Remy Brandon Fischer, Shalev Ezra ben Dov Baer Yaakov v Rivke Gittel

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Amy

Remy

Yesterday just before 4 pm, our family grew again with the birth of our grandson Remy. He weighed 8 pounds and is 19.5 inches long, and he is beautiful. His big brother Nate whispered in his ear, “You are going to be my best friend,” bringing us all to tears. It was a magical, wonderful, perfect day.

Remy is named for five remarkable women from all sides of his family. Remy is for Rose, his paternal great-grandmother who passed away just a few months ago. Brandon is for Bea, his other paternal great-grandmother who lived to be 101 years old. Here they both are, together at Remy’s parents’ wedding in 2006. They were both strong, independent women, both widowed far too young, but both women who not only survived, but found continuing joy and fulfillment in their long lives. I was honored to get to know them both.

Bea and Rose

Remy’s Hebrew name is in honor of three women from his mother’s side. Shalev is for my mother-in-law Sara, Remy’s maternal great-grandmother, who also lived a long life. She was the matriarch of her family and a strong, sweet, loving and incredibly funny woman who was adored by all her grandchildren, her nieces, nephews, and, of course, her sons and her daughters-in-law. She raised two truly wonderful men, one of whom I was fortunate enough to marry.

Sara with Maddy and Rebecca

Ezra is for my two aunts. My father’s sister Eva, who despite contracting MS as a young woman, lived a long and productive life, working until retirement age for the city of Philadelphia, where she was born and lived almost her whole life. She was another strong and independent woman who had an incredibly large and yet close circle of friends. (Picture to come once I get back to my scanner.)

Ezra is also for my Aunt Elaine, my mother’s sister, our family’s matriarch, who was yet another incredibly strong and loving and smart and funny woman, our family historian. As my mother remarked this past weekend, we cannot tell a story about her that does not make us laugh and smile. She, too, was adored by all.

Phil and Elaine

Remy, you have an incredible foundation to start your young life. May you be blessed to have the strength, the heart, the independence, and the sense of humor that all five of these women had to help get you through what we hope will be a long, healthy and very happy life.

1846-1911: Frances Cohen Hamberg, My Great-Grandfather’s Oldest Sibling

Posted on May 25, 2014 by Amy

By 1870, Jacob and Sarah’s oldest child, the baby they had brought with them from England, was married. Frances, or Fanny, had married Ansel Hamberg in 1866, and they had had three daughters in those four years: Bertha (1866), Sarah (1868) and Hannah (1869). Ansel was working as a pawnbroker with his father-in-law Jacob, according to the 1868 city directory. The family was living in Ward 13, District 38, at 533 Lorain Street, a street that I cannot find on a current map.

Fanny and Ansel Hamberg and family 1870 census

One additional note on Ansel before we move forward, especially since this is Memorial Weekend. He served as a second lieutenant in the Union forces during the Civil War and was cited in a number of newspaper articles as an example of the Jewish men who fought for their country during that war. He was commissioned as a colonel after the war in 1872, and even volunteered his services to the Secretary of War in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. I don’t know that he ever was called to duty during that war, however. He was born in Germany and came to the US as a young boy, but obviously felt a strong tie to his adopted country.

In 1872 and 1877, Ansel was working as a pawnbroker at 233 South 9^th Street, according to the city directories for those years. At home, Fanny and Ansel were having more children. Rachel was born in 1872, but died just a year later of typhoid fever.

Rachel Hamberg death certificate June 17, 1783

Another daughter, Caroline, was born in 1879. In 1880 the family was living on Lombard Street in the Seventh Ward, not too far from 136 South Street where Jacob and the other children were living.

Hamberg Family 1880 US census

Ansel was still working as a pawnbroker in 1881, now at 515 South 8^th Street, just a few blocks away, so perhaps they moved to be closer to where he was working.

From 1882 through and 1884 Ansel continued to work as a pawnbroker, although moving to new locations in 1882 and in 1884. I cannot tell from these records whether he was still working with Jacob or whether he was on his own, nor can I determine why he kept moving.

In 1887, the family was living at 1323 South Street, and Ansel was now listing his business as “livery” at 609 South 13^th Street. A year later his occupation in the directory was men’s furnishings, and he remained in the clothing business from that point on until his death. The family also continued to live at 1323 South Street during this entire time period, a location right near Broad Street and further west from where Fanny had grown up.

In 1900, Fanny and Ansel were still living at 1323 South Street, and three of their daughters, Bertha, Hannah, and Caroline, now 33, 30, and 21, were living at home and all working as “salesladies,” perhaps in the “furnishing store” where Ansel worked and perhaps that he owned. There was also a male servant living with them, Alexander Blunt. From the address and the fact that they had a servant, I assume that the family was doing quite well. Although I have not yet found a marriage record for the fourth sister, Sarah, I assume that sometime between 1880 and 1900, she had married, as I know from later records that she was married to a man named Harry Speare.

Hamberg family 1900

Sadly, on December 16, 1901, Ansel died at age 61 of heart disease and was buried at Mt Sinai Cemetery in Philadelphia.

Ansel Hamberg death certificate 1901

In 1903, Frances, now a widow, was listed in the city directory, still living at the same address, under the “Men’s Furnishings” category, so it would appear that she took over running the store. In 1910, Frances and two of her daughters, Bertha and Caroline (Carrie) were still living together, now at 1532 Page Street in North Philadelphia. Frances’ occupation was owner/manager, if I am reading the handwriting on the 1910 census correctly. Bertha was working as a mail order clerk for a department store, and Carrie was working as a saleswoman in a department store. I am assuming that the department store was the family store, the one owned and managed by their mother. Hannah had married by this time.

