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For a long time the Goldberger line of cantors stopped at Emanuel (Manó) Goldberger. The family remembered that Emanuel’s father had also been a cantor, and that his Hebrew name was Yaakov, from the way the names alternated down the generations: Menashe ben Yaakov ben Menashe ben Yaakov. As Milan put it, “it went back and forth.” But no document named him. The registers of Emanuel’s birthplace now point to a man called Markus Goldberger, born at Nagy-Kosztolány (Veľké Kostoľany), near Pöstyén, probably about 1807, who served the Jewish community of Nagy-Zsámbokrét (Žabokreky nad Nitrou) for at least 39 years.

His roots were in Kosztolány. The 1828 tax census of that small town lists eleven Jewish taxpayers and no Goldberger, but entry 64 is simply ‘Jud. Schachter’: the Jewish shochet, married, a sub-tenant, written down by his trade with no name at all. It may be Markus himself, then about 21, or his father; the record cannot say. He was not yet among the 24 Jewish taxpayers of Zsámbokrét that year, so he moved there sometime between 1828 and 1840. Other Goldbergers stayed in Kosztolány: Simon Goldberger, Ignaz Goldberger, whose son Jakab Goldberger became the town’s shochet and mohel, and a second Markus, a merchant. They were very likely his brothers or cousins, though the link is not proven.

When the Zsámbokrét community opened its register, the Matrica Buch, in 1840, Markus was already in office. From the very first wedding, on 12 May 1840, ‘Marcus Goldberg’ signs in the column for witnesses to the marriage contract, and through 1870 he witnesses about 120 of some 165 Jewish weddings in the village, roughly three of every four. The census of 1869 finds him in house 49, beside the rabbi Lipót Wolner, as ‘Marc Goldberger’, Schächter (ritual slaughterer) on an annual salary. In a village community the shochet and the cantor were very often the same man, who led the prayers, slaughtered for the kitchens and handled the paperwork of weddings.

Markus married three times. Laura Weisz, named as Emanuel’s mother in his 1919 death record, had died by 1869, and Emanuel later named a daughter Laura for her. Debure (Devorah) died at Zsámbokrét in December 1864, aged 50; she was almost certainly Markus’s wife, and probably the mother of Lipót (Leopold), the prayer leader born at Zsámbokrét about 1840 and very probably Markus’s son, who named his first daughter Deborah. By 1869 Markus was married to Antonia, born about 1830. His children were all born before the village birth register begins in 1842: Emanuel about 1837, Lipót about 1840, and perhaps a daughter, Bettie, who married there in 1862.

Markus died at Zsámbokrét on 5 May 1879. The Jewish death register enters him as ‘Markuz Goldberger, Kantor’, born at Nagy-Kosztolány, aged 72, of a paralysis of the lungs. About ten years later Emanuel came home to the village and took up the same post, signing at its weddings as his father had done for thirty years. Ashkenazi children were named only for the dead, and none of Emanuel’s sons born in Markus’s lifetime was called Yaakov; his youngest, Eugene, born in 1903, was. The USHMM photo archive calls Emanuel a fourth-generation cantor; Markus would be the third.

How sure is this? No record yet says in so many words that Markus was Emanuel’s father, and Emanuel’s birth entry has not been found. The case rests on the same village and office, the right age, Emanuel succeeding to the post, the Goldberg and Goldberger spellings shared by Markus and Lipót, and the names Emanuel gave his children. One puzzle remains: Emanuel’s 1919 death record, reported by his son Rudolf, calls his father Adolf. An Adolph Goldberger, a merchant, married at Zsámbokrét in 1852 with Markus as witness, very likely a relative, which may be how that name entered a grandson’s memory. So the family keeps all three names together: Markus in the registers, Yaakov by tradition, and Adolf in 1919. The identification is strong, but still circumstantial.

Eugene (Jenő) Goldberger was born at Hlohovec (Galgóc) on 27 August 1903, the youngest son of the cantor Emanuel (Manó) Goldberger and his second wife, Hanni (Anna) Klein. He was given the Hebrew name Yaakov, the name the family remembers for Emanuel’s own father, Markus, who had died in 1879. As a youth he studied Torah at Topoľčany and Pressburg, and as a boy he sang as a soloist in the choirs of the cantors Frankel and Abramson in Topoľčany. In 1926 and 1927 he was a student in Vienna, registered in Leopoldstadt, training in music and at the cantors’ seminary; by the family’s account he met Helena Berkovits there. They married in Senica in December 1927.

His first post was at Vukovar, where he was Oberkantor and taught in the Hebrew school, and where his eldest son, Milan, was born on Hoshana Rabbah in October 1928. In 1932 he became chief cantor of Troppau (Opava), with Helena’s brother Gabor Berkovits as his assistant and later his successor. Then, by his son’s memoir, he watched Nazi thugs assault an elderly Jew in Troppau and decided to leave. He answered a Copenhagen newspaper advertisement for a cantor, won the post over 120 applicants, and in 1934 a moving truck carried the family to Denmark. It was the step that saved his wife and sons; the siblings who stayed behind were murdered in the camps. In Copenhagen he sang as a soloist at the Tivoli Concert Hall and on state radio.

Under the occupation he was once taken in by the Germans after being overheard talking about music with another Jew, and released that evening. In 1943 a sympathetic Danish neighbor blocked his arrest. On 2 October 1943, at 9 p.m., Eugene, Helena and all four boys left Copenhagen in a fishing boat steered by its owner and landed at Limhamn in Sweden around midnight, stateless, with 700 Danish kroner and no passport. In Göteborg he found a small synagogue that needed a cantor. The family returned in June 1945, and at the rededication of the Great Synagogue he sang the prayer of thanks with his sons in the family row. With none of his relatives in Czechoslovakia left alive, he took the family to America in 1946.

