October 2, 2013

Michaela picked us up at the hotel to drive us to Theresienstadt.  She brought her late brother’s wife Hana with her.  And we joined with our cousin Petr Willheim on the way there.  Petr knew Theresienstadt well and would be our guide.  His parents had both survived the camp, and he had even been stationed there when he was a young soldier. From the parking lot Petr took us first toward the Small Fortress.  We passed a long rom of gravestones, mostly from late 1945, around the time of liberation, when thousands died of a Typhus epidemic that spread through the ghetto and the outlying areas.  Half of the graves were Christian and half Jewish.  Most of the Jewish ones had no names, just a number.  Michaela said that she heard that Gypsies had stolen the iron names form the graves, but I later heard that the unnamed graves simply represented hundreds of unidentified people who died during the epidemic.

Theresienstadt cemetery outside the Small Fortress

I wasn’t really much interested in seeing the Small Fortress.  It has a few claims to fame, as the home of the SS men who administered Theresienstadt Ghetto, as the place where prisoners were taken by the SS to be tortured to death or executed, and as the place where Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist who started World War One by assassinating the heir to the Habsburg throne, was imprisoned. I asked Petr to allow us to turn back instead to the town where the ghetto had been.

We walked toward the old garrison town, with its star-shaped exterior walls along the river Oh?e (Eger).  First we went to the memorial site where in 1944 the ashes of 22,000 prisoners who had died in the camp were thrown into the river.  The memorial did not do much for me, a tall sculpture of a woman standing next to a marble block.  Nathan and Petr waled down to the riverbank but I wanted to head back to enter the camp.

Despite having read extensively about Theresienstadt, I suppose I did not have a good mental picture of it.  Once inside the walls, it appeared very much like an ordinary town, a bit shabby in places, but in many ways just fine, with open spaces, parks, and nicely painted buildings, not like the army barrack housing I had imagined.  I took two pictures, to show how different you can make the place look, depending on where you point your camera.

We went into two buildings with museum exhibits.  The first one was a comprehensive exhibit with the history of the Jewish camp, with text panels in Czech, German, English and Hebrew, and reproductions of many documents.  I found the placards advertising concerts and events very interesting.  Some of the things I had seen before, but I could have spent longer.  There were some good videos also on display, in Czech with subtitles in English and German.  But near the end I joined a tour being led by 92-year-old survivor Pavel Stransky.  I only heard the last part of his story, and also an epilogue about the fate of Fredy Hirsch, a man who devoted himself to the care of children at Theresienstadt and later at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  I had an opportunity, but did not feel like interrupting the end of the tour to speak with Mr. Stransky.  After he spoke was the only time I felt that emotional wave of sadness come over me that I had been dreading on this visit.  I wrote in the guest book: “First family member to return to Theresienstadt since my great-grandfather Sigmund Zeisl was here July-August 1942.”

Downstairs in the gift shop I bought a book on Vedem, the children’s newspaper in Theresienstadt edited by Petr Ginz.  When I was in Prague in 1996, Michaela had introduced me to Martin Glas, who was a friend of hers.  I have a video of our conversation where he showed me an issue of Kamarat, another magazine he had helped publish as a teen in Theresienstadt.  He survived and later became been a tv news anchor in Prague. Downstairs there was also an exhibit room that had the names of all the children who who perished.  At first I did not realize it was just children and spent some time looking for my grandfather’s cousin Arthur Schönberg, who died in Theresienstadt.  But there were no Schoenbergs.  Then we realized that they were only the children.  It was overwhelming and sad.

We walked down the nice street to the Magdeburg Kaserne, the barracks that also housed the offices of the camp leadership.  Upstairs was a good exhibit that included a few rooms made up like barracks, with triple bunks.  I had presumed that suitcases had been taken from the prisoners, but I was wrong, and saw confirmation also in photos.  Perhaps it was just the contents that were stolen.  And maybe they were used then communally and not individually.  I don’t know.  Anyway, it was good to get a mental image of the barracks, even though it felt not quite as dingy and dirty as I had imagined it, probably because it was in fact clean and empty and not filled with sick and dying people, as it would have been when Theresienstadt was packed with ten times the ordinary number of inhabitants. The smell was missing.  This is also Daniel Mendelssohn’s critique of the boxcars that pepper our Holocaust museums.  Yes, they can give people a feeling of claustrophobia, but the stench, the cold, the heat, the fear — those are all absent.

The exhibition included rooms on the artists, composers, writers and actors in Theresienstadt. I was surprised to see a placard for a concert put on by Viktor Ullmann that included two songs by my grandfather.  Alice Sommer-Herz, now nearing her 110th birthday, was the pianist.

I did not feel like visiting the Crematorium and so we left Theresienstadt.  It was an odd visit.  I was used to our museum, where the architecture is part of the story.  In Theresienstadt, the architecture worked against the story.  These were just nice buildings in the Bohemian countryside.  The exhibits were adequate, but not extraordinary.  There was nothing there to give you the feeling that you were in the presence of a catastrophe, the site where tens of thousands of Jews were crowded together and murdered with hunger and sickness or deported to Auschwitz and Treblinka.  The town is just a somewhat humdrum old country town, nothing more.

We went to nearby Litomerice for lunch.  It has a beautiful town square, all neatly restored, and nice restaurants.  No goulasch on the menu so I ordered duck with knödel on the side, which was Bohemian enough and very good.

We returned to Prague and visited my distant cousin Helena Vankova (Kovanicova), whom I had never met.  We had corresponded over our Nachod ancestors for a number of years so I was eager to meet her.  She greeted us with her mother and two small children, Leah and Adam.  Later her father Jiri, a photographer, came, as did her husband Daniel, who teaches and works for the Jewish Community in Prague.  We had a nice dinner, speaking mostly English with some German.

