Link to story below to this picture.
Being Russian on my mother's paternal side....
...my mother's "Bubby" Sarah Beila brought one...
...from Russia to Philly.
It's been said the area of Philly known as
"Strawberry Mansion" was filled with Russian Jews.
They'd take the samovars to the park...
..family and friends would sit around sipping tea.
Map from 1904
Going to start posting information on towns my Grandma Mary said our family came from...
...in no particular order and sure I am missing a few. I'm fairly sure she meant her side but her side intersects with my grandpa Ben as explained often in stories on how and where they met in Philiadelphia.
Volozhin
Riga
Zhlobin
Odessa
Minsk
Kremenchuk
Lithuania
Malarussia
(in no particular order)
Later after they begin their journeies.
Manchester
New York City but mostly Philadelphia
Malaga NJ and nearby areas where the family owned an Inn and land
Key West
Tampa
Miami
NOTE TODAYS POST is for my own research. Very little grammar. Thoughts, flow of mind writing and putting down things I want to circle back and do research on. Read at your own caution I'll proof it one day down the road, just a good source for me to print out and do more research on.....
Her husband "Benny" was born in Chernigov though his family moved there from Nezhin and they were from somewhere else before Nezhin. I know but not going into it now, the point is my family really moved around often and it's far from the story of people living in one little Shtetl for what seemed forever until they decided to move to America with the rest of the Shtetl.
Mind you she shot off a lot of names, many of which sounded the same, from "the Old Country" meaning before they lived in Key West in the 1800s and before they came from England and before they went to England. I can only remember some....other's I have learned about doing genealogy. As someone who loves Geography and studied it in intricate detail for my degree in International Relations (think Geopolitics) I am spending time on "where" vs "who" with the hope that this ties together the crazy quilt of my genetic gene pool into what seems a more cohesive map of my family.
Today in our morning Chassidus class with Rabbi Lisbon he told a story about someone who connects to my family tree in an attempt to remind and explain why Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok the previous Chabad Rebbe was named Yosef Yitzchok; something I learned but there's several angles on the story pointed out and I thought a bit on how little I know much about some of those towns mentioned by my mother and my grandmother. In my grandmother's case she was always vague on distant ancestors, though to be fair she was the baby of the family and her father was easily old enough to be her grandfather. She grew up in Florida in Tampa, but was always traveling back and forth to Quincy Florida in ended up living in Miami for what seems "most of her life" though I'm wondering which location she remembers most as she like me traveled around a bit. She did talk on "Atlantic City" often where she lived with my Grandfather Ben aka "Beryl" a nick name for Dov Ber ended up for a while working on construction during the boom time there while she ran a cigar store/ice cream shop by the Boardwalk. So hearing the story the way Rabbi Lisbon told the story, reminded me "oh right the Cherkas Rav" son of Mordechai of Chernobyl" my mother spoke on him. To be fair, she only really spoke on him and mentioned him when she sat on her pale blue French Provincial Sofa crying and dabbing at her eyes about the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Being a sassy young girl I said "Mother your father came from Chernigov not Chernobyl" and that's where she cried harder, dabbing her eyes harder and with passion said "they were cousins to my father" and when she said "MY FATHER" she said it louder and almost angry I would offer to suppose she was confused on her saintly father who died before I was born when she was in her twenties and anything semi connected to him seemed raised to a holy level. I found out doing genealogy why that was so though there were other holy people in our family.
This is what it says in Wikipedia and easy source to find quickly with basic facts:
"Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak (1822-1876) was a Rebbe in Ovruch. He was compelled to assume this position by his father-in-law, Rabbi Yaakov Yisroel of Cherkas (son of Rabbi Mordechai of Chernobyl and son-in-law of the Mitteler Rebbe) against his father’s wishes."
Above is the family tree so to speak...
...for Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok.
His wife was Shterna Sara.
Her grandfather is the person in question.
Rabbi Yaakov Yisroel of Cherkas
But she is of course related otherwise.
And otherwise is the issue here.
