EXCERPTS
Vilnius (AFP) - After seven decades holed up in a Catholic church basement in the Lithuanian capital, thousands of Yiddish manuscripts that survived the Holocaust and Stalin's anti-Jewish onslaught are finally seeing the light of day. ...
With brushes, erasers and glue, archivists are now hard at work to prepare them for digitizing, in both Vilnius and at the New York-base YIVO Institute for Jewish Research that has spearheaded the bid to reunite the "lost" collection.
The aim is to put the more than one million manuscripts online in a digital archive highlighting pre-war Jewish life in Eastern Europe. It is expected to take seven years.
"During the 1920s and 1930s, all these materials were together here in Vilnius. They constituted a single whole that was torn apart first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets," Jonathan Brent, the institute's executive director, told AFP in a telephone interview from New York. *****
A Note from Ancestry Worship Genealogy
Throughout central and eastern Europe where the Catholic church dominated, records were kept by priests, who were sometimes the only people who could read and write in the area, and physically kept in the churches, which were often the sturdiest structures made of stone when most houses were made of wood. In the larger cities where there were large Jewish or other religious congregations the Rabbis sometimes kept records, but I've seen Catholic church records that include people of other faiths - not just mixed marriages.
Records kept by Jewish people will include some interesting information that are not kept by other religions such as WHO THE MIDWIFE WAS and WHO PERFORMED A CIRCUMCISM and the mother's maiden name is always recorded, where as in many Catholic - Latin records I have found many baptisms that only gave the father's name.
