Chicago: The Obamas’ Jewish house

Leave it to the Chicago Jewish News, edited by Pauline Yearwood, to come up with a fascinating house history – the Jewish history of President-elect Barack Obama’s house in Chicago – by Charles b. Bernstein and Stuart L. Cohen.

A Chicago attorney, Bernstein is a genealogist of the Chicago Jewish community, and a Chicago Jewish Historical Society founder. A mortgage banker, Cohen’s hobby is Jewish genealogy and Chicago Jewish history.

Its future is to be the Chicago White House. But a look at its past shows the construction of the Obama home was financed by a prominent Chicago Jew, that it was once lived in by a Jewish family and that it was home to both a Jewish day school and a yeshiva…

After Pauline Yearwood’s recent startling scoop in the Chicago Jewish News, which revealed that First Lady-elect Michelle Obama is a first cousin, once removed, of Rabbi Capers Funnye, it appeared unlikely that another significant Jewish connection to the Obamas would be found.

The Southside home – at 5046 S. Greenwood Avenue – is across the street from the city’s oldest Jewish congregation – KAM-Isaiah Israel Congregation. Secret Service agents guarding the home use the temple’s facilities. Only residents and temple members are allowed to pass through the street barricades at both 50th and 51st streets.

The earliest document for the house is a construction loan, dated Oct. 4, 1905, obtained by real estate developer Wallace Grant Clark from Moses E. Greenebaum. A prominent mortgage banker and real estate developer, Greenebaum was a member of a pioneer Chicago family which became a leader in both the general and Jewish communities. Moses’s father, Elias Greenebaum, came to Chicago in 1848 and eventually entered the mortgage and banking business. Elias’s father, Jacob, followed Elias to Chicago, so Moses was already a third generation Chicagoan. Elias was a founder of Sinai Temple, Chicago’s first Reform congregation. Elias, Moses and Moses’s son Edgar were all presidents of Sinai.

Built about 1908, its first Jewish owner – in 1919 – was Max Goldstine who bought the house and the adjacent vacant lot for about $13,750. Goldstine and his wife – Ethel Kline – were born in Hungary and immigrated to America as children. They married in September 1901 and had three daughters. Lucille (1902) married Harold Rosenheim; Viola (1905) married Robert L. Leopold; and Maxine (1908) married Harold L. Newmann.

Goldstine’s grandson Fred M. Newmann, 71, is a retired professor in Madison, Wisconsin and campaigned for Obama. Bernstein and Cohen contacted him and he was excited to learn that his mother’s childhood home was the Obamas’ house.

Granddaughter Nancy Rosenheim, 83, is married to Robert J. Greenebaum, 91, son of Edgar N. Greenebaum, Sr. (the son of mortgage banker Moses Greenebaum). Nancy and Bob’s grandchildren are seventh generation Jewish Chicagoans. Lucille Goldstine Rosenheim told her daughter Nancy that the home had a third-floor ballroom.

Maxine Goldstine’s childhood friend Dorothy Eckstein Herman Lamson of Highland Park, 95, grew up at 5125 S. Greenwood. She remembered Max had built a wooden toboggan slide on the adjacent vacant lot and that area children sledded there in the early 1920s.

Max and Ethel Goldstine sold the property via an April 1, 1926 deed to Virginia H. Kendall and Elizabeth K. Wild, as joint tenants.

During the Depression, the property went through foreclosure. The Foreman State Trust Savings Bank – the Foremans were a prominent Chicago German-Jewish banking family – was involved in the mid-1930s. Family and bank founder Gerhard Foreman (1823-1897) was married to a sister of Elias Greenebaum.

In about 1920, the Hebrew Theological College (HTC) formed and served mainly the Orthodox Russian immigrant community.