Families "connected" to the Schneerson tree tend to be related to a half a dozen other people who have various connections to the Schneerson tree as well as various names used for them from nicknames (very popular in Chabad as it is the Deep South" and contractions of the name and names related to geographic locations. Rather than making genealogy easier it's actually harder. In a normal world when you pull on a loose string it takes you back to the beginning, but in Chabad three strings appear and no matter which you pull you will usually end up at the Tzemach Tzedek or the Mittler Rebbe or in my case Rabbi Yisroel Noach who was the
This is the list of names used for him.
So yeah Neizhin aka Nizhyn.
So many spellings on that too!
How does this relate to Grandma Mary? She was a colorful storyteller. Storytelling was apparently in her genes and you had to have patience, something I was not strong on when young. She either didn't know certain details on her family tree or she just did not really care. She loved music, gardening and playing the piano. She had candlesticks she lit on Shabbos on Friday evening before we sat down to a meal of chicken and a baked potato and whatever else was served with it. She didn't make a big deal about religion, but was just as fierce on her Jewish heritage as she was on her Southern history. This to me made total sense as the connection runs deep in Southern Jews who talk more about the South but are very proud of their Jewish heritage and I mean PROUD but not in a "shtetl" way nor in a way where people go long on all the sufferings of the Jewish people; just proud nuff said. Of course Jews are always waiting for Moshiach to come and old school Southerners are always waiting for the South to Rise Again! As a child I put that together in my head and it made me smile.
Grandma didn't know much on her husband Ben "Benny" about where he came from as much as what he did while in America after meeting her in Philly at some event in the Naziner Shul for single people (like a mixer on Saturday Night) and how good he was to her and how wonderful he was and pointing out his mother Sarah Beila came to show her "how to cook kosher food" which apparently really annoyed her as she would say with that tone in her voice and her eyes sort of narrowing together "I knew how to cook kosher food, my mother kept a kosher home and I knew how to keep kosher from her!" to which I'd nod quietly not wanting to go there or open up any can of worms asking questions that would take her deeper into her sadness on her mother's death too young when she was in her late teens. I suppose there was some tension between her and her mother-in-law though I'm sure she was polite to her and nodded and just ignored the assumption she needed to be "taught how to cook kosher" and when I did ask her what that meant she'd say with a strong punctuation point at the end "she taught me how to cook Russian, I knew how to cook Kosher" at which point I'd drop the subject and ask her to play me a song on the piano. That changed every conversation with her where she seemed either sad on the loss of her mother too young or her much beloved Ben who died when she was in her early 50s. The piano was timeless and better than a pill she took for her headaches a gene she obviously did pass down to me as I get headaches often.
Again, this is my journal/diary of my search for how my broken branches connect. If it helps someone who wanders in and loves genealogy, history and can relate or help them then "fine and dandy" as Grandma Mary would say.
My brain is layered in patterns and when I heard about the Rabbi from Chernobyl who was from Chabad through another marriage of some ancestor or related to someone who became Chabad who was an ancestor my mind wanders and either I want a Nespresso to bring it back to the topic or I go running off down another road and that is the town of Volozhyn and Grandma would often start there when throwing out names to me of places the family was from the way someone throws feed to the chickens in the backyard that need feeding. It was like being inside a Pin Ball Machine with balls whirling around everywhere and I was definitely hitting tilt.
I'd ask "where's Volzhin" is and she'd tell me "well it's near Minsk" and all I could think of when she said Minsk was a Vaudeville theater of old. Sorry, being honest, this was before I studied the Geography and Demography of Russia in college.
My mother, I will add here, knew facts and names from her father but not a lot of definitive details. She loved her father, respected her father and so all she knew his his family was cousins with the Chernobyl Rabbi in Chernobly where people were dying "possibly some of her cousins" from the nuclear meltdown which will always be connected in my head to my mother's meltdown on her much loved French Provincial Sofa covered in plastic to keep the baby blue satin clean. I'll add, once my baby brothers began ripping the plastic off (didn't last long) it was just the old, loved sofa she bought when she redecorated the house when I was young. The dining room was French Provincial too! Everything looked like a picture in Southern Living.
