Note: In this post I talk about the failed search for my first cousin twice removed Dr. Erich Bruck whom I have tantalizing evidence wound up in the Argentinian part of Tierra del Fuego. I discuss the proof I obtained in confirming that a similarly named Dr. Enrik Bruck who is buried in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, a town more than 2,300 miles away from Tierra del Fuego, is not my distant cousin.
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POST 62: THE FAR-FLUNG SEARCH FOR MY FATHER’S FIRST COUSIN, HEINZ LUDWIG BERLINER
Dr. Erich Bruck is my first cousin twice removed born in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland], same town as my father Dr. Otto Bruck, on the 31st of August 1865. I have evidence of his birth from the Family History Library’s Microfilm Roll 1184449 for Jewish births in Ratibor. (Figure 1) He was one of 14 or 15 children born to my great-granduncle- and -grandaunt, Oskar Bruck (1831-1892) and Mathilde Bruck née Preiss. At the tail end of Post 113, I included a table with the available vital statistics on these children. Astonishingly, to date, I’ve been unable to find a single living descendant for any of these offspring.
Unlike some of his siblings who perished in the Holocaust, Erich is believed to have survived. As briefly mentioned in Post 113, a tantalizing clue as to Erich’s fate was found in the “Pinkus Family Collection 1500s-1994, 1725-1994” archived at the Leo Baeck Institute. On the Oskar Bruck-Mathilde Preiss family page, names and some vital data on 12 of their 14 or 15 “kinder,” children, can be found, including information on Dr. Erich Bruck. (Figure 2) It confirms he was born on the 31st of August 1865 in Ratibor, was a doctor in Argentina, and emigrated to “Feuerlandinseln,” Tierra del Fuego Islands in the 19th century. Beyond the fact this is an unusual place for an individual to have emigrated to, this is the closest I’ve been to finding a Jewish ancestor in Antarctica, still more than 2,300 miles away, the only continent where my family’s diaspora has not yet taken me.
Some brief geography. Tierra del Fuego, Spanish for “Land of the Fire,” is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The archipelago consists of the main island, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, with an area of 18,572 sq. mi. (48,100 km2), and a group of many islands, including Cape Horn and Diego Ramírez Islands. Tierra del Fuego is divided between Chile and Argentina, with the latter controlling the eastern half of the main island and the former the western half plus the islands south of Beagle Channel and the southernmost islands. Ushuaia is the capital of Tierra del Fuego, with a population of nearly 80,000 and claims the title of the world’s southernmost city. The family page from the Pinkus Family Collection makes it clear that Dr. Erich Bruck was a physician in Argentina, not in Chile.
My quest to discover what may have happened to Dr. Erich Bruck has been ongoing for several years interrupted by investigations into other ancestors. Obviously aware of an Argentinian connection, in 2021 I contacted the “Asociación de Genealogía Judía de Argentina (AGJA),” the Jewish Genealogical Society of Argentina, asking whether they or another genealogical association or group could provide any information about my distant cousin. I received a prompt response from a Ms. Estela Rappaportt (Figure 3) referring me to a Facebook group located in the Ushuaia community of Tierra del Fuego. I contacted them but never received a reply.
More intriguingly, Estela mentioned there is a tomb in the province of Chaco in Argentina, in the city of Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, of an Enrik Bruck, who died there on 31st of May 1931. Given that Erich Bruck was born in 1865, the age of this individual at death at least seemed like a plausible match. Moreover, I thought his forename might well have been changed to Enrik in Spanish. Ignoring the fact that Tierra del Fuego and Sáenz Peña in Chaco Province are more than 2,300 miles apart (Figure 4), I became obsessed with the notion that my distant relative is interred there. How Erich Bruck might have wound up in Sáenz Peña after living in Tierra del Fuego was an afterthought.
Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña in Chaco Province is under 700 miles from Buenos Aires (Figure 5), and has a population of 83,000 people, mostly descendants of settlers from Spain, Italy, Russia, Poland, then-Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine, as well as Jewish families from elsewhere in Argentina. Sáenz Peña was founded in 1912 and has developed as a commercial and industrial center serving the surrounding agricultural region of the Gran Chaco plains. In 1945, the Jewish population numbered around 200 families, though today fewer than ten Jewish families remain.
With Jews having lived in and around Sáenz Peña, it stands to reason there would be a Jewish cemetery. And, in fact, I learned about Saenz Peña’s “El Cementerio Judio,” a Jewish cemetery dating from 1920 with 120 graves, formerly called “Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña Cementerio.” The information about this Jewish cemetery was derived from the International Jewish Cemetery Project, which is a volunteer, cooperative effort of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies and JewishGen, Inc.’s “JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry” or “JOWBR” which seeks to identify Jewish burial sites and interments throughout the world.
