HIAS’s Genealogy Detective
Posted on Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 13:35 pm
The Jewish Week
July 15, 2008 -- International News
by Walter Ruby
Special To The Jewish Week
Bazarov feels a “sense of accomplishment” as he assists those with questions about their genealogy and unidentified ancestors.
For the roots journeyer digging through his family’s back pages, Valery Bazarov is an indispensable explorer and guide, Lewis and Clark all rolled into one. And as more and more baby boomers and others travel back to the Old Country and pore over tattered documents for clues to their past, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society archivist is perfectly positioned to lend a knowing hand.
Making use of the group’s archives, which contain records of Jewish emigration going back to 1909, and using the Internet to tap into databases that would have been unreachable only a few years ago, Bazarov, 66, has over the past decade helped several thousand Jews connect with their roots.
In recognition of his success, Bazarov was recently
promoted to the newly created position of director of location and family history services. Now a passionate practitioner of genealogy who has traced his own family’s history back to czarist times and discovered hundreds of living family members on four continents, Bazarov believes he is uniquely situated to help a wide assortment of Jews connect with their roots.
“Thanks to HIAS’ extensive archives I am in a position to help both recently arrived immigrants who want to find relatives in the U.S., and American-born Jews seeking to find descendants of family members left behind in Russia many decades ago,” he explained.
For the first decade that Bazarov worked for HIAS, the New York-based international migration and refugee resettlement agency, he traveled daily to John F. Kennedy International Airport to greet many of the more than 200,000 ex-Soviet Jews who poured into New York during the 1990s. Bazarov, who himself immigrated here from Odessa in 1988, cherished “being there at JFK to greet new arrivals and share their happiness that they had finally reached a place of safety.”
Yet he eventually lost that job after the numbers of Jews arriving here from the FSU plummeted in the late 1990s and has continued to drop ever since.
Reassigned to what he refers to today as “the not very well-defined position” of location specialist in 1998, Bazarov assumed that his new position as purveyor of the musty HIAS archives would pale in comparison to the emotional gratification he felt daily in meeting the new refugees. But he soon realized that his new job offered possibilities for connecting with people on an even more profound level.
Last May, Bazarov took part in a trip of top American Jewish genealogists and scholars to the International Tracing Service Archives in Bad Arolsen in central Germany, a repository of more than 50 million documents related to victims and survivors of the Holocaust. During the five days he spent at Bad Arolsen, which until recently had been largely closed to outside investigators, Bazarov uncovered vital information for 40 people who had approached him with questions about the fate of family members during and after the Holocaust.
One of them was Sharon Raddock, a 60-year-old resident of Boca Raton, Fla., who was born in Germany three years after the end of World War II and was adopted at the age of 5 by an American-Jewish couple. A year ago, Raddock turned to Bazarov to help find out what happened to her birth parents, a Polish Jewish father who survived the infamous Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald, and a German Christian mother. After searching the archives at Bad Arolsen, Bazarov was not only able to bring Raddock precious never-before seen photos of her parents, and copies of meticulously-kept Gestapo records concerning her father’s internment at Buchenwald, but was also able to relate to her the tragic story of her parents’ fate (Raddock’s father died young of a heart attack after emigrating to the U.S. with the false hope that he would be able to bring his family over later. German authorities eventually removed custody of the children from her mother after she broke a law in order to get food for them).
“After being ignorant for so long, I can finally look at my parents’ faces,” Raddock said, “to uncover chapters in a family history that seemed to have been lost forever.”
For his part, Bazarov said he returned from his recent trip to Germany energized. “I feel a sense of accomplishment that I was able to help Sharon and others like her to learn the fates of their loved ones and, in many cases, to find closure. Each time I accomplish that, I feel a powerful sense of motivation to go on and help the next person.”
