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.

Rachel “Ray” Rosenzweig: Can anyone remember anything else?

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Amy

I have had amazing luck in finding out something about the lives of all but one of Gustave and Gussie’s children. I have even been able to connect with descendants of many of them. There are still holes and unfinished stories for Lillie and Lizzie and Sarah, but I’ve at least been able to trace them through some part of their adult lives. The only child I have had no luck finding after she left the family home is Rachel or Ray, the youngest child.

I know Ray was born in 1904 and that through 1930 she was living with her mother in Brooklyn, but I have found nothing that reveals what happened to her after her mother died. I have not been able to find her on the 1940 census, on the NYC marriage index, or on the Social Security Death Index. I don’t know whether she had any descendants. I need some assistance.

A number of Gussie and Gustave’s descendants remember Ray, and I have been able to obtain these two photographs of Ray from the 1940s. I know she must have lived at least into the late 1960s since so many of her great-nieces and great-nephews have memories of her. One remembers that she moved to Florida at some point and thinks she married, but cannot remember her husband’s name. Another remembers that she lived in New Jersey and married someone with an Italian surname.

Now I am asking to look carefully at these two photos and see if they spark any specific memories—an occupation, a husband, a child, a residence, a date of death—anything that might help me find out more about the youngest child of Gustave and Gussie.

Ray

The Legacy of Rebecca Rosenzweig: Her Son, Irwin Elkins

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Amy

Iriwin Elkins 1960

I recently connected with Richard Elkins, the grandson of Rebecca Rosenzweig Elkin. Rebecca died in 1921 at age 27, when her son Irving was less than two years old. Irving grew up to be Irwin Elkins, who married Muriel, with whom he had two sons, Michael and Richard. Richard was kind enough to share with me some stories about Irwin’s life. With his permission, I am including some of what he shared with me in his own words.

First, some background. Rebecca Rosenzweig, my grandfather’s first cousin and the daughter of Gustave and Gussie Rosenzweig, married Frank Elkin in 1914. Her son Irving was born in 1919. After Rebecca died in 1921, Frank married Frances Reiner in 1922 and moved to Boston. Frank and Frances had a son named Stanley, who was born in 1925. In 1930 Frank was back in Brooklyn with Frances and the boys, but sometime thereafter they returned to the Boston area, where they settled permanently. I had assumed that Irving had stayed with Frank and his new wife during the 1920s, but Richard informed me otherwise.

“When Rebecca Rosenzweig passed away in 1921, Irwin Elkin moved into the home of Gustave and Gussie Rosenzweig, where he resided for eight years until 1929. Irving adored his Grandma Rosenzweig, and Grandma Rosenzweig adored my Dad. My Dad thought of Gussie as his mother. My Dad said Gussie was a fabulous cook. My Dad never spoke about Gustave.”

Perhaps the reason that Irwin never spoke about Gustave was that by 1921, Gustave and Gussie were divorced or at least no longer living together. If Irwin’s years with his grandmother were from 1921 to 1929, he was living with just Gussie, Ray, and Lizzie.

One of Irwin’s favorite stories about his years living with his grandmother was this one, according to Richard: “There was a large family gathering at Gustave and Gussie’s home, and Gussie discovered that she did not have enough food to feed the entire clan. Gussie pulled my Dad aside and told him to tell all the other children that when Gussie asked who wanted chicken for dinner, all the children were to say, ”No, thank you,” because they were not hungry. That way there would be enough food for the adults. When everyone sat down at the table, Gussie asked who wants chicken for dinner? All the children dutifully said no thank they were not hungry and were excused from the table. After the dinner was served and completed, Gussie then announced, ‘Any child who did not eat my chicken dinner will get no dessert!’ “

Richard also shared this story about his uncle, Jack Rosenzweig: “The only other story I recall about my Dad growing up in the Rosenzweig household is someone my Dad referred to as Uncle Jack who had a wild sense of humor. Jack worked behind the counter in the post office. One day my Dad walked into the post office to see Jack and Jack told my Dad he went to Yankee Stadium and met with legend Babe Ruth. Jack then tossed to my Dad a baseball with Babe Ruth’s autograph on it. There was just one problem. The autograph was written in purple indelible ink that was the same color ink that Jack used to address packages for postal customers.”

Irwin’s time with the Rosenzweig family ended in 1929. Richard wrote: “In 1929 Irwin was told to pack up his belongings. Frank arrived from Boston, picked up Irwin, and they went back to Boston on the train. My Dad was aware that Frank had remarried and had met Frances (Fan) Reiner. What my Dad did not know, until he arrived at his new home, is that he had a kid brother named Stanley who was six years younger than he was. That fact had been withheld from him while Irwin was living in the Rosenzweig household.”

