Category Archives: Reflections

Tillie’s Story

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Although I have no memory of meeting Aunt Tillie, I heard her name all the time when I was growing up. (I don’t know which spelling she preferred; sometimes it is Tilly, sometimes Tillie.  I have used both spellings throughout the blog.)  She was very close to my grandmother Gussie, and my mother and her sister and brother adored her.    She was described to me as a lot of fun: vivacious, outgoing, funny and loving.  It seems she was the one who provided a lot of the happy experiences for my mother and her siblings growing up.

Like my grandmother, she had a tough life.  She was born in 1884 and came to the US with Bessie and Chaim when she was 6 or 7 (census reports are in conflict; some say 1890, some say 1891).  In 1900 when she was sixteen, she was living on Ridge Street with her parents, her brother Hyman, and her two little sisters, Gussie, who was five, and Frieda, was three.  When her father Joseph died a year later, my guess is that Tillie must have become a second parent to Gussie, Frieda and the infant Sam.

In 1905 when she was 22, Tillie married Aaron Ressler.  At the time she was still living on Ridge Street with her mother and siblings.  Aaron was 26 at the time and was also living in the Lower East Side.  By 1910, Tillie and Aaron had three sons, Leo, Joseph, and Harry, all under five.  They were living at 94 Broadway in Brooklyn, where they owned a grocery store at 100 Broadway.  In addition, Gussie had moved in with them, choosing to live with Tillie instead of moving in with Bessie after she had married Phillip Moskowitz.  (Bessie and Phillip were still living on the Lower East Side in 1910, so moving to Brooklyn must have been a big deal for twelve year old Gussie.) Gussie helped take care of the boys while Aaron and Tillie worked in the store.  Family lore has it that my grandfather spotted my grandmother while she was sitting in the window of Tillie and Aaron’s store.

Life must have seemed pretty good for the Ressler family in 1910.  By 1918, however, things had changed.  On Aaron’s draft registration form of that year, he reported that he was not employed and was suffering from locomotor ataxia, a condition that causes pain and loss of muscle control and movements.  The 1920 census did report that Aaron worked at a grocery store, although it also said he worked at home.  They no longer lived on Broadway, but on Ralph Avenue in Brooklyn.  Aaron died six years later in February, 1926, leaving behind Tillie and three sons aged 20, 19, and 17.

Tillie continued to run the grocery store for some time after Aaron died. I cannot find any record of Tillie and her two younger sons in the 1930 census, but in 1940 she was living on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx with Joe and Harry (Leo had married Mildred and moved to Connecticut by then).  According to the census, she had also lived at this same address in 1935, so at some point Tillie had left Brooklyn as a widow with two almost grown sons and moved all the way to the Bronx.  She never remarried and died at age 72 in 1956 after suffering from painful arthritis.  My mother remembers that she was treated with cortisone, perhaps excessively, and ended up dying in a public hospital on Welfare Island in NYC, where my grandmother would go to see her every week.

I don’t know why she moved to the Bronx, perhaps to make a fresh start.  My mother remembers that Aunt Tillie lived in an apartment on the then-glamorous Grand Concourse with her two adult sons, Joe and Harry.  I don’t know how she supported herself after Aaron died, but somehow she did.  My mother was born after Aaron died, and so she only knew Tillie as a widow, yet she remembers Tillie as a happy, upbeat person who would bring my mother baked goods (and once a large easel) that she carried on the subway from the Bronx to Brooklyn on her weekly trips. Tillie was the one who held the family together—the one who encouraged my aunt Elaine to go stay with Leo and Mildred in Connecticut to broaden her horizons, who took my mother to baseball games, who could occasionally get my shy grandmother to socialize. When my sister was born in 1955, Tillie brought treats not only for my mother, but also for the other new mothers who were sharing the same hospital room.   She was a woman who was born in Europe, but spoke English like an American, who brought up three sons, took care of her sisters and brothers, and was one of the most positive influences on my mother and her siblings. She was strong and positive despite all the hardships she had faced.  I wish I had had a chance to know her.

