Shtetl Links: Lyakhovichi

Records of Lyakhovichi people in the JTO

The Records of the Jewish Territorial Organization in Kiev RussiaClick on the title to go to the larger 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 5000 names including 17 year old Israel Winogrod. You can search it further at the University of Haifa's Mass Jewish Migration Database

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 responsiblity 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. The University of Haifa has created an online database that is searchable by first and last name of immigrant. (see note under register image above) So you can look up everybody whose first name is Israel as well as everyone whose last name is Winogrod. You can also search by first three letters of either of those names so spelling variants are less of a concern. Lyakhovichi people identified in the records as of "Liachowitz, Minsk" (see also our page with Galveston immigrants) Lyakhovichi Immigrants entering the US through ports other than NYC . The list on that page has in November 2008 been included in our series Migration Tables.