In his job as a letter courier, Lars Menk has to be careful
not to let the names on the mail he is delivering distract
him. Menk, after all, knows something about names. He
compiled close to 13,000 of them for “A Dictionary of German-
Jewish Surnames,” an 800-page, scrupulously detailed
reference book that took him nearly a decade to complete.
And that is why today, when he stumbles across rare variants
of Jewish names – or names he’s never even seen before,
and which he thinks are on the verge of dying out – Menk
has been known to go home, research the names’ origins and
contact the names’ owners to discuss their family heritage.
A self-taught genealogist who at 19 became fascinated
studying his own roots, Menk now probes what names mean
and where they come from because he wants to help others
like himself find out, in a historical and a spiritual sense,
who they are.
“When I study someone else’s ancestry I try to follow
their family’s thoughts and lives. I’m interested in where they
lived, what they were doing, why this person changed his
location or his work, where his decisions came from,” says
Menk, who describes himself as a “mystical person” and who
speaks with a rare, bravely open sensitivity. “People want to
know the facts [about their families] and that’s what I give
them. But the facts are only just the beginning.”
In the 2005 tome released by Avotaynu, the world’s leading
publisher of Jewish genealogical texts, Menk provides
readers with what book reviewer Ralph Baer calls “the most
significant and useful genealogical reference book about
German Jewry published to date.” The book, which won
honorable mention in the Reference Book category for the
National Jewish Book Award, includes the etymological and
geographical origins of thousands of Jewish names as they
emerged within the boundaries of pre-World War I Germany
(encompassing East Prussia, parts of the Baltics, Silesia
and other regions). Readers can trace a family name back to
the German city, town or village where it, or a variation of it,
first appeared and the date when it appeared – in some cases
going back as far as the 14th century, but more frequently
referring to the early 1800s when Jews were required to use
surnames rather than family identification based only on
their fathers’ first names.
According to retired American engineer Edwin Taub
Richard, who has been researching his relatives over the last
20 years: “This dictionary is a superb source for finding the
origin of your German families.”
Menk, however, had no idea he was embarking on a
project of this scale when he drove in 1988 into the Hunsrück
mountains of Rhineland-Pfalz, looking for clues about
his cattle-dealing ancestors’ past. No one in his family had
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Menk’s grandfather joined the SA at 19 and became a Nazi.
But in digging through his family archives, Menk discovered
that a distant great-grandmother had been a Jew. The
revelation stirred him deeply.
“I wanted to know where my roots were because that’s
what I’m made of – all those influences of the past that came
together in my person,” says Menk, who studied medicine
for four years in Münster, though it was a career that didn’t
“feel right” and therefore he didn’t finish. Jewish teachings
and religion, on the other hand, had attracted Menk since
childhood, and suddenly that branch of genealogy became a
natural course for him to pursue. “In studying my ancestors I
tried to become like them, to think like they did, to know how
they lived their lives and what their attitudes were. I wanted
to find out who I was by looking at their influence.”
Soon, Menk was bringing that same intensity to bear
on his investigations of hundreds, and later thousands, of
German Jewish family names. Having moved to Berlin in
1984, he flirted with other university studies before turning
to his passion, genealogy, in the 1990s. Menk taught himself
to read Hebrew, tracked down obscure books on Judaica
and, anytime he came across a name he didn’t know, he
researched it and “followed the [family] line down.” They
were his “years of apprenticeship,” he recalls, as he combed
the nation’s archives and began constructing what would one
day become the dictionary.
“I loved it,” Menk, 45, says of his cross-country adventures.
“I took pictures. I collected documents. I was fascinated.
I’m lucky to live in Germany where all this information
is available.”
Menk did his most in-depth research, ironically, during
the five years he worked as a security guard for the Berlin
Chamber of Commerce. As someone skilled on the Internet,
he made use of his slow job hours by logging onto jewishgen.
org and other sites; on his off-days, likewise, he stayed
buried among his literature and notes at the State Library,
devoting “24/7 to the project.” Menk credits his wife, a nurse
from Kazakhstan, for helping keep him afloat psychologically
and economically. Indeed, Menk never accepted any money
for the private family research that people contacted him to
do, which is why he still refers to himself as an amateur, citing
that “amateur comes from amare, to love, because I love it.”
“I was afraid that if it became something I did for money,
I would lose my love for the research; that the money would
kill my enthusiasm,” Menk says. “I forget everything around
me when I’m in a special project. My reality. My work. My
family. I just concentrate on [the work] as if it were my own
family.”