Records of Ukrainian Jewish Immigrants
In their Destination Countries
Supplying Ukrainian Birthplaces and Last Residences
by Deborah G. Glassman,
copyright October 2005
The greatest of the Talmudic Rabbis, Rabbi Hillel, wanted to know the transmitted tradition for carrying slaughter knives for the major holidays in Jerusalem which required sacrifice but forbade carrying on the Sabbaths while traveling to the sacrifice. No such ruling could be found in the rabbi-to-rabbi teaching of the different schools which relied on the memories and transmitted teachings of one generation to the next to pass the teachings which had been passed from Moses to Joshua and down through the generations of teaching chains cited in Pirke Avoth. Yet clearly such a ruling had made a provision for this, in the past.
Hillel, looked to the actual practice of the people of the land. He found that before the sheep were herded from their home fields, the shephard would attach the knife to the sheep’s collar. When asked why they did it that way, they answered, “our fathers did it this way so they would not transgress the law.” From the knowledge-base of the Jewish people, Hillel was able to transmit the ruling to the next generation.
We need to know what you know. You have been tracing your families and visiting archives and writing to the holders of your parents and grandparents immigration, death, and marriage records. You go to the cemeteries and make sure that your grandparents graves are maintained. Tell us what you have learned. If you or they lived in the many nations of South America, Africa, or Asia, in which Ukrainian Jews made their homes, we currently have very little information about the records of your community. If they made their way to another European country, we often do not know what kind of records were created there. Every family tree has many branches and those of our ancestors living in the Ukraine who emigrated often had cousins who chose different destination points. One child emigrated to the United States, a second to Argentina. A cousin went to Canada, another to South Africa. The grandparents passed down stories about kinsmen in Mexico, Cuba, and England. Help us find out in what records an immigrant from our communities might have appeared. As some of these records appear on-line or on microfilm accessible around the world, we may be able to make indices of materials that name Ukrainian or Russian Empire immigrants. Even where the information can initially only be of benefit to the family, example the names of the parents of the subject, we may eventually be able to combine that with other information to increase our general knowledge base. But the Ukraine SIG wants to know about records that name particular Ukrainian towns of birth and last residence. Examples of such records including Manifests, Ticket Receipts, Visas, Consular Letters, Charitable Assoication Letters, and some of the gravestones with birthplaces that we will of course also upload to
JOWBR, will be posted here, to best inform the rest of us on what to look for and where to search. National Identity Cards, a census record, a voter's registration, a death certificate that shows birthplace - we can post each kind of example from each country and if they changed in different time periods, we will show that too. Please share the documentation that you have!
In October of 2005, I begin by listing the information obtained on Brazil but will add each of the countries whose information you supply or augment.
Ukrainian Jewish Immigrants in Brazil
Ship leaving Santos, Brazil in 1905
This ship was a regular on the transAtlantic run to Santos Brazil.
Santos was the port of Sao Paulo and over 2 and a half million immigrants passed through its harbor in a hundred years.There were also ports at Vitória, Rio de Janeiro, Paranaguá, Florianópolis and Porto Alegre.
I have begun this project by writing just one letter and now invite the Membership to join me in the search for this information. I wrote to Eliana Aizim who had generously supplied photographs for five different pages on these project pages and asked "Can you help me learn a little about the records created in Brazil about immigrants? Does any archives or agency keep the immigration manifests? What kinds of documents might have named a resident's place of birth? Did the Jewish cemetery stones in Brazil list birthplaces or have photographs attached? Are there records in Brazil that you think would be of value to researchers of Jews from the Ukraine?" and Eliana generously supplied the following information which I have divided according to the categories above (and so rearranged her original letter).
“About Brazil, I only know of Rio de Janeiro. São Paulo has a much bigger community than Rio."
Cemeteries
“Here in Rio, there are three orthodox cemeteries connected to the Chevra
Kadisha. Many tombs have photos attached to them and some of them have the birthplace. This depends if the family know it, or if they want to put the information there. For example, in my grandfather´s tomb there is written
Lugansk, but in his wife´s there is no reference, probably because the family didn´t remember it.
There is also another cemetery that is known as being of German Jews. It isn´t connected to Chevra
Kadisha. It´s together with a Catholic cemetery. They put the tombs one over the other, that the other cemeteries don´t do. I don´t know what they write on the tombs or if there are pictures.
There is also an old and small cemetery, that is closed, that was only for the prostitutes, that were many in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. There´s a whole story about this, that I know quite a lot because my father tells me and I have read a book and also searched the Internet.”