On March 26, 1947, the house was bought for the HTC with a donation from Anna Sarah Katz of Milwaukee, for about $34,000. There was also a $20,000 mortgage, $500 to be paid every three months until May 9, 1957, and signed by Rabbi Oscar Z. Fasman and Samuel S. Siegel. The Chicago Tribune reported September 22, 1947, that Katz “purchased a $50,000 plot of land with a building to be contributed to the Hebrew Theological College expansion drive.”

In the late 1940s, the house was the first home of the South Side Jewish Day School, which later became the Akiba Day School, merging with the Solomon Schechter Day School.

The Orthodox Jewish population declined in the 1950s; the house was sold in 1954 to the Hyde Park Luthern Church for $35,000. The Obamas paid $1.6 million for it.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Utah: Clarion’s Jewish colony

The Salt Lake City Tribune carried a story about the Clarion Jewish agricultural colony in Utah.

I first learned of Clarion through a colleague at the Henderson Home News in Southern Nevada – her family had lived in Gunnison. Later, I discovered more at sessions on Utah’s Jewish history during several international Jewish genealogy conferences held in SLC.

Jessica Ravitz’s story includes two sidebars, multimedia, historic and contemporary photographs.

Three miles west of Gunnison in south central Utah, where tumbleweeds roll across several thousand acres of rocky and barren land, 200 unlikely families once arrived to plant dreams. They were new Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, people who, in most cases, had been in America for less than five years.

Leaving crowded city tenements and East Coast sweatshops, factory and peddling jobs behind, they signed up in 1911 to be part of a global experiment.

The back-to-the-soil movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw 40 Jewish agricultural colonies sprout up across America. This happened just as similar projects took root in Canada, Argentina and Ottoman-ruled Palestine, now Israel — the genesis of the kibbutz movement, communal settlements that flourished in Israel’s early years and still exist today.

The man who led the charge for those who journeyed to Utah was Benjamin Brown (nee Lipshitz), a Russian-born ideologue living in Philadelphia who believed this effort would save his people by getting them out of congested environments, diversifying their skills and instilling in them greater self-sufficiency and confidence.

The story has quotes from Brown’s daughter Lillian Brown Vogel, now 99 and living in Ukiah, California.

University of Utah history professor Bob Goldberg wrote a book – Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World – about the colony and its struggles.

Four years of irrigation woes, a flood, an early frost, broken-down equipment, bad weather, financial troubles, poor soil and abysmal crops took a toll, causing most everyone to hop trains to cities. Along the way, three had died, including Aaron Binder, a strapping member of the community who was crushed in a logging accident.

Goldberg recently led high school seniors of Utah’s largest synagogue, Congregation Kol Ami, to the area to see the remnants: a few headstones in Hebrew, ruins of foundations, etc.

In 1982, while looking at a book about the state’s ghost towns, Goldberg discovered Clarion, and he wanted students to see an often overlooked chapter in Jewish and Utah history.

The Clarion colony was part of a final push for these agrarian developments in America. It was the largest in land area, as well as population, and lasted longer than any other settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, Goldberg said. Brown and his scouting partner, Isaac Herbst, had settled on Utah because the land was cheap, the state was hyping the promise of the new Piute Canal, and it was situated near railroad tracks. But, perhaps as important as anything else, Goldberg added that it was also far enough away from the East that it would make giving up and leaving more difficult for farmers.

Most families left in 1915 after the struggles proved too much. Their train tickets were paid for by Jews living SLC. Most went to cities, although a few went to farm elsewhere. The Jewish community tried to help and the history documents the fact that Mormon farmers offered assistance and knowledge. The church even donated $500 to help the Clarion group survive its last winter. The Clarion community utilized only half of the 6,000 acres they purchased.

A few families stayed until the late 1920s, but finally left when they became concerned that their high-school teenagers might marry Mormons.

Bruce Sorenson, 49, understands the intrigue. The local Mormon farmer, reached in his Centerfield home, first spotted the cemetery headstones when he was 16. Ever since then, he’s remained fascinated and has taken it upon himself to watch over the grounds. He used to bring flowers to the two gravestones, which are surrounded by small fences to protect them — until Eileen Hallet Stone, another Salt Lake City historian, told him Jews don’t traditionally honor their dead that way. Every now and then, when he thinks of it and even though he admitted he doesn’t know what he’s doing, Sorenson shows up with candles to light on Hanukkah.