Hamberg family 1910

Ten years after Ansel died, his wife Frances, my great-grandaunt, died on October 24, 1911. She was 65 years old. The cause of death was hemiplegia, with contributing causes given as “nephrotic mitral stenosis,”, which, according to my medical expert, sounds like a combination of health issues—heart, kidney, and who knows what else. Hemiplegia is defined as “total or partial paralysis of one side of the body that results from disease of or injury to the motor centers of the brain” by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. Overall, it sounds like Frances was in poor health for many reasons. She was buried at Mt Sinai cemetery with her husband Ansel.

Fannie Cohen Hamberg death certificate 1911

Looking back over Fanny’s life, it seems like a fairly good life, despite losing one child to typhoid fever. She and her husband Ansel had a long marriage and seemed to build a business of their own once Ansel left the pawnbroker trade and focused on men’s clothing instead. They lived in one location for many years after bouncing around earlier on when Ansel was a pawnbroker. They raised four daughters and even had a servant living with them for some time.

At the end, Fanny and her daughters Bertha and Carrie were able to move to a neighborhood in North Philadelphia, the area where more and more Jews were moving by the end of the 19^th century. I imagine those last ten years as a time when these three adult women, Fanny, Bertha and Carrie, were, like their aunt Elizabeth Cohen, not living the traditional roles assigned to women. They were all unmarried, working outside the home, and even owning a business.

If Jacob left England to find a better life for his family, Fanny’s life may have been some evidence that his hopes were fulfilled.

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I had thought I would write one post that covered four of the siblings, but now I see that that would make for very long posts. For now, I will instead write one post per sibling and see how that goes.

The Fusgeyers, Part IV: Romania Today

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Amy

Where my grandfather was born in 1888 in Iasi, Romania

As noted in my last post, the population of Jews in Romania has declined precipitously over the last one hundred years as a result of emigration before World War I and thereafter and also as a result of the murder of about 300,000 of them during the Holocaust. From a peak of 800,000 after World I, there are now just a few thousand Jews living in Romania today. What is it like in Romania today, and, more specifically, what is it like to be a Jew living in Romania today? What legacy is there in Romania from the once substantial Jewish community, and what do current residents know or remember of the Jewish communities and of the Fusgeyer movement that led many of those Jewish residents out of Romania? Beyond the cold, hard statistical facts, what is left of Jewish Romania?

I have consulted only two sources of information to answer these questions, so my views are based on limited information and possibly inaccurate. But those two sources left somewhat different impressions, so perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. Jill Culiner’s book, Finding Home, paints a rather gray and dismal picture of life in Romania in general and specifically of the Jewish legacy there. Stuart Tower, author of The Wayfarers, has a more positive impression of Romania today and of its people as seen in the photographs he took first in the 1980s and then in 2005 and also from what he shared with me by email. Culiner and Tower visited different cities and towns for the most part, but there was some overlap; both visited Barlad and Sinaia within a few years of each other. Both ultimately paint a picture of a country that once had many thriving Jewish communities but that now has virtually no Jewish communities and few residents who remember the communities that once were there.

Tower based his book around the town of Barlad; it is where the three Americans, grandfather, father and son, go to learn about their ancestral roots and meet the rabbi there who tells them the story of the Barlad Fusgeyers. Tower’s story is fictional, and he told me that he’d never actually met a rabbi in Barlad, but both Culiner’s book and Tower’s book talk about a very small Jewish community continuing to exist in that city and the beautiful synagogue that still stands there. In Tower’s novel, the rabbi describes a community of thirty people who still keep kosher and observe shabbat, but who have trouble forming a regular minyan. The elderly rabbi’s children have all moved away, and he knows that he will be the last rabbi in Barlad (spelled Birlad in the novel).

Culiner started her Romanian travels in Adjud, where she got off the train and began her Fusgeyer-inspired walk. Her description of Adjud is disheartening:

Here, fields lie flat under a grueling sun, and cars, trucks and buses roar with giddy impunity over pot-holed, uneven main roads. Under thirsty-looking trees outside the station, lining the street are unlovely lean-tos, modern bars and patios. All claim to be discos, all pump loud American music into the hot air.

Culiner, p, 35.

Culiner also said that “there were no buildings left from the pre-Communist era and certainly nothing of beauty.” (Culiner, p. 35) Her encounters with the local people are no more heart-warming. No one could tell her where there was a hotel or room to stay in, and she described the people she saw as “exhausted..expressionless, resigned.” Culiner, p.36. No one in town remembered that there ever was a Jewish community there or a synagogue, although there had been a community of about a thousand Jews there in 1900. The man who showed her where the non-Jewish cemetery was located demanded an exorbitant fee for his troubles. By the end of this first chapter, I was already feeling rather depressed about her experience and about life in Romania.

In contrast, here are some of Tower’s photos of the Romanian countryside that left me with a different impression. Thank you to Stuart Tower for giving me permission to post these:

Culiner’s experience at her second stop, Podu Turcului, was not any better. The townspeople warned her that her plans to walk through Romania were dangerous and that she would be better off visiting more modern cities elsewhere. There were no Jews left in this town, and no one there remembered there ever being a synagogue, although there was a Jewish cemetery. Only one man acknowledged that there once was a Jewish community there, a workman who had been curious about the Jews while in school and had learned where the Jewish residents had once lived in town, now just a neighborhood of faceless housing from the Communist era. This man told Culiner that he had been unable to learn more about the Jewish community in his town because discussing such matters was prohibited during the Communist era.

