| BELCHATOW (51° 22’N /19°
23’E) is 26.7 miles (50 km) south of Lodz and 13 miles west of Piotrkow Trybunalski
in the district of Piotrkow, Lodz Province. Nearby towns and villages include: Grocholice
(2.4 miles SSW), Kamiensk (11.5 miles SSE), Szcercow (11.7 miles W), Rozprza (11.7 miles
ESE), Piotrkow Trybunalski (13.1 miles E), Sulmierzyce (14.9 miles SSW), and Tuszyn (17.6
miles NNE), Lask (18.4 miles NW) Widawa (19.2 mles WNW), Pabience (20.7 miles N) and
Radomsko (20.9 miles S). If your family lived in any of these places, it’s possible
some of their records are in the Belchatow Jewish civil record registers. Jews first
settled in Belchatow in 1764. By 1939, six thousand Jews, more than 50% of the population,
made it their home. Many were engaged in the textile industry. During the Holocaust, most
of the Jews in Belchatow were sent to the Lodz ghetto and then deported to the death camp
at Chelmno. The Jewish community did not rebuild after the war. (Source: Encyclopedia
Judaica, Volume 4).
The Belchatow Shtetl CO-OP finished indexing the Jewish vital records for Jewish Records Indexing – Poland utilizing the microfilms in the
LDS (Mormon) collection.
Indices for the years 1809-1888 have been indexed and are available for searching at
the JRI-Poland web site. The years from 1868-1874 were put onto
spreadsheets by previous volunteers and are also available for research on JRI-Poland. Our
international Shtetl CO-OP team is made up of: Dr. Lester Bilsky (Arkansas, USA), Pawel
Brunon Dorman (Warsaw, Poland), Miriam S. Deitcher (Ohio, USA), Alan
Frishman (New York, USA), Jenny Jackson (Victoria, Australia), Roni Seibel
Liebowitz, Coordinator (New York, USA), and Steve Rabinowitz, MD (New York,
USA).
We are very excited to announce that through the PSA/JRI-Poland project, indices for
years 1889-1899 are also now included on the database. These will be updated as additional
indexes for more current years become available in the future. If you have family from
Belchatow or a nearby shtetl, please consider making
a financial contribution to this project. See the JRI-Poland website for information on
how to make your contribution. The donations will also be used to hire people who can
extract those brides names writtten in Cyrillic that are missing from the original Polish
indexes. These people will have to look at the records themselves to extract the names.
To learn more about the Belchatow Shtetl CO-OP and the PSA/JRI-Poland project, contact
Roni Seibel Liebowitz. |
