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Origins of Jewish Registers

Following is the explanation of the origins of registers of Jewish vital events (births, marriages, and deaths) and the ways in which they can be used by genealogical researchers.

The registers of vital events-births, marriages, and deaths for the Jewish population began in 1784 by decree of Austrian Emperor Joseph II. This decree ordered registers of Jewish births, marriages, and deaths to be kept in a precise format: a separate colunm for each category of information about the individual whose vital event was recorded.

The decree assigned Catholic priests the responsibility of creating the registers and ensuring that they were kept carefully. In order to guarantee standardized registration, preprinted forms were used. The decree also instructed Jewish registrars to maintain the same type of registers, but allowed them to adapt the colunms to categories used in the Jewish religion. In localities with rabbis, the rabbis were assigned responsibility for maintaining the registers; where Jewish families lived scattered in the countryside without an organized community or a rabbi of their own, the master record was to be kept by the rabbi of the closest Jewish community. An alternative option was for Jewish vital events to be recorded on the back pages of the Catholic parish registers by the local Catholic priest.

In 1787, authorities took steps to improve and standardize the master records of Jewish vital events. A new decree ordered that parish registers and circumcision registers were to be kept for the Jewish population in the German language, and all Jewish records were to include the official given names and family names assigned to every individual.

In practice, this meant that all Jews permitted to reside in the Czech Lands, by virtue of the so-called Familiant (licensed Jew) Law of 1726, were compelled to adopt family names. They and their families were to use these names henceforth in all formal activities, such as records in the vital event registers, visiting schools, contact with state or manorial authorities, lists of Jews, and so forth.

The relationship between the Jewish population and the state in the Czech Lands underwent a fundamental change in 1797 with the so-called "systemal patent." This decree outlined the rights and obligations of the Jewish population. For example, Jewish teachers were responsible for maintenance of Jewish vital registers. In localities with no Jewish schools, the responsibility fell on men appointed and sworn by the local manorial authorities. Catholic priests were responsible for checking the Jewish registers and for keeping duplicate registers of Jewish births, marriages, and deaths, so-called "control registers."

The years 1848-49 saw liberal uprisings (sometimes called "revolutions") throughout many parts of Europe, including the Czech lands. These events began the process of full emancipation of Czech Jewry and the abolition of all discriminatory laws against them that had existed up to that time. These changes are reflected in the master records of Jewish vital events. The registers kept by Jewish registrars were declared to be authentic records acceptable as evidence in a court of law. Supervision of Jewish vital registration by Catholic priests was abolished. Instead, Jewish registrars were ordered to keep duplicates of the originals with appropriate indexes and to submit them to district authorities annually. District authorities were instructed to place the duplicate Jewish registers in safekeeping and to compare them with the original registers. As late as the first half of the 20th century, district authorities still checked the maintenance of the original registers of Jewish communities and stored duplicate Jewish registers.

When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1945, the registers and documents of the Jewish communities suffered a fate similar to that of the Jewish population itself. In October 1938, Jewish communal registries in German-occupied Czech borderlands were closed. Registers from the Bohemian border region were collected in Liberec, the center of the so-called Sudetenland. The registers were not maintained between 1939 and 1945, but were completed retrospectively - death records especially - by referring to the master records. The registers from the Jewish communities in the border regions of northern and southern Moravia did not survive at all and are believed to have been lost at the beginning of the German occupation.

In 1942, the Office of the Reichsprotektor ordered that all original Jewish registers in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia be sent to the Central Office for the Regulation of the Jewish Question in Prague. In April 1945, by order of the Gestapo, the original registers were transported to a paper mill in Prague and destroyed. In 1943, the duplicate registers also were collected, but thanks to the Czech employees of the Central Office for the Regulation of the Jewish Question, they were stored along with the older control registers. Duplicate registers for the years 1880-1945, saved by virtue of having been stored outside Prague, were (in October 1945) declared to be valid originals for issuing certificates, official documents, and licenses.

All preserved registers were transferred to the Prague Jewish community, which then was entrusted with the further administration of the registers for Bohemia and Moravia. In December 1949, a new law removed administration of vital registers from the churches, instead establishing standardized civil registers supervised by non-religious authorities-initially district committees, today municipal offices and town councils. In compliance with this law, the Prague Jewish community transferred the entire collection of Jewish registers, along with all other master documents, to the district committee of Prague. They remained there until 1983, when the entire collection was transferred to the Central State Archive in Prague, now the National Archive. This priceless collection of more than 3,000 volumes of Jewish birth, marriage, and death registers that cover Bohemia, Moravia, and the Czech part of Silesia for the period 1784-1949 now is held in the First Department of the Czech National Archive in Prague.

The collection inventory is available on the website of the National Archive at &lt;www.nacr.cz&gt;.