I asked Richard if he knew why Frank and Frances had moved to Boston rather than stay in NYC. He wrote:

“Although Francis Fan Reiner was born in New Jersey, her extended family lived in Boston. … The second move back to Boston occurred because Frank changed professions. He met a couple who were twenty years younger than he was named Joseph Cohen and his wife Rene Cohen. They opened up a business called Debonair Frocks located on Kneeland Street that was in the high rent fashion district in Boston. Frank was the salesman who traveled throughout New England.”

Richard also told me that his father graduated from Boston English High School and was accepted into the MIT School of Engineering. He could not afford the $600 per year tuition and instead went to Northeastern University, which had awarded him a football and baseball scholarship and the opportunity to work on a paid co-op job. According to Richard, “Frank and Fanny Elkins were very unhappy that Irwin wanted to study engineering in college. They believed it was a useless profession. They would invite family and friends over to convince my Dad that the future was in clothing, not engineering. People need things to wear, they don’t need mechanical engineers.”

Irwin soon proved them wrong. Richard wrote:

“When World War II broke out with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, my Dad had just graduated Northeastern and tried to enlist as a fighter pilot. He was rejected for two reasons. He stood 6’4 and weighed 200 pounds which made him too large to fly. He also had his degree in mechanical and aeronautical engineering that made him too valuable to serve in the armed forces. My Dad was assigned to be a civilian contractor working for Bethlehem Steel at the Fore River Ship Yard in Quincy, Massachusetts. His responsibility was to oversee the construction of light cruisers and destroyers, take them to sea on shakedown cruises, and sign off on their seaworthiness before turning over the ships to the War Department.

“It was my Dad’s crew of engineers at the Fore River Shipyard who perfected the “Davit” that was first invented in 1928. It’s the device that holds a ship’s lifeboats in place that would lower the lifeboat by hand cranking the boat down into the water. My Dad was the lead engineer who re-designed the Davit into a fully automated self-contained hydraulic system that would first lower the two arms holding the lifeboat from their vertical position – while keeping the lifeboat level – into a horizontal position for boarding. The Davit hydraulics would then resume lowering the lifeboat into a fully locked horizontal position at which point a second set of hydraulics would automatically lower the lifeboat while maintaining its level stability even if the weight distribution in the boat was not balanced. The end result was an automated steady descent onto the water regardless of the surf conditions or high winds.

“If you want to see first-hand the engineering legacy of Irwin “Tiny” Elkins, then take a vacation cruise on a Princess, Carnival, Disney, or Royal Caribbean ship. Look closely at the hydraulics on the Davit’s holding up the lifeboats. Nothing has changed in the past seventy years. The survivors of cruise ship disasters like the Concordia in Italy can thank the Rosenzweig family genes for that innovated engineering solution.”

Irwin Elkins with Piper Cub 1958

Richard also shared these recollections of his father:

“My Dad was physically a large man and a wonderful athlete. Growing up we skied together, played tennis, and golfed. In a batting cage he could outdo me with little effort. Whenever anyone asked my Dad why such a large person like him was called “Tiny,” his standard response was “I was an incubator baby, and the nurse in charge turned the heat up too high.” Whenever he was asked why he did not have a middle name, his standard response was, “My parents were so poor they could not afford one for me.” Whenever someone asked him why he was so tall, his standard response was “So if I cut off my legs, will it make you feel any better?” In his business dealings he often told his customers, “It will be done my way and don’t worry about it. If I’m wrong, I’ll deal with it after I’m dead.” If someone did something that my Dad considered to be stupid, my Dad would point to his head and say “That’s using your toukis.”

Finally, I asked Richard whether his father ever reconnected with the Rosenzweig family. He shared this story:

“In 1969 a woman and her son walk into my Dad’s office in Brattleboro. When my Dad asks if he can help her, she introduces her son named Steven Rosenthal who will be a student at Windham College in nearby Putney. My Dad replies, why is that of interest to me? She informs my Dad that her name is Rebecca Kurtz Rosenthal. She was named after my Dad’s mother Rebecca Rosenzweig. Her mother was Sarah Rosenzweig, the sister of Rebecca Rosenzweig. To say that my Dad was completely stunned at this unannounced visit is an understatement.”

