My family came from ex-Yugoslavia.

My paternal family was ashkenaz, austro-

hungarian jews who migrated to Croatia in the middle of 19th century, first to
Osijek and then to Zagreb. They were the Lewinger, Hoffman, Schwarz (that lived in
Krizevci) and Frohlich (from Karlovac). My late father, Ivo/Ivica Lewinger was born
in 1932 in Zagreb and the surviving family, who were first in Rab concentration
camp and after with the partisans, was part of the 2nd alia group to Israel in 1948.
They couldn’t adapt to Israel and migrated to Brazil in 1953.

Maternal family was sefarad, and established themselves in Beograd in the

end of the 19th century, but, as far as I discovered, lived for at least one century in
Serbia. The Eskenazys were in Nis from at least 1875, maybe came from Salonica or
Bulgaria, but they probably lived some time in Leskovac, where my ggfather was
born. The Russos stayed in Nis for a long time, my 2nd great-grandfather was
president of the community in the 20s of the 20th century but, according to Jasna
Ciric, they probably came from Rousche, in Bulgaria. The Ozmos were in both of the
jewish expulsions in the 19th century, first my 3rd greatgrandfather and family, in
the 50s of the 19th century in Pozarevac and then, my 2 nd greatgrandfather and
family in the 70s of the 19th century in Smederevo. They returned to Smederevo in
the beginning of the 20th century, then to Beograd during WW1. The Romanos are
the least known side, the tradition is that they came from Salonica, Romaniote
jews, but I have no evidences of it. All the family surnames are pretty common and,
until the moment, I coundn´t establish their possible connections to other families
with the same surnames. Probably the Ozmos and Eskenazys will be the easiest to
trace because they were several brothers and branches but, so far, no book,
document or site has the data that I need and I can tell you that I looked for data in
dozens and dozens of sources. Even in Beograd Jewish Museum databases there
were only small bits of information, most of it related to my great-uncles families,
who died in WW2, from whom I hadn´t much until some years ago. During WW2,
part of the family escaped Belgrade to Split and then had shelter in Italy until the
capitulation, then escaped again to Switzerland. After the war they migrated to
Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. My brother and I were the first ones who returned
to Serbia, in 2016, after 75 years.

I was born in Sao Paulo Brazil in 1966. I had a “first life”, where I graduated in
Engineering in 1988 and worked as a business consultant until 2005. From 2003, I
returned to the studies, did a BA in philosophy and started to work in the field of
NGOs. My GENI project started in 2011, with the help of my late father. First it was
only a familial tree but, after some time (and, unfortunately my father’s death) I
saw the opportunity to start to use GENI to "rebuild" the jewish jugoslav
communities connections. Then, in 2016, this project was accepted as a Master in
Jewish Studies in the Lab for Ethnicity and Racism Studies in the Universidade de
Sao Paulo, Brazil. I also started in that year a small Facebook group “Judeus de
Origem Iugoslavia” that tries to connect the (very) small community in Brazil (so
far, we know about less than 300 migrants and relatives in the country).

Since then, this is my fulltime activity, trying to connect all the available data
on yugoslav jews, using Geni as the repository for data, pictures, links, stories, etc.
Sometimes, it is very productive but sometimes it is like finding a needle in a
haystack. After starting my MA, I had several chats with longtime friends who are
in the History field since the 80s and all of them helped me in finding possible
theoretical guidelines for the research. One is prosopography, which is lately the
basis of my work. Second, and more important, is Carlo Ginzburg´s microhistory
theory. Working with tons of data imposes me sometimes to take decisions on how
to enter data in the system, mainly because of the lack, scarcity or error in data.

This is why you will probably find some errors in what I have entered in Geni,
because one of my main assumptions is that is better to have the data in the system
with errors or lacks than wait to find possible answers to these problems. The
solution to these cases is sometimes in the database/site itself. As a collaborative
platform with more than 1 million users, I´m contacted almost daily by relatives or
researchers that know some of these individuals that I´ve entered. We connect and
they “help” me with new information, corrections and, most important, almost
always discover something about their families that was “hidden” in databases,
books, etc.

Nowadays i have 20.000 records entered in the database and based in my last
evaluation, getting to 25.000 is almost sure, only a question of time and hands.
Maybe, one day we will have 30, 40 thousand.

Since December, 2017 GENI invited me to be their Curator. Geni designated a

group of experienced users as Curators to help achieve the goal of having the World
Tree (https://www.geni.com/worldfamilytree/learn-more). Similar to Wikipedia
administrators, Geni Curators are volunteer Geni users granted special privileges
by Geni to help maintain and improve the quality and accuracy of the Geni World
Family Tree. You can read more about it here https://help.geni.com/hc/en-
us/articles/229706727-What-are-Curators-