In Montreal he became cantor of the Adath Israel congregation in Outremont, which he chose over better-paid offers and served for about eighteen years, founding music education and a youth choir. He was sought as a concert cantor: in April 1953 he headlined the Saint John, New Brunswick, celebration of Israel’s fifth anniversary before a capacity crowd, and that summer he toured six countries on his congregation’s behalf, meeting cantors and musicologists. In March 1964 a testimonial concert marked his eighteen years, and trees were planted in his honour as the Cantor Goldberger Grove in Israel. That June the Cantors Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary made him an honorary fellow, one of five cantors so honoured. Two of his sons followed him into the profession.

In October 1964 he and Helena arrived in Israel to settle, welcomed at the airport by the World Mizrachi centre, and the Tel Aviv daily HaTzofe ran a full profile of ‘an immigrant cantor’. He later served a congregation in San Diego, stayed for a time with Milan in Long Beach and with cousins in California, and settled in Jerusalem for good in 1986. He died on 19 Av 5749 (20 August 1989), in his 86th year, and was buried at Har HaMenuchot beside Helena. His matzevah names him ‘the Rabbi-Cantor Reb Yaakov son of Rabbi Menashe’ and praises his pleasant voice.

His life comes down to us through his Vienna registration, the Swedish police report taken on the night of the crossing, Montreal and New Brunswick newspapers, the Hebrew press in Israel, a memorial tribute from the Cantors Assembly, and the memories of his sons, among them Milan’s interview for Yad Vashem.

Milan Emanuel Goldberger was born at Vukovar on 5 October 1928, Hoshana Rabbah 5689, the eldest son of the cantor Eugene Goldberger and Helena Berkovits. By family account he may have been born on the road, during his father’s tryout visit for the Vukovar post. His Hebrew name was Menashe, after his grandfather Emanuel. He spent his early years at Troppau and then, from about 1934, in Copenhagen, where his father had become chief cantor. At home his parents spoke Hungarian to each other and German to the boys, who grew up Danish.

On 9 April 1940, at eleven, he watched from his window as German planes flew over Copenhagen. He went on to study at a Copenhagen business college and once saw an underground bomb blow out the windows across the street. In October 1943, at fifteen, he scouted the street for the family when the Gestapo came. In his own memory the Germans arrived with a truck at night while the family hid silently in the bedroom, and they later waited in the bushes near the airport before sailing in a small fishing boat, pretending to fish as a German plane passed over. The Swedish police reports show the whole family leaving Copenhagen at 9 p.m. on 2 October 1943 and landing at Limhamn that night. In Gothenburg, while his younger brothers went to school, he was put to work, apparently for a furrier.

On 21 January 1946 he landed alone at Philadelphia from the Swedish ship Formosa: seventeen, a student, stateless, his passage paid by his father, bound for the Ner Israel rabbinical college in Baltimore. In 1949 he met Sulamith “Sue” Lebovics on the beach at Rockaway, and they married at Bronx Borough Hall on 14 August 1950; he was then a fur designer living in Montreal. Thirteen children followed, the eldest born in Maryland during the Baltimore years.

He made his living with his hands and his wits: as an oil-burner mechanic, for about ten years in the fur trade making mink coats, in plastic slipcovers, in diamond cutting, and managing apartment houses in Harlem. He was naturalized in Brooklyn in 1956, the petition describing him as a furrier, five feet eleven, with brown hair and eyes. The family lived in Long Beach, New York, where his father stayed with him for a time. In 1987 he made aliyah to Jerusalem to care for his ageing parents.

It was Milan who kept the family’s memory of its cantors: the alternating names, Menashe ben Yaakov ben Menashe ben Yaakov, which, as he said, “went back and forth.” That memory became the key that later identified his great-great-grandfather Markus (Yaakov) Goldberger in the registers of a Slovak village. At about 88 he recorded his own testimony with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Sue died in 2019. Milan died on 10 December 2023, the third light of Chanukah 5784, and was buried beside her on the Mount of Olives.

His story is told by his own Yad Vashem interview and by the records of his new life: the Philadelphia arrival card of 1946, the Bronx marriage certificate of 1950, the Brooklyn naturalization petition of 1956, and his matzevah in Jerusalem.

Hirs Lebovics, Chaim Tzvi in Hebrew (Tzvi is Hersh), was born on 18 January 1893, the date on his American petition; his 1921 marriage register gives June 1893. He was the son of Rabbi Yaakov (Jakab) Lebovics and Töbe (Toba) Lebovics née Welber. His birthplace was long recorded as Orlov, in the Šariš region of Slovakia, but the primary records point instead to Orlyava, or Irlyava, in Ung county (today Zakarpattia, Ukraine), a village officially called Orlova in the Czechoslovak period: the ‘Orlova’ and ‘Orlawa’ of his US papers. His mother was born there, his parents married there on 15 March 1892, and his brother Mózes was born there about 1895. His own birth entry has not been found, so Irlyava remains probable rather than proven.

As a young man he served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War; two portraits of him in uniform survive, one showing him seated beside a man in a sickbed. In February 1921, in Satu Mare, he married Maria Gotlieb, daughter of Herman Gottlieb. Their daughter Abigail was born there in January 1922, and a son, Yehoshafat, followed.