I tried contacting the Sáenz Peña’s Ayuntamiento, the city’s town hall, but never received a response. I tried working through a friend at the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles and her Rabbi to establish a local contact but this too failed. I even tried having South American relatives call the Jewish cemetery’s caretaker, all to no avail. Because information on the International Jewish Cemetery Project regarding gaining entry to the cemetery implied the process was rather informal (Figure 6), I set the issue aside for future consideration. Nonetheless, I remained stubbornly convinced that my ancestor was interred in the Jewish cemetery in Saenz Peña and had eventually intended to go on a letter-writing campaign to confirm this.
Let me briefly digress. Like most avid genealogists, I have a “bin” of unresolved genealogical questions, quests if you will. In Post 62 and Post 62, Postscript, I discussed my father’s first cousin, Heinz Ludwig Berliner, who, like Erich Bruck and my father, was born in Ratibor; “Berliner,” incidentally, was my paternal grandmother’s maiden name. Hearsay from Heinz’s branch of the family suggests he committed suicide in 1948, place unknown.
Heinz’s last known location is in Bolivia. A brief reference in MyHeritage stated he wound up there. In 2019, I contacted the Jewish synagogue in La Paz, the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia, hoping they might have immigration or other records on Heinz, which they do not. At the time, I mistakenly concluded the theater where Heinz had performed under his stage name “Enry Berloc,” the “Teatro Municipal,” was in Buenos Aires rather than in La Paz (Figure 7); as a result the Circulo referred me to the AMIA in Argentina, the central institution of the country’s Jewish community. AMIA, in turn, directed me to the “Asociación de Genealogía Judía de Argentina (AGJA),” which is how I encountered Ms. Rappaportt.
My contact with the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia was not for naught, however, as I will explain in another postscript to Post 62.
Getting back on track. A recent email from the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia reminded me I had never connected with Saenz Peña’s El Cementerio Judio, so I decided to again contact Ms. Rappaportt from AGJA asking her who I should write to in Saenz Peña about Enrik Bruck. Estela sent me the name and email of the President of the Kehilá or village of Sáenz Peña, but then almost immediately sent me a photo of Enrik Bruck’s headstone. (Figure 8) To say I was flabbergasted would be an understatement given that I’d been looking for such information for years.
While I never asked Estela where she obtained the photo, I eventually located it on my own on the JOWBR website. I have literally looked at hundreds of burial registry records on JOWBR’s website (Figures 9a-b), and this is the first time I’ve ever seen one with a picture of the individual’s gravestone, so I consider myself fortunate to have obtained this image without going down more rabbit trails.
At first glance, Enrik’s tombstone appears unreadable but enlarging and zeroing in on the text I realized that a lot of information was decipherable. (Figure 10)
Below is what I managed to construe:
DOCTOR
O.E.P.
(H)ENRIK BRUCK
NACIO EN ALBA JULIA (born in Alba Iulia)
EL 16 DE DICIEMBRE xxxx (the 16th of December xxxx)
FALLECIO EL 31 DE Mxxxx (passed away the 31st of xxx (May according to JewishGen))
DE MUERTE PE (of death xx)
Armed with what seemed like rather scant details, I first turned to Google to learn where “Alba Julia” is located. I discovered it is in Transylvania, the historical and cultural region in Central-Eastern Europe, that now encompasses central Romania. Alba Iulia, as it is called, was the seat of residence of the princes of Transylvania in the 16th and 17th centuries, and for several centuries was administered by Hungary. In the 17th century there were about 100 Jews living in Alba Iulia, and by 1930, 1,558 out of 12,282 people living there were Jewish. By 1941, all Jewish community property had been confiscated, and the men seized for forced labor. The Jewish population peaked in 1947 at over 2,000, but by the beginning of the 21st century, the Jewish population in Alba Iulia, as well as in the rest of Romania, was very small.
Next, I searched in ancestry for Enrik Bruck in Alba Iulia, and surprisingly found two births registers listing a Henrik Brück, with an umlaut over the “u,” born there on the 16th of December 1888. (Figures 11a-c) Since the place and day of birth match the information on the headstone located in Saenz Peña, I am certain the individual interred there is Dr. Henrik Brück.
While disappointed so far not to have tracked down my distant cousin Dr. Erich Bruck in Argentina, I am now certain he is not interred in Sáenz Peña. Ms. Rappaportt, who has relatives in Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego, tells me there is no Jewish cemetery there. An online search of the cemetery records in Ushuaia and Río Grande, Tierra del Fuego’s two largest cities, show no Brucks interred there. So, while the question of where Erich Bruck wound up remains unresolved, I was finally able to establish the identity and origin of the Brück who lies in Sáenz Peña.
REFERENCE
Nimcowicz, Diane. Jewish Genealogical Research in Argentina. Arhttps://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/argentina.htmlgentina