Culiner and her companion next arrived in Barlad, a city of 79,000 people, the city where Tower’s characters stayed and learned about the Fusgeyers and were in awe of the beautiful synagogue. Culiner is less enthusiastic. Her first impression of the city is its “potholed, deteriorated sidewalks” and the “[r]are trees [that] gasp out their life in the dense cloud of exhaust fumes, providing little shelter from the pitiless sun.” (Culiner, p. 55) Culiner once again encountered skepticism about her plans and ignorance about the Jewish history of the city. She was particularly disappointed that in this city where the Fusgeyer movement began, no one seemed to remember anything about them. Even she, however, was impressed with the synagogue, to an extent:

Despite its rather austere, unassuming exterior, the synagogue is magnificent. Dating from 1788, the walls and ceilings are decorated with paintings of birds, flowers, leaves and imagined scenes of Jerusalem. Yet, despite its beauty, there is a strange feeling of loss, the aura of a building struggling to exist in a world that has little place for it. It has become a relic.

Culiner, p. 58.

Although Tower also described a dying Jewish community in his novel, there was still some life, some people who cared in Barlad. Culiner saw the glass as half-empty whereas Tower saw it as half-full. Here are some pictures of the Barlad synagogue and some other towns visited by Tower that show a far less dismal impression of in Romania. All photos courtesy of Stuart Tower.

Synagogue in Barlad courtesy of Stuart Tower

Synagogue in Barlad Photos courtesy of Stuart Tower

Stuart Tower reading from The Wayfarers at the Barlad Synagogue

Romanian countryside

Romanian woman

17th Century wooden synagogue in Piatra Neamts

Culiner’s experiences in the towns and cities she visited after Barlad were not much different from her first three stops: ignorance and indifference to the history of the Jewish communities in those towns, ugly scenery, and disappointment. She did meet some friendly and helpful people along the way, including some who were Jewish or were descended from Jews, but for the most part she found most Romanians at best ignorant and at worst rude and even hostile.

In Focsani, no one seemed to be able to help her find the synagogue, sending her on a wild goose chase only to find it right near her hotel. On the other hand, Focsani had a fairly active Jewish community (relatively speaking), as the synagogue regularly drew about twenty people for shabbat services and more on major holidays. Culiner was bewildered by the fact that the non-Jewish residents did not even know where the synagogue was located despite its central location.

In Kuku, Culiner met a friendly, helpful woman who likely lived in a building that was once the hostel where the Fusgeyers stayed while traveling through that town, but that woman also knew nothing about where the Jewish community had gone or about the Fusgeyers. In Ramnicu Sarat, Culiner spent time with a woman whose mother was Jewish and who remembered the days of an active and close Jewish community. The woman told Culiner that the Communists had demolished the synagogue that had once stood in the town. She also talked about being unable to be openly Jewish during the Communist era.

Similarly, in Buzau she talked to a Jewish man who refused to take her inside the synagogue because he was ashamed of its condition; there were not enough Jews left in the town to make a minyan and not enough money to maintain the building. This man told her that “the greatest threat is that all will be forgotten.” Culiner, p.122. In Campina, another Jewish man told her, “The Jews will die out. We will go to the cemetery. And no one will replace us.” Culiner, p. 144.

Only in Sinaia did Culiner find anything of beauty in the countryside, but again not without some negative observations. She wrote: “The scenery is a slice out of a romantic painting and Watteau would have delighted in the mossy banks, the majestic spread of trees, although he might have taken artistic liberty, ignored the discarded shoes and packaging stuffed into vegetation, the tattered plastic and ripped shreds of fabric caught on branches in the river.” Culiner, p. 146. Tower’s photographs of Sinaia reveal all the beauty without the observations of garbage mentioned by Culiner.

Peles Castle, Sinaia and surrounding countryside

Before I read Culiner’s book, I had been giving serious thought to an eventual trip to Romania, in particular to Iasi. After reading her book, I put that thought on the far back burner. Her book left me with a vision of an ugly country filled with ugly people who hated Jews. After looking at Tower’s photos and corresponding with him about his travels in Romania, I am reconsidering my decision to put a visit there on the back burner. Just as I would like to visit Galicia to honor my Brotman family’s past, I would like to visit Iasi—to see where my grandfather was born and spent his first sixteen years, to honor his past and the lives of his family—-the Rosenzweigs and the Goldschlagers. I have no illusions about what I will find there. I know not to expect a lively Jewish community or even any Jewish community. It’s all about walking where they walked and remembering their travails and their courage. Maybe the scenery is not as idyllic as in some of Tower’s photos. Maybe the people are not as colorful and friendly as they seem in his photos. But that, after all, is not the point, is it?

Culiner did not visit Iasi, our ancestral town in Romania, on her trip, but Tower did, and I thought I would end this post by posting his pictures of Iasi and some of its people as well as those taken by my Romanian researcher Marius Chelcu. Maybe someday I will get to be there in person and walk down St Andrew’s Street where my grandfather was born and pay tribute.

If we don’t, who will? Will we allow the story of the Fusgeyers and of the Jews of Romania to be forgotten for all time? That, in some ways, is the message of both Tower’s book and Culiner’s book: we need to learn and retell the story of our ancestors so that those stories and those people will not be forgotten.

Stuart Tower’s photos of Iasi

1670 Synagogue in Iasi

Hotel

Father of Yiddish Theater, plaque in Iasi

National Theater, Iasi

Marius Chelcu’s photos of Iasi:

Photos taken near St Andrew Street where the Goldschlagers lived

The Fusgeyers, Part III: What Came Afterwards

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Amy

In my last two posts, I wrote about the vast emigration of Jews from Romania between the late nineteenth century and World War I in the face of widespread anti-Semitism and poverty. According to one source, almost thirty percent of Romanian Jews migrated to the United States or Canada between 1871 and 1914; many others migrated to what was then Palestine.[1] Wikipedia estimates that about 70,000 Jews emigrated from Romania, almost a quarter of the total Romanian Jewish population in that period.