In 1924 the family left for America, Hirs going first and alone. He sailed from Cherbourg on the S.S. Majestic and landed at Ellis Island on 24 June 1924, listed as ‘Hirsh Liebovitz’, 31, rabbi, last residence Satu Mare, his nearest relative his father-in-law Herman Gottlieb. He was going to his father, ‘J. Leobovitz’, at 5 Goerck Street on the Lower East Side, with a note that he was to join a congregation at 135 Henry Street, and he gave his birthplace as ‘Czechoslovakia, Orlawa’. Nine days after landing he filed his declaration of intention. Five weeks later Maria, Abigail, the baby Yehoshafat and his mother Toba followed on the S.S. Olympic, arriving on 29 July 1924.

The 1930 census finds the household at 385 East 3rd Street, Hirs a working rabbi, renting at $45 a month, with a radio in the home; it records him and both his parents as born in Czechoslovakia. He was naturalized in New York on 10 February 1930. In the summer of 1935 the family made a journey to Europe, returning from Genoa on the S.S. Conte di Savoia on 20 July 1935: Hirs, Maria, Abigail, Sulamith and Ezra, all on the list of US citizens, of 394 Amboy Street, Brooklyn. His mother died in Brooklyn in 1938. The 1940 census finds him in the Bronx on East 177th Street, a salaried rabbi working 48 hours a week, with four years of college; curiously, it describes him as holding only ‘first papers’. In 1944 he stood as a character witness at a Brooklyn naturalization, still giving his occupation as Rabbi and his address in the Bronx.

Hirs died on 9 September 1962, aged 70, in Manhattan. His death certificate, reported by his daughter Sulamith, calls him a widower and a Rabbi, of 162 South 8th Street, Brooklyn, and names both his parents, Jacob (Yaakov) and Töbe née Welber. He was buried the next day at Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge Township, New Jersey, beside Maria; his matzevah reads “Chaim Tzvi son of R’ Yaakov Lebovics”. His path is traced through the 1921 Satu Mare marriage record, the Majestic and Conte di Savoia manifests, his citizenship petition, the 1930 and 1940 censuses, the 1944 witness record and the 1962 death certificate, which together carry the Orlov, or Orlova, Lebovics line from Ung county to New York.

József Schächter was born in Budapest on 15 September 1896, the son of Rabbi David Schechter, a poultry slaughterer (shochet) from the Podhajce district of Galicia, and Malka Halpern, of Zborów. The family lived at Nádor utca 25. His birth was registered only in October 1904, after his parents, already married religiously, had their civil marriage in Budapest. On 27 May 1920, in Vienna, he married Leontine (Lea) Knoll, daughter of Osias Knoll; that one register entry ties the Schechter and Knoll families together.

His mother had brought the younger children to America in 1921. Joseph and Lea followed from Le Havre on La Lorraine, landing at New York on 11 October 1922, bound for his father in Brooklyn and leaving behind his sister Rosa Herzmann in Vienna. Their son Hyman was born a month later. Joseph worked as a butcher in the poultry market, declared his intention to become a citizen in 1926 and petitioned in 1929, with his father as witness. He ran the Schechter Live Poultry Market at 257 Brighton Beach Avenue and guaranteed the credits of the A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corporation, run by his brothers Martin, Alex and Aaron, whose slaughterhouse stood on East 52d Street.

In July 1934 a grand jury indicted the four brothers and their two companies on 60 counts of violating the New Deal’s ‘Live Poultry Code’; Joseph was named in six, far fewer than his brothers. The trial court threw out 19 counts, the brothers were convicted on others, and the Court of Appeals upheld most of the convictions, though Judge Learned Hand wrote that slaughterhouse work in Brooklyn was local business, beyond Congress’s power over interstate commerce. On 27 May 1935 a unanimous Supreme Court threw out the convictions in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, and with them struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act. It became one of the most famous cases in American legal history: the ‘sick-chicken case’.

The next day the Brooklyn Times Union ran the brothers’ photograph under the headline ‘Their Squawk Killed the Blue Eagle’, with Joseph at front right. He told the paper he felt most happy that the highest court had found him not guilty of misconduct in business, but the fight had cost ‘every nickel I had’, and he would have preferred jail had he known the price. Days later Lea received an anonymous letter in Yiddish threatening her for ‘breaking the NRA’; she answered with a defiant poem, and Joseph called the letter cowardly. When the Brooklyn Daily Eagle spent ‘A Day With the Schechters’, it found Joe ‘tall and gaunt’ at his store, Lea ironing his trousers, and neighbors who called them ‘nice people’. A year on, newspapers reported the brothers broke and the bank foreclosing on their father’s house.

Life went on in Brooklyn. Their daughter Estelle was born there in 1936, and in 1942 his draft card found him, at 46, still at Brighton Beach Avenue and in business for himself. He died in 1968. A new scholarly history, The Sick Chicken Case (2025), is the fullest published account of the brothers.

The identification rests on the records: his Budapest birth entry, the Vienna marriage register, the La Lorraine manifest and his naturalization papers, and the 1921 manifest of the SS Chicago, whose Schechter children match three of the four brothers. The court opinions and a shelf of 1935 newspapers, from Brooklyn to Honolulu, tell the rest.

On his headstone in Vienna he is Yehoshua, “son of Yaakov Kopel Knoll, of Nadwórna.” Osias Knoll was born about 1866 in Nadwórna (now Nadvirna, Ukraine), in the Stanisławów district of eastern Galicia, the son of Kopel Knoll and Ides (Hidas) Rund. The town’s birth index has an Osias (Ozjasz) Knoll born in 1870 or 1871, very probably him.