So Volzhin a town with many spellings as you can see below is a town in Minsk known as Valozhyn which seems obvious but not as easy to figure out as you'd think as when you Google them one reference says Minsk that's near Grodno. And yet another reference says
"It is often referred to in historical, Jewish, and Eastern European contexts as Volozhin (Russian: Воложин)."
Famous people who were Jews.
Yeah, Solovetchik a Levite.
Grandpa Ben was a Levite.
That's another story.
So what did I learn this week?
I learned I need to go back to the basics and geography and history has always been my basics. I need the map to make some sense. The cities of Europe are linked by rivers and in my own case marriages made my family that were often based on marrying into the same "kind" of Jewish person based on things I understand such as "they were landsman" which didn't mean exactly "from the old country" as much as they were Litvaks but in my case they davened Nusach Ari a style made famous by a Chassidic Rabbi from a Litvak background connected to Chabad.
When Chabad first formed way back in White Russia (another term for a region) the old school Litvak Rabbis were not happy with innovations added by the Alter Rebbe (first Chabad Rebbe Schneur Zalman) and the daily siddur was "changed up a bit" with prayers in different orders and an emphasis on adding Chassidic thoughts into learning adding a new layer to the study of Torah. People are always afraid of new things. Grandma Mary's mother Chaya Etel was from Malarussia another name for "Little Russia" another name for the Ukraine which was always part of Russia when it was not part of the Ottoman Empire, but that's another story. Old time Rabbi's would call Schneur Zalman "The Litvak" in a semi derisive way and I'm talking Litvak's as Chabad is the Chassidus of "White Russia" not the Carpathian Mountains known as Chagas Chassidus usually.
Ben was "kosher" in her mind even though he barely spoke English and she didn't speak Russian so they spoke on Yiddish. Ben apparently was one of the few people "up in Philly" who understood her Yiddish with a Southern accent or he was just as smitten with her from the start. Few understood her Yiddish except fellow Southerners as she sounded like Scarlet O'Hara asking the Tarleton Twins if they wanted to come inside and sit in the parlor a bit. Grandma Mary had a parlor growing up in Tampa, her older sister Annie was married to Myron Falk "of the Falk brothers from New Orleans" in the family parlor.
God I loved Grandma Mary...
Miriam Leah Bas (daughter of) Chaya Etel and Velvel Zev.
Grandma Mary who bobbed her hair one day in Atlantic City impulsively since she wanted to look Modern like Millie (IYKYK) and almost gave her old school Russian husband a heart attack as he loved her long, beautiful hair that would easily grow back. She had thick wavy hair with a small white streak left side of her head that you only saw when she hadn't been to the "parlor" recently.
Maps below.
I'm done.
Gonna go get a Starbucks as I'm liking the new drink this week!
Need to get out, enjoy the beautiful weather and I'll think on this tomorrow or another day...
Blue marker marks Volyzin
Easier is a map of the 3 cities in question.
Volzhyn (near Minsk)
now known as Belarus
Next, Nezhin in Chernigov region.
Nezhin the city, Chernigov the county so to speak
Chernobyl not that far from Nezhin.
Riga up at the top was a city she mentioned.
Yet she said Odessa also and that's another region.
Jewish Genealogy is not easy.
Jewish Geography is actually easier said...
...than pinpointing on a map in Russian
( I read Russian)
So
I found out this week that when Sarah Beila, my great great grandmother, went back to Europe to retrieve her daughter Esther who chose to stay with her brother Lev in Moscow when her mother went to join "check out" her sons Karl (Koppel) and Ben "Beryl" (Dovber) in Philly and got stuck there by World War 1 .... the building she stayed in with her son Lev and Esther was a famous building where artists lived in post Communist Russia which was divided up into apartments. Trotsky once lived in the building. Isadora Duncan lived in the "flat next door" while studying ballet in Moscow. There was a small Nusach Ari style shul about a mile or so away where representatives of Chabad (really spies) in the dark days of Stalin when religion was not allowed now was the actual revolutionary history so synagogues went the way of statues of Lenin.
