Croatia Jewish Records

The Genealogical Society of Utah has microfilmed all the Jewish registers that have been saved in the National Archives in Zagreb and Osijek. Records that were not deposited into the public archives may be in possession of local Jewish communities. In general, theregisters civer the time period from 1850 to 1895, when civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was introduced. Some registers go back to the later 1700s and early 1800s, but it was only in 1787 that Emperor Joseph II ordered the Jews throughout Hapsburg territories to adopt German family names to replace their Hebrew patronyms.

The authorities required more than one copy of registers be kept. Thus, some registers are misleading because they are later transcripts written in the same handwriting covering many decades in which the rabbi or scribe has preserved the history of the families of the community by including the births and parentage of newly arrived members of the cummunity. For example, registers of births may include births that had occured in places as distant as Moravia.

In early 1848 Hungarian government ordered a special census of all Jews. The 1848 Jewish census has not survived for all Hungarian counties. These records supply the name of the head of household, wife's maiden name and names of children, together with ages and places of birth, profesisons and length of time an immigrant had been in Hungary or in his 1848 place of residence.

What determined the places where Jewish people lived and their movements? If individual family members have gone on ahead, there was the natural tendency of other family members to follow. For those who eventually settled in Croatia, records suggest that the usual route was from Bohemia and Moravia into the western counties of old Hungary (now in Slovakia and the Austrian Burgenland) and then through southern Hungary into Croatia and Slavonia.

For more information see article Researching Jewish Family History in Croatia, Slavonia and Hungary by Malcolm Scott Hardy published in AVOTAYNU (Volume XVII, Number 3, Fall 2001).