EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is the second of our special religion articles that appeared in the March/April 2001 issue of Ancestry Magazine: "Religious Records: A Closer Look".
Jews do not have a ritual comparable to baptism, therefore, there are no synagogue records of births. They do not post banns; therefore, there are no synagogue records of marriages. Yet there are aspects of the Jewish religion and culture that produce clues or documents that assist in genealogical research.
Before delving into the traditional research venues among Jewish records, one term used in this article must be understood. Each newborn Jewish child is given a religious name, called shem ha’kodesh (plural shmot ha’kodesh), which means literally "sacred name." A male child receives this name at his circumcision; a female receives it at a naming ceremony in synagogue, usually at the first Torah reading after her birth. The shem ha’kodesh consists of the person’s Hebrew given name, followed by "son of" or "daughter of," followed by the Hebrew given name of the person’s father. Its genealogical value is that it gives the names for two generations–the name of the individual and the name of his or her father. My religious name, for example, is Godl ben Yakov (Gary, son of Jack).
Birth
Although the Jewish religion does not require birth records, one valuable practice invariably provides a clue to ancestry: Jews whose ancestry is Central or Eastern European (Ashkenazic Jews, from which almost all American Jews are descended) usually name their children after deceased relatives. The name is even a clue to the ancestor’s year of death. Because of this, my genealogical database includes a number of death-date entries noted as "before" a given year. Each date was determined by the birth of a baby who was named for a deceased person. For example, I know that my great-great-grandfather Godl, for whom I am named, had to have died before 1892, because a child named Godl Mokotoff was born that year.
If two Jewish genealogists think they have common ancestry, they will invariably start comparing given names in the common line. The presence of the same given names in two unlinked families suggests common ancestors.
For example, my son Gregory’s shem ha’kodesh is Moshe Shmuel ben Godl (Moses Samuel, son of Gary). He is named after my father’s father and after my wife’s uncle.
Whenever there is discussion of Jewish birth records, the subject of mohel records is included. A mohel is a ritual circumciser. Many mohels, in the United States as well as in Europe, kept an accounting of those they circumcised, thus providing a type of birth record, because counting back eight days from the date of circumcision produces the birth date of the male child.
Mohel records are extremely rare. They were not required by Jewish law, but were the personal property of the mohel, and they only came to light because some families kept them as heirlooms and subsequently donated them to archives.
Bar Mitzvah
The bar/bat mitzvah is the rite of passage in which a child is accepted into the Jewish religion as an adult. This is a minor passage in the religion. The child is honored by being permitted to participate in religious services for the first time. Only in recent decades has the event become a social occasion with much celebration.
The bar mitzvah literally means "son of the commandment," and the bat mitzvah means "daughter of the commandment." The bat mitzvah is an American invention not practiced by orthodox Jews. The first bat mitzvah in the United States was in 1922, but the concept did not gain wide usage until the 1950s.
The bar/bat mitzvah is of little genealogical value. Although most genealogical software programs allow for it, I know of no Jewish genealogist who keeps track of it. Since there is no requirement that the bar/bat mitzvah be performed exactly on the child’s thirteenth birthday; the rite is at best only a clue that the child’s birth occurred approximately thirteen years previous.
Marriage
Whenever a Jewish couple marries, a religious contract called a ketubah (plural, ketubot) is signed by the bride and groom, the rabbi, and two witnesses. The contract is a family document, not a synagogue record, presented to the bride as a statement of the groom’s obligations to her. Written entirely in Aramaic–the vernacular language of Jesus’ time–ketubot include the date of marriage (reckoned on both the secular and Hebrew calendar), the place of marriage, and the shemot ha’kodesh of the bride and groom.