The mystery of my Great Uncle "Lev" short for Levi Yitzchok is a mystery for another day. But it's something to circle back to and it may explain some connections Sarah Beila had in the Bronx or it may just be an interesting point of trivia.
Things I learned about my Grandma Mary's mother-in-law Sarah Beila:
Aunt Ada... She taught her how to pick vegetables in the market and only buy fresh onions without loose skins. She told my Aunt that you "prepare for Shabbos" on Thursday (food, baking, etc) because you have to clean the house for Shabbos on Friday because "you don't go into Shabbos with a dirty house" which explains why my mother only cleaned the house once a week on Friday (that's true but a joke she had an artist soul and doing art was more important that putting away the laundry) and my Aunt loved her "Bubby" very much.
My mother said "she dragged a samovar on ship" "she shlepped a samovar on a ship all the way to America" which led me to feel defensive of this woman I had no real knowledge of saying always "well it was important to her" adding "maybe it belonged to someone in the family and was important to her" and in truth when she went to Philly to check on her sons she sent to her brother Boruch who was already living there she may have been bringing it to him or a parent as it's possible her mother also was already in America. I can make a case for it but there is no smoking gun or smoking samovar...
From Grandma Mary "she said she was teaching me to cook Kosher food, I knew how to cook kosher food MY MOTHER taught me, she was teaching me how to cook Russian food" later elaborating on how Ben liked his picked peppers.
From Aunt Ada's scrapbook: I found a card from the Rosen (Rosin) family in Philadelphia that they sent when she got married and sadly it doesn't say Grandma's name just from the family and "Mother Rosen" but like everything it's a clue. I've checked the cemetery. Lots of clues. The Rosen/Rosin family was in Nezhin during the time of Yisroel Noach whose connected to Sara Beila daughter of Liba/Lieba
Anyway.......
This is the puzzle of my genealogy. Lithuania. White Russia. Malarussia ("Little Russia") now Ukraine after Lenin who was trying to legitimize the new country USSR with various republics so he drew u a map around different "areas" such as "the Ukraine" and others showing they were a nation of Republics the way the USA is nation of "States" out with the old, in with the new. Life went on...
If you click you can see ...
Vilna
White Russia (where Chabad comes from...)
Little Russia where farming colonies were set up.
Little Russia was like the Wild West.
Ukraine literally means the Borderlands.
"The word "Ukraine" (Ukrainian: Україна) is most commonly interpreted by historians and linguists to mean "borderland" or "frontier region" (from Slavic roots u + kraj), historically representing a territory on the edge of surrounding empires." from Google.
Little Russia was like the Wild West. Each river valley had it's own band of cossacks known by the name of the river and they were like the bandits of the old West in America. They'd come into town, drunk, with a purpose but rather than shooting up the settlers who came from somewhere else.... they'd use large scythes coming into a village on horseback slashing at any person in the way or possibly some they specifically didn't like and Jewish family histories are littered with stories of Pogroms and the Cossacks who as my Great Grandma Sarah Beila told my mother they had killed someone's grandfather while a family was trying to marry off their child. She only remembered this suddenly in the middle of watching Fiddler on the Roof at the Miami Dade County Auditorium when it came into town. I had never heard her mention a grandmother or Bubby as Grandma Mary's mother died before my mother was born. But when Aunt Ada, her sister, would talk on her Bubby I realized Aunt Ada remembered Sarah Beila whereas my mother only talked on her maternal grandfather Wolf (Velvel Zev) which kind of blew me away. However Aunt Ada was 5 years older than my mother and a different type of person and I'm guessing easier to take to the market than the little Annette (Chana) that her Russian father said as Anetka a nickname for Annette in Russian or just the Russian translation.
My Aunt Ada was named after Grandma Mary's mother Ida aka Chaya Etel.