Many of those who left were part of the Fusgeyer movement, groups who walked from their home towns across Romania to escape, often depending on donations raised by entertaining the crowds in towns throughout their route to freedom. My grandfather was one of these walkers, and so perhaps were his siblings, cousins and other family members, though I’ve not heard any other descendant report that their grandparent walked across Romania. According to Culiner, there are no statistics on how many people were a part of this movement or how long it lasted. Groups ranged in size from forty people to 300 people, and in 1903 about 200 to 300 Jews were leaving Romania each week, many on foot. (Culiner, p. 20).

Although Jacob Finkelstein’s report of the experiences of his 1900 Fusgeyer group painted a generally rosy picture of their trek, being welcomed and well-fed in most places they visited, other groups faced greater struggles. One observer reported that he saw groups where people were famished, in some cases starving, and living in horrible conditions. He wrote:

One has to imagine 300 people, men, women and children wandering through the cemetery [where they were then living] like famished wolves, burnt by the sun during the day, tormented by mosquitoes in the night, all three hundred of them with bare feet, sick, some moaning, others crying: fever-racked women who are incapable of feeding their young, the children pale and suffering.[2]

Is it any wonder that my grandfather never talked about his life in Romania, other than to mention the music and beautiful horses he remembered? I’ve asked many of my newly-found Rosenzweig and Goldschlager cousins if they knew anything about their ancestors’ lives in the “old country,” and the response I’ve heard over and over is that their grandparent never wanted to talk about those days, but wanted to focus on the present and the future. Given the conditions they endured both living in Romania and leaving it, why would they want to remember any of it?

Despite this large-scale emigration of Jews before World War I, there were close to 800,000 Jews remaining in Romania at the end of that war. (This large increase resulted from the addition of Bukovina, Transylvania, and Bessarabia to the territory controlled by Romania in accordance with the terms of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference after World War I.)

the death train from Iaşi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By the end of World War II, that community had been further decimated. Approximately 300,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust between 1941 and 1944 by the Romanian government, the largest number of people killed by any Nazi ally other than Germany itself. Nevertheless, unlike in many other countries in Europe, the majority of the Jews in Romania survived the war. Estimates vary, but approximately 300,000 Romanian Jews survived. Most, however, did not return to or remain very long in Romania. The Communist era resulted in further reduction of the Jewish population with many who had returned emigrating to Israel or the United States or elsewhere. Wikipedia includes this chart of the declining population of Jews in Romania:

Historical population
Year	Pop.	±%
1866	134,168	—
1887	300,000	+123.6%
1899	256,588	−14.5%
1930	728,115	+183.8%
1956	146,264	−79.9%
1966	42,888	−70.7%
1977	24,667	−42.5%
1992	8,955	−63.7%
2002	5,785	−35.4%
2011	3,271	−43.5%
Censuses in 1948, 1956, 1966, 1977, 1992, 2002 and 2011 covered Romania’s present-day territory Source: Demographic history of Romania

These facts are important in order to put into context my next post: what Romania is like today, as seen through Jill Culiner’s eyes in her book Finding Home and through Stuart Tower’s eyes as depicted in his photographs of Romania.

[1] Joseph Kissman, “The Immigration of Romanian Jews Up to 1914,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science (New York 1947-1948), p. 165, as cited in Jill Culiner, Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers (Sumach Press 2004), p. 19.

[2] Isaac Astruc, “Israelites de Roumanie,” p. 43, as translated by and quoted by Culiner, p. 23.

The Fusgeyers, Part II: How They Did It

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Amy

A Group of Fusgeyers from Iasi, c. 1900 http://epyc.yivo.org/content/photos/14_q_RM-RUMANI-4_lg.jpg

Yesterday’s post described some of the reasons that Jews like my grandfather and his relatives decided to leave Romania in the early years of the 20^th century: rampant anti-Semitism, poverty, violence, false accusations, and laws depriving Jews of access to education and to most means of earning a living as well as denying them the legal rights of citizens. Thousands of Jews left Romania between 1900 and 1910, many of them on foot, including my grandfather. In both The Wayfarers by Stuart Tower and Finding Home by Jill Culiner, there are vivid descriptions of how these people managed to accomplish the task of walking about 1500 miles to cross the border from their homes in eastern Romania to Hungary or Galicia, where many then caught trains that would eventually bring them to the ports where they could sail to the United States.

Both Tower and Culiner relied heavily on the unpublished manuscript written by Jacob Finkelstein around 1942, describing his personal experience as a member of the first group of Fusgeyers. Finkelstein’s memoir appears to be the most important primary source regarding the Fusgeyers, and Culiner begins most of her chapters with an excerpt from that manuscript. The first group of Fusgeyers walked out of Romania in 1900, traveling by foot from Barlad to Predeal and crossing into Hungary. As detailed in both Tower’s and Culiner’s books and as described by Finkelstein, that first group was an outgrowth of a club of young people in Barlad who put on theatrical works to raise money for charitable causes. Members of the group decided that they could use their talents to raise money to pay for their travels out of Romania. They raised some initial money through donations and from fees collected from those who wished to join them, and eventually there were seventy-five men and three women who joined the group and left Barlad in April, 1900.

Barlad, Romania

Română: Timisul de Jos,Predeal,Brasov,Romania. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One person was selected to be the leader of the group, and others were appointed to various roles: treasurer, medical care, scouts, and security. They had flyers printed to distribute in the towns they planned to visit, and the people of Barlad provided not only financial support, but food and supplies to the group. The group then walked from town to town across Romania, often being treated very well; in some places people provided them with food, shelter, and generous donations. The group would stage musical performances to raise money. Many newspapers publicized the movement, bringing even more donations and larger audiences to greet and support the Fusgeyers. Moreover, this first group inspired new groups to form and to leave their homes as well. My grandfather, who loved music and was smart and funny, might very well have been one of the Fusgeyers who left Iasi in 1904.

