European Emigration
European Emigration Documents
citing Lyakhovichi Residence
Researched, Indexed, and Arranged by Deborah Glassman, copyright 2005
All records relating to migration and immigration can be found at the Complete Lyakhovichi Records Catalog in the tab named Migration Records (Compiled).
The Hamburg lists were created by the steamship companies in a de facto government role. They were handwritten manifests which specified the surname, the name, the occupation, and last residence of each head of family and the relationship to that head of family of all others in the group. They listed the name of the ship, the name of the captain, and the ports of departure and call of the ship. In the list that follows for Baranovichi, there were no adults born in Baranovichi, a railroad boom town whose construction proceeded from the 1870s through 1890s, so those whose last residence was Baranovichi, were born elsewhere and a sizable number were born in Lyakhovichi. There was more than one Baranowicze and Baranovichi in the Russian Empire, including one today in Poland, and "our Baranovichi," which is today in Belarus. Sometimes the records will specify "Baranovichi, Minsk," but more often there is no elaboration, and further investigation will be necessary in other documents, to make a judgement. I have eliminated some emigrants who were clearly not members of the Jewish community from whichever Baranovichi they came.
What else might be included in a page dedicated to European Emigration Records of Lyakhovichi residents?
Help us find the Libau Records! Extract some of the Hango records of our residents! Let us know what search procedures would turn up transit records in European communities that we have not yet discussed. Or we could combine those records where someone from Lyakhovichi settled in another European community. France had a rigorous set of documentation requirements for the hundreds of thousands of "Russians" and Poles that settled in the French nation between the World Wars. What else can you suggest? We also could tackle arrival records, barely broached today. What suggestions can you offer for finding the records of Argentinian ports named in these Hamburg records? How about Havana, Cuba? South Africa. A collaborative site means that we draw on a knowledge base much larger than any one small group of researchers.
Records of Lyakhovichi people in the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO)
The Records of the Jewish Territorial Organization in Kiev Russia
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The enlarged image is from a page in the ITO archives from which this half-page was extracted. Winograd is easy to find in the alphabetical listing.
This organization hired 100 agents to spread across the Jewish Pale of Settlement, looking for healthy young men to emigrate to the western United States. Israel Winogrod of Lyakhovichi, Minsk Gubernia, shows up in their register and in the database of other files. The register is held in Ukraina's State Historical Archives in Kiev and microfilm are owned by the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. The University of Haifa (Israel) has created a searchable database containing 5,000 names, including 17 year old Israel Winogrod.
The Galveston Plan, the primary settlement activity of the Jewish Territorial Organization, was initiated by Israel Zangwill in London and Jacob Schiff in the United States to bring strong productive young Jewish men to a part of the United States off the Eastern seaboard. Jacob Schiff saw it as a way to aid Russian Jews and build a strong Jewish-American citizenry, Israel Zangwill saw it as a way to build a force that could support an eventual Jewish state, somewhere. The two men together, aided around ten thousand immigrants to move from Russia to the central and western United States (though many eventually gravitated back to the NYC area.)
Many such plans failed at the organizational level, but Jacob Schiff was a businessman who made solid plans. There would be three departments of responsibility in the three places of activity and each would function somewhat independently. The places were Kiev for recruitment, Bremen for embarkation, and Galveston for debarking. The arrangement lasted until just before World War I, when the separate agendas of the founders, and the state of a world about to go to war, ended the experiment. The departments had been called:
Kiev - officially the Jewish Emigration Bureau, unofficially just the Kiev bureau. Headed by Max Mandelstamm and secretary David Jochelmann. Their mission was to recruit the best candidates and get them from Russia to Bremen.
Bremen - operated by the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden (Relief Organization of German Jews) managed by Dr. Paul Nathan. Their mission was to aid the emigrants arriving in Bremen, house and care for them until embarkation, and get them safely on board.
Galveston - Jewish Immigrants Information Bureau under Morris Waldman. Waldman's group received them, gave them money, and sent them to communities in the western part of the United States. This department continued a separate existence dealing with immigrants in the western states and aid to previous immigrants, through 1920. Their records are at the American Jewish Historical Society and there is a finding guide on-line.
There are a number of published sources available on the Galveston Immigration. See Lyakhovichi Immigrants entering the US through ports other than NYC.
Lyakhovichi train on Baranovichi Luniniec line c.1910
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This train would have rolled through Lyakhovichi on a regular basis, moving as it did on the Luninets-to-Baranovichi line before WWI. Most emigrations from Lyakhovichi and the other Jewish communities of Belarus, started at the local train station, or following a wagon trip to nearby Baranovichi, which was a junction for multiple lines. The travelers made their way north to Liepaja (Libau) where they stayed on Russian trains right into the port or they moved west to Brest-Litovsk, where you could transfer to the main European lines. Imperial Russia had created an effective gateway to unapproved rail entry, the gauge of the train track was not the same as in the rest of Europe and Brest-Litovsk was where you could portage to trains whose line ended there.