Facts necessary for genealogical research can be determined through the ketubah. For example, throughout my mother-in-law’s life, she was known within the family by her affectionate name, which was her Yiddish/Hebrew name, Raizel (Rose). Her father’s name was Feivel (Philip), so it was assumed that her shem ha’kodesh was Raizel bat Feivel (Rose, daughter of Philip). But during my mother-in-law’s declining years, my wife and I came across her ketubah, which showed a startling fact: Her name was not Raizel, but Sima Raizel, and her father’s name was Shraga Feivel, not Feivel.
Divorce
Jews must obtain a religious divorce, known as a get, as well as a secular divorce. A Jewish woman who does not obtain a get cannot remarry in the Jewish religion. Jewish men sometimes use this as a vindictive weapon against their ex-wives, since the man must agree to the get for it to take effect. Gets rarely have information of genealogical value other than the shemot ha’kodesh.
Death Records
Jewish tombstones contain genealogical information not usually present on Christian tombstones. If there is a Hebrew inscription, it includes the shem ha'kodesh and, therefore, the name of the deceased’s father.
Within two weeks of starting my genealogical quest for my Mokotoff ancestry, I was able to go back four generations. I knew my grandfather’s name was Morris. My father was able to provide me with the name of his grandfather, Hyman, as well as with the name of the cemetery where Hyman was buried. A trip to the cemetery gave me the name of my great-great-grandfather. Hyman’s tombstone inscription (in Hebrew) read: "Here lies Chaim Meir, son of Menachem Mendel."
Erecting a small memorial plaque dedicated to deceased loved ones in a synagogue has been the practice for many years. These memorials are known as yahrzeit plaques. (Yahrzeit means anniversary in Yiddish, but it is used only in connection with the anniversary of a death.) The plaques include the name of the decedent, his or her date of death, and the shem ha’kodesh, which includes the given name of the father. If a researcher does not know where a person is buried and, therefore, does not have access to the tombstone inscription, a yahrzeit plaque will provide this important information.
Jews have a religious obligation to commemorate the yahrzeit of a family member every year on the anniversary of death, as reckoned by the Hebrew calendar. Many synagogues send notices to members, reminding them of the obligation, and synagogues recite the names of these deceased persons at the Sabbath prayer service closest to the anniversary of the death. This means that synagogues have records of these peoples’ death dates. But finding out which synagogue has this information can be difficult. It may be either the synagogue where the deceased was a member or the one where a relative (usually a child of the deceased) is a member.
Religious Caste
Jews have a caste system, of significance only in their religion, that sometimes assists in tracing ancestry. It is a hereditary, paternal, religious caste; that is, it is passed down from father to son(s). There are three castes: Cohanim, Leviim, and Israelites. The highest caste, Cohanim, are the descendants of Biblical Aaron. Members of this caste were the High Priests of the Temple, when the Temple existed. Persons with the surnames Cohen, Kagan, Kogan, Kahn, Kahan, Katz, Kaplan, and Rapoport are invariably Cohanim. (Recent DNA technology has confirmed that there is a Cohanic trait among Jewish men who claim to be part of this caste, which confirms this religious practice has existed for millennia.) The middle caste, Leviim, are descendants of the tribe of Levi, who were the Keepers of the Temples. Persons with surnames Levy, Levin, Segal, Landau, Horowitz, and Epstein are invariably Leviim. Most Jews belong to the lowest caste, the Israelites.
For many years, I thought the Mokotoff name was monogenetic, that is, all Mokotoffs in the world, past or present, were descended from my great-great-great-grandfather. This theory was disproved when I found the grave of a man named Mokotoff, buried in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery, whose tombstone inscription read: "Here lies Israel Jacob, son of Moses the Levite." My caste is Israelite, so this man could not be related to me along paternal (Mokotoff) lines. Since then, I have found graves of other Levite Mokotoffs from the Warsaw area. I still haven’t located any living Mokotoff not descended from the progenitor of my family, but that may be because all members of the other families were murdered in the Holocaust.