Sometimes, however, the group met up with hostility. In Ramnicu Sarat, the police confiscated the passports of that first Barlad group, telling them to keep themselves from being noticed. The passports were, however, returned once they left the town. The group was threatened with arrest if they entered the town of Mizil, so they stayed out, sleeping in tents in the rain instead, and they were told to avoid the next town as well, resulting in another night of sleeping in the rain. There was even trouble within the group; money was wrongfully taken by one of the group representatives. Overall, however, at least according to Finkelstein, his group’s experience was a huge success—enabling not only that group to escape, but also inspiring thousands of other Romanians to do the same.

I cannot capture or describe all the details of the experiences of the Fusgeyers. All I have as primary material in Finkelstein’s memoir, but Stuart Tower’s book takes the skeleton of facts provided by Finkelstein and builds from those facts a novelized version of that experience that helps to bring to life the Fusgeyers’ trek through Romania. He developed characters and storylines that add an extra layer of humanity to this basic story.

The Wayfarers (Paperback) ~ Stuart Tower (Author) Cover Art

When I was doing some additional research about the Fusgeyers yesterday, I happened upon a website that described plans to turn Tower’s novel into a documentary about the Fusgeyers. I did not realize it at first, but the website was a page on Kickstarter, a crowd-sourced fundraising site that helps people raise funds for private projects—in the arts and otherwise. The Kickstarter page for The Wayfarers movie had not yet attracted any donors. I made a small donation and also left a comment for the contact person of the page, Ron Richard, explaining my interest and expressing my concern that there had not yet been any other donations for the project.

I have heard back now both from Ron Richard and from Stuart Tower, the author of The Wayfarers. Tower sent me some wonderful photographs of Romania from a Fusgeyer tour he ran in 2005, and I am hoping to get permission to post some of those photos here. If any of you would also like to help Ron Richard and Stuart Tower make this film about the Romanian Fusgeyers, please check out their Kickstarter site at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1552736981/the-wayfarers-the-story-of-the-fusgeyers?ref=live It may be the best opportunity many of us have to see Romania and to understand better the experiences of our ancestors.

Jill Culiner’s book takes a different approach to exploring the Fusgeyer experience. After reading Finkelstein’s memoir, she decided to re-enact the walk of the Fusgeyers, also walking from Berlad to Predeal, but not with a large group, just with one companion. Her experiences doing this provide a chilling post-script to the story of the Jews in Romania, one that I found moving and haunting even re-reading it. I will post more about her book and her experiences tomorrow.

The Fusgeyers: Why They Left Romania

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Amy

Isadore Goldschlager

“Grandpa walked out of Romania to escape from the Romanian army.” That was the one story I knew about my grandfather’s life before he came to the US as a teenager. I knew a few other snippets about him in general—that he loved music and animals, that he knew multiple languages, that he was a union activist and very left-wing in his political views, that he was a milkman, and that he was a terrible tease and had a great sense of humor. But the story about him walking out of Romania was the one that always intrigued me the most. I would ask my mother questions: Did he go alone? Where did he walk to? How did he get to the United States? But she knew nothing more than that barebones story—that as a teenager, he decided to run away from the army and walked across the country to escape.

When I first started researching my grandfather’s family, I wanted to know more about this story. Was it just a myth, or was there any factual basis to it? I did some initial research and learned that there was in fact an entire movement of Jews who left Romania by foot beginning in the early 1900s, around the same time my grandfather left (1904). These walkers were known as the Fusgeyers or “foot-goers.” Unfortunately, I could not find many sources of information about this movement. I found only two books devoted in depth to the topic. One is a novel called The Wayfarers by Stuart F. Tower; although written as a novel, it was inspired by the author’s actual search to learn about the Fusgeyers. It tells the story of an American man whose grandfather left Romania by foot. The grandson, now an adult, takes his own teenage son and his elderly father to Romania to learn more about his grandfather’s escape from Romania. The author describes long conversations that the lead character had with a rabbi living in Romania who was familiar with the Fusgeyer movement. Although this book gave me a taste of what the movement was like, I wanted to read something more fact-based and scholarly to understand and know more about the Fusgeyers.[1]

I found that in the second book about the Fusgeyers: Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers by Jill Culiner. This book, a work of non-fiction, is fascinating and heart-breaking. After reading Jacob Finkelstein’s “Memoir of a Fusgeyer from Romania to America,” an unpublished Yiddish manuscript written around 1942 and held by the New York-based YIVO Institute, Culiner, not herself a descendant of Romanian Jewss, decided to retrace the routes taken by the Fusgeyers as they walked out of Romania. She actually walked these routes, visiting all the towns and cities along the way, asking current residents what they remembered of the Fusgeyers and of the Jewish communities that existed in those towns before the Holocaust. What she learned about the past and present in Romania is what makes the book both fascinating and heart-breaking, and in a subsequent post, I will write more about that. But first, I want to set the scene by describing what I learned from this book and elsewhere about why the Jews left Romania in the early 1900s.

As reported by Culiner and others[2], Jews had likely been living in the two principalities that became Romania, Walachia and Moldavia, since Roman times. The Jewish population increased significantly in the second half of the 14^th century when many Jews from Hungary and Poland immigrated there after being expelled from their home countries. (Wikipedia). Ironically, Romania eventually became one of the most anti-Semitic of the European countries. In 1640, the Church Codes of Walachia and Moldavia declared Jews heretics and banned all relationships between Christians and Jews. (Culiner, p. 15). During the 17^th and 18^th century, there were repeated “blood libel” accusations against Jews—being accused of killing Christian children for their blood— followed by violence and persecution. (Culiner, p. 15; Wikipedia).