They tried to teach us a few words in Czech, but I am afraid my brain can’t hold it in.  It was nice to finally meet Helena, although she was so busy with dinner, I hardly got to speak with her.  Her husband is friends with some folks I hope to meet later in the week, so it was nice to get to know him as well.  He let Nathan try out his shofar, which was challenging.

We returned home for some computer time and now it’s time for bed.  Tomorrow I hope to see some of the Jewish Museum and also maybe the Castle.

Oct 1, 2013

Easy flight via Paris to Prague.  Cousin Michaela picked us up at the airport.  Lots of construction on the road into town, but it gave Michaela and me time to catch up.  Staying at the Hotel Intercontinental.  We stayed here on my first visit during the Communist era.  Back then you could hardly engage in conversation with the staff.  Much easier now.  The location is great, right on the river and just steps from the Altneuschul and the rest of the Jewish quarter.

Nathan in front of his gg-grandmonther Pauline Nachod’s synagogue, the famous Altneuschul in Prague.

Nathan and I walked around and then found a kosher restraurant, Dinitz. Had a nice chicken with mushrooms (“forestiere”), which was the only non-Israeli entree on the menu.  Nathan had an hamburger.  Then we walked around the old town, climber the tower and go a view of the city, and walked down to the Charles Bridge, crossed and then wound our way up the bank to the next bridge and back to the hotel.  A fine first day with lots of great views of the city and the castle on the hill.  Tomorrow we go to Theresienstadt.

Sep 30, 2013

I am heading off to the Czech Republic with my 13-year-old son Nathan to attend the rededication of an old synagogue in Ckyne, southern Bohemia.  Our first stop is Prague, the capital city where my great-grandmother Pauline Nachod was born in 1848.

I have been to Prague before.  The first time was when I was a teenager, during the Communist era.  At that time, getting a visa to enter the country was difficult and tours were very constrained.  Interaction with ordinary Czechs was pretty much out of the question.  I returned to Prague in 1991, after taking the bar exam.  Following a brief lunch with my aunt Nuria’s friend, the musicologist Ivan Vojtech, I tried to track down a cousin of my paternal grandmother Gertrud Kolisch.  I looked in the café’s old telephone book that had not been updated in twenty years and found Dr. Rudolf Kolisch.  So I called the number.  The young man who answered (I later learned he was just 15) did not speak English, nor French, but uttered a few words in German before hanging up on me.  “My grandfather is dead.  My mother is not here.”

Traveling alone and having nothing better to do, I took the address in the old phone book and decided to try to see if I could find my cousins.  I took the bus to the outskirts of town, to a residential park filled with 10-story apartment buildings.  When I finally found the building matching the address I scanned the intercom directory.  No Kolisch.  My grandfather is dead, the boy had told me.  His mother wasn’t home.  So the apartment must be listed under the mother’s married name.

Well, I had come this far.  Undeterred, I went over to the sandbox playground next to the building.  Some young folks about my age (25) were playing with their babies in the sandbox.  I asked if they spoke English.  No luck.  French?  No.  German?  No again.  One of them spoke a little Russian, but my four weeks of Russian in seventh grade didn’t get me very far.  So I took out a little notebook and drew a picture of my family tree, up through my father to his mother and her father, then sideways over to his brother down to his son and then to ?, the woman in the building.  They understood enough and ran to get the help of an old lady in a nearby building.  She spoke German with me and told me she would call my cousin. In a little while I was ushered into the building and introduced to my cousin’s neighbor, with whom I conversed for nearly an hour in French.  Who knew I could even speak French?  I thought I had forgotten it all.

Finally, my cousin Michaela Navratilova walked through the door.  I don’t remember my grandmother, who died when I was just a baby, but from the photos I knew I could recognize that Michaela had the same face.  No doubt she was a Kolisch.  With tears in her eyes, we embraced.  She had known of our existence, but had never communicated with us.  Her father and brother had died over a decade earlier, and she felt herself completely cut off.  With only her father’s books to remind her of the more cosmopolitan world before 1939, she had until the fall of communism in 1989 never seriously allowed herself to dream of traveling abroad or of meeting another member of her father’s family.  And now here I was, opening the door for her to the outside world.

Michaela took care of me for the next several days, showed me the little cabin in the woods that her husband had built with the plum tree laden with fruit.  We went hunting for mushrooms.  At each one, she said “Hmm.  I’ve never seen one like this before.”  On the way back to the cabin, we stopped at the local gas station and she asked the woman who lived upstairs to come down and inspect our basket of mushrooms.  Returning to the car with a smile, she assured me the old woman said they were all non-poisonous and edible.  Not completely convinced, I let her son Tomas, the one who had answered my initial phone call, taste the stew first.  When he didn’t drop dead, I ventured a taste and then dug in.  For dessert, we ate dozens of homemade plum dumplings called Zwetschkenknödel in German.

I returned to Prague in 1996.  Pam and I had just become engaged and she joined me on a trip to Vienna for a family reunion I had organized with the various branches of my family.  Beforehand, I had planned a side trip through Moravia and Bohemia to visit the towns where my ancestors had lived.  The plane landed in Vienna after a long flight and we immediately set off into Moravia in a rental car.  Many hours later,  we arrived at Kromeric, exhausted, and found a hotel.  Waking up the next morning, eager to explore, we looked for our car.  And looked.  And looked.  It was gone, taken during the night.  The hotel claimed that the parking lot out front was not its responsibility, which was small comfort.  I had been too tired to put the “club” on the wheel and bring the last bag up, the one with Pam’s dresses, to our room.  She still hasn’t forgiven me for losing them.