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Miracles

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There has been more than enough media attention paid to the fact that Hanukkah coincides with Thanksgiving this year.  There have been menu suggestions, historical comparisons, mathematical calendar explanations, and rabbinic messages regarding the coincidence.  It’s all been fun and interesting, but in the end nothing too serious since it only will happen this year for any of us living today and for hundreds of generations to come.  (Apparently the next time it happens will be almost 80,000 years from now.)  It’s a once in many lifetimes coincidence with no deeper hidden meaning.  And yet here I am, looking for meaning.

Aside from planning to have latkes with the turkey, I hadn’t given this whole thing much thought myself, but now that the two events are about to occur, I have been thinking about what this means to me.  Both holidays celebrate freedom and specifically freedom of religion.  The Pilgrims left England and came to the New World to be able to practice their own form of Christianity; the Maccabees fought the Syrian army in order to be able to practice Judaism. When we light the menorah, we not only celebrate the miracle of the oil lasting eight days. we also celebrate the miracle that we have survived—not only then, but every time before and after that time when some army, some nation, some maniac tried to exterminate the Jewish people.  It is indeed a miracle that we, the Jewish people, are here.

Although Thanksgiving has no particular miracle associated with it (aside from the miracle that at least for a short time, the settlers were not trying to kill the natives who lived here first), we celebrate the miracle of America—its bounty, its beauty, and its identity as a place of refuge not only for the Pilgrims, but for all the immigrants who came later to escape religious, political or economic oppression.  This year when we eat the turkey and light the candles, I will be grateful not only for what I have now, but for all those who came before me.  I will think of Joseph and Bessie and be grateful for their courage and determination.  It is in many ways a miracle that they were able to come here with their children and survive with few resources or skills other than hard work, determination, hope, and love.  I am so thankful for all they did and for everything their descendants—my grandparents and my parents —have done to provide me with the life I live today.  It is indeed a miracle that we, all of our family members, all of the descendants, are here.

Of course, this year I am also grateful to have found all of you, my long-lost cousins, and for all my relatives everywhere.  Enjoy this crazy coincidence of Thanksgivukah in whatever way you celebrate it, and let’s hope for continuing miracles in our lives and the lives of all people everywhere.  It is indeed a miracle that we are here.

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Jewish Naming Patterns

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Most people know that in Jewish tradition, a child is often named after a relative who is no longer alive.[1]  It is also Jewish practice to identify a person in Hebrew with his or her father’s first name added to that person’s own first name.  For example, on his headstone Joseph’s name appears in Hebrew as Yosef Yakov ben Avraham, meaning that his father’s name was Abraham.  These naming patterns are a great help to genealogical research since often you can find names recurring through several generations, providing a means of establishing family relationships.

For example, we know that Bessie’s Hebrew name was Pessel and that her mother was named Gittel.  Bessie named her daughter Gussie for her own mother—in Hebrew, Gussie’s name was Hannah Gittel.  Then, in turn, I was named for Gussie’s mother, Bessie—in Hebrew, Pessel.  I then named my older daughter Rebecca Grace for my grandmother; her Hebrew name is Rivka Gittel.  So both Gittel and Pessel are names that recur through the generations and perhaps go back even further and perhaps will stretch further into the future.

Similarly, my brother Ira was named for our grandfather Isadore, whose Hebrew name was Ira.  Isadore’s father was Moritz/Moshe, and Isadore was named for Moshe’s father Ira.  Isadore in turn named his son Maurice for his father, and Maurice named his son James Ian and one of his daughters Robin Inez, the I being for Maurice’s father Isadore.  So the M’s and the I’s keep recurring in our family.  My younger daughter Madeline (Mazal Ahava) was named in part for my uncle Maurice (as well as for my husband’s uncle Murray), and there are several other M’s in the family among the fifth generation.

I am sure each of you can find similar recurring patterns in your own branches of the family.  There certainly are many B/P names and J names that run throughout our family tree.   Some of them undoubtedly are for Bessie/Pessel and Joseph or one of their descendants.