The widespread anti-Semitism really came to a head in the mid-nineteenth century during the movement for Romanian independence and the unification of Walachia and Moldavia into the independent nation of Romania. As the report on Romanian anti-Semitism on file with Yad Vashem reports, after the Crimean War and the defeat of Russia, which had previously controlled Walachia and Moldavia, the European powers (primarily France and Britain) put a great deal of pressure on the leaders of the independence movement in the region to grant Jews full legal status in the new country. Although the leaders had originally argued for such rights during the uprisings against Russia, the external pressure created a great deal of resentment, and in the end the European powers backed off from insisting on full legal rights for the Jewish residents of the newly-united nation of Romania. (Yad Vashem report).

The Yad Vashem report continues: “A real explosion of openly expressed antisemitism occurred as the prospect of achieving national independence became more certain. During discussions of the new Constitution of 1866, Romanian leaders began to portray Jews as a principal obstacle to Romanian independence, prosperity, and culture.” As finally drafted, Article 7 of the new Constitution for Romania provided that “[t]he status of Romanian citizen is acquired, maintained, and forfeited in accordance with rules established through civil legislation. Only foreign individuals who are of the Christian rite may acquire Romanian citizenship.” Culiner described this development, saying that “anti-Semitism had now become part of the national identity.” (Culiner, p. 15)

Despite protests and outcry from western European countries, the new country persisted in its anti-Semitic views and practices. Between 1866 and 1900, a number of laws were enacted restricting the business and other activities of Jewish residents in Romania. Jews could not become officers in the military, customs officials, journalists, craftsmen or clerks. Jews could not vote or obtain licenses to sell alcohol. Jews could not own or cultivate land. Jews could not own or manage pharmacies. They could not work in psychiatric institutions or receive care as free patients in hospitals. Jews could not sell tobacco or soda water or certain baked goods. Fewer than ten percent of Jewish children were allowed to attend public schools, and Jews were prohibited from opening their own schools. Jews were not allowed to work as peddlers, which was sometimes interpreted to include owning shops. Jewish homes were randomly destroyed as “unsanitary.” (Culiner, pp. 16-17)

Culiner wrote: “Eventually, 20,000 Jews found themselves on the streets of Romania and dying of starvation. There were many suicides in Iasi, Bacu, and Roman….In 1899 and 1900, harvests were poor and a severe depression gripped the country. Anti-Semitic decrees were applied with new severity and anti-Jewish speeches were delivered in parliament. Riots took place in several towns, and…a pogrom broke out in Iasi.” (Culiner, pp. 17, 19) (See also Wikipedia and the Yad Vashem report on Anti-Semitism in Romania.)

That pogrom in Iasi was described in the American Jewish Yearbook of 1900: “For several hours there was fighting, merciless blows, pillaging and devastation, all under the paternal eyes of the police authorities and the army, which interfered only to hinder the Jews from defending themselves.”[3]

In 1900, my grandfather was twelve years old. He lived in Iasi. He experienced this horrible violence and hatred. By that time his uncle Gustave and his aunt Zusi had already left for America. Is it any surprise that this young teenager would have wanted to escape from his homeland and seek refuge someplace else?

Isadore age 27

As I will report in a later post, he and thousands of other Jews did leave, many on foot, walking out of Romania to find a better life. My grandfather followed his uncle and his aunt, who had left in the late 1880s, but he left alone, without his parents or siblings. His first cousin Srul Srulovici, who became Isador Adler, had left two years before him in 1902, also alone and without his parents and siblings. My grandfather left in 1904, and by 1910 the rest of his family—his siblings, mother and father and the rest of his Srulovici cousins—had also arrived. I don’t know the details of how any of them got out or whether they were also Fusgeyers, but they all followed their two oldest sons and brothers, both to be called Isadore in the United States.

So my grandfather left Romania on foot, but not only to escape the Romanian army. He escaped a life of poverty, of hatred, of discrimination. He was only sixteen, but he was brave enough, smart enough, and strong enough to get out of a place that held no future for him. He led his family to freedom. Whatever life brought them in America, and it wasn’t easy, it was better than what they had left behind.

[1] Apparently the novel is being turned into a documentary about the Fusgeyer movement. See https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1552736981/the-wayfarers-the-story-of-the-fusgeyers

[2] Wikipedia has a long and detailed article on the history of the Jews in Romania at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Romania. I also consulted other sources, such as a report on Romanian anti-Semitism filed on the Yad Vashem website at http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/events/pdf/report/english/1.1_roots_of_romanian_antisemitism.pdf

[3][3] “Romania since the Berlin Treaty,” The American Jewish Yearbook (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1900), p. 83, as quoted in Culiner, p, 19.

Assessment time

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Amy

It’s time for my periodic review of what I have learned and where I am going in my research. I keep a Word document with lists of things I need to do, but sometimes I need to step back and see the whole picture, then step forward and see the details.

English: Forest trees Part of the forest which is a bit more mature than some of the other parts along the path here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the Brotman side, I think I am in fairly good shape. I have found descendants of all but one of Joseph and Bessie Brotman’s children, although I am not in touch with all of the descendants. The only missing link is Sophie Brotman; I’ve had absolutely no luck finding any records for her. I don’t know when she arrived, whether she married and, if so, who she married, where she lived, where she died. And sadly, I don’t think I ever will. There is no one left alive to ask about Sophie; none of the descendants I’ve spoken with know anything about her. Perhaps one of Abraham’s descendants might know something, so I will contact Paula, the one Abraham descendant I’ve been in touch with, and see if she has ever heard of an aunt named Sophie.

