and Jewish Life
includes my images of St Albans
Here are some photos taken last weekend at and around St Albans, outside London. …
Source: elirab.me/st-albans-england/
St Pancras railway station (/seɪnt ˈpæŋkrəs/ or /sənt ˈpæŋkrəs/), also known as London St Pancras and since 2007 as St Pancras International, is a central London railway terminus located on Euston Road in the London Borough of Camden.
Coordinates: 51°31′46″N 0°07′37″W / 51.52944°N 0.12694°W / 51.52944; -0.12694
The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide (German pronunciation: [ˈviːnɐ ]); is the world’s oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, its causes and legacies. Founded in 1933 as an information bureau that informed Jewish communities and governments worldwide about the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis, it was transformed into a research institute and public access library after the end of World War II and is now situated in Russell Square, London.[2]
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_Library_for_the_Study_of_the_Holocaust_and_Genocide
The West End of London (commonly referred to as the West End) is an area of Central and West London in which many of the city’s major tourist attractions, shops, businesses, government buildings and entertainment venues, including West End theatres, are concentrated.
Selfridges is a Grade II listed retail premises on Oxford Street in London. It was designed by Daniel Burnham for Harry Gordon Selfridge, and opened in 1909.[1] Still the headquarters of Selfridge & Co. department stores, with 540,000 square feet (50,000 m2) of selling space,[2] the store is the second largest retail premises in the UK,[1] half as big as the biggest department store in Europe, Harrods.[2] It was named the world’s best department store in 2010,[3] and again in 2012.[4]
First Bunnings in the UK. Bunnings was started in Perth, Australia. Ten minute walk from Neil
Read the character names on these pages – amazing coincidence – Roly Poly Bird saves Jill! Roly Poly is what the grandkids call me!
St Albans /sənt ˈɔːlbənz/, /seɪn … / is a city in Hertfordshire, England, and the major urban area in the City and District of St Albans. It lies east of Hemel Hempstead and west of Hatfield, about 19 miles (31 km) north-northwest of London, 8 miles (13 km) southwest of Welwyn Garden City and 11 miles (18 km) south-southeast of Luton. St Albans was the first major town on the old Roman road of Watling Street for travellers heading north, and it became the Roman city of Verulamium. It is a historic market town and is now a dormitory town within the London commuter belt and the Greater London Built-up Area.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Albans
In honour of the Jewish Pedlar or Smous – see Graaf Reinet KehilaLink
My article about the Shanghai KehilaLink has been published in the April 2016 edition of Shemot, the publication of the JGS of Great Britain.
http://www.jgsgb.org.uk/shemot
My interest in family history started in 1992, after my cousin wrote seven ancestors’ names down on a scrap piece of paper.
I have had many genealogical success stories since then. This is due to my often unorthodox, multi focused approach, described by my daughter in law as “tangential”!
In 2011 I visited Eastern Europe for the first time. My heritage travels have taken me back four additional times. I have visited Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Germany, the Czech Republic and Turkey.
I started writing KehilaLinks in 2011, the first being for Orla, near Bialystok in Poland in 2011.
http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/orla
What is a KehilaLink:
JewishGen KehilaLinks (formerly “ShtetLinks”) is a project facilitating web pages commemorating the places where Jews have lived. KehilaLinks provides the opportunity for anyone with an interest in a place to create web pages about that community. These web pages may contain information, pictures, databases, and links to other sources providing data about that place.
Kehila קהילה [Hebrew] n. (pl. kehilot קהילות): Jewish Community. It is used to refer to a Jewish community, anywhere in the world.
Sites are hosted by JewishGen, the world’s largest Jewish genealogical organisation, an affiliate of the Jewish Heritage Museum in New York City. JewishGen provides amateur and professional genealogists with the tools to research their Jewish family history and heritage.
People are invited to send in their own stories, photos and memoirs. There is no cost in participating in a KehilaLink and it is a great way to share one’s family history
My list has grown to 63 websites with 3 more in the pipeline.
The full list and links are available at
http://elirab.me/litvak-portal/kehilalinks/
The Shanghai KehilaLink
http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/shanghai/Home.html
Ironically, the one place I have not been to is Shanghai! Yet, I have been drawn to it by its connection to the Jewish people and especially because of the story of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno, the capital of Lithuania during WWII. Against his government’s wishes, Sugihara issued transit visas to Jews, enabling them to get to Shanghai, and therefore saved many lives. The story only surfaced in the 1970s. See Rabbi Levi Wolff of Sydney Central Synagogue:
http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/shanghai/Australia.html
The video:
Sugihara also appears on several of my other KehilaLinks: Mir in Belarus, Kedainiai in Lithuania, and Sydney and Melbourne in Australia.
