Genealogists who deal with Eastern European Jewish records: what's the latest comment you've ever seen added to a pre-Holocaust vital record?
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For the uninitiated: vital records in Eastern Europe (at least the Jewish ones, with which I have experience) often are cross-referenced with sources/updates: marriage records will refer to birth records, birth records to death records, and so on.
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I'd seen early Soviet updates (1946?) to Galician records, but today's find beats that by far, in time and space...
Before finishing the thread my example is surpassed...
@Benignuman@cholentface My grandfather had a talmid who got a position in the small Frum community of Edmonton.
One day, he calls my grandfather for help: a local Muslim couple have come to him for help in removing a dybbuk. The dybbuk is Jewish, you see.
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@Benignuman@cholentface ...
My grandfather asks to speak to the dybbuk. (I don't remember if this was arranged later or if the couple was there.)
The woman gets on the phone, and begins to speak in a guttural voice in lousy Hebrew.
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@Benignuman@cholentface ...
A quick examination of the dybbuk's Jewish knowledge finds that it does not exceed what one would expect of a Palestinian woman who spent a reasonable amount of time in Jerusalem... which she was.
(Diagnosis: your dybbuk needs Rosetta. Not that he said that.)
Well, on the topic of rabbis and frocks, and Rav Shach's yahrtzeit...
There is a known controversy around the status of the traditional Litvish rabbinical garb, the frak, with regard to tzitzis, whether it counts as a four-cornered garment or not.
In modern times, it is usually considered pretentious to raise the question.
Anyways, a long-time Kolel student finally achieves the dream and is granted I minor rabbinical position. With the job comes the uniform: now he gets to wear a frak! But does it need tzitzis?
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He goes to consult Rav Shach.
"Hmm. You'll be wearing a frak now, you say... What's your position?"
"A Rosh Kolel" [not quite a rabbi or Rosh Yeshiva]
"Full day?"
"No, an evening Kolel" [a subprime position, to be sure]
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A propos today's #Jwitter discourse around the vagaries and disappointments of the rabbinate as a profession, here are two (hopefully somewhat encouraging) anecdotes:
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The rabbi of a shtetl was deposed from his position, and his friends, knowing what the job meant to him, came to comfort him.
"Don't worry," said he, "they can take everything away from me ... except for the מלפנים*."
*'formerly'
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(Sorry, that one assumes a knowledge of rabbinic signature styles...)
Sorry, misread the Geni tree: her husband, Stephen Lowey, is a descendant.
Specifically, his father, Henry Lowey (d. 1980) was a great-grandson of Elchanan Lowy of Tzehlim (Deutschkreutz), the Or Chadash's grandson. geni.com/people/Henry-L…
Medical and medical-adjacent gentlepeople, please help me:
A friend just cited me their Covid-vax-hesitant doc's statistic that nearly 3K have died in the US after taking the vaccine. There are obvious problems with the relevance of this stat, but where does this come from?