Why do I bring this up now? Well, after receiving Abraham’s death certificate and being bewildered by the fact that it records his parents’ names as Harry and Anna, I consulted with my mentor Renee.  She asked me several questions that reassured me that the death certificate is most likely incorrect.  First, she said look for naming patterns.  That reminded me that Abraham’s oldest son was named Joseph Jacob—Yosef Yakov on his headstone.Image  If Abraham’s father was named Harry, then why would he have named his son Joseph and not Harry? In fact, there are no Harrys or H names among Abraham’s children or grandchildren.

In addition, Renee pointed out that Abraham’s full name on his headstone is Avraham Zvi ben Yosef Yakov.  Zvi is a Hebrew name that means “deer” and in Yiddish was usually translated into Hersh or some Americanized version: Harry, Herbert, or (as in the case of my husband) Harvey.  Renee also pointed out that Abraham’s American name was Abraham H. Brotman.  She said it was extremely unlikely that his father’s name would have been Harry or Hersh/Zvi also (unless, of course, his father had died before Abraham was born, which does not seem likely).  By looking at the naming patterns, I am now convinced that it is unlikely that Abraham’s father’s name was Harry and that the death certificate is not correct and the headstone is.  Perhaps the Zvi/H in his name was for his maternal grandfather. Maybe that’s how it ended up on his death certificate.

So, cousins, do you know who you were named for? Do you know what your Hebrew name is? What your parents’ Hebrew names are? It would be really helpful and interesting to me and perhaps to others to know this information as it may open other doors for more research.  If you are willing to share that information, please let me know by using the comment box below so that we can all share this information.  Thank you!

[1][1] At least that has been the tradition among Ashkenazi East European Jews.  German Jews apparently did not always adhere to this tradition.  For example, my father’s name is the same as his father, John Nusbaum Cohen, and until he was an adult, he used “junior” after his name.  Moreoever, his sister’s name was the same as their mother—Eva.

Victor Hanson, “Natural Links in a Long Chain of Being”

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I heard this yesterday while at an event.  Someone read it aloud, and it resonated for me.  It’s from Victor Hanson’s essay, “Natural Links in a Long Chain of Being.”  You can find the full work at the following link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5048763

Here are some of the lines that stood out for me.  I think you will see why when you read them.

“[W]e need some daily signposts that we are not novel, not better, not worse from those who came before us….Although I came into this world alone and will leave alone, I am not alone.…I believe all of us are natural links in a long chain of being, and that I need to know what time of day it is, what season is coming, whether the wind is blowing north or from the east, and if the moon is still full tomorrow night, just as the farmers who came before me did.

The physical world around us constantly changes, but human nature does not. We must struggle in our brief existence to find some transcendent meaning during reoccurring heartbreak and disappointment and so find solace in the knowledge that our ancestors have all gone through this before.

You may find all that all too intrusive, living with the past as present. I find it exhilarating. I believe there is an old answer for every new problem, that wise whispers of the past are with us to assure us that if we just listen and remember, we are not alone; we have been here before.”

 

 

Mt Zion and Mt Hebron

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[This is the second part of my post about the weekend in New York. If you haven’t read the post about the Lower East Side, that is Part One. This is Part Two.]

Before I write about my trip to Mt Zion and Mt Hebron cemeteries, let me tell you that I have never been someone who understood why people go to cemeteries, and it always seemed a little creepy to me. I don’t believe in an afterlife, and it seemed to me that you could remember those who had died without standing over the place where their bodies were buried.

I initially saw a cemetery trip this time as a way of doing more research. Then when I realized that Joseph was not buried near any of his children or his wife, I felt badly. It was likely no one had been there for a hundred years. Did that matter? Joseph didn’t know, so why did I care? I am not sure, but somehow I felt compelled to pay him honor. In fact, once I received the photos of the headstone and footstone from Charlie Katz, I no longer needed to go for research. I was going for some emotional reason that was mysterious even to me. The trip to Mt Hebron, which is only ten minutes away from Mt Zion, then seemed like an obvious addition to the trip to Mt Zion.

So off we went on Sunday morning, first to Mt Zion. It is one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in New York City, and the graves are very close together with almost no open land left. I knew from Charlie Katz that it would be hard to find Joseph’s gravesite. The stones are so close together that it is very difficult to walk between and around them, and without Charlie’s directions, we might never have found it. But then suddenly we spotted it.

