LitvakSIG delegation visit Tolerance Center, Vilna Gaon Museum, Carol Hoffman third from left

The Litvak genealogical web site LitvakSIG‘s board of directors have recently been travelling around Lithuania as part of their important work. The board currently includes nine members: Amy Wachs, Barry Halpern, Carol Hoffman, Dorothy Leivers, Garri Regev, Jill Anderson, Phil Shapiro, Ralph Salinger and Russ Maurer. Six of the nine board members visited Lithuania this past week to meet with archivists and members of the Vilnius and regional Jewish communities. We managed to interview Carol Hoffman at the Bagel Shop Café in Vilnius last Sunday.

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Tell us something about yourself.

My names is Carol Hoffman. I was born and raised in the United States. My father was born here in Lithuania in 1892 in Kapčiamiestis, in Yiddish it’s Kopcheve. My mother was born in the United States but her mother was born in Kapčiamiestis, in Kopcheve, in about 1858. So my entire family from my mother’s side and from my father’s side are Litvaks.

So, my entire family are Litvaks, they’re from the same place, from the same shtetl, and I was raised with a strong sense of being my brother’s keeper. I came to Israel in 1972 with three young children and a husband and we settled in the northern part of Israel. I worked as a librarian and a teacher of computer science in the university for many, many years, and I retired seven years ago when began working full-time as a volunteer for LitvakSIG. This is my seventh or eighth or ninth trip to Lithuania, I’m not sure. My first trip was in 2000. I had never been here. I met Regina Kopelevich on the border and we went to … Kopcheve and then to Vilnius. So I feel the strong sense of roots.

What we do at LitvakSIG is we obtain records from the archives in order to put them on a freely-searchable database called the All-Lithuania Database. We have over two-and-one-half million records. It’s completely free to search, and to just give you an example, the Israeli ambassador, ambassador Amir Maimon, sent me a message with a picture of a photo-card of someone who was born in 1920. It had the name of her mother and her father, and she was born in Łódź in 1920. The family is looking to see what happened to her. So I searched the All-Lithuania Database. I found that her father Lezer was born in Vilna. Her mother was born at [inaudible], and then they apparently moved to Poland, and came back to Vilna, and she was married in Vilna.

So this is one example of what can be found. Can everything be found? No. Why not? Well, we remember our history. There were fires, there were floods, there were sometimes pogroms, and everything was wood, and so it was very easy for the material to get lost. And there was an additional reason. Yes?

And how do you work with Lithuanian archives?

We work very closely with the historical archive, the Lithuanian State Historical Archive, with the Lithuanian State Central Archive, with the Lithuanian State Special Archive, the Lithuanian State Kaunas Regional Archive and some of the smaller archives. We have excellent relations with them. We met with all of the directors this week, with the chief archivists of all of Lithuania. This is not the first time I’ve met them, but this is the first time our entire board met them. And we appreciate what they do, because without them we could not do our work.

Do you often come, annually, to Lithuania?

At least once a year, sometimes twice a year.

And what do you do when you come, just for sight-seeing or for more serious matters?

Oh no no no, I never sight-see! I never have time to sight-see. Well, I always have appointments with archives and I go to see them to say hello, to see if there’s anything new that we might be able to get, and with researchers who work for us, and then always once in my trip I rent a car, I drive to Kapčiamiestis and I go to the cemetery and I say hello to my family.

Kapčiamiestis is so small, so nice, like a fairy tale.

Yes, and they have a beautiful little local museum that has a lovely archivist. We have a permanent display of the history of the Jews in Kapčiamiestis there in their museum. So I always see the elder, I always see the archivist and I also see the priest to thank him, to thank him, to thank his parishioners for looking after our people.

Do you want to address people of the Jewish Community here or living in Lithuania [who] don’t know anything about you, so they can contact you?

Thank you for the opportunity. I do want to address Litvaks all over the world with an emphasis on the Litvaks here in Lithuania. We did have a wonderful meeting with the Ponevezh Jewish Community on the ninth of May on the celebration of the, the capture back of our country from Nazi Germany, and we had a wonderful, wonderful visit with the Jewish Community in Kaunas. We know that there aren’t many of us left here in Lithuania, but those of us who are here, first of all I reach out and thank you. I thank you for protecting our heritage and for promising our future. We want the Litvaks here and abroad, everywhere abroad, to know that our database is open, it’s free. We have complete information about all of the archives here in Lithuania, how to approach them, how to write to them [and] we can do it for you. We have interesting articles, mainly in English. We have a map, an interactive map that when you press let’s say on Vilnius–we use the modern names, I should say, but then when you press on Vilnius you’ll see Vilna, Wilno–and it has all of the links to the communities and to the important information and it shows you where on the map it is. And we have a glossary of Yiddish terms, what it means, because many people several generations later don’t know what it means. I’m a fiercely loyal Litvak, that’s very dangerous. I have all of the awful traits of Litvaks and all of the wonderful traits of Litvaks. So LitvakSIG is here for everyone, and we are reaching out…

What does SIG mean?

SIG means “special interest group.”

I would love to explain something which is very important about our organization. We are volunteers, all volunteers, not one person in our organization earns a penny, not one penny. So people who donate to us, that is the money that we use to pay the archives for material. The materials that we receive are in Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, Russian and Lithuanian, and we transliterate everything to Latin characters… I’m here for LitvakSIG, not for anything else, not for my personal shtetl, it’s for LitvakSIG and to be able to explain what we do, because we do excellent work, we help people all over the world. We have over 1,000 people who support us regularly because they like what we’re doing. No other organization is able to come to the archives here in Lithuania and to have the excellent relationship that we have. Thank you.

Interviewed by Ilona Rūkienė