After touring the bishop’s palace in Kromeric, we decided to go directly to Prague and boarded a train in nearby Holesov (birthplace of my great-grandfather Hermann Jellinek).  The train stopped on the way in Pardubice (birth-place of my great-great grandmother Rosalie Reichmann).  As we had no food or drink, I decided to get off the train while we are stopped at the station and buy something to drink at a small stand.  I handed the woman a large bill, the only one I had, and she mumbled something in Czech and ran off to make change.  As I waited for her to return, the whistle blew for the train to depart.  I grabbed the change from the lady and ran for the train, just hopping on as the train gained speed and headed out of the station.  By the time I got to our cabin and found Pam, the train was at full speed, and Pam was white as a sheet.  Day one of the trip: car stolen, dresses stolen, and now alone on a train, not even certain where she was going.  She thought I had abandoned her! Our stay in Prague was clouded by the difficulties of our first day.  It took two days, until we arrived in Vienna, before Pam smiled again.

After the family reunion and a trip to Salzburg for a performance of Moses und Aron, Pam returned home and I went back to Prague alone, staying in the apartment of my cousin Nick Teller.  Nick had been raised in England and Germany.  His father was my grandmother’s cousin and his mother was from Prague, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.  Nick worked at the German Commerzbank in Prague, almost as a quadruple-agent.  He could play British, Czech, German or Jewish and witnessed the worst prejudices of all these groups in Prague.  I used my stay to visit the Czech State Archives and get copies of records of my family.  These records had been maintained by Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia since 1782, when the Habsburg Emperor Josef II issued his famous Tolerance Patent, granting Jews some civil rights.  (They would not be fully emancipated until after 1867.)

The records had been collected during World War II, as the Jewish communities were liquidated by the Nazis, and ultimately were deposited in the Czech State Archives.  One of the books I found was for the small town of Ckyne in southern Bohemia.  All I knew of the town was that Rosa Bloch, the maternal grandmother of my grandfather Eric Zeisl, was born there.  She was apparently a nasty lady, who burned my grandfather’s early compositions and criticized him for “playing instead of practicing.”  My grandfather half-joked that he had three enemies in his life: Hitler, the sun and his grandmother.  That he would put her in the same category as Hitler gives you some idea of what she must have been like.

Anyway, I found the old record books from Ckyne in the Czech State Archives.  Probably no one had looked at them for decades.  I traced back from Rosa to her father Isak and then to his father Mathes Bloch.  I soon noticed that Mathes Bloch had signed as the mohel for all the boys born in the town in the first half of the 19^th century.  The whole book was in his handwriting.  I triumphantly reported back to my family that we were descended from the Mohel of Ckyne.  Only years later, when the cemetery was photographed, did I learn that Mathes (or Mendel) Bloch was in fact not only the mohel, but the rabbi of Ckyne.

Several years later, I received a call out of the blue from a man in Boston named Alex Woodle.  He said that he just learned that his family, who came over to the US in the 1840s, may have come from Ckyne.  I pulled out the copies I had made of the pages where the Blochs were mentioned in the old record book, and sure enough, right next to them were the records for the Wudl family.  Alex was thrilled to get confirmation and help tracing his family back another generation.  Ultimately, he went to Prague and Ckyne and even made a film about his discovery that was shown on TV.

I kept in touch with Alex and over time we discovered a number of other families that descended from the Jews of Ckyne.  Amazingly, many of these families also had avid genealogists.  Emily Rose even published a successful book on her family.  Rochester professor Phil Lederer put up a detailed account of his roots trip to Ckyne on his website.  So did Francisco Fantes.  Heleen Sittig in the Netherlands had an entire website devoted to her family tree.

A few years ago, Alex announced to me that a woman named Jindra Bromova in Ckyne had arranged for the town to repurchase the old synagogue building and restore it.  She managed to raise over 200,000 Euro from the European Union and intended to turn the building into a Jewish cultural history museum of southern Bohemia.  Apparently, this synagogue, built in 1828, was the finest example of synagogue architecture left in the entire region.

The Czech Republic was not bombed very much in World War II and so many of the synagogue buildings, including the very old and beautiful ones in Prague, still stand.  The Ckyne synagogue had been abandoned as Jews moved to larger towns and was sold  even before the Nazi era.  From what I have seen, it is a large, rather ordinary looking building.  But the inside has been nicely restored and so I am curious to see what becomes of it.  When Jindra wrote to tell me that there would be a rededication ceremony, I decided I wanted to be there.

As it happens, the rededication is on October 6, just six weeks after our son Nathan’s bar mitzvah.  Pam and I decided it would make sense to pull him out of school for a week so that he could attend and participate in the ceremony, as the representative of his ggggg-grandfather Rabbi Bloch.

So we are off to Prague.  Michaela will be meeting us and she and our cousin Petr Wilheim will take us to Theresienstadt on Wednesday.  I have never been to a concentration camp before.  When I admitted this to a group of Holocaust survivors a few years ago, I was berated and told I must go.  I have misgivings.  First, I am not someone who needs to go somewhere in order to be reminded of the Holocaust.  As the President, and for the past ten months Acting Executive Director, of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, I have to deal with the memory of the Holocaust nearly every day.  I also don’t feel any special connection to the main camps.  My great-grandfather Sigmund Zeisl was deported to Theresienstadt in July 1942 and deported two months later to Treblinka, where he was presumably murdered on arrival, if he even survived the train ordeal.  There is nothing at Treblinka for me.  Just a monument at the place where he was taken for execution by his kidnappers.  If I wanted to connect with my great-grandfather, I would go to Vienna, where he lived for ll but the last two months of his 70-year existence.