On 13 June 1890, as Ozyasz Knaul, a merchant of Nadwórna aged 24, he married Ester Lichtman, 20, daughter of Wolf Lichtman and Chane Chaje, in Stanisławów before Rabbi Isaac Horowitz. In November 1932 a note was added by decree of the provincial office: ‘the groom’s surname is Knoll, not Knaul.’ The young couple seem to have moved between towns. Ester’s first two children, Marya (1891) and Feyga (Funnie) (1893), were born in Kołomyja and registered under her surname; Mendel (Emil) (1895), Chane Lea (Lea) (1896) and Beile (1897) were born in Stanisławów. By 1903 they were back in Nadwórna, where the Jewish death register records little Beile, aged 6, at house no. 29.

Osias made his living as an agent. When Ester took the cure at Karlsbad alone in August 1898, the spa list entered her as ‘Frau Agent Osias Knoll’ of Nadworna. In August 1913 the couple came together and stayed at the Kurfürst on Egerstrasse, and they returned in August 1920, when she was written down as ‘Frau Erna’, a name she also carries in Lea’s marriage record.

Then came the war. In April 1914 the Atlas insurance company of Vienna sued ‘Osias Knoll, agent, last in Nadwórna in Galicia, whose whereabouts are unknown’ for 400 crowns, a debt case that was probably him. Like many eastern Galician Jews, the family fled to Vienna. By 26 October 1914 Osias was signing as householder the registration card of his daughter Malcha and her husband Hersch Ungar, who lodged with him in the Darwingasse, Vienna II. In November 1915 the city gazette listed his new trade licence, ‘Knoll Osias, Handelsagentur’, at Darwingasse 12 in the Leopoldstadt.

Vienna became home. Osias was named as the bride’s father when Fanni married Juda B. Katz on 19 October 1917, and when Leontine (Lea) married Jozef Schächter on 27 May 1920, the record that ties the Knoll and Schechter families together. From 1919 the family lived at Vorgartenstraße 150, where his agency entered the city’s trade-tax register in 1920. That summer an Osias Knoll in Vienna, almost certainly he, gave 800 crowns to the Palestine Office, which cared for Jewish emigrants. In June 1924 the commercial register recorded Osias Knoll, ‘Kaufmann in Wien’, appointed managing director of a coal and timber export-import company on the Praterstraße, to sign jointly with Baruch Löw.

Ester died at home on 22 February 1931, aged 60. Osias died there on 14 October 1935, aged 68, recorded as an organisation manager born in Nadwórna, and was buried on 16 October in the Jewish section of the Zentralfriedhof, in a different section from Ester. His Hebrew stone remembers “a good and generous-hearted man, whose hand was open to charity.”

She was born Chane Lea on 11 August 1896 at house no. 61 in Stanisławów, Galicia (today Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine), and named on 17 August. The Jewish birth register, record 452, enters her as the daughter of Ozyasz Knaul (Knoll), a merchant, and Ester Lichtman, herself the daughter of Wolf Lichtman and Chane Chaje. Her brother Mendel (Emil) had been born there in 1895, and her sister Beile followed in 1897. In America she gave her birth as 11 July 1898 and her birthplace as Nadwórna, the Knoll family’s town, but the register’s 1896 is the authoritative date.

In the First World War the family were Galician refugees in Vienna. Lehmann’s directory puts her father at Darwingasse 12 in 1915 to 1918 and at Vorgartenstraße 150 from 1919. In 1917 the Vienna police issued her an identity booklet as ‘Leontine Knoll’; ‘Lontzá’ is a diminutive of Leontine, and the portrait on this page is taken from that booklet. That October her sister Fanni married Juda B. Katz. In those war years Lea wrote verse, among it a poem called ‘War’. On 27 May 1920, in Vienna, she married Jozef Schächter; the marriage register names his parents, David Schächter and Malka Halpern, and hers, Osias Knoll and ‘Erna’ (Ester) Lichtmann, and so ties the Schechter and Knoll families together in a single entry.

Lea and Joseph sailed from Le Havre on La Lorraine and landed at New York on 11 October 1922; the manifest lists her as ‘Leontine Schachter’, 24, born Nadworna, going to her father-in-law at 1603 Prospect Place, Brooklyn. A month later, on 8 November 1922, their son Hyman was born in Brooklyn. The 1925 state census finds ‘Lillian Schechter’, housewife, at 1439 St Marks Avenue with Joseph, who worked in the poultry market, and Hyman. Joseph’s 1929 naturalization petition names his wife Leontine, and on 20 January 1933, as Lilian Schechter of 257 Brighton Beach Avenue, she petitioned for citizenship herself.

In May 1935 Joseph and his brothers won the famous ‘sick-chicken’ case, in which the Supreme Court struck down the NRA. Soon afterwards Lea received an anonymous letter in Yiddish threatening to ‘dig out’ her eyes ‘for breaking the NRA’, with a photograph of her whose eyes had been punched out. Unbowed, she answered in verse in the Brooklyn Times Union on 31 May 1935, reminding her accuser that the decision had been the Supreme Court’s, not theirs: “Success bears enmity, this we all know.” Two weeks later the Brooklyn Daily Eagle spent ‘A Day With the Schechters’ and found her ironing at home in a blue-and-white checked dress. ‘I’m just a home-sitter,’ she told the reporter. She kept her poems in a scrapbook signed with her maiden name, Leontine Knoll, and the paper printed her wartime poem ‘War’.

Her daughter Estelle was born in Brooklyn in 1936, and through Estelle runs Ben’s own line. Lea died in Brooklyn in September 1969, according to her Social Security death record. Her life is pieced together from the Stanisławów birth register, the Vienna identity booklet and Jewish marriage register, Lehmann’s directories, the La Lorraine manifest, the 1925 census, the naturalization papers of 1929 and 1933, and the two Brooklyn newspapers of 1935 that let her speak, and rhyme, in her own voice.

