Genealogy and Jewish family research in Mecklenburg

The residents of Mecklenburg of Jewish descent or religion were often and early on the subject of isolated genealogical studies. Particularly distinguished in this regard was the last state rabbi of Mecklenburg before the Shoah, Dr. Siegfried Silberstein, who thus ensured that numerous family trees are still available today.
The Mecklenburg Jews have probably never been comprehensively studied as a genealogically related population group. The project Jews in Mecklenburg has therefore been collecting family trees and biographical data of persons who had a connection to Judaism in Mecklenburg in electronic form for years. The goal is to enable a more realistic and well-founded picture of the Jewish population of Mecklenburg. As sources, records from municipal and state archives, census registers, church books, Jewish soul books and registers, civil registry records, and not least private family trees and the accounts of Holocaust survivors have served and continue to serve.
A recording approaching numerical accuracy is not simple. It is difficult in part because in every Mecklenburg town in the 18th and early 19th centuries, alongside the officially registered Schutzjuden (protected Jews) and their families, there were also so-called foreign Jews who were unwanted by the sovereign authorities but nonetheless somehow made their way for years and were never registered due to their illegal residence. But additionally problematic for the overall survey are -- in some cases clearly -- erroneous or ideologically colored registers from the Nazi era that were later adopted unchecked in detail and remain the basis of more recent statements to this day.

According to oft-cited estimates, no more than about 3,500 persons of the Jewish faith lived at the same time after the resettlement of Jews in Mecklenburg. More precise surveys based on all available sources and cross-referenced with one another do not exist to this day, however.
At the present time, we too are not yet able to make a reliable statement on the Jewish population figure of Mecklenburg. According to our current state of research, however, over the generations since the resettlement, there were far more than 20,000 persons who were Jews, descended from them, or were at least related to them. As our current data holdings show, the Jewish population of Mecklenburg since their resettlement drew its roots, besides the German lands as a catchment area, primarily from the more easterly regions, such as Pomerania, Posen, Silesia, and Galicia. With the increased emigration overseas and migration from the mid-19th century, Mecklenburg itself then contributed to the growth of German major cities, above all Hamburg and Berlin. During this period, Mecklenburg additionally enriched the Jewish population in the Scandinavian countries in particular. Driven by the persecutions of National Socialism, Western countries, above all the USA and Great Britain, then took in the fleeing in the 1930s and 1940s. Descendants of the Mecklenburg Jews are therefore found today especially in the two aforementioned countries.

To view the Mecklenburg Jews of the modern era as a homogeneous genealogical group is, according to our available data, simply wrong. What is certain, however, is that the Jews in Mecklenburg were more closely related to one another than the rest of the Christian population here. The reason for this was solely the compulsion, prevailing in both Christian and Jewish families at first, to marry within one's own religion, and the more limited selection of Jewish life partners among the Jews compared to the Christian population. During this period, it was therefore not uncommon for life partners to have to be sought outside Mecklenburg. By the beginning of the 20th century at the latest, however, it is clearly evident that this religious pressure was gradually dissolving, also due to the increased assimilation and religious conversions or departures of the Mecklenburg Jews.

As exciting as genealogy is, every family researcher knows how painstaking the search for one's own ancestors can be. Missing church books, burned-down archives, destroyed records, and dead ends are familiar to every genealogist. Jewish family research, however, presents considerably greater difficulties: Since the vast majority of Jews in Mecklenburg, until the requirement of the Emancipation Edict of 1813 to adopt hereditary family names, used only patronymics alongside their first names for identification, the reconstruction of family structures based on the actually much further-reaching Jewish registers or soul books, insofar as they still exist, involves extraordinary effort and additionally requires much experience.
But the greatest obstacle to completing Jewish family trees is the past racial mania of the National Socialists. Beyond the denial of the Jewish history of Mecklenburg, the most profound problem is that those who could still have provided information about their ancestors were murdered, and thus stories of entire family branches were destroyed forever. Those fortunate enough to escape often had so little time and opportunity that family documents had to be left behind.
And another aspect of this era further complicates Jewish family research: Even "Mischlinge 2. Grades" (second-degree mixed race), as it was perfidiously termed in the Nuremberg Race Laws, had to reckon with at least reprisals. It is therefore not surprising that some denied or sought to conceal their Jewish ancestry, and thus the knowledge of Jewish descent among their descendants has simply been lost.

All the more important it is to save what can still be saved. Please help us with this! We are constantly searching for family tree data from Mecklenburg that have a connection to the local Jews.

By Gramenz, Jürgen / Ulmer, Sylvia (created: Dec 27, 2015)

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