Irwin Elkins reunited with his cousins Rebecca Kurtz and Ben Kurtz and others in Florida 1992

The following year Richard himself met the Rosenzweig family:

“In 1970 at a family reunion in Long Island, New York, at the home of Rebecca Kurtz Rosenthal and her husband Sam Rosenthal, I arrived with my parents. Other than Rebecca and her husband Sam, none of the Rosenzweig family knew that my Dad would be attending the reunion. When we walked into the backyard Rebecca introduced my Dad to all of her family. I distinctly remember a flood of tears because the entire Rosenzweig clan had not seen Irwin in over forty years.”

“Rebecca’s and Sam’s son, Steven, introduced me to a woman he called “My Great Aunt Lizzie.” She must have been Lizzie Rosenzweig. She knew the name of the cemetery where Rebecca was buried. When my Dad asked her what his mother died from, Lizzie replied that she succumbed to a flu pandemic in 1921 that devastated NYC. Lizzie also informed my Dad that he had two older brothers named Milton and David who also died from the same pandemic that took his mother’s life. “

“When the emotions settled down several hours later, Lizzie told my Dad a comical story about when Frank showed up at the Rosenzweig household to court Rebecca, Lizzie’s parents would lock all the other sisters into their parent’s bedroom. However, they were allowed to put their ear to the door and listen.”

Rebecca’s death certificate indicates that Rebecca in fact died from tuberculosis at a sanitarium in Liberty, New York, where she had been a patient for a little over a month before her death. I also found the death certificates for Rebecca and Frank’s two other sons. The first born was Milton, born on December 14, 1914, just nine months after Rebecca and Frank were married. He died just five months later on May 16, 1915. It seems he had been sick for two months, in other words, since he was really just an infant.

Milton Elkin death certificate

The second child was Daniel (not David). He was born October 31, 1916, and died December 16, 1917, when he was just over a year old, from broncho pneumonia.

Daniel Elkin death certificate

Although the family lore was that Rebecca and the two boys died during the flu pandemic of 1921, that appears not to be true. It would appear instead that Milton died over a year before Daniel was even born, and that Daniel died two years before Irving was born and four years before Rebecca died. Maybe the family remembered it differently because it was just too painful to imagine Rebecca and Frank losing one child after another and then Frank losing Rebecca when Irving was not yet two years old. It is too painful to imagine.

I am deeply appreciative of Richard’s willingness to share his family stories. They preserve not only the memory of his grandmother Rebecca, who never saw her son grow up; they also preserve the memory of that son, Richard’s father, Irwin Elkins, who despite losing his mother at such a young age, grew up to be a man with a great sense of humor, a wonderful father, a successful businessperson, and an inspired engineer. The resilience of the human spirit is remarkable.

Max and Irving: The Sons of Abraham Rosenzweig

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Amy

Abraham Rosenzweig was the oldest son of Gustave and Gussie Rosenzweig and my grandfather Isadore’s first cousin. He was born in New York City on February 12, 1889, apparently the first of their children born in the US. He served in the Navy before and during World War I, and he worked for a bakery after the war and thereafter.

Although I do not have any documentation for Abraham’s marriage, it seems that he probably married in Pennsylvania. Rebecca Fagles, his wife, was born in Pennsylvania, and Abraham was stationed on the USS Georgia in Philadelphia in 1910.

Abraham Rosenzweig 1910 census US Navy

I assume that that was when and where they met and that they married around 1915 because although Abraham was living with his family and single as of the 1915 census, his first son Maxwell was born April 2, 1916. Abraham and Rebecca’s second son Irving was born April 26, 1919, and in 1920, they were all living in Brooklyn, according to the 1920 US census.

UPDATE: I was able to find the marriage of Reba Fagles and Abraham Rosenzweig in 1915 on the Philadelphia marriage index. I am assuming that that is the record for Abraham and Rebecca.

Abraham Rosenzweig and family 1920 census

Abraham and Rebecca, known as Abe and Beck, lived in Brooklyn for the rest of their lives, where they raised their two sons, Max and Irving. Max married Sylvia Herrick and had two sons, Joseph and Gerald.

Max and Sylvia Ross

Irving married Irene Rubenstein/Robbins and had two daughters, Jane and Arlene. Gerry remembers his grandparents very well since he grew up in Brooklyn where they lived. He remembers that his grandmother Beck served untoasted English muffins and used memorial candle holders as glasses. Gerry named his two children for his grandparents, his son for Abe and his daughter for Beck. Abe died in 1961, and Beck died in 1970.

Abe, Sylvia, Ray (Abe’s sister) and Beck

Here are some photographs of Max and Irving and one with their aunt Ray, an aunt I’ve otherwise been unable to locate.

Max and Irving Rosenzweig/Ross

Max and Irving with their aunt Ray

I was able to get some background information about the lives of Max and Irving from Gerry and Arlene.