Charles Freilich was born Schloma Hersch Freilich at Podhajce (Pidhaitsi), in Galicia, southeast of Lemberg. The town’s Jewish birth register records him on 11 March 1864, at house 212, son of Isaac and Sara; the family’s own records, and his 1898 naturalization, gave 17 March, a few days off. His Hebrew name, Shlomo Tzvi ben Yitzchak, is the one on his gravestone. His parents were Falik (Isaac) Freilich and Sara Marjem, and the patronymic ‘son of Yitzchak’ reconciles two civil records: the ‘Falik’ of his 1893 marriage and the ‘Isaac’ of his 1915 death were one and the same man. His mother’s maiden name is less settled: Klein in 1893, Krissel in 1915, and Terkil in this tree, the given name Sara or Sadie constant throughout.

He landed at New York on or about 10 March 1890. On 2 July 1892 he swore his Declaration of Intention in the federal court for the Southern District of New York, giving his address as 247 Broome Street on the Lower East Side; the printed form has him renouncing ‘the Emperor of Germany’, a catch-all the clerk used, though every later record makes him Galician, and so Austrian. On 20 April 1893 he married Anna Wachtel on the Lower East Side, with Rev. Baruch Schohr officiating. When their son Harry was born at 80 Essex Street on 2 August 1897, the birth certificate called his father ‘Charley Frailish’, 31, a jeweller, and recorded four earlier children, three living. In March 1898, a jeweller of 128 Delancey Street, he was naturalized, with David Guran of Eldridge Street, who had known him seven years, as his witness.

The jeweller became a dealer in buildings. The Real Estate Record of 22 October 1898 shows leases to him from the McKeon family, and over the next years he moved the growing family through 279 Stanton Street and 747 East 5th Street, with seven living children by mid-1905: Harry, Sena (Lena), Sadie, Dorothy (Dora), Fannie (Frances), Sylvia (Rose) and Morris. The New-York Tribune in 1904 and the New York Times in 1906 record him as a Manhattan broker selling tenements and flats on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, and several of his buyers were Anna’s family: ‘a Mr. Wachtel’ at 77 Avenue D and Louis Wachtel in 1904, and the firm of Wachtel & Reich, which bought two Harlem flats through him in June 1906.

One deal went to court. On 2 December 1909 Bessie Tucker signed a note promising ‘Charles Freilich, the broker’ $350 for arranging a swap of her building at 149 Ridge Street for one on Shepherd Avenue in Brooklyn, $100 down and the rest at closing. The closing collapsed because her building carried a third mortgage she had not disclosed, and she refused to pay. He lost in the Municipal Court but won on appeal in July 1910: the judges held that the buyer had been ready, so she could not use her own default to escape the commission, and ordered a new trial. Freilich v. Tucker is the only reported case under his name.

By 1915 the family had moved uptown to 165 East 112th Street in Harlem. Charles died at Harlem Hospital on 24 February 1915, aged 50, still a real-estate dealer; the death certificate spells him ‘Frelich’, which is why it hides from a search under Freilich. He was buried at Mount Zion Cemetery, Maspeth, in the Lemberger society plot, where his father-in-law Nathan Wachtel already lay, strong evidence of the family’s Lemberg roots. His stone remembers him as ‘my beloved husband and our dear father’. Anna lived twenty more years as his widow and was buried not beside him but at Riverside Cemetery, Saddle Brook, New Jersey, the start of a Freilich family plot there.

His life is traced through the Podhajce register, his 1892 Declaration and 1898 naturalization, the 1893 marriage and 1897 birth certificates, the real-estate columns, the published appeal, his 1915 death certificate and his Mount Zion burial record.

Moses Lazerowitz was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, on 3 July 1907, the date in his birth registration and his Dachau records; from 1946 he used 1908, which the family follows. His father, R’ Aharon Shmuel Lazerowitz, came from Wodzisław near Kielce; his mother, Sarah, was the daughter of Kalman Potok. Moses was the youngest of her children, and after she died her brothers took him to their village farm, with about a hundred apple and pear trees. He became a master tailor, studying fashion in Paris and earning a diploma at Katowice, and served as a corporal in the Polish army. In 1931 he bought a fine-coat store at 16 Modrzejowska Street, ran a workshop of ten tailors, and with his brothers bought a one-third share of uncle Zelig Potok’s manor farm at Gluzy, near Działoszyce.

In September 1939 he survived a German roundup in which every tenth man was to be shot, and watched the synagogue burn. For a time the farm was a ‘small paradise’ that sheltered relatives and sent food to the city. Then the great deportations of 1942 took his stepmother and young sister; his brother Yerachmiel, with his wife Rivkah and their children Sara’la and Eliezer Yosef, hid in the straw at Gluzy through the winter before being lured to Nowo-Radomsko and murdered. On 1 March 1943, answering a Gestapo summons, Moses gave himself up so the Germans would free his brother Kalman Shlomo and his wife. Months later word came that the Środula ghetto had been liquidated, killing Kalman Shlomo with his wife and two boys, and his sister Esther with her husband.

He survived the labour camps of Ottmuth and Łaziska Górne as the commander’s tailor. In November 1943 he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and tattooed 160183; in December he was among a thousand men sent to KL Warschau, prisoner 4455, clearing the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, where he kept a secret Passover seder with the Klausenburger Rebbe. Marched out in July 1944, he reached Dachau on 6 August as prisoner 88797 and was sent to the Kaufering camps near Landsberg. There, as a tailor, he won potatoes and soup for the prisoners, brought weak men into his warm workshop, and saved two Hungarian Jews from execution. After a death march toward the Tyrol he was liberated by the US Army at Buchberg, near Wolfratshausen, on Lag b’Omer, 1 May 1945.

