Reading Old Family Letters About Land in Yiddish, Polish or German

To read an old family letter for clues about land, first work out its language and script, then scan it for a short list of key words, such as land, plot, owner, contract, register and dunam, before paying for a full translation. Yiddish and Hebrew letters are written in Hebrew characters, German letters may be in the old Kurrent handwriting, and Polish and Russian letters have their own spellings and endings. Volunteers on JewishGen's ViewMate and translators listed by YIVO and JewishGen can help with the pages that matter.

Families often hold a bundle of letters from the 1920s to the 1950s that nobody in the house can read. This guide is a practical companion to our article on documents at home that can prove a land purchase. That article explains what each type of paper can prove; this one explains how to read them.

Step 1: Which language and script is it?

Before looking for words, sort the letters by script. This tells you which reader you need.

What you see	Likely language	What to know
Hebrew letters, written right to left	Yiddish or Hebrew	Yiddish is a different language from Hebrew, though it uses many Hebrew words. Family letters are usually in cursive.
Spiky, joined German handwriting that is hard to read	German in Kurrent	Kurrent was used for centuries in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Latin letters with ł, ą, ę, ś, ż	Polish	A short word list below helps you spot land terms.
Cyrillic letters, sometimes with ѣ or і	Russian	Letters written before 1918 use older spelling.

Expect mixtures. The Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado notes that Jewish records often mix Hebrew, Yiddish and local languages, and family papers are no different.

Step 2: Which words should you look for?

You do not need to read the whole letter to know whether it deserves translation. Look for the words below. Each translation comes from a published word list or dictionary listed in the sources. These lists are not complete, so a missing word does not mean the letter is irrelevant.

Hebrew

Word	Transliteration	Meaning
קרקע	karka	land, ground, soil
אדמה	adama	earth, soil, ground; land
פרדס	pardes	orchard of citrus trees
שטר	shtar	bill, banknote; deed (business)

You may also meet Israeli land terms in Latin letters or in Hebrew. The Nefesh B'Nefesh glossary defines Tabu as the land registry, whose records are open; a gush as a numbered section of the country; a helka as a numbered plot within a gush; and a dunam as 1,000 square metres. Our guide to what a kushan is explains the word families most often use for an old title deed.

Yiddish

Yiddish took many words from Hebrew. The Jewish English Lexicon traces the Yiddish karke (written קרקע) to the Hebrew word for ground or land, and gives its Yiddish meanings as "ground, land, cemetery plot".

That last meaning is an important caution. A Yiddish letter about buying "a karke" may be about a burial plot with a hometown society, not land in Eretz Israel. Read the surrounding sentences, or ask a translator, before you draw conclusions.

Polish

From FamilySearch's Polish Genealogical Word List:

Polish	Meaning
grunt	land, property
ziemia	earth
posiadłość	property, estate, place
majątek	property
właściciel	proprietor, owner
kupił	he bought
umowa	contract, agreement
pełnomocnictwo	power of attorney, proxy
wyciąg	extract
dziedzictwo	heritage, inheritance
pismo	letter, correspondence

Names in Polish letters can look unfamiliar too. Our guide to Jewish name spellings in land records explains why, and how to search every version.

German

From FamilySearch's German Genealogical Word List:

German	Meaning
Land	land, country
Grundbuch	land register
Urkunde	record, document
Eigentümer	proprietor, property owner
Besitzer	possessor, proprietor, owner
kaufen	to buy
Verkäufer	seller, vendor
Erbschaft	inheritance
Nachlaß	estate, inheritance
Auswanderung	emigration

For German Jewish families of the 1930s, letters about land often sit alongside papers about emigration and transferring assets. Our guide to the Haavara transfer agreement gives that background.

Russian

From FamilySearch's Russian Genealogical Word List:

Russian	Meaning
земля	earth, land
землевладелец	landowner
недвижимость	immovable property
имущество	property
владелец	bearer, owner, proprietor
договор	agreement
нотариус	notary
наследник	heir
свидетельство	certificate, evidence, testimony

The list notes that before 1918 Russian used some letters that were later dropped: ѣ became е, і became и, and the hard sign ъ no longer ends masculine words. A word in an old letter may therefore look slightly different from a modern dictionary entry.

Numbers and areas

Areas of land in Eretz Israel were usually given in dunams. The Jewish Virtual Library explains that in the Ottoman period and the early Mandate years a dunam was 919.3 square metres, and that the metric dunam of 1,000 square metres was adopted in 1928. Note the date of any letter that gives an area.

Step 3: How do you read the handwriting?

