At the HMC Library Archive, Dr. Rick Stoler did extensive research on his family's
hometown of Bereznitz, a small town in the Ukraine.

Jewish residents of Bereznitz and Sarny met with Moshe Sharett (seated, middle
of the front row), who became the second prime minister of Israel, in Sarny in
1935. Some of those shown in the photo have descendants in the Detroit area, accord-
ing to Richard Stoler.

Links To The Past

Holocaust Memorial Center library educates, connects
and preserves memories and history.

Shari S. Cohen
Contributing
Writer
I

hen a visitor enters the spa-
cious, bright Holocaust
Memorial Center Library
Archive, Feiga Weiss, head librarian, is
ready for anyone from a teenage student
with a deadline for a paper about the
Holocaust to an elderly Holocaust survivor
who enters with visible hesitation.
Knowledge is enriching, but when it
comes to the Holocaust and European
Jewish history, it can be very personal and
painful as well.
Weiss has the expertise, archival
resources and empathy to help genealo-
gists, authors, students, educators, survi-
vors and reporters — all of whom have
sought her assistance. She is intimately
familiar with the collection she helped to
build beginning in 1984 at the original
HMC location in West Bloomfield.
"There were only shelves, and I had
free rein to make a collection:' she said.
"We started with the collection of Philip
Slomowitz (the late founder/publisher of
the IN) and built on his library:'
Weiss of Oak Park had previously
worked at the Library of Congress in
Washington, D.C., where she was senior
reference librarian in the Hebraic section

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30

May 21 • 2015

of the reference department. Her special-
ized education and experience were ideal
for the HMC Library Archive, now staffed
by two full-time employees and seven vol-
unteers. Her co-worker Judy Rosenzweig
serves as a cataloguer, and Weiss is
responsible for administrative, acquisition
and reference functions.
The library and archives include more
than 50,000 books, 700 film and DVD
documentaries, almost 700 audiotapes of
personal oral histories and 1,500 memorial
books from European Jewish communi-
ties. The memorial books were usually
written by a group of survivors from a
region or city after World War II.

Family Research

Weiss is highly regarded for her ability to
help people research family histories and
hometowns in Europe. She provided the
"inspiration and guidance" for Richard
Stoler, D.O., of Bloomfield Township
to investigate the Jewish community of
Bereznitz, his grandfather's hometown,
and to connect with Bereznitzers world-
wide.
Stoler remembers that when he was a
young boy, his father pointed out an old
vacant building in Detroit as the Bereznitz
Center. His grandfather and other relatives
had immigrated from Bereznitz, a village

in the Ukraine, to Detroit during the early
20th century. Drawn by the promise of
good jobs and opportunities, an unusually
large number of Jewish Bereznitzers immi-
grated to Detroit.
Like immigrants from some other
European towns, they formed a landsman-
schaft, or immigrants' association, known
as the Bereznitz Relief Society, that helped
new immigrants get settled, provided
financial aid and made sure burials were
provided for needy Bereznitzers.
In a quest to trace additional relatives
and others who emigrated from Bereznitz,
Stoler embarked on an investigation that
took him to the Detroit Public Library's
Burton Historical Collection, the Wayne
State University Walter Reuther Library,
Temple Beth El Archives and then to the
HMC.
With direction from Weiss, he began
collecting photos, artifacts and oral his-
tories that gradually expanded to include
Bereznitzers and their descendants in
many states and several other countries.
Stoler praises Weiss for her knowledge and
helpfulness.
He visited Bereznitz and the nearby
villages of Sarny and Dombrowica with a
small group of Detroiters about six years
ago. Stoler describes Bereznitz as similar
to the village in Fiddler on the Roof, with

fields still being plowed by oxen. While the
towns remain, the Jewish community is
gone — many through emigration early in
the 20th century and others killed during
the Holocaust or displaced afterward.
Stoler recently returned from Israel
where he searched additional archives
for material about the Bereznitz area
and hired a graduate student to trans-
late Ukrainian documents. His extensive
Bereznitz collection of materials is kept at
the HMC and is evolving to become a per-
manent exhibit in the museum. Stoler was
honored for his work to preserve Jewish
history at the HMC's 30th annual dinner
last year.

'Wealth Of Knowledge'

Mark Adler of West Bloomfield had heard
about Feiga Weiss and sought her assis-
tance to learn about his father's home-
town — Dolne Krskany, outside of Nitra
in Slovakia. Adler's father was in a labor
camp during World War II, and several
close family members were killed during
the Holocaust. His father rarely talks about
those experiences and can't bring himself
to visit the Holocaust Memorial Center,
Adler said.
Weiss offered a "wealth of knowledge
quickly finding books, some in Hebrew,
with stories of the Dolne Krskany rabbis.

Links To The Past on page 32