At Feldafing he found his half-brother Lazer alive and learned that his sister Rushka had survived. His fiancée, Rivkah bas Gershon Shimonov, had been murdered. With his cousin Hinda, the only survivor of Zelig’s nine children, he fought in the courts of Miechów and Kraków to recover the Gluzy farm, and failed; in December 1945 he smuggled himself and his young relatives out of Poland. In Bayreuth he ran a lumber business and found Regina Olshevsky, daughter of Yakov Olshevsky, once a seamstress in the family business. They married in Munich on Lag b’Omer 1947, and their son Jack was born in July 1948. In October 1949 they flew to New York and on to Cincinnati, where he went to work as a tailor; they were naturalized there together in 1956, and later lived in Brooklyn and Deal, New Jersey.

Night after night he went down to the basement and wrote out his stories in Yiddish. He finished in 1972 and signed it ‘Moshe ben Aharon Shmuel and Sara Lazerowitz’, calling it a tombstone in writing for his murdered family. Years later Lazer read the Yiddish aloud, it was translated into English through a service arranged by his grandchildren, and a grandson bound it as Zeidy’s Book. In 1997 he also recorded his testimony in Yiddish for the USC Shoah Foundation. Moses died on 5 April 2000 and is buried at Wellwood Cemetery, West Babylon. Alongside his own words stand the records: the Dachau personal file he signed ‘Mojsze Lejzerowicz’, his displaced-person registration at Bayreuth, and the 1949 passenger manifest.

Regina Olshewski was born in Sosnowiec, in the Zagłębie region of Poland, on 12 January 1912, the date her Social Security and death records carry; her post-war papers keep the same day but give the year 1918. Her parents were Yankel (Yaakov) Olshevski and Chaia Feigel Olshevski, née Szajewicz, and the surname is also written Olszewski and Olshevsky. Her matzevah names her Sarah Rivka bat Yaakov; Moses Lazerowitz called her Sura Rivka in his testimony, and in his memoir ‘Rivtcha, the Olshevsky girl’. From about the age of fifteen she sewed for the Lazerowitz family’s clothing store, and her own DP file records her as a seamstress for Leizerowicz from 1936 to 1939, living in August 1939 at Szklana 1.

Before the war’s end she had married a man named Silberstein, the name she carried through the DP years; he was very probably her first husband. From 1939 to 1943 she laboured in a ghetto workshop. In 1943 she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was held as prisoner 72216 from 1 August 1943 until 18 January 1945. Her first husband and their baby daughter, Malka, did not survive. Regina lived through the evacuation of the camp: Ravensbrück from 20 January to 25 February 1945, then Malchow and Leipzig, where she was liberated about 26 April 1945. That same year she registered in Sosnowiec as a survivor, under her married name, Regina Zylbersztajn.

Three of her brothers had also survived: Maks (Mendel) and the twins Josef and Aleksander (Alter Yechiel). On 3 August 1946 she registered as a displaced person in Bayreuth, living with them at Badstrasse 13 and hoping to reach Palestine; later she lived at Parsifalstrasse 55, the ‘Partzufal Strasse’ of Moses’s memoir, and a December 1946 town list records her as an Auschwitz survivor with no children. In Bayreuth she and Moses, who had known her before the war, found each other again. They married in 1947 on Lag b’Omer, and their ketubah was issued by the Jewish Committee in Munich. Her IRO certificate, made at Würzburg on 4 November 1948 with her photograph, describes her as 158 cm tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed, with one identifying mark: ‘C.C. 72216’, her Auschwitz number. By then she held a baby son, Jack, photographed with her in Bayreuth in 1948.

A JDC card shows the couple planning in April 1948 to emigrate to Paraguay, a plan closed in June 1950. Instead, on 13 October 1949, Mozes, Regina and baby Jakob Lejzerowicz flew from Bremen to Idlewild on a Transocean Air Lines flight, bound for 1430 Central Parkway, Cincinnati. Regina and Moses became US citizens there on 22 May 1956, on consecutive petitions. From Cincinnati, in 1959 and 1963, she filed restitution claims in Berlin for what had been taken: bank balances, gold, silver and jewellery, fur coats, and machines for leather-working; the catalogue enters her as divorced from Silberstein. Moses’s memoir does not mention her first marriage. She later named a daughter for her own mother, Chaya Feige.

Regina died on 11 August 2005 (6 Av 5765), ‘at 93’, and was buried beside Moses at Wellwood Cemetery, West Babylon, grave 14-L. Their footstones there memorialize both murdered families by name. Her story comes from her own Arolsen DP file and IRO papers, the Bayreuth registration lists, her JDC card, the 1949 air manifest, her Cincinnati naturalization card, and her 2005 New York death certificate, which names her father Jacob; her mother’s maiden name comes from the 1901 Miechów birth act of her brother Mendel. Moses’s USC Shoah Foundation testimony preserved her portraits and their ketubah, and his memoir, Zeidy’s Book, and the Sosnowiec yizkor book hold the rest.

Baruch Moskovic was born on 5 June 1912 in Habura, the village of his father Moses Moskovic. His mother, Mariam, a Schlesinger of Kosárvágása, had married into Habura in 1889, and together they raised a large family; Baruch was their youngest son. Both parents died in Habura in 1935, Mariam on 29 June and Moses on 12 November, three years before he left.