He occasionally spots people wandering around in search of something. visitors have included Brown’s daughter Lillian and her son, other colonists’ descendants, and even people from Israel. He helps out by showing them where to go, what he knows and asks them to sign his copy of Goldberg’s book.

There’s much more in the complete article at the link above.

Boston: Two dramatic stories, Dec. 7

Two dramatic stories of digging into lost histories and reuniting long separated families will be featured by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston (JGSGB) at its December 7 meeting at Temple Emanuel in Newton.

The stories are Stephen Denker’s “documenting business history in Cuba,” and Alexander Woodle’s “reuniting family divided by 250 years.”

Denker reports on seven years of research, worldwide travel and internet chats. By tracing his American family’s manufacturing business and life in Cuba early in the 20th century, he unraveled a genealogical history and reconnects cousins separated for more than 70 years. In summer 2007, Denker spent two weeks in Havana completing his research and visiting the family home and factory.

Woodle reports on re-tying a genealogical thread after 250 years. His quest started with discovering a familiar surname in Austria and Romania in a search of international telephone directories. JewishGen and Familysearch database resources provided evidence of relationship. He then contacted a family in Romania, and utilizing the latest tool of genea-technology, dispatched a DNA kit. Last May, Woodle traveled to Central Europe to visit his distant cousins.

Both presentations exhibit an additional important facet of genealogical research: historical context. Denker describes the circumstances of Jewish immigration to Cuba. Woodle’s review of Jewish history in Central Europe yields clues to the dispersal of his family from 18th century Bohemia to Banat (now partially in Romania) in the southern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Join the group from 1.30-4.30pm, Sunday, December 7, at Temple Emanuel, 385 Ward St., Newton. JGSGB members: free; others: $5. For directions and additional details, click here.

Australia: Jewish genealogy conference

I know this is somewhat late, but it’s important to note that the first-ever Australian Jewish Genealogical Conference was held in Canberra in early November. An article describing the meet was carried in the Australian Jewish News here.

Participants at the first Australian Jewish Genealogical Conference held in Canberra discovered some surprising family connections.

The conference included a reception hosted by Israeli Ambassador to Australia Yuval Rotem, special interest group sessions and guest speakers from the National Archives of Australia, National Library and Australian War Memorial.

It was nice to see the names of good friends and acquaintances from down-under: Rieke and Peter Nash, as well as Martha Lev Zion from Beersheva.

This conference – as do many genealogy conferences – produced some surprises. Two delegates discovered they were born in the same hospital in Shanghai to refugee parents. Peter and Prof. Ben Selinger found a connection through their fathers’ professional lives in pre-war Berlin.

Sharing the same great-grandfather were Enid Yoffa Elton and Cecily Parris. He had arrived in Australia in 1847 from Krakow via England.

“It was unbelievable,” Elton told The AJN. “I found about four or five relatives from the same family tree.”

Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem – whose family name was Frenkel – hosted a reception for attendees. He told how he found surviving Polish family members in Melbourne, while another attendee wondered if she was related to Rotem through her mother’s family.

Dr. Martha Lev Zion was the keynote speaker and discussed two modern tools for genealogical research: the growth of online records and DNA analysis.

Read the complete article for more information.

Postings of note: Thank you, Randy Seaver

My colleague Randy Seaver, author of the excellent Genea-Amusings blog, also writes a weekly Best of the Genealogy Blogs, where he spotlights excellent postings across the genea-blogosphere.

He reads hundreds of blogs each week. We are happy that he finds the time to do that!

In his round-up posted today, Randy pointed to my Tracing the Tribe post on the LDS issue of posthumous baptism of Jews (Holocaust victims and others) here and MyHeritage.com’s interview with me.

Thank you, Randy!