See also:
http://elirab.me/australia/sugihara-house-museum/
Four New South African KehilaLinks
This week we went live with:
Please visit the sites. If you have connections to these towns or cities, please contact me.
There are already some interesting contributions:
Read about the tribute to the Jewish pedlar (smous) from Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft
Photos of the Wertheim family from Amanda Katz Jermyn: Read Amanda’s story:
Amanda’s grandfather’s uncle, Hermann Wertheim, his wife Mathilde, and children Julius, Max, Fanny and Fritz who lived in Graaff-Reinett. It was taken in about 1892
The general store, Wille & Wertheim, formerly Baumann Bros., where Amanda’s grandfather, August Katz came to work for his uncle Hermann Wertheim.
August Katz, Amanda’s grandfather, in his British Boer War uniform
Grave of Fritz Wertheim, son of Mathilde and Hermann Wertheim. Hermann was a brother of Amanda’s great-grandmother, Mathilde Wertheim.
Kol Tuv
Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who worked for the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith), a Jewish civil rights group, spent years documenting the rise of antisemitism. He collected books, photographs, letters, magazines and other materials, including school primers and children’s games,[3] recording the spread of Nazi propaganda and its racist doctrines.[4]
In 1933, Wiener fled Germany for Amsterdam and then settled in Britain. The collection opened in London on 1 September 1939, the day of the Nazi invasion of Poland. It was known as the Jewish Central Information Office and functioned as a private intelligence service. Wiener was paid by the British government to keep Britain informed of developments in Germany.[5]
After the end of World War II, the library used its extensive collections on National Socialism and the Third Reich to provide material to the United Nations War Crimes Commission and bringing war criminals to justice.
The Library’s most successful publishing venture was the production of a bi-monthly bulletin commencing in November 1946 (and which continued until 1983). Another important task during the 1950s and 1960s was the gathering of eyewitness accounts, a resource that was to become a unique and important part of the Library’s collection. The accounts were collected systematically by a team of interviewers. In 1964, the Institute of Contemporary History was established and took up the neglected field of modern European history within The Wiener Library.
During a funding crisis in 1974 it was decided to move a part of the collection to Tel Aviv. In the course of the preparations for this move, a large part of the collections was microfilmed for conservation purposes. The plans to move the library were abandoned in 1980 after the transports had already begun, resulting in a separate Wiener Library within the library of the University of Tel Aviv that consisted of the majority of the book stock, while The Wiener Library in London retained the microfilmed copies.
Today The Wiener Library is a research library dedicated to studying the Holocaust, comparative genocide studies, Nazi Germany, and German Jewry, and documenting Antisemitism and Neonazism. It is a registered charity under English law.[6]
The Library also hosts The Fraenkel Prize. This prize, sponsored by Ernst Fraenkel (former Chairman and one of the Library’s Presidents) is for “outstanding work of twentieth-century history in one of The Wiener Library’s fields of interest”. These areas of interest include the following: “The History of Europe, Jewish History, The Two World Wars, Antisemitism, Comparative Genocide, Political Extremism”.[7]
In just under 12 hours, Jill & I will be jetting across Australia, the Pacific & the USA.
30 hours after leaving Perth, we should be in Long Island City with its magnificent views of Manhattan.
Click on this interactive Google map below showing my planned stops.
Here is a more detailed map of my Lithuanian leg, where I will be driving around as I did last year.
These are my planned stops:
New York
Toronto
London
Warsaw
Vilnius
Utena
Daugavpils (Dvinsk)
Rokiskis
Kupiskis
Birzai
Bauska
Rundale
Salaspils
Riga
Siauliai
Plunge
Rietavas
Kelme
Kedainiai
Seduva
Kaunas
Marijampole
Kalvarija
Alytus
Vilnius
Warsaw
If you have any questions about these places, please fill out this contact form.
I am pleased to advise that I have been selected to give a presentation at the 35th IAJGS International Jewish Genealogical Conference in Jerusalem in July.
The title of my talk is:
“A TRAGIC ROMANCE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES:
FROM ONE PHOTO TO JOURNEYS OF RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY!”
The narrative about Moshe and Paula starts in Orla, Poland and ends suddenly in South Africa.
