To: @PIKHOLZ.PML Subject: Genealogy #28 Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 20:12:24 +0200 Dear Pikholz Project Participants, Observers and Others, I hope the new year is treating you all well. Mazal tov on the births of Ethan Larson Hyman (the STEVE family - his grandfather is on this mailing list), Luna Berit Hagmayer-Pickholz (the YITZHAK family - her father and grandfather are on this mailing list) and Chana Yedidyah (the IF1 and IF2 families, here in Israel). Condolences to the families of Dorothy Siegel Friedheim (the BREZDOWICZ family - her daughter is new to this mailing list) and Margit Pickholz (the VIENNA family). Some of these congratulations and condolences are several months old, but I can only report what people tell me. (There is a hint in there, in case anyone missed it.) We have several new Pikholz descendants on this mailing - from both North and South America and from South Africa. The web site has additional grave photographs from Tablada Cemetery in Buenos Aires and from seven cemeteries here in Israel. A couple of years ago, we learned of Peter Pickholz, a twenty-five year old soldier in the Austrian army who died in Vienna in 1916. I recently contacted the Austrian military archives and learned that Peter was the son of a Brandes-Pikholz marriage and as such we can place him in the IRENE family (which almost surely includes the BARNEY family). The Pikholz-Brandes couple had children around 1890 - the early and late births in Tarnopol. But Peter, in the middle, was born in Lwow (Lemberg) so apparently they lived there for a few years. Eventually some of this family lived in Vienna and were killed by the Nazis in Maly Trostinez and Theresienstadt. About three months ago, Keith found an Italian website listing sixty- two Jews who were deported to camps in 1943. This list included a woman named Augusta Pickholz, born in 1901 in Tarnopol. We identified this woman as the daughter of Meir Pickholz - both he and his wife died in Vienna when Gusta was a teenager. However we don't know anything about Meir. At a visit to the Central Zionist archives a few weeks ago, I found that this same Gusta, living in Salerno Italy, wrote to the Jewish Agency in 1938 apparently trying to immigrate to Israel. Her letter and the answer are both in German and I hope to get them translated in the near future. The story behind this should be interesting, aside from the genealogy. Another file in the same archives referred to Stryjer Chaya Pickholz, who later became a well-known English teacher in Tel-Aviv. This file consisted of a 1927 letter from the Labor Zionists of Stryj saying that Chaya had previously been in Israel and was now in Poland saying bad things about the Jewish settlement in Israel "and its leadership" and should not be permitted to return. This was apparently due to her having the wrong political affiliations, a malady that continued to afflict the Zionist psyche for many decades thereafter. What is interesting is that people here who knew her (including a niece) tell me that she was very much part of the establishment and certainly had no reputation as a political "troublemaker." One other item of interest from my visit to the Central Zionist Archives. There was a 1962 letter from Leo W. Pickholz of 73 West 82nd Street in New York, looking for his sister Amalia (Mali) who had last been seen in Brasov Rumania. This was of interest because we have three other references to Leo. One was his entry into the US in 1923, showing that he had been born (as "Wolf Pikholz") in 1892 in Kopicienice and his parents Lea Pikholz and Berl Pfeffer were living in Vienna. One was his application for a Social Security card with a NY address in 1963. Finally a reference in the SocSec Death Index in 1971. New York claims to have no death certifi- cate nor can we find him in any NY area cemetery. We don't know if he was married or had children. So now we know he had a sister in Rumania and we have a 1962 NY address. A new contact in the VIENNA family tells us about some Stricks/Stryks descendants in that family, including a tenor in the Viennese opera and the synagogue choir. One of the more curious discoveries of the last few months is a non- Jewish Pikolcz family from the Hungarian town of Visk, now on the Ukranian side of the Rumanian border. Our contact on this is the husband of a Pikolcz descendant in Arizona. Apparently this family had a very long history and might have been minor nobility, or at least landowners. Visk is not all that far from East Galicia and I am considering the possibility that our Jewish Pikholz families (or some of them) might have been tenants of these non-Jewish Pikolcz in the late 1700's and when they had to take surnames, may have taken the landowners surname. Checking this possibility out might be difficult - I have made some preliminary inquiries about land records from that period in that Hungarian county. Steve is partly responsible for making this contact. I have some open questions out there for some of you and I hope that some results will come in soon. Some of these are family questions and others are "errands." The Jewish Records Index (JRI) project is moving along. The most recent town of interest to us that has become available is Mikulince, which has a number of records pertinent to the RITA family. I'd like to think we will be able to order these records. The next towns of interest to us to be indexed will be Zurawno (a Rozdol branch), Kopicienice and a few of minor interest, followed by Rozdol. In the meantime, we still have a few Skalat-area records that we need to finance. We have worked out a payment arrangement with the AGAD archives, whereby Jacob Laor makes the transfers to them. So anyone who can participate in financing records should please send checks to his order and send to him at Arazim 11, Kefar Sava 44456, ISRAEL. Jacob is also investigating the possibility of a search for Pikholz and other surnames in the Lwow and Tarnopol archives. The idea here is that if we get other researchers involved, we can search for them and us and save search money (which we don't have much of anyway!). That's about it for now. More as it happens. Israel P.