His 1938 arrival manifest tells the story of the crossing. A store worker of Habura, aged 26, he sailed on the SS Normandie from Le Havre on 21 September 1938 and reached New York on 26 September, four days before Munich. Line 26 names his nearest relative back home as his brother-in-law Mozes Bobker, the husband of his sister Eszter, and sends him to a relative at 2186 Creston Avenue in the Bronx: his brother Jack Moskowitz, who by the 1940 census was living a few doors away at 2188. Getting out barely a year before the war is why he, nearly alone among the Habura Moskovics, lived. His brother Khaim’s family in Slovakia would not survive, and most of the children who stayed behind were later murdered in the Shoah.

In America the papers followed quickly. His Declaration of Intention, filed in the Southern District of New York on 9 February 1939 and bearing his photograph, describes a delivery boy of 2188 Creston Avenue, born in Habura on 5 June 1912, who had arrived as Baruch Moskovic on the Normandie. By his Second World War draft card of 16 October 1940 he was Bernard Moskowitz, with the same birth date and village, and his brother Jack as his contact.

On 11 February 1941 he married Elaine (Ilona) Fried at the Brooklyn Municipal Building, with her sister Cecilia as witness. Elaine came from Budkovce, so the wedding joined Budkovce and Habura. His Petition for Naturalization in the Eastern District of New York (no. 403588) finds him a furrier at 1173 52nd Street, Brooklyn, and records the marriage. Bernard and Elaine are Brooke’s grandparents.

Bernard died on 21 September 1985 and is buried at Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Glendale, Queens. Elaine, who died in 2000, is likely buried with him there.

Mendel Fried, Yisrael Menachem in Hebrew and Emanuel or Israel on civil papers, was born at Budkovce on 22 July 1874. He came late into a big household. The 1869 census of Butka, as the village was then called, already shows his father, Eliezer Zvi Fried, recorded as ‘Hersko Fried’, and his mother, née Jäger, with five children born between 1858 and 1869: Hani, Linka, Marko, David and Haim. His mother, Ceva “Batsheva”, died at Butka on 31 May 1908, aged 73; the civil death register names her parents as Vilmos Jäger and Ema, and that she is the ‘Cseva Jager’ of her son’s records is all but certain.

Mendel married Malka Schönberger, born 2 December 1881, daughter of Leopold and Devorah “Dora” Schönberger of the Beňatina and Szürte area of Ung county. The family dates the wedding to 18 December 1898; Mendel’s own Declaration of Intention gives Budkovce, 24 January 1899. He became the village innkeeper, running the tavern from his house, and the 1930 Czechoslovak census finds the household at house no. 212, Budkovce, with Mendel entered under his civil name Emanuel Fried, Malka as Malvína, his birth date of 22 July 1874 matching, six of the children still at home, and an elderly lodger. A 1937 resolution of the village council concerning the Fried tavern concession survives in its minutes. He is remembered as a warm, outgoing ‘people person’ who taught himself the violin and often played at weddings.

The children came across two decades. Those named in Mendel’s papers include Sarah (Sadie), Rose, Theresa, Esther, Armand (Armin), Elaine (Ilona), Cecilia, Martin and Irene; the family tree also counts Lazer Hersh (Lajos) and Renee (Rosa), and two children who died young. Long afterwards, family members went looking for those two small graves in the Jewish cemetery at the end of the village, but most of the stones are gone, taken during the Holocaust for building material.

In September 1937 Mendel and Malka left. As Izrael and Malvine Fried of Budkovce they sailed from Cherbourg on the Aquitania and landed at New York on 12 October 1937. On 16 February 1938 he filed his Declaration of Intention in the Eastern District of New York, with his photograph, listing ten children and their birth dates; his Petition for Naturalization, no. 384191, describes him as retired, living at 5521 12th Avenue, Brooklyn, and notes that his son Armin was then serving in the U.S. Army. In 1948 the family gathered in New York for Mendel and Malka’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, and the big group photograph of that party is one of the treasures of this line. Malka died in 1953.

Mendel died on 6 January 1969. He lies at Mount Hebron Cemetery, Flushing, in the Chevra Bechur Bnei Menashe plot, registered as Israel Fried; Malka is beside him, and their son Armand next to her. Back in Budkovce, a Fried grandchild found at the Michalovce municipal office the deeds to two houses Mendel owned, with a map of the original house numbers. The one he lived in still stands, essentially original, with a large back yard; the well, wine cellar and kitchen were all outside, as was the custom. The other he sold to his nephew Elimelech, and it was later split in two.

We know his story from the 1869 and 1930 censuses, his mother’s 1908 death register, the Aquitania manifest, his Declaration and Petition, the Mount Hebron interment register, the family’s photographs, and the deeds and pictures brought back from Budkovce.

Harry Engel was born on 12 January 1896 at Toporoutz in Bukovina, then part of Franz Joseph’s Austria. His Hebrew name was Tzvi; at home he was Hersch, the Yiddish name behind the American Harry, and his middle name Heinrich later became Henry. His parents, Wolf Engel and Elka Engel née Morgenstern, had been well-to-do farmers before the war, by his own later account. In 1913, aged 17 and single, he sailed from Hamburg on the S.S. President Grant and landed at Ellis Island on 1 October. The manifest lists him as ‘Hersch Engel’, a clerk, Austrian and Hebrew, last living at Boian, a village just east of Toporoutz, with his father there as nearest relative.

He found his way to the farms of Tompkins County, New York. In June 1915 a ‘Harold Engel’, 19, born in Austria, was a hired man on Dana Bush’s farm on Kline Road in Lansing, next to Groton; it is probably him. That October Harry swore his Declaration of Intention before the Tompkins County court, giving his occupation as farming. Around Groton he worked farms, attended Groton High School, drove a truck for the Ithaca Fire Department and took the winter short course in agriculture at the state college at Cornell.