Of course, I have read a great number of books about Theresienstadt.  My great-grandfather’s time there was no doubt brief and terrible.  The elderly did not receive enough food to survive for long and the crowded and diseased living conditions made the mortality rate astronomically high, even in this supposedly model ghetto.  Theresienstadt was a garrison town, built to house soldiers, and what remains are the same barracks and buildings.  Now they house museum exhibits about the infamous Nazi ghetto.  I am at the same time eager to see how the Museum deals with the subject-matter and at the same time afraid of the emotions my trip there will be sure to evoke.  I am not sure how traveling with my son will affect me.  Just thinking about it makes me well up with sorrow and indignity and terror at the inhuman cruelty of it all.  Being there will not be easy for me, which is why I have avoided it until now.

I suppose it is every father’s dream to have a son.  When Nathan was born, I was genuinely surprised.  After all, my college roommate had already had three straight girls.  It wasn’t long before Nathan cracked his first smile, that winning combination of mischief and innocence that you all have seen, and he’s had us in the palm of his hand ever since.

For those of you who were not at Nathan’s bris, I have to explain his very long Hebrew name – Nathan Nachman Avraham.  Pam and I had decided to name our first son after our two paternal grandfathers.  Pam’s grandfather Nathan Mayers was a larger than life figure in her family and we both agreed it would be wonderful to name our son after him.  His middle name would be Arnold, after my grandfather, a similarly important figure in my family.  While I knew that Arnold’s Hebrew name was Abraham after his own paternal grandfather, I had assumed incorrectly that Nathan Mayers’ Hebrew name was Natan.  On the morning of the bris, I learned that his true Hebrew name had been Nachman.  I consulted with our mohel, Rabbi Liebovics, who first reminded me of his generous discount offer – the fifth son is half price!  I told him our dilemma, that we had intended to name our son Natan Avraham, but now we learned that it should be Nachman.  “It’s the same price,” the rabbi replied.  “Just give him three names.”  So that is how our son became Natan Nachman Avraham.

The reason I held onto the name Natan was that it reminded me of the famous 18^th century play Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) by the great German author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.  Lessing was close friends with the founder of the Jewish enlightenment or Haskalah, Rabbi Moses Mendelssohn, the famous philosopher who also translated the Hebrew bible and psalms into German, and was the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.  In Nathan the Wise, Lessing makes the case for religious pluralism, so strong that the Church initially banned the play during Lessing’s lifetime.  In the play, the wise Jewish merchant Nathan is asked by the Muslim Saladin which religion is the true religion.  Rather than answer directly, Nathan tells a parable about a magic ring.

A prince made a beautiful magic ring that was said to make the owner beloved by God and man.  He determined that it should be passed on to only his most favorite son, and from him to his favorite son and so on, so that the ruling prince would be the one who received the magic ring.  Eventually the ring came to a prince with three sons, but this prince could not decide between his children.  So the prince made two more rings, identical in appearance to the first.  Upon his death each son received a ring.  But which was the true one?  No one could tell.

Each son accused his brothers of being a fraud, possessing only a counterfeit ring.  So the three sons went to a wise judge.  He said, the magic ring is supposed to make the bearer beloved by God and man.  Which one of you is the most beloved by the other two?  The sons did not reply.  The judge therefore decreed that he could not tell which ring was the true ring, that all three might be counterfeit and the original lost.  To find out whether one of them had the real ring, it was up to them to live in such a way that their ring’s powers could prove true, to live a life that is good in the eyes of God and mankind rather than expecting the ring’s miraculous powers to do so.  In the play, Nathan uses this parable to answer Saladin’s question about religion, saying that each of us (Christian, Muslim or Jew) must live a good life by the religion we have learned from those we respect, without worrying about which one is truer than the other.

Reading your Torah portion this week, and thinking about the man that you have become, I was reminded of Nathan the Wise.  Nathan, you have a heart of gold, an internal moral compass that sets your course.  The Torah has lessons for all different types of people.  Some people need to be taught that there are terrible consequences for their bad acts, that they will be rewarded if they do something right, and cursed or punished if they do something wrong.  Some people need to believe that they hold a magic ring that steers them on the right course.  But you, Nathan, don’t need all those tricks.  Think about it.  If the list of curses in your portion had been shorter or longer, would that make any difference to you in how you behave?  If we told you that the Tallis that you received for your bar mitzvah was magic, would it change you?

What makes you so special, and what makes your mommy and me so proud of you, is that you know, almost instinctively, what is right and what is wrong.  You are a kind and caring person by nature, just exactly what we hoped for when you were born.  You treat your siblings and your friends with respect and fairness.  You make good decisions and avoid bad ones.  In short, you have become just the man we always hoped you would be, and we could not be any more proud and happy to be your parents.

[Published in Avotaynu XXIX, No. 2, p. 7.]

by E. Randol Schoenberg[1]

Until recently, we began by building our own individual family trees.  We started with our parents, siblings, children, spouses and continued to fill in as much as we could.  When we reached a branch where we did not know the information, we turned to a relative or searched for records, perhaps even hired a professional genealogist.  With time and patience, many of us built nice trees, even large ones, with hundreds or thousands of people.  We documented our results with records and photographs.

Most of us eventually computerized our trees, using programs such as Family Tree Maker or Reunion.  We submitted GEDCOM files to Beit Hatufsoth or JewishGen’s Family Tree of the Jewish People (FTJP).  Some of us even published our trees on the Internet or in books.  But what we never did was allow someone else to work on our tree.  We did not collaborate.  The tree was ours and no one else’s.  It did not grow without our involvement and it did not venture beyond where we wanted to go.