However, the research starts 80 years later in Australia and takes me to Poland, Belarus, Israel, the UK, Germany, South Africa, the US and Canada.
More to follow in upcoming blogs.
Where is Orla:
Facebook page just started for Moshe and Paula:
https://www.facebook.com/mosheandpaula?ref=hl
chairman@iajgs2015.org
35 th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy
| Conference Keynote Speaker Announcement | |
From: Michael Goldstein, Chairman IAJGS 2015 (chairman iajgs2015.org) |
|
| Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2015 09:17:21 -0700 (PDT) | |
Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, former Chief Rabbi of Israel and Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, will deliver the keynote address at the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) 35th International Conference on Jewish Genealogy to be held in Jerusalem from July 6-10, 2015. Rabbi Lau will speak on the topic, ?Connecting to Jewish Heritage through Jewish Genealogy.? Israel Meir Lau, who was one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp at the age of eight in 1945. Throughout his life, he has continually championed the preservation of the memory of the six million victims of the Holocaust, gaining prominence as an outstanding orator and activist. Rabbi Lau has participated in every March of the Living commemoration held in Poland, bringing together thousands of students and adults from around the world. He brings an important message to focus on the individuals who comprise the millions murdered. Israel Meir Lau was born in the Polish town of Piotrków Trybunalski, and is the 38th generation in an unbroken family chain of rabbis. On Independence Day 2005 Rabbi Lau received the Israel Prize generally regarded as the State of Israel?s highest honor, for lifetime achievement and special contributions to society and the State. In 2011 he was awarded “Legion of Honor” (France?s highest accolade) by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. In announcing Rabbi Lau as the keynote speaker, Conference Chairman Michael Goldstein put forth that the message that Rabbi Lau brings to us at the conference and in all his related talks a message that reinforces how vital our research is so that we learn of those members of our family who were displaced and murdered and how important our research is in bringing together families which were torn apart.
| Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau ישראל מאיר לאו |
|
|---|---|
| Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv Chairman of Yad Vashem |
|
 |
|
| Other | former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel |
| Personal details | |
| Birth name | Yisrael Meir Lau |
| Born | 1 June 1937 Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland |
| Nationality | Israeli |
| Denomination | Orthodox |
| Residence | Tel Aviv |
| Parents | Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau |
| Children | 8 children including David Lau |
Yisrael (Israel) Meir Lau (Hebrew: ישראל מאיר לאו; born 1 June 1937 in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland) is an Israeli and the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, Israel, and Chairman of Yad Vashem. He previously served as the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1993 to 2003.
Yisrael Meir Lau (8 years old) in the arms of Elazar Schiff, Buchenwald survivors at their arrival at Haifa on 15 July 1945.
Lau was born on 1 June 1937, in the Polish town of Piotrków Trybunalski. His father, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau (Polish: Mojżesz Chaim Lau), was the last Chief Rabbi of the town; he died in the Treblinka extermination camp. Yisrael Meir is the 38th generation in an unbroken family chain of rabbis.[1]
Lau was freed from the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945, after Rabbi Herschel Schacter detected him hiding under a heap of corpses when the camp was liberated.[2] Lau has credited a teen prisoner with protecting him in the camp (later determined by historian Kenneth Waltzer to be Fyodor Michajlitschenko).[3] His entire family was murdered, with the exception of his older brother, Naphtali Lau-Lavie, his half brother, Yehoshua Lau-Hager, and his uncle already living in Mandate Palestine.
Lau immigrated to Mandate Palestine with his brother Naphtali in July 1945, where he studied in the famous yeshiva Kol Torahunder Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach[4] as well as in Ponevezh and Knesses Chizkiyahu. He was ordained as a rabbi in 1961. He married the daughter of Rabbi Yitzchok Yedidya Frankel, the Rabbi of South Tel Aviv.[1] He served as Chief Rabbi in Netanya(1978–1988), and at that time developed his reputation as a popular orator.
Lau is the father of three sons and five daughters. His eldest son, Moshe Chaim, took his place as Rabbi in Netanya in 1989; his son David became the Chief Rabbi of Modi’in, and later Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel; and his youngest, Tzvi Yehuda, is the Rabbi of North Tel Aviv.[1]Lau is the uncle of Rabbi Binyamin (Benny) Lau, an educator and activist in the Religious Zionist movement, and Amichai Lau-Lavie, the founder and artistic director of the Jewish ritual theater company Storahtelling.
In 2008, Lau was appointed Chairman of Yad Vashem, succeeding Tommy Lapid.
