Ari’s 3x great-grandfather Meyer Loshak was born on 4 April 1884 in a town that is now called Hritsiv in Ukraine. Before WWI the town was called Gritsev, and it was in the Volhynia district of the Russian Empire. In 1879, the year of the Russian census, the Jewish population of the town was 979. There was a pogrom there on 21 Sept 1917. The town was captured by the Germans on 5 July 1941, and a ghetto was established. All the Jewish people of the town (c.1900 at that time)  w

Eleazer (or Lazarus) Loshak was Ari’s 4x great-grandfather. We know he was born in about 1845, somewhere near Gritsev, Ukraine. The date of birth comes from this amazing papercut, handed down in the family and now in my possession, which gives the date of his bar mitzvah in Hebrew. I found this information by uploading the image to a wonderful resource called ViewMate on the website JewishGen, where you can ask for translations. Rivka Chaya Baddiel kindly sent me this very he