Max and Sylvia settled in Brooklyn, where Max first was in the egg and poultry business and then in the business of reconditioning steel drums for storing oil. At some time after World War II while doing business with the army, Max changed his last name from Rosenzweig to Ross, believing that he would have more success with a name that was not obviously Jewish. Sometime thereafter Irving also changed his last name to Ross for similar reasons and also because their mother Beck did not like the idea of the two brothers having different last names.

Arlene told me that her father Irving had met her mother Irene when her uncle Max went to Sylvia’s house while they were dating and brought his younger brother Irving with him. One of Sylvia’s friends was there and arranged for Irving to meet her younger sister Irene. For Irving, it was love at first sight, but not for Irene. For a year, Irving pursued her. Irene had joined the Navy, one of the first ten women to become a WAVE, and Irving, himself in the US Army, placed an ad in the Stars and Stripes to find her and to get her attention. Eventually, Irene agreed to date him and fell in love with him as well.

They were married in 1945, and according to Arlene, to his dying day, her father would do anything to make Irene happy. Irving and Irene Irene and Irving lived at 41 Kew Gardens Road, Queens, and their two daughters were born at Kew Gardens General Hospital. Irving owned a share in a successful hardware business.

In 1957, Irving and Irene and their daughters went to visit Irene’s parents, who had moved to the Miami, FL, area. Irene was so taken with life in South Florida that within days after returning to Brooklyn, Irving sold his share in the hardware business and bought three tickets to Miami for Irene and his daughters, coming down a few months later himself once his business matters were resolved. He was, as Arlene said, determined to make Irene as happy as possible.

Within five years, Irving, a man who never graduated from high school, had obtained a license to sell insurance and had established a very successful insurance brokerage business. He was able to provide his family with a large, custom-built house and a comfortable lifestyle. Irving and Irene remained in the Miami area thereafter and only occasionally would they return to the New York area.

Sadly, their lives would be marked by tragedy. In 1968, Irving was admitted to Baptist Hospital in Miami for congestive heart failure. While he was being admitted, Irene and Arlene went to get something to eat, and while driving down North Kendall Drive, where Baptist Hospital is still located, they were hit head-on by a minibus going northbound on U.S. 1, South Dixie Highway. The minivan had defective brakes and had skidded across the median. Both Irene and Arlene suffered severe injuries, and Arlene underwent numerous surgeries and was laid up for a substantial time after the accident. For some period of time all three members of the family shared one hospital room.

Arlene and Irving Ross August1968

Not long after the accident, Irving was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and died at age 51 on August 5, 1970. Irene was only 49 when he died. She had to go to work to support herself and her children and became a purchasing agent at Florida International University, where she worked for many years. She died January 16, 2009, at age 88.

Irene Ross in 2006

Arlene Ross

Max also died at a prematurely young age. His wife Sylvia had a number of medical problems, and while accompanying her for treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital in November, 1975, Max had an aneurysm and died. He was only 59 years old. Sylvia lived more than twenty years after Max died.

Sylvia Ross

The two sons of Abraham and Rebecca, Max and Irving, thus had many parallels in their lives. Both were big strong men over six feet tall, both had changed their name to Ross, both had had two children and long marriages to women to whom they were devoted, and both had died before they were sixty years old. Gerry said he speaks to his father daily and has every day since he died in 1975; Arlene also spoke adoringly of her father. I could tell in speaking with both Gerry and Arlene that each of them loved their fathers dearly and want their memories preserved. I hope this blog will help to do that.

Thirteen Abraham Rosenzweigs or How I Almost Threw My Computer through the Window

Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Amy

I have had some incredible luck following my hunches when ordering vital records about people who I think are my family members—finding Frieda Brotman’s death certificate and marriage certificates, for example, or finding Susie Mintz and Gustave Rosenzweig and Tillie Strolowitz and their relatives. But lest anyone think that all my hunches have worked out, I want to give you three recent examples where I just guessed wrong.

The first example involves Gussie Rosenzweig, Gustave’s wife. Recently I was able to obtain her death certificate and saw that her son Jack had listed her as a widow with a husband named Ben. I was very puzzled by this as Gussie had not been listed as living with any man in the most recent census reports before she died. Had she married sometime in the 1920s or 1930s and been widowed in between census reports? I did a search and found only one Gussie Rosenzweig who had married a man named Benjamin. I ordered that certificate, and this is what I received:

Clearly, this is not the right Gussie. This Gussie was only 27 in 1934, whereas our Gussie would have been in her 70s; this Gussie had different parents who had come from Hungary. So I still have no idea whether there ever was a Ben who married Gussie after she and Gustave split up. Strike one.