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I stood there, not really knowing what to do or to think. I thought of his life, thanked him silently for bringing his family here, tried to imagine what he looked like. Did he have red hair? No idea. Then I left on the headstone one of the beach rocks I had collected the prior weekend. I had decided to bring a piece of something I loved to leave at the graves, and the beach is the place that always makes me the happiest. I left feeling that I had at least done something to honor his memory.

Then we went on to Mt Hebron, a much larger and much less crowded cemetery. The section where Bessie is buried is across the road from the section where my grandparents and Sam are buried. [What I didn’t know then is that Frieda is also buried there, but that’s a story for another post.] I saw Philip’s headstone right away, but did not realize that Bessie’s was right behind it, as you can see in the photo below.

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It took some counting and looking, but finally Harvey spotted it. I felt the same way standing at Bessie’s grave—grateful and wistful. I found myself drawn to her name—both in Hebrew and in English—and rubbed my hand over the name Bessie, saying, “That’s my name.” I also was very touched to see that the Brotman name was included on her headstone, not just Moskowitz.

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I left one of my beach rocks there as well and then walked across the street to the other section.

In that section I first saw Sam Brotman’s headstone. I never met Sam, and I really felt badly about that, given that he lived until I was 22 years old. I left a beach rock on his stone, saying, “I am sorry I never met you.”

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In the row behind Sam’s grave I found my grandparents’ grave. The headstone was covered with ivy, which looked pretty but made reading the inscriptions impossible. I gently tore away the ivy so I could see the stones.

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My grandfather died when I was almost five, so I have only the vaguest memories of him, but have heard lots of stories about him—how funny he was, how smart he was (he knew several languages), and how opinionated. He walked across Romania to escape oppression and poverty. I wish I had had a chance to know him better. There was a rock left on his headstone when we arrived. Who could have been there? I don’t think it could have been anyone recently, but perhaps it had been there for many years. I placed mine next to it and rubbed his name.

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Seeing my grandmother’s headstone was the most difficult for me. She lived until I was 23, and when I was a little girl I loved her very much. She was fun and loving with her grandchildren, despite having had a difficult and often sad life. I have thought of her so many times while doing this research and learning what her life was like, but standing there, thinking of her, I suddenly was overcome with emotion and found myself sobbing, thinking of her and her life and the memories I have of her. As I did with Bessie and Isadore, I found myself rubbing my hand over her name, Gussie, feeling some unexpected emotion in doing so. I left my beach rock, specially selected for her, and wished I had asked her more questions while I could have.

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Apparently, I was wrong. Going to the cemetery can bring you closer to those who are gone.

The Lower East Side

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The Lower East Side

I just returned from a wonderful weekend in NYC.  Although seeing my grandson Nate (and his parents and his great-grandparents) was the best part of the weekend, I also had an opportunity to do two things I’ve wanted to do for a while: go to the Lower East Side and see where the Brotmans lived in the early 1900s and go to the cemeteries where my great-grandparents and grandparents are buried.  I am going to divide those two experiences into two posts rather than one.  This one will be about the trip to the Lower East Side.

On Saturday morning Harvey and I left our hotel down near Wall Street and walked north through the financial district and Chinatown, under the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, to the Lower East Side. As we crossed streets like Grand, Henry, and Delancey, I tried to imagine what that neighborhood would have been like on a Shabbat morning a century ago.  Now it is a mix of various ethnic groups, but I was surprised to see a number of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox men dressed for shul, walking past us.  I hadn’t expected to see any sign of a Jewish community surviving there.  As we passed two men dressed in Satmar garb (big furry hats, long black coats, beards and payes), I wondered, “Did Joseph dress anything like that? Were they at all observant? Did they go to shul? Or were they completely non-religious once they got to the US?’  I know that my grandmother had a kosher kitchen at first, but gave that up by the time I knew her.  She was not at all religious, and I know that my grandfather was also not at all religious.  What about your grandparents? Do you know how observant any of them were?

