Thousands of documents that were made available online 10/29/08 tell the tales of generosity of American Jewish citizens who supported the travels of Germans, Austrians and other Europeans during and after World War II.
The cards - known as Jewish Transmigration Bureau Deposit Cards - provided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and newly digitized, were part of 26 million Jewish historical documents compiled for the first time on a single Web site, Ancestry.com.
“It’s not only just genealogy,” said Gary Gibb, vice president of content for Ancestry.com, which houses the records. “These offer a story.”
In addition, several million documents, including 19th Century Polish birth, marriage and death certificates, Russian voter registration lists and Lithuanian census records, were supplied by JewishGen, a Web site that provides ancestral information and is affiliated with New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, said Warren Blatt, JewishGen’s managing director.
The records, including transcriptions of more than one million tombstones from 40 countries, took more than two decades to collect, translate and transcribe, he said.
While the compilation on Ancestry.com includes famous records such as Schindler’s List, the names of hundreds of Jews saved by a German businessman, Blatt said it’s difficult to choose which archive is the most meaningful. “The most important document,” he said, is one that names an individual’s ancestor.
The records will give Long Island’s large Jewish population the chance to better research family histories, which is encouraged in Hebrew school, said Rabbi Steven Moss of B’nai Israel Reform Temple in Oakdale. “We all are products of our past,” he said.
Many Jewish historical records were destroyed during the Holocaust, Moss said, making it difficult to build complete family trees. Ancestry.com plans to never charge for the Holocaust records on its Web site, which include ghetto hospital death records, a database of Auschwitz Forced Laborers and newspaper survivor lists, Gibb said.
“We just published all the records,” he said, “and now people need to find these stories.”
Related Link: JewishGen.org
BY CHRISTINA HERNANDEZ |christina.hernandez@newsday.com
