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The Schejtman Family
I am a descendant of the Schejtman/Arcusin family on my paternal side and of the Plotnik/Golcman family on my maternal side. When I began my genealogical search I encountered mainly two problems. The first is that, most of our family names are rather generic. There are many Plotniks, Holtzmans, Levins, Tenenbaums, Schechtmans and Leventhals. This makes it very hard to find information, and where it exists, connecting it to our family is just as difficult. The second problem is the lack of accessible on-line databases in Argentina.
Plotnik and Golcman Families
My maternal Plotnik family comes from Pinsk (now in Belarus - See Map). My grandfather, Isaac Moshe Plotnik, is the youngest of the five children of Abraham Zvi and Hanna Fradl Levin. He left Europe and arrived in Buenos Aires in 1923.
The earliest generation we have any information about is the one of Abraham Zvi and Hanna's parents. From Abraham Zvi's obituary we learnt that his father's name was Bunim Plotnik. From Hanna Fradl's matzeive we learnt that her father's name was Yosef Levin. David Kavon (grandson of Isaac Plotnik's sister Slava) told us that our great-greatgrandmother Bobe Dinie was Yosef Levin's wife.
My maternal grandmother is Hanna Golcman. Golcman is a Russian derivative of the surname Holzman. We had always called our grandmother Hanche or Janche in the Spanish spelling. She is one of seven children of Mordechai Golcman and Rivka Tenenbaum. She also had an older half-brother, son of a previous marriage of Mordechai Golcman. They lived in the village of Kobryn a few kilometers west of Pinsk (See Map).
Most of the people in these families perished in the Holocaust.
Hanna Golcman had met Isaac Plotnik and they immigrated to Argentina. There Isaac was a teacher in the Jewish education system. They had three children, two boys -Marcos (Mordechai-Mote) & Freddy (Edito)- and a daughter: Dina. Dina is my mother.
Schejtman and Arcusin Families
My father Natalio (Natan) Schejtman is the sixth and youngest son of Abraham Schejtman and Esther Arcusin. Both the Schejtman and the Arcusin families were among the first colonist-immigrant Jewish families to Argentina as part of the settlement program organized by the Baron Maurice de Hirsch (Jewish Colonization Association - JCA). They arrived at the end of the nineteenth century. My grandparents were born in the colonies, so was my father (See Map).
As with the Plotnik/Golcman side of my family, also on the Schejtman side, the earliest information I have refers to my great-greatparents' generation. Specifically, we know that Abraham Schejtman was the son of Natan Schejtman and Berta Cautar. Very recently we have discovered the Schejtman family on a list of passangers for the ship called Paraguassu that was headed for Buenos Aires. The list was for about 10 individuals most of whom were children and these children's names are the same as my grandfather Abraham's brothers and sisters. From this list we found that the family came from the town of Bricheva which is now in the state of Moldova (See map). We had known that the family came from Besserabia but nothing more specific.
On the Arcusin side, until recently the only information known was that Esther Arcusin's parents were Abraham Leib Arcusin and Berta Leventhal. Thanks to the research made by Marcelo Kisnerman (he himself a descendant of another branch of the Arcuschin family) our knowledge grew with the names of Abraham Leib's siblings, father, uncles and grandparents. We also learnt that the family originated in the city of Kherson, in the Ukraine (See Map).
What I do know is that both the Schejtman and the Arcusin families were quite numerous. On the Schejtman side, Natan and Berta had 7 children, 21 grandchildren and at least 35 great grandchildren. On the Arcusin side, Abraham Leib and Berta had 10 children, 30 grandchildren and at least 45 great grandchildren.
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