Bessie

The big research area remaining for me on the Brotman side is finding out whether we are related to any other Brotmans, in particular the Brotmans who settled in Brotmanville. I am in touch with a few of Moses Brotman’s descendants, and one is a genealogist, so we plan to collaborate and see whether we can find the connection between our families. If we can, that may also lead me to other clues about where in Galicia Joseph and Bessie lived and to clues about other family members.

Moses Brotman—Joseph’s brother?

On the Goldschlager branch, I think I am also in fairly good shape. I have found the descendants of Moritz, my great-grandfather, and of Betty and David Goldschlager, my grandfather’s siblings, and I know about the lives of Betty and David and their children. I’d love to go back and research Moritz Goldschlager’s family, but since his parents died when he was a young child, there does not seem to be too much more I can learn. My Romanian researcher did not find anything more related to my Goldschlager relatives, so I may have reached the brick wall with respect to that line.

Moritz Goldschlager

On the other hand, the Rosenzweig branch, my great-grandmother Ghitla’s family, still has a number of unanswered questions. I have been able to learn a great deal about most of the children of David and Esther Rosenzweig, my great-great-grandparents, but Zusi Rosenzweig remains a mystery. Her descendants were not responsive to my inquiries, so I may have to find another way to get closure on Zusi and her son Nathan and her husband Harry Mintz. I’ve had better luck with Tillie Rosenzweig Strolowitz Adler and her children and grandchildren and have been in touch with two of her great-grandchildren. There are still some loose ends there, but for the most part I have been able to find a fair amount about the children of Tillie and Jankel and even about their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Ghitla Rosenzweig Goldschlager

As for the family of Gustave and Gussie Rosenzweig, I still have some open questions, mostly about the daughters Lillie, Lizzie and Ray. This week I spoke with one of Sarah’s granddaughters, and I am hoping that she will also be able to help me find out more about her grandmother’s sisters, but as of right now, I have not been able to find any of the descendants of Lillie, Lizzie or Ray.

So that’s where I am in this journey to find my mother’s family. I feel as though I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, though there is still plenty of tunnel to get through.

What do I do now besides continue to search for answers to the remaining questions? I have a number of thoughts.

For one, I want to continue to build the relationships I’ve made with all my new cousins on both sides of my mother’s family—the Brotmans and the Goldschlager/Rosenzweigs. Having found them, I don’t want to lose them again. Facebook and email make this so much easier, but it will still take effort. I also want to see if I can organize a meeting for the Rosenzweig/Goldschlager cousins like we had for the Brotmans earlier this month.

I also want to pull all my research together into a format that will make it more easily accessible. I’d like to tell the story of the Brotmans, Goldschlagers and Rosenzweigs as a chronological story so that someone can pick it up and get the whole story without having to jump from blog post to blog post, searching for the next discovery. That is a larger project, and I don’t even know how to start it, but that is what I see as my ultimate goal—to write the book that tells the stories so that our descendants will have it and know who their ancestors were.

And then there is the next huge research task: my father’s side. That will be a very different research experience. His family has been in this country for about fifty years longer than my mother’s family. They came from Germany and from England. They settled and lived in other places: Philadelphia, western Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Mexico, among other places. There will be a lot more American and European records available, which will make the task both easier and harder. I’ve already traced one of my father’s lines back to the 1750s or so in Amsterdam, a full century earlier than I’ve been able to trace any of my mother’s relatives. I look forward to this research with some trepidation because of the size of the task ahead. But I am also excited by the idea that I have more discoveries, more stories, more understanding of my family and of myself ahead of me.

Turn, Turn, Turn: A New Brotman-Goldschlager-Rosenzweig Has Arrived!

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Amy

Michael Paul Lammlin

Life does in fact turn, turn, turn. One day you are sad about someone who passed away, and the next you are rejoicing in the birth of a new baby. I am delighted to announce the birth of Michael Paul Lammlin, brother of Joshua Lammlin, son of David and Marissa Lammlin. Michael is the grandson of Beth and Steven Robin. Beth is my first cousin.

Michael was born on March 13, 2014, at 5:34 pm, weighing 8 lbs., 1 oz., 19 1/2 inches long. And he carries on the Brotman tradition of red hair! (His father David also has red hair, so we cannot take all the credit.)

Michael was named for his great-grandfather, Maurice Goldschlager, my uncle, my mother’s brother. He joins a number of other cousins named for my uncle, who was adored by us all.

On his maternal side, Michael is the great-grandson of Maurice and Lynn Goldschlager and the great-great-grandson of Isadore Goldschlager and Gussie Brotman. Going even further back, Michael is the great-great-great grandson of Moritz Goldschlager and Ghitla Rosenzweig Goldschlager and the great- great-great-grandson of Joseph and Bessie Brotman. He is thus related to all my cousins who are the descendants of David and Esther Rosenzweig, Ira and Beila Goldschlager, Abraham and Yetta Brotman, or Joseph and Gittel Broat Brotman, his great- great-great-great grandparents.

Mazel tov to Marissa, David and Josh, to Beth and Steven, and to all of us! The family continues to grow.

Brotmans, Resslers, Rosenzweigs, and Goldschlagers: All Roads Meet on Pacific Street in Brooklyn

Blog Update

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Amy

Just a quick note to let you know that I have updated the page for David and Esther Rosenzweig’s Descendants to include the newly found children and other descendants of Gustave and Gussie Rosenzweig. There is also an updated family tree (see the link) and some new photos, so check it out when you get a chance. The page is found by clicking on the appropriate title at the top of the blog page under the main title.