All that has changed in the past several years with the advent of collaborative genealogy.  A product of the connectivity of the Internet, collaborative genealogy allows a number of different people to work together remotely on one connected tree.  The result has revolutionized the field of genealogy, and Jewish genealogists have been at the forefront of this new development.  Instead of speaking of trees of thousands, we now talk of millions.  Instead of starting from scratch, many people are coming to genealogy as a result of an invitation to an existing tree that they are asked to join and help build.

Separate Collaborative Trees (Ancestry.com, MyHeritage)

Inviting Collaborators to Your Tree.  A number of collaborative genealogy websites exist to facilitate cooperative tree-building. The most popular genealogy websites, for example Ancestry.com and MyHeritage, have offered collaborative tree building options to their customers.  On these sites, users build their own trees (or upload GEDCOM files) and then invite people on the tree to join by entering their e-mail addresses.  The invited users can then help to build the tree by adding new profiles and information.  The potential for growth is great.  Your first cousin shares two grandparents with you.  He can add in his other two grandparents and invite cousins from the other side of his family.  So can his spouse.  In this fashion, the trees start to grow in this fashion in all directions, the only limit being the industry of the invited members.  The largest trees of this type generally have fewer than 100,000 profiles.

Merging Duplicates, Adding Sources, Finding Matches.  The better sites allow merging of duplicate profiles, so that if a person appears more than once in the tree, the profiles may be joined together seamlessly.  This avoids unnecessary duplication of profiles in the tree.  Sites such as Ancestry.com and MyHeritage also offer the ability to connect records from their enormous databases to the profiles in the tree, which is a huge bonus for those who like to have their trees well documented.  Users also have the ability to search the unconnected trees of other users and contact them to confirm or trade information.  The companies even have developed algorithms to detect data matches and suggest them to the customers.  Finding these matches allow users to glean new information for their trees.  Ancestry recently added a feature to find matches on Facebook to allow users to invite their relatives to the tree through that website.

Mergeable Collaborative Trees (Geni, WikiTree, WeRelate, FamilySearch)

Finding Relationships.  The collaborative model was further improved by Geni, a California company recently acquired by MyHeritage of Israel. The key innovation was the ability to merge separate trees together. What began as thousands of separate trees has evolved, over time, into one enormous World Family Tree of over 70 million profiles, including 2.9 million connected users.[2]

While many thousands of separate trees still remain on Geni, the real action is in the World Family Tree.  A genealogist who can connect to that tree instantly is connected to an enormous web of related profiles.  Using Geni’s far-reaching relationship finder, researchers can determine the closest path between two profiles on the tree.[3]  Because of a computational resource limit, however, the algorithm generally finds profiles that are either direct relatives, or are otherwise no more than twenty steps away (e.g. an uncle’s wife’s cousin’s sister’s nephew).

Many users find it fun to see how they are connected to famous people in the tree. [4] The more popular Jewish ones range from King David[5] and Rashi, to Albert Einstein and Jamie Lee Curtis.  At this point it would be difficult to find a Jewish celebrity whose tree is not already part of Geni’s World Family Tree.

Curators. Geni’s approach has attracted a host of excellent genealogists, eager to build the World Family Tree.  About 120 of them have been selected by Geni as volunteer curators, who have been given the ability to resolve disputes, untangle incorrect merges and lock problem profiles.  Not surprisingly, about 10 percent of the curators are Jewish, with expertise ranging from biblical to modern times, and everything in between.[6]  The many non-Jewish curators also are extremely knowledgeable and helpful.

One of the interesting aspects of Geni is the ability to compare the working behaviors of genealogists from all over the world.  Some have exhibited incredible feats, adding thousands of profiles, records, sources, photographs and documents, and completing thousands of merges and data conflict resolutions every month. Even those who consider themselves very active and experienced in Jewish genealogy would be quite amazed at what some other people are capable of doing.  Each curator brings his or her own expertise and interests to the task.  Collaboration allows these genealogists to learn from each other and work as a team to make Geni a better environment for building the World Family Tree.

Projects.  Geni also enables users to create projects, allowing close collaboration on specific areas of research by way of project discussions and adding profiles to the project.  The Jewish Genealogy Portal with several hundred collaborators is an umbrella project with a directory to many of the Jewish projects on Geni.[7]  Two of the largest are the Auschwitz-Birkenau project, with more than 5,000 profiles, and the Jews of Kraków, with more than 13,600 profiles.[8]  Geni already has hundreds of significant Jewish projects with more started every day.

Massive published genealogies have been entered into Geni and indexed in projects.  These include Neil Rosenstein’s The Unbroken Chain,[9] Malcolm Stern’s First American Jewish Families,[10] and Georg Gaugusch’s Wer einmal war.[11]  While some data from these books may still be missing, the skeleton of the tree is all there and is being improved on daily with information and records not include in the books, such as photos, documents, sources and links to living descendants and relatives, many of whom are Geni users.

Web Searchable and Crowd-Sourced.  Although privacy restrictions make the lower parts (with living profiles) less publicly accessible, Geni’s tree most closely resembles a Wikipedia model in that the public portions of the tree are searchable on the Web.  This feature distinguishes Geni from all of the other collaborative tree platforms, and has made it a magnet for new users.  Because of the large number of users, Geni’s tree is dynamic, not static.  It is constantly being changed and improved.

