MARCH 5, 1998

JEWISH ROOTS IN POLAND

by Myra Vanderpool Gormley, C.G.

"American Jews have long struggled with their European roots,'' says Dr. Michael Berenbaum.

Berenbaum, who wrote the foreword to the recently published Jewish Roots in Poland, is president and CEO of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Los Angeles, and the former director of the Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

"The first-generation children of immigrants entered the American mainstream,'' he says, and, "... they regarded everything American as progressive and their European roots as backward, something to throw off, to abandon and leave behind... The second generation, however, and later the third and fourth, sought to remember what their parents had chosen to forget. They turned back to Europe in search of something.

"But it was a different Europe to which they looked back. The fires of the Holocaust had consumed the world that was... Poland was the home of dead Jews, of graveyards and concentration camps.''

Americans with Polish roots, especially Jewish links, have long assumed that "all the records were lost'' during the wars in Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth, as certified genealogist Miriam Weiner discovered when she began exploring the repositories in Poland and the former U.S.S.R.

It has been nearly five years ago since Wiener approached the then newly appointed director of the Polish State Archives and proposed the idea of a town-by-town listing of documents throughout the Polish State Archives. It was to be published along with inventory lists from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Warsaw Srodmiescie office, which holds Jewish documents for towns that are currently within Ukraine borders but were within Polish borders prior to 1939. As a fellow professional genealogist and writer in whom she confided, I knew it was an incredible undertaking, but would be an enormous contribution to genealogists and historians.

The result is the magnificent Jewish Roots in Poland: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories, a 446-page reference book with more than 500 illustrations (300 of them in color) and 14 maps.

Chapter One includes an introduction to Polish-Jewish genealogical research, covering records such as civil vital records, how to locate an ancestral shtetl, find and use synagogue records, yizkor books (memorial books), business and telephone directories, cemeteries and synagogues, and Yiddish and Polish-language newspapers.

Chapter Two focuses on cities and towns in Poland, with maps of towns and their historical backgrounds. Richly illustrated, a typical town entry includes a synopsis of the town history, pre- and post-Holocaust population figures, latitude/longitude and reference to a nearby larger town. Information about synagogues, cemeteries, Holocaust memorials and selected reading are given, along with sources.

Chapter Three pertains to Jewish genealogical research in the Polish State Archives where documents dating from the 14th century can be found. There also is information about repositories in Poland that are outside of the Polish State Archives System.

Chapter Four is about the USC, Urzad Stanu Cywilnego, the office whose responsibility it is to record births, deaths, marriages and divorces. Each city and town in Poland has a USC office, generally located in the town hall.

The other chapters provide in-depth information on:

-- the Jewish Historical Institute -- its archives, library, museum, and archival holdings

-- concentration camp archives

-- archival inventories, detailed and indexed by town

Jewish Roots in Poland makes available to the public for the first time the inventories of records relating to the Jewish experience in Poland that are held in archives throughout Poland. It is available ($58 postpaid) from Routes To Roots Foundation, Inc., PO Box 2879, Clifton, NJ 07015-2879. Website: http://www.rtrfoundation.org