England Cousins

- For years I assumed that all the ancestors of my extended family came straight from their Shetls in Eastern Europe, got on the boat at the turn of the century and came directly to America. While dimly aware that some Jewish families went to western Europe, that wasn't us. Well, once you start doing your Genealogy be prepared for surprises!
- We knew that in Poland my Grandfather's family name was originally Bialystok or Bialistock or something similar, and as his older brother left for America, they changed the name to Baleston, something more western sounding. We also knew that my Grandfather's mother's maiden name was Lask. She was Anna Lask, born circa 1873 in Poland, died 1961 in New York.
- For years I had a bundle of very old sepia portrait photos that bore the imprint of London, UK photo studios. They were from the home of my Grandparents, then given to me by my father a few years before he passed, he said he believed they were relatives, but was not certain of that. Looking at the photos, I doubted we were related, they looked too high-class to be our relatives!
- Once I got serious about documenting our family I remembered that my father had told me that we were related to one famous person: the Attorney Louis Nizer. He had a television show in the early 1960s, where he would analyze cases and debate their merits. He was a celebrity lawyer in New York and Los Angeles from the 1930s through the 1970s. He was just as famous in the 1950s and 1960s as Alan Dershowitz is now. Supposedly we were related to Louis Nizer. So I did a search to see if there was a connection.
His parents were Ashkenazim, from Eastern Europe and had lived in England as a newly married couple, where their first child Louis, was born in 1902. They then came to America, he went to university and became famous. Last month as I looked a little deeper I found our link to him: Louis Nizer's mother's maiden name was Bella Bialistock, the same original name for our group of five grandparents.
That is how we are related. The likely scenario is that Joseph (Baleston) Bialistock (b.1849), my great-grandfather, had a niece, and that was Bella, mother of Louis Nizer. So if Bella Bialistok went to England, maybe others from our family did as well.
- Then a few days ago one of my newly discovered second cousins (descendants of my Grandfather's sister Adele and her daughter Lillian Feld Ravitz) sent me a scan of an entry in his mother's 40 year old phone book with names of two English-UK relatives!
- So I scanned all our UK photos, ran them through Photoshop to tweak, added an ID number 'UK12', etc, and constructed this page.

I'm looking for UK England descendants of: Bialistok - Baleston - Lask - Levanovisch
Recognize anyone here? Maybe we're mishpucha!! Note the UK ID number, contact:

UPDATE: January 27, 2021 Mystery partially solved, contact made with the Levan-Lask family in England.
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1. Both my second cousin Jane (USA) and I have a very high DNA match with Maurice Levan,
Grandson of Leah (Lask) Levanovitch. Our Great-Grandmother is Anna Lask, presumed sister of Leah.
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2. Jane & family have their Mother's old phone book in which were written 1950's era addresses of
her UK cousins. When that was shown to the UK Levan family, they confirmed the names & addresses.
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3. On the Leah Levanovitch headstone (Edmonton Cemetery, Montagu Rd, London), an online database states
her Hebrew name: 'Leah Tila bat Yaakov HaCohen'. Our Anna Lask is also 'bat Yaakov' on her stone.
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4. When shown the photos below, in the possession of the American descendants of Anna Lask
since the 1940's, the UK Levan family recognized several family members, including Leah Lask.
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We are happy to share these photos with our UK family, and hope to carefully ID the names soon !