Working on Geni is like working on an enormous jigsaw puzzle with thousands of other people.  You get the advantage of everyone else’s work, and they all get the advantage of yours. With the power of crowd-sourcing, Geni allows genealogists to work together on much larger projects than anyone working alone could ever tackle by himself.[12]

Drawbacks to Collaboration

Mistakes.   With the numerous advantages of collaborative genealogy come some significant drawbacks.  Allowing others to access and modify a tree sometimes permits mistakes to creep in.  Of course, the same openness also allows users to correct mistakes.  Often I hear people complain that they looked at Geni or WikiTree and found mistakes–but that may turn out to be one of the great strengths of these platforms.   Not only can individuals find the mistakes, they also can fix them–and for everyone.  This is the model that Wikipedia used eventually to supersede The World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica.

With over one million collaborators correcting and improving the tree, there is simply no doubt that the World Family Tree on Geni is becoming not only the largest, but also the most accurate and well-sourced tree available in most areas.

Working with Difficult People.  As with all works in progress, collaborative trees sometimes present difficulties, as, for example, when competing versions of a tree are merged and discrepancies are discovered.  Working out the differences with others may be challenging.  As every experienced genealogist knows, records often conflict or are unclear.  Family stories may turn out to be fabrications.  Hidden relationships sometimes reappear.  The best collaborative genealogists understand that working together with others means sometimes being open to accepting a different point of view.

Lack of Privacy.  One potential drawback of collaborative genealogy, especially on Geni, is that everyone gets to see what you are doing.[13]  If you like to keep something private, don’t put it on the Internet.  Some family histories are better left unpublished, but for most genealogical data, publication on the Internet causes no harm.  Some people fear so-called “identity theft,” but that term is in fact really a misnomer and more of a marketing slogan for companies trying to sell security. What people call “identity theft” is in fact just garden variety fraud – either by way of batch theft of customer credit card data from merchants, or fraudulent credit card applications by people who personally know the victim and already have access to his or her personal identification information.  As far as I have been able to determine, there has not been even one documented case of fraud involving use of an online family tree.

The lack of privacy can also have advantages, as it allows others to find connections and assist in building the tree alongside you.  There is no better way to make a breakthrough than to make your tree public so that some other relative or genealogist can find it.

Time and Expense.  Moving to a collaborative tree can be expensive and time-consuming.  Most of the collaborative tree platforms have different levels of membership.  Often there is a fee for the service, or for certain aspects of it.  Some allow users to start for free, but then charge for added features.  Shop around and make sure to pick the price structure that is best for you.  Adding a tree to a collaborative platform can be as easy as uploading a GEDCOM file, or as difficult as re-entering all the data by hand.  In its early years, Geni grew exponentially by allowing GEDCOM imports, but the imports eventually created so many duplicate profiles, that GEDCOM importing was stopped.  People with large trees (more than a few thousand profiles) almost always find that much of the tree is already on another collaborative tree in the database.  Often it is better to connect with and join an existing collaborative tree than start one of your own–but the effort needed to enter new data, or sources, by hand may be daunting.  Fortunately, it is usually possible to find collaborators to help with data entry.

Who owns the Tree?  Those who start or join a collaborative tree project on the Web essentially give up ownership of the tree and agree to share it with others (and the company that owns the platform).  That means that if the platform disappears, so could all your work. Thus far, we do not see much risk of any of the major collaborative tree projects disappearing.  The more likely scenario is exemplified by MyHeritage’s purchase of Geni, as one collaborative platform is acquired by another.  The databases created by collaborative genealogists have become very valuable assets, and it seems unlikely that the data ever will disappear completely.  Nevertheless, most of the platforms allow at least a limited ability to download a GEDCOM file of some size to protect your work and that of your closer collaborators.

Conclusion

In the past decades, Jewish and non-Jewish genealogy has focused on data aggregation rather than tree building.  The incredible resources created by JewishGen or JRI-Poland, for example, or with the digitized indexing of the U.S. Census, have tended to make us think of the Internet as only a source of data rather than as a platform to build trees together.  Some people are disappointed not to find more information about their own families in the various collaborative trees.  When they see a tree that is incomplete, without sources, or lacking the answers they seek, they object and look elsewhere.  This misses the point, I think.  Genealogy is about the tree and the relationships we all have to one another.  Although by now we have learned not to believe FTDNA and 23andMe when they predict that we’re second cousins with another Jew in their database, we can be certain that there is a connection somewhere, perhaps lying just a few generations beyond where the records stop.

Collaborative trees are not a substitute for records research; they are the way to structure the results of that research so that it is available for others to build on.  This is how knowledge and science advance, with one person working off of and improving the work of another.  Without collaborative genealogy, we will all be limited in our focus, able to see only the relatively small web of relationships that we work on by ourselves, and never seeing the majesty of the larger web that includes us all.

Harvard News 6/1/83–Editorial – AN EDUCATIONAL CRISIS?

By E. Randol Schoenberg, Editor-in-Chief

Time Magazine began its report on the decline of educational achievement in the U.S. with these words from a 36 page document issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, “Our nation is at risk. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.” These are strong words for the government to use while it calls the massive buildup of nuclear weapons “a necessary risk” and a nuclear war “survivable.” Obviously, there must be a big problem with our educational system.

During the Cum Laude Induction ceremony, the distinguished guest speaker, Mr. Leroy Barnes, again warned us about declining achievement. He said that our generation is not as competitive as his was, and that we would have to push ourselves harder because our classmates wouldn’t be able to. The problem must be getting serious.

Unfortunately, I found no proof of any decline in achievement at Harvard. Too bad for Mr. Barnes that he was directing his talk to a senior class with a record shattering 25% of the class in the top one half percent in the country. Isn’t it ironic also, that as Harvard is building a reputation for academic excellence, we are told that the rest of the academic world is crumbling. But it is reassuring to find that the logical basis for this hue and cry over the decline and fall of academia in the U.S. is, to say the least, shaky.

