Sokolov wrote the following about Yurovsky, (Rob's translation from the French
edition of his "Report"):
"The Jew Jacob Mikhailovich Yurovsky was born in 1878. Clockmaker by profession and photographer..."(Sokolov then states the took depositions of his mother Esther Moisseiva Yurovskaya, and his brothers Eli Meyer, and Leyba Yurovsky).
"Jacob Yurovsky's grandfather lived in the Poltava Government, his son Chaim, Jacob's father, had earlier been convicted for carrying a loaded firearm and sentenced to permanent exile in Siberia. ... According to the birth certificate written by the Rabbi of Tomsk on May 23 1905 and given to me by Layba Yurovsky, Chaim Yurovsky was entered into the society of the Bourgeois in Kainsk, Siberia.
"Jacob, according to the depositions of his mother and brothers, entered into the Jewish School "Talmateyro" in Tomsk, which was next to the Synagogue. He did not do well in school and was apprenticed to the Jewish clockmaker Perman, in Tomsk." ... "In 1905, for an unknown reason, he left for abroad, and lived for a year in Berlin. There he abandoned the faith of his fathers and became a Lutheran."
pp. 174-175 "Enquete Judiciare sur l'Assassinat..."
This is all more or less consistent with what I have always read about Yurovsky.
On the other hand...
FOTR, pp. 251-52: "...Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky was born on June 19, 1878, in the Siberian city of Tomsk, the eight of ten children born to Mikhail Ilyich Yurovsky and his wife. The Yurovsky family was solidly working class, with bourgeois values and traditional dedication to home life; to the church; and, especially, to the Romanov dynasty. .... Michael Yurovsky, as his son recalled, was deeply religious. He later wrote of his father's 'religious fanaticism... On holidays and regular days the children were forced to pray... my first active protest was against religion and nationalistic traditions'..."
P. 582 (notes) "Great mystery surrounds the Yurovsky family's ethnic origin. Most authorities have concluded that they were Jewish. This clearly suited the interests of the majority of the Whites and monarchists, who believed that Jews - Russia's traditional scapegoats - were all Bolsheviks; in time, like so many other elements of Romanov case, this assertion became accepted as fact, repeated endlessly from book to book. Thus Robert Wilton spoke of 'Yankel Yurovsky, the son of a Jew convict' (Wilton and Telberg, 299). The deliberate alteration of Yurovsky's Christian name from Yakov to Jewish Yankel, indicates both Wilton's own anti-Semitism and his tendency to fabricate information to suit his own ends. Unfortunately
such assertions continue to cloud the issue"
P. 583:
"... With anti-Semitism rampant among the White Army, it is not surprising that the ethnic origin of the family should have loomed large in their interrogations. Then too, we know from multiple source material and evidence available that conscious attempts were made by the Whites to indeed link the Jews to the murders in Ekaterinburg. Given these conditions, there are solid reasons for questioning the content of Leonti Yurovsky's testimony. On the identification of his grandfather as a Jewish rabbi, we find very serious doubts. The
Yurovsky family itself was Russian Orthodox, not Jewish; Yurovsky himself seethed with a fair amount of anti-Semitism in his youth - something inbred into a majority of ethnic Russians and often encouraged by the church itself...."