We crossed under the Williamsburg Bridge and then down Broome Street to where it intersected Ridge Street.  Joseph and Bessie lived at 81 Ridge Street in 1900; it is where they lived with Max, Hyman, Tilly, Gussie, Frieda and Sam.   It is also where Joseph died in 1901.  The picture below shows the corner of Broome and Ridge:

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We walked down Ridge to where 81 once stood.  There is now a school there, as you can see :Image

Although I was sad that there was no longer a tenement building there, I thought that having a school there was the best possible alternative.  Education helped our predecessors and all of us get to where we are today, so replacing what was probably a run-down tenement building with a modern new school seems appropriate.

Across the street at 80 Ridge is a newer building also, so obviously the original buildings are all gone.

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I took these pictures at the corner of Ridge and Rivington where there was an older building.  Perhaps that was more like the one where our family lived.

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As we walked up and down the street, I tried to imagine my grandmother being a little girl, living there.  I thought of her being just five years old when her father died, and how awful that must have been for them all.  And I thought of poor baby Samuel who was four months old and would never know his father.  It must have been a sad and very hard time for them all.

New York City is a remarkable place.  The layers of history are all there, and you can feel them as you walk from neighborhood to neighborhood.  Ridge Street is a nice street with clean and newer apartment buildings.  You wouldn’t know today that it once was a crowded street with tenements filled with new immigrants, speaking Yiddish, and struggling to survive in what was supposed to be a place with streets lined with gold.  As we walked past Asian and Latino residents who themselves are likely immigrants or the children of immigrants, I realized how that experience continues to make New York the rich, fascinating and challenging city that it is.  I may have left the New York area long ago, but it still calls out to me as my home.  I am sure the same is true for many of you, whether you are living in Ohio, Virginia, South Carolina, California, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts—or New Jersey or Long Island.

Isn’t it also interesting how some of the fifth generation children have returned to New York City themselves?

WHY

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I wrote about how I started doing this research and what resources—human and otherwise—I’ve used to do it.  But I’ve given a lot of thought also to WHY.  Why am I doing this?  Why spend all this time, energy, money, etc. doing this?  What is it for?

Part of it is the fun and the excitement of hunting down information and then actually finding it.  Part of it is the reward of learning that I am connected to all these other people I never knew—that we shared ancestors and DNA and a history together, even if we’ve never met. And I hope that part of those rewards will be meeting you all in real space, not just cyberspace.

But it is more than that.  Someone involved in genealogy research told me that most people do not get involved with this kind of project until they are in their sixties.  I turned sixty last summer when I first started doing this.  Sadly, by the time we’re sixty, our grandparents are long gone, so our principal sources of information about our ancestors are not around to help.  But why do we get interested in our sixties? Obviously, as we start to face our own mortality, we must yearn for a sense of purpose.   Will anyone remember us in 100 years? That leads to—where did we come from? Who were the people who preceded us that we no longer remember? We’re all part of a long line of family history, and at some point many of us yearn to figure out what that history was.

I never, ever thought about my great-grandparents until I started this project.  I knew I was named for Bessie, my great-grandmother, but I never wondered what she was like, what was her life like, why did my parents choose to name me for someone who died when my mother wasn’t yet four years old.  I still don’t know the answers to all those questions, but I know more than I did a year ago.  She was a brave woman who married a man with at least two children from a prior marriage, both of whom were young boys in 1881 when she married him.  She had at least five children of her own with him, and probably others who died very young.  She left everything she knew to come with her young children to America, and then she lost her husband not long after doing so.  She picked herself up, remarried and helped raise more children.  She lost a leg to diabetes.  I know she loved animals because the one clear memory my mother has of her was that she played with kittens in her grandmother’s bathroom as a very young child.

And Joseph?  I have learned to admire him as well.  He came to the US before Bessie, establishing himself as a coal dealer.  He worked very hard at back breaking work to support his family and died just four months after his youngest child Sam was born.  From his footstone inscription, we know that his children and wife loved him and appreciated the hard work he did to bring them to the US and support them when they got here.