The statistic that is used over and over again was printed in Time, “From 1963 to 1980, the average scores on Scholastic Aptitude Tests fell more than 50 points in verbal skills and 36 points in math.” A person needs only to look as far as his home encyclopedia to find an explanation for this decline. According to my 1976 edition of the World Book, the percentage of Americans who have had at least four years of high school has risen from 43% in 1963 to 60% in 1973 with a trend for equal increases in the last ten years. It is logical to infer from this that there has been a substantial increase in the number of students taking the SAT. Today, there are people graduating from high school and going to college who would not have in 1963. But it shows an improvement in education, rather than a decline, that more people (17% more in 1973) are finishing high school. And the increase more than accounts for the decline in test scores.

Unfortunately, all that the statistics do show is that educational opportunity has risen faster than educational quality. There are people going to college today who are not as prepared as those in 1963. But, as usual, people cry that the horse is dying because it can’t carry a big load as fast as he could carry a small one. The answer is not to make the horse work longer hours or to punish it for going too slowly. The answer is to get more horses.

I am for better training and pay for teachers and increased citizen involvement to get more money for education, two changes recommended by the National Commission on excellence in education. But the other three reforms, stiffer state and local high school graduation requirements, higher achievement standards, and more time devoted to learning basics, serve only to soothe the consequences rather than to solve the causes of a societal disease. The problem is that education is a low priority in state and local government and therefore does not receive necessary funds.

Stiffer graduation requirements and higher achievement standards cannot be met without first mending the system that puts out people who cannot meet the requirements and standards. The Back-to-Basics movement is a negative one. It assumes that reading, writing, and arithmetic are all a person needs to be “educated.” It frowns upon the fine arts and other courses that related to functioning in the real world—driver’s education, physical education, sex education, psychology, and any other courses that one might consider an “elective.” Back-to-Basics also requires longer school hours and longer terms to achieve its goals. Obviously, this requires more money, money that should be used to repair and improve the present system rather than to expand it.

There are some beneficial aspects to the reforms that I have condemned. However, none can be effective at all if programs to increase teacher pay and training and to encourage citizen involvement (i.e. lobbying for more money) are not implemented. Such programs are essential for further reform to work. We cannot expect more from our schools without putting more into them.

To students at Harvard, this entire argument may seem somewhat irrelevant. We go to a private school and these problems exist only in the public schools. But we should take an interest and feel responsible for the future of our country on which the products our schools depends. As many spokesmen for the government have said, because of the dire situation that exists in our schools “our nation is at risk.” If our goal in this country is to produce a greater number of educated people than in the past, then we must realize our priorities. We cannot be selfish and stay ignorant to the severe test which our school system is now undergoing, for our nation depends on everyone to improve the situation.

“Change of air urgently recommended.”  Those were the words my great-uncle Rudi Kolisch sent by telegram from Florence to my grandparents Arnold and Trude Schoenberg in Berlin on May 16, 1933.   That evening they packed a suitcase, boarded a train to Paris, and never returned.

In a way, by being early targets of the Nazis, my grandparents turned out to be some of the lucky ones.  They escaped while escape was still possible.  But for those who stayed behind, the routes of departure soon closed.  My grandfather’s brother Heinrich, an opera singer, died in Salzburg from injuries suffered in the custody of the Gestapo.  His sister Ottilie managed to survive the war in Berlin, protected by a non-Jewish partner, but her daughter Inge and her husband were shot by SS as they fled their hiding places during the fire-bombing of Dresden near the end of the war.  My grandfather’s first cousin Arthur, an engineer who directed the Munich electric company, and his wife Eva died in Theresienstadt.  Their daughter Lotte was killed in Jasenovac, the Croatian concentration camp.  This was the sad fate of those who were left behind.

When my grandfather fled from Berlin to Paris in 1933, he immediately met with Zionist leaders, including the visiting Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leader of American Jewry, to alert them to the perils facing Jews in Germany.  In large part his appeals fell on deaf ears. Foregoing an invitation to attend the Zionist Congress in Prague, my grandfather came to America in the fall of 1933, and gave speeches at Jewish organizations about the situation in Germany.  For the next five years, he drafted numerous letters, essays and speeches warning of the calamity that was about to befall the Jews of Europe.  This culminated in a lengthy essay he entitled “ A Four Point Program for Jewry,” completed in Los Angeles in October 1938, just days before the infamous Kristallnacht.

After largely ignoring the 100th anniversary in 2012 of the composition of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, the Los Angeles music community is about to celebrate the 100th year of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in typical a-historical fashion.  Breathlessly announcing the upcoming festivities, art critic Edward Goldman writes on the kcrw art talk page:

Exactly one hundred years ago, a riot broke out among the Parisian sophisticates attending the premiere performance by the Ballets Russes of Le Sacre du printemps, otherwise known as “The Rite of Spring.” Since then, the names of its composer, Igor Stravinsky; impresario, Sergei Diaghilev; and choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky have become synonymous with the birth of 20th century modern culture.

I suppose if one only looked to France, and ignored Austria and Germany, one might consider only Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Nijinsky’s achievement “synonymous with the birth of 20th century modern culture.”  Of course, the Rite‘s premiere on May 29, 1913 came a bit too late for that honor.

I would argue that the Munich premiere of Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano, Op. 11 on January 2, 1911, which gave rise the next day to Kandinsky’s Impressions III (Concert), holds a greater claim to the title.

I’ve often wondered if anyone has explored whether the rioting in Paris at the Rite‘s first performance on May 29, 1913 might have been influenced by news reports of the huge riot that took place at the famous Skandalkonzert conducted by Schoenberg in Vienna two months earlier, on March 31, 1913.  At that orchestral concert at the Vienna Konzertverein, fistfights broke out during the performance of Alban Berg’s Altenberglieder and the concert had to be stopped.  How was the Vienna riot reported in Paris?