The next bad guess involved a search for the other children of Gussie and Gustave who did not survive infancy. I had seen on Rebecca’s birth certificate in 1893 that Gussie and Gustave had had five children, four living at Rebecca’s birth. Somehow I miscounted and thought there was a missing child, although now when I go back and re-read my blog post, it seems pretty obvious that I had found all four living children (Lillie, Sarah, Abraham, and Rebecca) and the one deceased child (David). But I thought I had found another—Samuel Rosenzweig—and sent for that death certificate. Not surprisingly, he was not the child of Gustave and Gussie, as you can see below. Strike two.

The last example of my bad hunches involved a man named Paskel Rosenzweig who came from Iasi in 1900. I thought that he might be another Rosenzweig sibling and decided to research his life in the US. I was able to determine that he had changed his name to Charles and ordered a death certificate, hoping it would show that he was the sibling of Gustave, Tillie, Ghitla and Zusi, but as you can see below, he was not. Strike three.

Perhaps he was a cousin, but it would require some further digging into Romanian documents to see if Charles’ father was related to my great-great grandfather David Rosenzweig. For now I will accept that my hunch is unproven, if not yet proven wrong.

There are other examples of times I made a bad guess. Fortunately for the most part these bad guesses are not costly, as the documents usually came for free from the Family History Library. But even so, every time I open a document, either electronically or in hard copy, my heart is beating, hoping it will provide an important clue or confirm a hunch. When it does not, it is very disappointing. Inevitable—what are the odds I will always find the right person?—but nevertheless, disappointing.

Family Photo Album: Joe and Sadie and Their Daughters Irene and Mildred

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Amy

Joe and Sadie and their daughters

Photographs can capture so much—a moment in time, a relationship, the style of an era, a mood, an emotion. Even family snapshots can reveal a lot. These pictures of Joe and Sadie and their daughters capture a family. Thank you to the next generation for sharing these pictures of their mothers and grandparents.

These pictures from the early 1940s of Irene, in her early 20s, and Mildred, a teenager, are so touching. They show two beautiful sisters who seem close to each other and to their parents. They both look like they have so much ahead of them.

Ariela described her mother Irene as very outgoing and social like her father Joe, someone who would strike up conversations with total strangers. Ariela said that Irene loved to dance and ski and sail as a young woman and that she loved jewelry and clothes and other beautiful objects. She loved dressing up and attending parties, and you can see that love of life and people in her face in these pictures of her as a young woman.

Irene 1941 Rockaway Pkwy

Irene, Joe and Mildred 1941

Tragically, Mildred’s life was cut short when she died in 1951 at only 25 years old, leaving behind her young husband and fifteen-month old child. I am hoping to learn more about her, but from these pictures it looks like she was also a young woman who loved life and people and was adored by her sister and her parents.

Mildred

Sadie and Mildred 1942

Mildred 1941

Mildred and friend 1943

Mildred Rosenzweig and Seymour Sundick 1947

Ron and his mother MIldred Sundick at his first birthday, a few months before she died

This is one of my favorite pictures in this group of photos. It shows both Mildred and Irene surrounding a baby carriage. Although we cannot see the baby, the descendants of Mildred and Irene and I thought that it is likely that the baby is Ariela, based on the hairstyles dating it in the 1940s and the adoring look on Irene’s face, looking down at what must be her baby.

Mildred and Irene looking at Ariela 1947

You can also see that same adoring look on Irene’s face many years later as she looks lovingly at her daughter Ariela.

Irene and Ariela

And here is one of Irene with her grandson Aron. Same loving look—on both of their faces.

Aron and his grandmother Irene

Here are some photos of Joe and Sadie in the 1940s:

Here are some from the 1950s and after of Joe, Sadie and Irene:

This photo is of Irene and her husband Leo Kohl with her parents Joe and Sadie.

Leo Joe Sadie and Irene

Ariela told me that her mother was madly in love with Leo and missed him dearly until the day she died. Irene died less than a year and a half ago at age 91.

As I said, photographs capture so much. These capture a family over time, a family where children adored their parents and vice versa, a family that endured a terrible tragedy, but that survived and thrived and found love and joy in their lives again

Brotmanblog: A Family Journey

Adventures in Genealogy

Category Archives: Rosenzweigs

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

The Legacy of Rebecca Rosenzweig: Her Son, Irwin Elkins

Max and Irving: The Sons of Abraham Rosenzweig

Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose

Family Photo Album: Joe and Sadie and Their Daughters Irene and Mildred

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