Rabbi Lau addresses
the United Nations
Lau was ordained as a rabbi in 1961. His first rabbinic position was at the Ohr Torah synagogue in North Tel Aviv. In 1965 he was appointed as rabbi of the Tiferet Tzvi Synagogue in Tel Aviv, a position he held until 1971 when he was appointed rabbi of North Tel Aviv.
In 1978 Lau was appointed as chief rabbi of the city of Netanya. In 1983 Lau was appointed to serve on the Mo’etzet of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. In 1988, after the death of his father-in-law, Lau was appointed to serve as chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, a position he held until 1993. When Lau met the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson in 1992, the Rebbe told Lau to finish his work in Tel Aviv, as he would soon be chosen to become the Chief Rabbi of Israel.[5] In 1993, Lau was elected Chief Rabbi of Israel.
On 9 June 2005, Lau was reinstalled as Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv after serving in this position from 1985 until 1993, when he was appointed Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, a position which he held until 2003.
Lau has often been characterized as the “consensus rabbi”, and has close ties to both Haredi and Modern Orthodox Judaism, particularly in regard to his politics, which have been characterized as moderate Zionist.[6] One report described him as “too Zionist to be considered Haredi.”
He is respected internationally by Jews and non-Jews alike, and is one of the few figures in the Haredi world who has managed to gain the trust and admiration of both the Sephardic and Ashkenazic population.[7][8] Lau has received some negative attention for his stances and remarks on non-Orthodox denominations of Judaism. When Lau was awarded the Israel Prize in May 2005, there were protests from the Masorti and Reformmovements in Israel. Non-Orthodox leaders noted that it was ironic that Lau was being honored for “bridging rifts in Israeli society”. Lau’s spokespeople said that the fact that he had been approved by the (presumably heterogeneous) Prize Committee spoke for itself.3
In 1993, Rav Lau had an hour-long meeting with John Paul II at the Pope’s summer residence of Castel Gandolfo near Rome sought to offer the Vatican’s moral support to the latest peace moves in the Middle East. The visit was the first between a Pope and one of Israel’s chief rabbis since the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.[9] In 2009, he was critical of a speech given by Pope Benedict XVI during a visit to Israel.[10] He later applauded a new papal statement which gave more emphasis to the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.[11]
In the spring of 2006, the Israeli media reported that Lau was being considered for presidency of the State of Israel. Some critics in the Israeli media wrote that Lau was more focused on maintaining his image as a progressive than in implementing such positions in the rabbinate’s policies, specifically major issues such as agunot, civil marriage, the status of Shabbat, and other divisive topics that continue to be relevant to many in the secular community vis-a-vis the Chief Rabbinate, which under Lau’s leadership usually sided with the Orthodox perspective.
Another criticism was that a rabbi as president could further blur the line between religion and the state, and push Israel closer to becoming a theocracy, both in fact and public perception. Israel’s gay community also opposed Lau’s possible candidacy due to his criticism of the Gay Pride parade in Tel Aviv and views on same sex couples. The Reform and Conservative movements in Israel also regarded Lau’s candidacy as “unsuitable.” A Reform activist accused Lau of being more concerned with fulfilling Judaism’s ritual requirements than focusing on pressing ethical questions such as discrimination in Israel or genocide in Darfur.
In 2005, Lau was awarded the Israel Prize for his lifetime achievements and special contribution to society and the State of Israel.[12]
On 14 April 2011, he was awarded the Legion of Honor (France’s highest accolade) by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in recognition of his efforts to promote interfaith dialogue.[13]
“Let’s sit down together and let’s live together. We always knew how to die together. The time has come for us to know also how to live together, said Lau, calling for co-operation and dialogue between all Jews (Jerusalem, 14 February 1999).
At the 2006 commemoration of the massacre of Babi Yar, Lau pointed out that if the world had reacted, perhaps the Holocaust might never have happened. Implying that Hitlerwas emboldened by this impunity, Lau speculated:
“Maybe, say, this Babi Yar was also a test for Hitler. If on 29 September and 30 September 1941 Babi Yar may happen and the world did not react seriously, dramatically, abnormally, maybe this was a good test for him. So a few weeks later in January 1942, near Berlin in Wannsee, a convention can be held with a decision, a final solution to the Jewish problem. Maybe if the very action had been a serious one, a dramatic one, in September 1941 here in Ukraine, the Wannsee Conference would have come to a different end, maybe“.[14]