So what does all that mean to me? It means I came from people who were strong, brave, hard-working and dedicated to their family—all traits I admire and aspire to myself.  They obviously raised children who adapted well to America and made successes of themselves.  Those children, our grandparents, raised Americans, our parents, who moved to the suburbs, owned businesses, became professionals.  And then there is us—the fourth generation.  We are spread all over the US, we are involved in all different types of careers, we are the American dream.  Wouldn’t our great-grandparents who were raised in a shtetl and escaped poverty and anti-Semitism be amazed at who we are today?

So why? Because we need to know how we got here, why our lives are what they are.  We need to be grateful for those who left Europe, avoided the pogroms and Hitler, and gave us all the opportunity to live in freedom and to pursue our own dreams.

How This Started

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I’ve been asked what got me started on doing this research.  I’d like to claim some life-changing event or spiritual moment got me started, but to be honest, it was a television program, Who Do You Think You Are.  That program showed celebrities researching and learning about their ancestors, and as I saw how moved these people were learning about an ancestor they’d never met, I decided that I wanted to learn more myself. 

I started by joining ancestry.com and made a lot of progress with my paternal side, but very little on my maternal side.  I hit a wall and put it all aside, figuring I’d never find more.  Then this past summer I received an email from someone who’d seen my ancestry tree and thought we might be related through my maternal grandfather, Isadore Goldschlager.  My interest was sparked again, and that contact gave me a contact in Romania who was able to find documents about my grandparents and great-grandparents, including the name of my great-great-grandparents, names my mother had not known.  The fact that my great-great-grandfather was named Ira, the same name as my brother, even though my mother had never known her great-grandfather’s name, gave me the chills and made me realize how rich and rewarding this research and these discoveries could be.

So I turned to the Brotman side, and this time I turned to third parties for help, asking questions on ancestry.com, geni, JewishGen, anywhere I could.  I learned how to find and order birth, marriage and death certificates and other documents, and one of my mentors found the obituary of Renee Haber, which was how I found David Ruzicka. I also found David Haber through ancestry.com, and he helped me find Judy.  Someone on JewishGen/GesherGalicia contacted Bruce Brotman in response to my inquiry, and slowly but surely the pieces came together.  It wasn’t until then that I realized that there was a brother named Max; my mother only remembered the names Hyman, Tilly, Frieda and Sam.  Yet she remembered Renee and Rosalie, thinking they were Hyman’s daughters, so I knew I had the right people.  And then my brother found Abraham’s naturalization papers with Max’s name on them.  When I was able to confirm by the address that it was the same Max, the hunt to verify that Abraham was another brother began.

There have been so many dead ends and false starts, but also so many amazing moments on this journey so far. I have encountered so many kind and generous people—not only the Brotman cousins themselves, but the helpers on the other sites and the man who volunteered to go to Mt Zion cemetery to take pictures of Joseph and Abraham’s headstones (and then also took those of Abraham’s wife and son Joseph on his own, just to be nice). 

I am not done. There are still many unanswered questions. Most importantly, I am still trying to find out where our family came from in Galicia and what their lives were like there. 

So stay tuned…who knows what and who else I will find? 

 

A simple and righteous man: Our great-grandfather

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Below are two photos, one of Joseph’s headstone, one of his footstone.  (I did not take these; a very kind stranger volunteered to do so.  I do, however, plan to visit the grave next weekend.)  Although I don’t know much Hebrew, using a translator program I think that the headstone says, “Here lies a Simple and righteous man, Our beloved father Yosef Yaakov ben Avraham, Deceased [Hebrew date].”

The footstone inscription is longer and harder to translate, but I think that it says something like, “Here lies a simple man who woke and toiled doing crushing work in order to support his home, to see and satisfy a dream as a gift to other people,  Yosef Yaakov ben Avraham, Deceased  [Hebrew date].

Like I said, I relied on a translation program, so I am using some poetic license to put this into English.  If there is anyone who has any fluency in Hebrew, please correct me!!

Edited: After consulting with a rabbi and working at this again, I think the footstone says, “Here lies a simple man who toiled doing crushing work to support his home and rejoiced in pleasing others.”

At any rate, I found the inscriptions very touching.  At the very least we know his family saw him as a plain, hardworking man who worked to support his home and provide for their dreams in the new world.

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