Holocaust Education

We currently have 2 projects to commemorate the Holocaust.

We have teamed up with a movie production company which is engaged in making a full length feature film about the life of our world-famous cantor, Moshe Kraus, who died one year ago at the age of 101. Professionally, he led the services in major synagogues all over the world, starting from the age of 16 in pre-war Eastern Europe. His last position was in Ottawa; and for the last 20 years of his life he was a valued member of our synagogue. 

The movie is being based on his autobiography which tells the story of his life from pre-war Hungary through the dark days the Holocaust to becoming the post-war Chief Cantor of the IDF in Israel and then occupying Chief cantor positions all over the world. Cantor Kraus was devoted to Holocaust education and spoke in vivid terms to audiences of all ages, to make sure that the Holocaust would never be forgotten. A movie would go a long way to accomplishing this goal. Especially these days, when anti-Semitism has resurfaced, the lessons of the Holocaust must be reinforced.

As part of our mandate to promote Holocaust education we are raising funds in order to be able to hire world-class script writers and to team up with movie producers. All donations are tax-deductible. For citizens of the US, we will direct you to our sister organization in the US for US tax receipts. We can also arrange for Israeli tax receipts.

The hearts of Jews, who are remnants of families almost entirely destroyed during the Holocaust, ache to find relatives who might have survived. It is generally a futile search for them because most were murdered; but survivors’ children are also tragically often unaware for whom they are searching. This is because survivors most often refuse to talk about their traumatic past, thereby depriving their children of family information. Therefore, creating family charts based on archival research, would be a great benefit to identifying relatives. Cousins, or even second cousins, are easily identified this way. Many of our synagogue members have roots in Poland and Ukraine. We happen to have a lot of expertise in the Jewish genealogical history of families originating from towns in the Polish province of Kielce. One of them is Opatow.

The name of our synagogue derives, in part, from the 19th century Chassidic Rabbi of the town of Opatow, known by the name of his famous book “Ohev Yisroel”. Therefore, we know a lot about the history of the families originating from that town, and have succeeded in several cases to reunite lost relatives from there.

Our main area of expertise lies in the Polish town of Pinczow. We own the intellectual property for the database of extracts of birth, marriage and death records of families living in Pinczow between 1700 and 1912. Again, as part of our mandate to promote Holocaust education and, in particular Holocaust-based family reunification, we are raising funds in order to publish a 5,000 page e-book containing charts of all 2,000 families of Jews who ever lived in Pinczow from ca 1700 to 1912. It will also include a socio-historical history of the Jews of Pinczow.

The Facebook group, Jews from Pinczow has attracted over 140 members. One of the reasons for the existence of this group is to enable us to, at least, memorialize our family and our ancestors. This is not just a hobby.  We are going beyond just charting names and relationships. The Holocaust memorial organization, Yad VaShem, describes one of its missions most admirably by recalling a single sentence from the 1941 entry in the diary of a particular Holocaust victim: 

“I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger.”

One of Yad Vashem’s projects is, therefore, to commemorate individual Holocaust victims by collecting their histories. That works if the victims had immediate surviving family who could make a report. This was not always the case. Our project is an opportunity to not only talk about the David Bergers of the Holocaust, but to also say exactly who they were and who their ancestors and cousins were and their professional lives and contributions to society.

Among the more than 140 Facebook group members, we have helped 3 of them to figure out who they are in the grand scheme of things. They were struggling with a sense of loss, and they ached for knowledge of their grandparents, aunts, uncles and first-cousins etc. whom they never knew because they were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. They did not even have pre-war family photos. We succeeded in finding 2nd cousins about whom they were previously oblivious, purely via our genealogy project. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Publishing an entire book on the subject will help many more families.

As our first Holocaust-reunion project, we have chosen Pinczow because of the almost comprehensive nature of the database and because Pinczowers tended to marry other Pinczowers. This results in the genealogical history of an entire town, occupying about 5,000 pages of charts, and much more when we include text. As far as we are aware, this has never before been attempted for any other Polish town; and our work would serve as a model for others. The project is well on its way. And we have published an academic paper on the subject. But the immensity of the work requires several thousand hours of mostly data input; and this is obviously expensive. We therefore solicit donations for this most important project. One can get charitable tax receipts for use in Canada, the US, and Israel.  An academic paper describing the methodology of a particularly tricky part of the research is available below.

The final book will be available for sale on a cost-recovery basis. Major contributors will receive a copy for free.