Doors slam every five minutes even though though on each of them there is manual saying “do not slam the door”. But all listen and ask a lot of questions what is not always the case at the universities. Here a few hundreds of people socialize; you can be a true member of the conference without attending any lecture. Conference members have their own world. When they ask “what is your shtetl”, they mean “in what town did your ancestors live”. “How far did you go in you research” means “from what date comes the earliest document regarding your family”.
Some ask me whether Ukrainian is a separate language or just a dialect of Russian. Almost everyone use Russian or Polish place names. But when asked, everyone express true support for Ukraine in current conflict.
Shetl 3.0. Good to be here.