Days after the United States entered the war in April 1917 he enlisted at Syracuse, ready to fight ‘until there isn’t a kaiser left’. The Dryden Herald called him ‘an ardent American’ who had not been able to reach his people since the war began, and the Ithaca Journal reported that he had joined the regular cavalry. At Fort Slocum he was rejected for a slight hearing defect and came back to Groton; that May he was released from school as a farm cadet. His service remains unresolved. He registered for the draft that June; a Harry H. Engel, 21, probably him, served as a private in Company M, 4th Infantry, New York Guard, the state home-defence force, from November 1917 to April 1918. A Veterans Administration card gives him an Army service number and the 1950 census marks him a veteran of the war, yet the local papers say every wartime attempt to enlist was refused.

All the while there was silence from Bukovina. In March 1919 Harry, then of Ithaca, asked for the State Department’s help in finding his parents. A local man, very likely the Groton newspaper editor M. V. Atwood, carried his case to Washington, first through Congressman Pratt and then through Representative Houghton, and the petition and the Acting Secretary’s reply survive. The answer came from Harry himself. On 8 January 1920 the Groton Journal and Courier printed his letter from New Brunswick, New Jersey, under the headline ‘Harry Engel Finds His Parents Escaped Death’. They had survived, but lost nearly everything: “They have a little store in the city neighboring where they used to be… now just make a living.” That August he became an American citizen in Washington, D.C.

On 29 May 1923 he took out a Brooklyn license to marry Jennie Green, daughter of Israel and Esther, and they were married on 3 June on Avenue B in Manhattan by Rabbi A. J. Sinkin. Harry, 27, was then running a fruit store in Brooklyn. By the end of the decade they were farming on Foxon Hill Road in the Foxon district of East Haven, Connecticut, where the name settled into the farm spelling Engle. His 1942 draft card finds him there, self-employed, with Jennie as his contact; the 1950 census records the farm, and a 1956 drainage plan in the town land records still marks the ground ‘Harry H. Engle’. They raised two daughters, Esther, who married Aharon Shmuel Lamm, and Elsie, the mother of Eliahu Soffer.

Harry died in January 1983, a resident of Connecticut, and he and Jennie most likely rest in East Haven’s Jewish cemetery, Vilner Lodge Memorial Park. His life can be followed almost year by year: the 1913 manifest, his 1915 declaration, the Groton and Ithaca newspapers that carried his letter home, the 1919 State Department correspondence, the 1923 marriage records, two draft cards and the East Haven census and land records.

Max Soffer was born on 25 January 1889 at Bircza, a small Galician town near Przemyśl, now in south-eastern Poland. His Hebrew name was Menachem. His parents appear on his 1917 marriage certificate as Samuel Soffer and Rebecca née Rubinfeld; the ship’s manifest calls his father ‘Scholem Sojfer’ of Bircza, the Shulem of the family tree, and Rubinfelds of Bircza turn up in Galician registers of that era. His mother, Rebecca, and his father had both died by 1943.

For years his papers hid where he came from. He later said he arrived on the Cleveland in August 1910, but his Queens naturalization file of 1927 matches him to an Ellis Island record of 29 August 1909: ‘Monacheim Sojfer’, single, a glazier, born and last living at Bircza, sailed from Hamburg on the Cleveland. His passage had been paid by his brother Moses Soifer of 63 Cherry Street, whom he was going to join. In 1914, a glazier of 131 Pitt Street on the Lower East Side, he filed his first declaration of intention; by 1917 he was a glazier at Far Rockaway, and registered for the draft that June as Max Hertz Soffer. On 30 September 1917 he married Anna James at her family’s home in the Bronx.

Rockaway became home for good. The 1920 census finds Max and Anna owning, with a mortgage, 596 Boulevard, Rockaway Beach, where he ran his own house-furnishings business, and that October his brother Isaac’s wife Zlata and her son Fischel arrived from Europe bound for that very address, so Isaac’s family first landed at Max’s house. About 1923 The Wave reported that ‘M. H. Soffer, glazier’ was improving the corner property at Beach 60th Street and the Boulevard he had recently bought. Their daughter Sylvia was born on 3 March 1923, and the 1925 state census finds the three of them at 77-12 Boulevard, the same address Rose Hanig gave when she married his brother Benny in November 1924. The couple also had a son, Morris. Max refiled for citizenship in 1922 as Max Henry Soffer, and was naturalized in Queens on 30 November 1927, with Moses, by then a real-estate owner in Rockaway Beach, as his witness. In 1940 he kept his own retail glass shop, with teenage Sylvia as its bookkeeper, and the 1942 ‘old man’s draft’ found him self-employed at 6418 Boulevard, Arverne.

The family always said Max was robbed and beaten and that it killed him, and it was true. On 13 June 1968 three youths mugged and robbed him in his own shop, M. H. Soffer & Son, glazier and paints, at 64-18 Rockaway Beach Boulevard. He died of it on 30 June at St. Joseph’s Hospital; The Wave put him at about 78, the cemetery at 80, though his birth date makes him 79. Its obituary, headlined ‘Mugging Leads To Death’, called him a glazier in Rockaway for 61 years who, with his late brother Morris, was among the first Orthodox Jews in the community, and the founder of Congregation Chevra Shomrei Shabbos, which he later passed on to others; he was not one for organisations, but gave to many charities. He was buried at Wellwood Cemetery, West Babylon, in the plot of Congregation Arugath Habosem. Anna died two months later, and her own obituary said the shock of his death was believed to have contributed to hers.

His story comes from the 1909 Cleveland manifest, his 1914 and 1922 declarations and 1927 naturalization file, the 1917 marriage certificate and draft card, the 1920 and 1925 censuses, the 1942 draft card, the pages of The Wave and the Wellwood records.