It's logical to say my Grandpa Ben named her Annette calling her lovingly Anetka (heavy Russian y yeh accent) Ann-nyet-ka after a Chana in his family, maybe his grandmother who really know. That's not recreating history, my Grandma Mary told me that Ben let her name after HER first daughter after her much loved mother Chaya Etel (Ida) and well he would name the next child after his family. He died way before I was born, never met him, but could feel his presence always hovering around the home we lived in that he built. I had dreams when I was little a few times and saw a man walking around and when I woke up I was off center not sure where I was and when I saw pictures of him when I was way older the man looked like the man I saw in the unnerving dreams. They were unnerving because I didn't know who he was and suddenly he was gone.
That's it.
Chores for the day:
Make a list of priorities.
Blog on weather.
Clean out the other room and use that desk to work on in a more organized way.
Try to stay away from the nebulous Schneerson family tree that is useful, interesting and invades my messy mind as really I was hoping to find myself a li'l bit Scottish or French or even Irish (never British) or even a bit of Gypsy (old joke) yet of course Yisroel Noach in Nezhin is totally logical in ways. I have a bit of Mizrachi Persian that seems to be traced to the Naftalin side on my father's maternal line as a relative moved to Bagdad for business on the more modern leg of the Silk Road and his wife Esther went with him and raised money for the people suffering in the famine there and well that kind of blew my mind the other night. My grandmother, my father's mother, was named Esther and I knew she had an ancestor on the Naftalin/Naftolin/Neftalin side that have given large amounts of money to the Persian Relief Family from JewishGen and even there it's noted there it was a rare for the donation to come from a woman and the only donation from that part of Plunge/Kovno. It was always a mystery and I always wondered if my Grandma Esther was named after that ancestor of hers (logical) but now I know a lot more to the rest of the story. Supposedly some of her children in Persia were married into other families which would give me "cousins" from Persia even though there was the Lithuanian Ashkenazi connection. So leaving a note here to Bobbi vs Bracha lol
Do more research on Reb Yitzchok and his wife Esther on their life in Bagdad and parts of Persia.
More research on my father's mother Esther Bas Menechem Mendel who went by Mendel as noted in archives from Plunge Lithuania/Kovno in JewishGen a site with so much awesome info but not a fan as it's worse that falling down the rabbit hole Alice fell down in a fairy tale I have always disliked immensely.
1. Levi Chitrik spelled Hitrik often who lived in Moscow and took responsibility for his baby sister Esther (yes I have Esther on both sides of the family) and where Sarah Beila was living for a while before taking Esther back to America where some of her other children and her siblings were living in Philly. Esther's naturalization papers use the name Esphir which was used in Russia.
Esther's naturalization papers......yes I did see that IYKYK.
2. Esther Naftalin info....
Naftalin family lived in Plunge and parts of Kovno but was originally from Telz.
3. Research the infamous charity giver who felt it important to give to the Persian Relief fund, more than others in Plunge.
4. Research on the connection between the Hitrik family in Riga Latvia with the family in Chernigov and or originally Nezhin. Ancestry shows them as cousins and they share many of the same names (Levi Yitzchok for example) though some of them died sadly in the holocaust. One married a Dvorkin that went by Davidson, she was very pretty.
5. Keep better track of the Levites as they relate to my Grandfather Ben.
Chow for now as I used to say which bugged the hell out of a good friend... well my spelling not my usage of saying Ciao! Also did Grandma Sarah Beila come to America for the first time via Genoa for a specific family reason or because it was the easiest, fastest way out of Chernigov where she originally came the first time before Moscow the second time. Who owned the Samovar originally I wonder?
Link to the story about the Samovar at the top of this post.
Bobbi
ps if anyone actually reads this I'll proof it later, this is my note pad online, my diary, my journal and my way of keeping track of info so I can print it out and study it'... it's not great literature, it's not for a book and it's not to be used in a screenplay but I've given up worrying on that one because IYKYK!!!
