Jewish families seeking Polish roots

Jewish families of Polish background have been given various effective ways to discover more about their antecedents.

Addressing an April 2 genealogy open day by the Australian Society of Polish Jews and their Descendants (ASPJ), Michal Majewski, a historian and graduate of the Institute of History at the University of Warsaw, told his audience at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum of a multitude of search resources.

Majewski is COO of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland (AJHP), which houses the acclaimed Ringelblum Archive, detailing heroic Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto 80 years ago.

AJHP is closely tied to Warsaw’s POLIN Museum, which showcases 1000 years of Polish Jewish history before the Holocaust, he noted. The POLIN Museum’s Virtual Shtetl is a website which is searchable by town of origin.

With more than one million Polish Jews having perished in the Treblinka concentration camp, the Foundation for the Memory of Treblinka has established a victims’ index.

Foundation ‘Forgotten’ is a project in which 186 unmarked Jewish graves have been located in the village of Poreba Srednia, with townspeople working to discover and mark the graves with wooden matzevot (headstones). The process is “a starting point for discussion and commemoration”, said Majewski.

At the national level, the Foundation for the Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries has the largest database of Jewish gravestones in Poland.

Majewski said the Polish Declarations of Admiration and Friendship for the United States, an initiative from 1926, carried the signatures of 5.5 million Polish schoolchildren. It has been computerised and cross-indexed as a searchable database of prewar Poles.

ASPJ’s Andrew Rajcher related how the AJHP helped him discover Polish descendants. ASPJ president Ezra May introduced Patrick Ferry, assistant state manager at the National Archives of Australia, who described the B4064 database, comprising applications to bring family members and friends to Australia in 1945-46.

When the National Archives discovered the applications were overwhelmingly from Jewish refugees living in Australia from the prewar period, it partnered with the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation to analyse the database, which contained some 1400 applications, more than half of them relating to Jewish survivors in Poland after the war, said Ferry.