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Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Henry Zvi Ucko Papers #5146, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Lenora Ucko of Durham, N.C. in February 2004 (Acc. 99721).

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Processed by: Nancy Kaiser, August 2004

Encoded by: Nancy Kaiser, August 2004

Diacritics and other special characters have been omitted from this finding aid to facilitate keyword searching in web browsers.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• American Jewish Historical Society.
• Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
• Dominican Republic--Ethnic relations.
• Jews--Cultural assimilation--Dominican Republic
• Jews--Dominican Republic--History.
• Judiasm--Prayer-books and devotions.
• Lopez Penha, Haim Horacio.
• Refugees, Jewish--Dominican Republic.
• Sephardim--Latin America--History.
• Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leonidas, 1891-1961.
• Ucko, Henry Zvi.

Henry Zvi Ucko was born 13 May 1910 in Koenigsberg, Germany. He studied at Universities Koenigsberg in Freiburg from 1928 to 1933. He prepared a doctoral thesis, but no degree was conferred due to political conditions and growing anti-semitism in Germany. In 1938, he served as a rabbi, cantor, and teacher at a high school for the study of Judaism and at a Jewish teacher's education institute. In 1939, Ucko fled Nazi Germany to Amsterdam and then immigrated to the Dominican Republic. En route to Santo Domingo, he lost all his belongings when the boat he traveled on, the Simon Bolivar, either was torpedoed by the Germans or hit a land mine in the North Sea, killing 80. Ucko organized a congregation in Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo), where he and his first wife, Ellie, lived until moving to the United States in 1946. Rabbi Ucko led congregations in Massachusetts (1946-1956) then Mason City, Iowa, and Fayetteville, N.C. (ca. 1959-1983). In 1985, he married Lenora Greenbaum, and in 1988 they moved to Chapel Hill, N.C.

Ucko's research interests during the 1940s and 1950s focused on the history of Jews in the Dominican Republic. In 1945, he gave a public presentation of his dissertation "La Fusion de los Sefardies con los Dominicanos." Ucko returned to the Dominican Republic in 1957 to conduct more research. It is not clear that the research from this trip was ever published. Ucko's book of short stories, The Triumph and Other Stories, was published in 1993.

Henry Zvi Ucko died in 1995.

The collection includes correspondence, writings, notes, photographs, reference material, clippings, and prayer books relating to Henry Zvi Ucko's research into the history of Jews in the Dominican Republic, especially the assimilation of Sephardic Jews into Dominican society. Correspondence chiefly concerns Ucko's attempts to secure funding and a publisher for his research. Also included is correspondence with Haim Horacio Lopez Penha, a writer from the Dominican Republic who encouraged Ucko to write a history of the Jews in the Dominican Republic, and with President Rafael L. Trujillo Molina, who pledged the interest and cooperation of the Dominican government in support of Ucko's research. Writings and notebooks are based chiefly on research conducted in Dominican Republic in the summer of 1957, with the support of the American Jewish Historical Society and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Also included are photographs of tombstones in the Jewish cemetery in Santo Domingo, probably taken during Ucko's research trip in 1957; reference material about Jews and the Dominican Republic; and two prayer books. Many items, including letters and writings, are in Spanish, and some have English translations. Three letters are in German, and the prayer books are in Hebrew, one with an English translation.

Items separated include oversize papers (OP-5146/1), photographs (PF-5146/1), and volumes (SV-5146/1-2).