The earliest Jewish birth registers included date of birth, child's name, parents' names, and names of witnesses. In addition, they included details specific to the Jewish religion: circumcision ceremonies for boys and name-giving ceremonies for girls. Entries in the early registers were simple, often including only names and dates. The information included depended on the decisions and conscientiousness of the man responsible for making the entries. Standardized rules for the design of the master registers were not issued until 1838, when specific columns for each category of information were mandated.

Most registers were not completed in such an ideal form. The registrar always determined how much information was recorded. Duplicate registers, especially, often were kept in outline form only. For example, duplicate birth registers sometimes recorded only the names of parents and omitted all other mandated information. In addition, the Familiant Law allowed only 8,500 Jewish families to reside in Bohemia and only 5,400 in Moravia. In these families, only the first born son had the right to marry and replace his father as head of the family-called the familiant in German and Czech documents. Subsequent sons had to wait for a vacancy among the official families and needed to apply for a state permit to marry. Some Jewish marriages were performed by rabbis without the requisite state permit. Any child of such a marriage was defined officially as fatherless and was recorded in the Jewish birth registers under the mother's maiden name. The father could assume responsibility for such a child, and if he did, his declaration of paternity, together with the signatures of two witnesses, was recorded as a note. Children of parents who married after 1848 were legitimized retrospectively and, at that time, received their fathers' surnames. This fact is not widely known by their descendants and often complicates research in pre-1848 registers.

In 1838, the same year that standardized forms were introduced, registration districts were specified. The community with the largest Jewish population was designated the center of a district and the location where the registrar was supposed to reside. If the registrar's position was not filled in a particular locality, births, marriages, and deaths were to be reported to the nearest alternative registry office. In many cases, this meant going beyond the geographical boundaries of the original registry district. This fact complicates genealogical research, especially in Jewish communities on the inland border between Bohemia and Moravia.

The master documents transferred along with the Jewish registers to the Central State Archive in December 1949 include original reports of autopsies from the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto conducted between 1941 and 1943. In addition, judicial declarations of death for many Holocaust victims issued during the period 1946-48 and 1950 fill gaps in the master Jewish death records. Jews who survived the Holocaust needed to create new lives-find work, apply to inherit relatives' property, marry and/or adopt children. To do so, they needed new personal documentation for themselves and, often, death certificates for their relatives. The latter were replaced with judicial confirmations of death. Useful for genealogical research, these documents provide personal data such as birth date and parents' names, plus information about where the subject had been born and his or her last place of residence before deportation. In some cases, these documents also include the address and name of the person applying for a declaration of death, usually a relative of the deceased. The master document records also include a small group of applications for change of surname and for permission to adopt an orphan. Children coming back from the concentration camps without parents were adopted either by relatives, family friends, or by people who had lost their own children in the war. The process to adopt a child was not simple; it required numerous confirmations and references. The former especially can help verify the identity of applicants for citizenship or to confirm kinship in applications for property or indemnification. Applications for change of surname were made by a number of concentration camp survivors with typical Jewish surnames (such as Abeles, Kohn, and Roubitschek) or typical German surnames (such as Adler, Schwarzkopf, or Weissmuller) - with the intention of putting the past behind them and integrating into a non-Jewish enviroment.

Also valuable are registers created during Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia in connection with deportations to Terezin and other camps in Eastern Europe. Until now, one card index in Prague is used for official purposes by the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic.

Another index is stored in the Third Department of the National Archives, and another in the archives of the Terezin Memorial located in a small fortress in Terezin. Records on the cards also provide information helpful for genealogical research: names, dates of birth, last address and transport number.

The First Department of the Czech National Archive also holds Jewish Control Registers, duplicate registers kept by the Jewish community for review by the Catholic priests designated to keep their eye on all Jews living in their parishes.

Law of Privacy

Personal data recorded in both original and control registers and in the card index files are protected legally. Birth registers for 100 years and marriage and death registers for 75 years after the last entry are accesible only to direct relatives.

More than 3,000 volumes in both collections of Jewish registers are available on microfilm in the study room of the First Department of the National Archives.

Documents preserved in the Czech archives dealing with the Jewish history fall into two broad categories: documents generated internally communities, schools, associations, foundations, I(orninent individuals. These records reflect the funcJewish communities and institutions carried out own members as well as their relationships with Christian world. Functions conducted

Types of Archival Records

The following types of archival records are available at each level of the Czech archival system (with focus on records of particular interest for Jewish genealogy):

For more information on Jewish history see an article Czech Archival Sources: History of the Jews in the Czech Lands by Lenka Matušíková, published in the Avotaynu, Volume XXIV, Number 2, Summer 2008. (Family History Library INTL book 296.05 Av79).