German Kurrent and Sütterlin

BYU's Script Tutorial describes Kurrent as the handwriting used by clerks and scribes from as early as the fifteenth century. It notes that Sütterlin is one reformed style of Kurrent, introduced in 1915, and that Kurrent was "phased out by Nazi Germany and was never restored after WWII."

The Science History Institute adds a bitter detail: Kurrent largely vanished from German correspondence after 1941, following a decree that falsely called the script of Jewish origin. It also describes a 1938 family birthday letter in which the parents wrote in Latin script and the children in Sütterlin. A single family letter can mix both.

BYU's free tutorial offers a full alphabet chart, animations showing how each letter is written, real document examples and practice tests. The FamilySearch German word list also points to FamilySearch's Old German Script lessons.

Yiddish and Hebrew cursive

Handwritten Yiddish and Hebrew often use cursive letter forms. J.D. Arden of the Center for Jewish History offers practical tips:

• Read the whole letter first, to learn how this writer forms each letter.
• Watch for look-alikes. The vertical strokes of vav, alef and yud can become almost indistinguishable, and mem may shrink to one thick mark.
• Yiddish writers often use ligatures and flourishes, so a double yud can merge into a wavy line.
• Numbers and abbreviations written in Hebrew letters are marked with a small stroke called a geresh.
• Dates in letters often appear as the day in Arabic numerals and the month in Roman numerals. Writers educated in Polish or Russian sometimes add "r" (for rok, year) or "г" after the year.
• Spelling can follow the writer's dialect, so the same word may look different from one letter to the next.

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado suggests scanning at high resolution so you can enlarge faint ink, and zooming in to separate similar letters such as dalet (ד) and resh (ר).

Russian Cyrillic

The FamilySearch Russian word list refers readers to FamilySearch's "Reading Russian Documents" lessons and to handouts on handwritten Cyrillic numbers and months.

Step 4: Where can you get translation help?

JewishGen ViewMate

ViewMate lets you post an image online and ask for help translating or identifying it. JewishGen lists letters, documents, book pages and maps among the images it accepts. You need a JewishGen login to post or reply, but anyone can view posted images.

• Requests are filed by language, under categories such as "Translation - Yiddish", "Translation - Polish" and "Translation - Russian".
• JewishGen credits "dedicated volunteers from across the globe" with answering requests.
• Images have a viewing time of 168 hours (seven days), after which they can be moved, with their responses, to a searchable archive.

The archive shows that families already post Yiddish postcards and letters there, and one Russian letter in the archive mentions Nahalal and Tel Yosef. Remember that what you post is public. Share only the pages you are happy to show, and ask a specific question, such as whether a page mentions land, a plot or a company.

Translators for longer work

• YIVO keeps a list of translators, stating that "this is not a YIVO service." Reference questions can go to reference@yivo.org.
• JewishGen's Yizkor Book Project keeps a list of people who translate for a fee. It does not recommend particular translators, and arrangements are between translator and client.
• The Center for Jewish History's Ackman and Ziff Family Genealogy Institute offered research guides and workshops, according to the 2017 CJH article cited above.

If a letter may later be used with a lawyer or an official body, ask the lawyer what kind of translation is needed before you commission one.

Step 5: How should you record what you find?

A simple log keeps the evidence clear and saves paying twice for the same work. For each letter or page, record:

Field	Example of what to write
Item number	The number on the scan file and the folder
Date and place	As written, and your reading of it
Writer and recipient	Names in every spelling used
Language and script	For example, Yiddish cursive, or German Kurrent
Transcription	The original words, letter for letter
Translation	Who translated it and when
Uncertain readings	Mark them with [?] rather than guessing
Land clues	Place names, areas in dunams, plot or block numbers, companies, societies, lawyers, payments

Keep three things apart: what the letter says, what the translator understood, and what you think it means. A future researcher, or a lawyer, needs to see each one separately.

Before anyone handles the originals further, make good copies of every page and both sides of every envelope. Our guide to documents at home gives simple storage and scanning advice. If your letters mention a hometown society or a purchase group, the town's memorial book may tell you more; see our guide to yizkor books as a source for family land.

A note on what letters can show

Letters rarely prove ownership. They may describe a plan that was never carried out, a payment that was never completed, or a plot that was later sold. What they can give is a name, a place, a seller, an area and a date, the details that make a records search possible. Only the land records, reviewed with a qualified Israeli lawyer, can show the legal position today.

If your letters point to land bought in Eretz Israel between the 1920s and the 1950s, you can send us the details and the key pages. Our small team in Israel searches the records, and the initial search has no charge. If relevant documents are found, you receive a preliminary summary and a clear quote and then decide.