Das nächste Wiener Schönberg-Konzert. Karikatur in Die Zeit vom 6. April 1913

In the Supplement to Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective, he includes the following review published in Paris-Midi on May 29, 1913, the day of the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite:

Yesterday’s concert merits our attention for historic reasons.  It was indeed on May 28, 1913, at about ten o’clock in the evening that musical cubism made its appearance in the fair city of Paris.  By singular irony of fate, it was in the venerable hall of the Conservatoire, the temple of all tradition, that this revelation took place.  The Société Musicale Indépendante presented a concert there offering to its habitués the first performance of three piano pieces by Arnold Schoenberg.  This composer hails from Vienna, preceded by an intriguing reputation.  Every performance of one of his works in Austria and Germany has provoked disorders, police intervention, transportation of the wounded to the hospital and of the dead bodies to the morgue.  At the sound of the last chord the listeners would come to blows, and music lovers strewn on the floor would be picked up in bunches.  So we awaited with impatience the first contact of this explosive art with French sensibilities, and the organizers had provided stretchers and mobilized ambulance drivers to clear the hall after the deflagration.  But all expectations were deceived.  The pianist E. R Schmitz, who was assigned the task of igniting the fuse, could accomplish his dangerous exercise in perfect silence.  True, there were some uncomfortable smiles, some anguished sighs, some stifled groans, but no scandal erupted.  Arnold Schoenberg would not believe it!  The French public has resigned itself to the fact that music eludes it and has renounced public protests. . . .  And we are appalled by the speed with which musical conceptions replace each other, overtake each other and destroy each other.  Composers like Debussy and Ravel could not preserve for more than a year or two their revolutionary label and they are already relegated to the retrograde group even before they have succeeded in making themselves comprehensible to the crowd!  It is, alas, in music that new stars rapidly become old moons!

Has anyone researched how these, and perhaps other Paris newspaper reviews, might have precipitated the riot at the Rite?

Announced by his grandmother Karen Burberry (Greissle) on Facebook (of course!), we learned today of the birth of Ryan to parents Eric and Jennifer Young.  Ryan is the first great-great-great grandchild of Arnold Schoenberg.  Congratulations to the proud parents!

Since my previous posting about the missing Mahler photo, there have been two separate articles by Dan Wakin in the New York Times.  The first article on October 10, 2012, accurately described the facts we had developed.  Then the man who discovered the photo, Cliff Fraser, decided to speak to Dan Wakin, resulting in a second article on October 17, 2012 that only added further confusion and obfuscation.

According to his own family, Cliff is a bit of a shady character, so anything he says has to be taken with a grain of salt.  He apparently sent Dan Wakin a copy of a sworn statement signed by his grandmother, Rene Fraser, stating that she “saw her husband, Abraham Fraser, receive the Mahler photo as a gift from his teacher, the composer Josef Schmid, in Brooklyn before the family moved to California in 1958.”  This appears to me to be very likely a fabrication by Cliff.  Cliff refused to send us a copy of his grandmother’s statement, and even blacked out the name of the alleged notary and witnesses on the copy sent to the New York Times.  His grandmother is, conveniently, “too elderly to be interviewed,” according to Cliff.  Besides the difficulty of explaining how the photo went from the Schoenberg home in Brentwood, where my aunt Nuria specifically recalls seeing it in my grandfather’s study, to the Berg pupil Josef Schmid in Brooklyn, now Cliff has to explain why on earth the conductor Schmid would give this treasured Mahler autograph to his completely undistinguished pupil Abraham Fraser.  Cliff isn’t helping himself by inventing a story and putting words into his elderly grandmother’s mouth.

More likely is that Abraham Fraser picked up the photo from the autograph dealer in Long Beach that his son remembers him frequenting.  We’re still trying to identify the name of that dealer.

Wakin’s second article also misleadingly suggested that the Schoenberg family “first offered to buy the picture.”  That was untrue.  At one point, my uncle Lawrence Schoenberg wrote to Cliff, “Are you considering selling the photograph?  If so, we would be interested.”  That is not an “offer,” but rather an inquiry, attempting to determine what Cliff’s intentions were.  Cliff admits that he responded by offering to sell the photo for $350,000, “but said in the interview that that was a wildly inflated amount to scare them off.”

Cliff subsequently offered the photo for $100,000 to a dealer, as you can read on Bill Ecker’s blog.  Since Cliff’s story is that he found the photo in his grandmother’s house, one has to wonder on what authority he is offering to sell the photo.  Is he trying to steal it from his grandmother, or has she authorized him to sell it on her behalf?

As the hunt for more evidence goes on, we continue to uncover more interesting clues.  Here is a photo of Mathilde Schönberg, taken in Berlin, with the Mahler photo in the background.

Additionally, the Alma Mahler – Arnold Schoenberg correspondence has just been published by Haide Tenner (“Ich möchte so lange leben, als if Ihnen dankbar sein kann” Residenz Verlag 2012).  The book is filled with interesting details about their 50-year (platonic!) relationship. The one constant is Schoenberg’s adoration for Gustav Mahler.

To the New York Times, Cliff made some reference to the address card for Josef Schmid and the fact that it had Schmid’s New York address.  The card appears to have been updated by Richard Hoffmann, a cousin of my grandmother who became my grandfather’s assistant around 1948.  Not sure how this could be relevant.  Schmid had sent a number of letters and birthday greetings to Schoenberg over the years.  But there is no evidence that Schoenberg ever wrote to Schmid.  Probably he received a copy of the mimeographed 1949 letter Schoenberg sent out on his 75th birthday.