Immigration
“The immigrants´ data are found at the Arquivo Nacional, in Rio. They gather information for all the country´s ports. People who live in any place of the world, except Rio de Janeiro, can write to the Arquivo Nacional (e-mail, fax or letter) to ask for data. They search and send the answer. People living in Rio have to go there personally.
In São Paulo there is the Museu da Imigração. Their documents are about the disembarkation of immigrants at the port of Santos (state of São Paulo), between the years of 1882 to 1978.“
I would like to remind you that in the state of Rio Grande do Sul there were about four agricultural colonies of Baron Hirsch. My great-grandparents Averbuchs and their children, and my great-granduncle and their children went there. Most of the people who went there were from Ukraine. In Argentina there was also such a colony. There are books written and material on the Internet about the colonies.”
Note from Deborah Glassman, web page creator
"At this date there are no cemeteries listed in JOWBR for Brazil. There is no general database for South America on JewishGen and no appearance among the American components of the JewishGen database. Your assistance could change those things."
We would like to find Volunteers in Brazil who could:
Take Digital Photos of Cemetery Stones for the JOWBR project that we could additionally process for birthplace data and photographs. Stored on JOWBR's site on JewishGen and linked from the Ukraine SIG, they would be a tremendous resource for those who right now only know that their grandfather had a brother who "went to South America."
Identify additional sources of data in Brazil on Ukrainian Jewish Immigrants (Residential and Business Directories? School Records? Landsmanschaften records?
Ascertain what indexes are available on the Immigration records, the Passport records, the Census Records, etc.
Make more suggestions on how to find out about the emigration to Brazil during the periods of the Russian Empire, of the Ukraine Republic and Polish Republic of the 1920s and 1930s, and of the Soviet Union.
Immigrants Hostel in San Paolo Brazil
from Wikipedia, our thanks to R. Sabbatini who supplied this picture via the terms of Wikipedia
Here is some information about immigration to Brazil found on the open-source
on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia:
This immigration profile of Brazil really started to change in the second half of the 19th century during the Empire era. Dom Pedro II, the ruling Brazilian monarch, was a learned and cosmopolitan man, who abhorred slavery (it was abolished by a imperial decree in 1888) and who thought that Brazil would only achieve progress by bringing in more European immigrants. He thus strongly encouraged immigration from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Middle East, Russia and other regions and countries which were exporting lots of their own people to the New World from 1860 on, due to the accumulation of political and economical crises in Europe. At the same time, Brazil's economy, which was eminently agrarian (coffee, cotton, tobacco, rubber and sugar cane being the main crops) at the time, needed able laborers once slavery of black people was stopped.
Since agriculture, industry and services sectors were developing quickly and strongly in the South and Southeast, these provinces (Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, São Paulo, Minas
Gerais, Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul) received the brunt of European immigration. Italians and Germans went mostly to the South; while Italians, Middle Easterners, Portuguese and Spaniards went to the Southeast. In a later wave, towards the beginning of the 20th century, Japan became also an important source of immigrants, who, in their majority, established themselves in São Paulo and
Paraná.
Brazil's receiving structure, legislation and settlement policies for immigrants were much less organized than in Canada and the United States at the time. Nevertheless, an Immigrant's Hostel
(Hospedaria dos Imigrantes) was built in 1886 in São Paulo, and quick admittance and recording routines for the hordes of immigrants arriving by ship at the seaports of
Vitória, Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Paranaguá, Florianópolis and Porto Alegre were implanted. The São Paulo site alone processed more thar 2,5 million immigrants in its almost 100 years of continuous operation. People of more than 70 different nationalities were recorded.
After the First World War, during and after the Second World War, three other waves of immigrants came to Brazil from Europe and Asia, on the wake of great disturbances caused by the wars, and Jewish immigrants also became important. In the second half of the 20th century, immigration to Brazil was greatly reduced, in part because checks on entrance of foreigners became more rigid, but also because immigration pressures decreased as wealth and political and economical stability increased in those countries which contributed mostly. Recent immigration was mainly constituted by Chinese and Koreans and, in a much smaller degree, by Argentines and other Latin America immigrants willing to escape from political oppression and economical suffering.
We want to provide similar data for those who came from cities and towns across the Ukraine to countries around the globe. Here are the first questions that we can begin by answering, others will undoubtedly come up as we learn more about the holes in our knowledge.
Cemetery Records (for adult immigrants who died within 30 years of immigration)