Landsmanshaft Societies
When Jews came to the United States, they formed social organizations, called landsmanshaft (plural, landmanshaftn) societies, based on towns of ancestry. These groups helped immigrants assimilate into the American culture by holding social events and, most important to genealogy, buying plots in Jewish cemeteries and reselling them to members. If the ancestral town of an immigrant ancestor is unknown and the person is buried in a landmanshaft plot, there is good chance (but no guarantee) that the deceased came from that town in Eastern Europe.
Holocaust
The great tragedy of the twentieth century for Jews was the Holocaust. For genealogists, it denied access to people who knew about one’s family history. More than 300 members of the Mokotoff family were murdered during this period; I know of less than twenty survivors.
The Holocaust created a wealth of documentation of both victims and survivors. The most unusual documentation is a manuscript collection called Pages of Testimony, located at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Starting in 1955, Yad Vashem made a worldwide request for people who knew Jews murdered in the Holocaust to come forward and testify that they knew of the deceased and to provide information about the Holocaust victim. The form has spaces for the victim’s name, year of birth, place of birth, place of last residence, place and circumstance of death, and parents’ names. Some forms also include name of spouse (including maiden name of women) and names and ages of children who perished. The forms also include the name and address of the person submitting the testimony. To date, there are more than three million Pages of Testimony, indicating that more than half of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust have been documented. The entire database was recently computerized, and there is hope it will be available on the Internet within the next year. Until this happens, copies of Pages of Testimony are available by writing to Yad Vashem, P.O. Box 3477, 91034 Jerusalem, Israel.
Resources for Jewish Research
The principal presence of Jewish genealogy on the Internet is JewishGen. Visiting the JewishGen home page links you to the following subcategories of information available at the site:
Discussion groups. Discussion groups for general Jewish genealogical inquiries and other special interests.
Databases. Databases include JewishGen Family Finder, a database of ancestral surnames and towns being researched by more than 40,000 Jewish genealogists throughout the world; ShtetlSeeker, a database of every town (more than 500,000) in Central and Eastern Europe, showing the latitude and longitude for the town and a map of the area; Family Tree of the Jewish People, a database of family trees submitted by users of JewishGen; Jewish Records Indexing Poland, an index to more than 800,000 birth, marriage, and death records from nineteenth-century Poland; All Lithuania Database and All Belarus Database, which include information about ancestors from those regions.
InfoFiles. Genealogists throughout the world have submitted more than 200 files of information (InfoFiles) on a variety of subjects ranging from the basics of Jewish genealogical research to a list of Jewish passengers on the Titanic.
Projects. Projects include Family Database (Jewish family Web sites); Holocaust Global Registry; JewishGen ShtetLinks (Web pages devoted to individual ancestral communities); JewishGen ShtetlSchleppers (information on planned trips to ancestral towns); JewishGen Yizkor Book Project (a project to facilitate access to Holocaust memorial books known as yizkor books and their contents); and the planned Online Worldwide Burial Registry (information about Jewish cemeteries throughout the world, plus a database of individual burials).
Tools. Tools include the ability to convert a Hebrew date to the secular calendar and vice versa; to display the dates of all Jewish holidays for any year; to compute the distance between two coordinates on the earth in either miles or kilometers; and to find the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex Code for any word (typically a surname or town name). [This Soundex code is used for all Jewish genealogical databases rather than the conventional Soundex system.]
Further Reading
Avotaynu, Inc. is the principal publisher of books for Jewish genealogists. To date, it has published twenty-one books on the subject. A book list for Jewish genealogical research, including books of other publishers, can be found at avotaynu.com.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin. Jewish Literacy. New York:
William Morrow, 1991. Chap.14.
Gary Mokotoff, the first person to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, is an author, lecturer, and teacher of Jewish and Eastern European genealogy. He is also the co-author of the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex System, the standard for all Jewish genealogical databases on the Internet.
Return to the Ancestry Magazine March/April 2001 Table of Contents.
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