Enjoy!

Brotmans, Resslers, Rosenzweigs, and Goldschlagers: All Roads Meet on Pacific Street in Brooklyn

Posted on March 9, 2014 by Amy

Gussie and Isadore

This is probably the most moving discovery yet for me personally. I am so excited that I don’t know where to start. This story involves the Brotman family and the Ressler family AND the Rosenzweig family and the Goldschlager family. It’s the final piece of the puzzle about how my grandparents met. It came as a posthumous gift from my much beloved Aunt Elaine, who truly was not only our family matriarch, but also our family historian. Aunt Elaine, you always wanted to tell me these stories, and I was too young and dumb to care. I know you would be so happy that I am finally interested and recording them for all time.

Fortunately, someone was interested in her stories back then. It seems that not only did my brother listen to my aunt, so did my cousin Jody’s husband Joel, my aunt’s son-in-law. He interviewed her about the family and took careful notes. Jody and Joel just found his notes while going through some boxes in their house, and Jody emailed them to me. There is so much information in there that it will take me a while to digest it all and write it up for the blog. Joel’s notes cover stories and anecdotes about the family and reveal some new things as well as things we now know but that I did not know a year ago. But here’s the story that made me say out loud, “Oh, my God!” And then to stop and sit in amazement.

You may recall that a while back I wrote a post about how various members of my family met their spouses, including my grandmother and grandfather. I wrote: “My grandfather Isadore supposedly saw my grandmother sitting in the window of her sister Tillie’s grocery store in Brooklyn and was taken by her beauty.” That was the family story passed down the generations.

When I wrote about this story recently, what I couldn’t figure out was what my grandfather was doing in Brooklyn. He had always lived in East Harlem since arriving in New York and did not live or work in Brooklyn in 1915. So what would have brought him to Brooklyn from East Harlem when he first saw my grandmother?

The answer is revealed in the notes Jody and Joel just sent me. The story begins with my aunt telling Joel that my grandmother Gussie Brotman used to go to her sister Tillie’s grocery store after school.In case you cannot read that, it says, “After school on Friday Gussie would go to Tillie’s house in Brooklyn at her grocery store.”

In 1915 Tillie and Aaron were living at 1997 Pacific Street in Brooklyn. As Joel’s notes continue:

“Isidore Goldschlager visiting a cousin who lived down the street from the grocery store. As he got off the trolley he saw Gussie on milk box and said to his cousin there is a very beautiful girl. Isadore said he wants to meet her.” (emphasis added)

In 1915, the Rosenzweigs were living at 1914 Pacific Street, right down the block from 1997 Pacific Street where Tillie and Aaron Ressler lived. When I wrote that post back on February 5, I did not yet know about Gustave Rosenzweig and his family. I had no idea that my grandfather had cousins living in Brooklyn on the same street where my grandmother was living.

Rosenzweigs 1915

Gussie living with TIllie 1915

So the cousin that my grandfather was visiting was one of the sons of Gustave Rosenzweig. In 1915, Abraham was 26, Jacob was 21, and Joseph was 17. Abraham and Jacob were in the Navy, and Joseph was working as a driver’s helper. My grandfather was 27 in 1915, so my guess is that he was hanging out with Abraham, who was closest to him in age.

Isadore age 27

I have wondered whether my grandfather ever saw these cousins once they all got to NYC, whether he knew them well. Well, obviously he did. If he had not been close to them, he would never have come to Brooklyn. He would never have seen that beautiful red haired woman sitting on the milk box. And this would never have happened:

Isadore Goldschlager and Bessie Brotman marriage certificate

Isadore Goldschlager and Gussie Brotman
marriage certificate

And if that hadn’t happened, then my Aunt Elaine and my Uncle Maurice and my mother would never have been born, and then all my first cousins and my siblings and I would never have been born.

That little stroll down Pacific Street brought the Rosenzweig/Goldschlager family together with the Brotman family and thus created my family. How could this not be my favorite story ever?

This is another one of those moments when all the time spent studying census reports pays off. If I had not found the 1915 census reports for the Resslers and the Rosenzweigs, I would never have known they lived down the street from each other. If I hadn’t looked at all those other documents, I would never have learned about my grandfather’s cousins and his uncle Gustave. If I hadn’t started this blog, Jody and Joel might never have found these notes in their boxes of papers and provided the last piece of the puzzle. If Joel hadn’t listened to his mother-in-law, we wouldn’t have her memories and stories to tie it all together. It should remind us all to ask questions and take notes and listen to our parents, our aunts and uncles, and our grandparents so that we can learn everything we can while we can.

Thank you, Jody and Joel. Thank you, Aunt Elaine. Thank you, Uncle Gustave, for moving to Brooklyn. Thank you, Aunt Tillie, for taking my grandmother to Brooklyn. And thank you, Abraham Rosenzweig, for taking my grandfather for that walk down Pacific Street so that he could meet and marry my grandmother.

Brotmanblog: A Family Journey

Adventures in Genealogy

Category Archives: Goldschlagers

Remy Brandon Fischer, Shalev Ezra ben Dov Baer Yaakov v Rivke Gittel

1846-1911: Frances Cohen Hamberg, My Great-Grandfather’s Oldest Sibling

The Fusgeyers, Part IV: Romania Today

The Fusgeyers, Part III: What Came Afterwards

The Fusgeyers, Part II: How They Did It

The Fusgeyers: Why They Left Romania

Assessment time

Turn, Turn, Turn: A New Brotman-Goldschlager-Rosenzweig Has Arrived!

Blog Update

Brotmans, Resslers, Rosenzweigs, and Goldschlagers: All Roads Meet on Pacific Street in Brooklyn

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