Mendel (Morris) Pickholtz, 5657-5717 (1896-1957)

Twenty-fifth anniversary, 1946

My grandfather died on the ninth of First Adar - that's Monday evening - sixty years ago. He has been dead almost as long as he lived.

Everyone thought I was too young to go to the funeral, or even the unveiling - something I resented until, well forever. He had had a serious heart attack just before I was born and there was some concern that I would bear his name, but happily he recovered. He kept the extra name "Chaim" that was added during the illness.

In the end, it was a "cerebral vascular accident." Twelve hours from onset until death. I knew without anyone's telling me.

They lived in this house since sometime in the 1930s until I think 1952.

From the 1940 federal census

 
Sometime in the 1940s, my grandmother's mother moved in with them, until her death in 1950.

My father and Aunt Betty both went to their weddings from that house.

The family lived in Zalosce, east Galicia, and my grandfather's first seven siblings (four of whom survived childhood) were born there. Maybe the next two as well, but Zalosce birth records are available only through 1890, so we are not sure. My grandfather, the youngest was born in Bogdanowka, in house 95, on the holiday of Hoshanna Rabba, during Sukkot.

This Jezierna birth record is from the All Galicia Database of Gesher Galicia

Within a few years, the family began it's multi-stage migration to the Pittsburgh, where his father's sister had settled in the 1880s. My great-grandmother came last with the three youngest children, not through Baltimore or Ellis Island like the others, but through Montreal and the St. Albans Vermont border crossing.

With U. Dave (center) and U. Joe (right)

My grandfather was in the wholesale grocery business on Miller Street with two of his brothers, Uncle Joe and Uncle Dave, a business which closed when Uncle Joe turned sixty-five. I remember being there.

The children of the three brothers (the eldest, Uncle Max, had no children) were close in age and that and the business connection made my father's generation and mine closer with them then with the three sisters' children, who were older. (Not to mention that my grandfather and Uncle Joe married sisters!)

My grandfather had first cousins in Pittsburgh on both sides of his family, but the family connection didn't survive much after that first generation - until I began doing genealogy.

1953. Getting ready for the first seder on Northumberland Street, after leaving the house on Phillips Avenue.
I share the head of the table with my grandfather. Six people in this picture are still with us.

The Pittsburgh Jewish Criterion (thanks to The Pittsburgh Jewish Newspapers Project) recorded many of the key events in his life, including his regular listing as Vice-President of the Poale Zedeck Men's Club (and my grandmother's as President of the Sisterhood). Here are a few.

And finally...

Not mentioned are Aunt Becky and Aunt Bessie who predeceased him.

May his soul be bound in life. תהא נפשו צרורה בצרור החיים.

Housekeeping notes
I am speaking here in Israel in English - 16 March 2017, 7:30 – IGRA, Beit Fisher, 5 Klausner Street, Raanana
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey

I have had four proposals accepted for the IAJGS Conference in Orlando 23-28 July. No times or dates yet. But if anyone wants me to speak in the US before the Conference, now is the time to speak up.

And for the attention of any program chairs (or anyone who knows program chairs), I'll be available in the US late April-early May of 2018. Another bar mitzvah in Chicago.

Moritz Rosenzweig, Eighty-Eight Years Later

My great grandfather Moritz Rosenzweig died 19 Heshvan 5689, eighty-eight years ago today.

With his wife Regina and children, ~1905

He was born 26 November 1858 in Domaniza, Trencin County, Slovakia to Ignac (Yitzhak Yehudah) Rosenzweig and Mali (Miriam) Zelinka. Both his parents' families had lived in Trencin County for several generations.

He had a sister who died just before her sixth birthday and three brothers, two older and one younger.

The towns in red are "ours," as is
Považská Bystrica (aka Vag Bestercze)

Moritz' mother Mali died in 1905 at age eighty and Ignac in probably 1917 at age ninety-six. Both are buried in Vag Bestercze.

In February 1885, Moritz Rosenzweig married Hermina (Chana) Schaefer in Budapest. They had a daughter Elvira and a son Siegfried (aka Aunt Ella and Uncle Fred). Hermina died in 1889 and the next year, Moritz married Regina (Rivka) Bauer of Kunszentmiklos. They had three children in Budapest - Sigmund, Albert Jules and Ilona (later Helen). Uncle Julie (later AJ Rosen) was named Yitzhak Yehudah in 1893, after his grandfather who lived another two dozen years.

In 1901, Moritz went to the United States, arriving in New York but bound for Allegheny Pennsylvania, now the North Side of Pittsburgh.

According to the passenger list, he was going to his cousin in Allegheny. I cannot read the name precisely and do not know who it might be.
 
The following year, Regina arrived in Allegheny with the five children and one year after that my grandmother was born. She was named Miriam (Margaret) after Moritz' living mother.

He became a US citizen in 1906. I see no evidence that he ever returned to Europe, not for his parents' funerals nor to visit his ninety year old father. (I checked both US passport applications and incoming passengers on Ancestry.)

Moritz worked as a cabinet maker and the family attended the (predominantly Hungarian) Poale Zedeck synagogue in the Hill District. He served on the building committee for the new building in Squirrel Hill and died at age seventy, just after the first High Holiday services were held in that building.

Housekeeping notes
I have just set for 12 February at the Orange County JGS.

Program chairs - and people who know program chairs - please note. I have some available dates during my coming US trip, particularly the weekdays between 23 January and 2 February, in the east and midwest and 14-16 February in the NY/NJ area  Several topics are available including the Lazarus-Endogamy talk which I presented in Seattle and a new one where DNA is not the main point of interest.

The following programs are set, with some others under discussion:

22 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Maryland, Baltimore County Public Library, 1301 Reiserstown Road, Pikesville
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?
29 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Greater Philadelphia, Main Line Reform Temple 410 Montgomery Avenue, Wynnewood
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
5 February 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Cleveland, Park Synagogue East, 27500 Shaker Blvd,  Pepper Pike
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
10 February 2017, 11:00 – ROOTSTECH2017,
Jewish DNA: Successes and Lessons from the Journey
12 February 2017, 1:30 - Orange County JGS - details to follow.
13 February 2017, 7:30 - JGS of Los Angeles, American Jewish University, 15600 Mulholland Drive
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?

Breakfast at Poale Zedeck

Last year, my son concluded thirteen years as rabbi of a small congregation in suburban Chicago. During a number of those years, he and his family - his wife and six sons - would vacation at the yeshiva in Lakewood New Jersey, driving both ways. It is a long drive and usually they would stop overnight in Pittsburgh at Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken's.

This is the story of one of those stopovers.

The year Avrohom turned thirteen.

Before the big event
I went to Washington DC for the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, after a few days in Baltimore (another story for another time). The Conference ended Friday and Elliot Greene dropped me at the airport in Philadelphia where I picked up a rental car and drove to Lakewood.to spend Shabbat with the kids. (I told a story mentioning that Lakewood visit here.)

I spent a very pleasant day with the family, my son his wife and five of their six boys. Their second son, Avrohom, was in camp in Cleveland. The plan was that Abrohom would meet up with the family in Pittsburgh, getting a ride from Cleveland with one of the Pittsburgh boys at camp. But that wasn't going to work out, so I became the back-up plan.

Avrohom's thirteenth birthday fell while he was at camp, and they made a bit of a thing about his becoming a bar mitzvah. The bigger,family celebration was to be the Shabbat immediately after returning to Chicago, with a Sunday evening planned at Skokie Yeshiva for more family, classmates etc.

The kids' trip back to Chicago from Lakewood included Wednesday night in Pittsburgh. Wednesday night, meaning Thursday morning. I saw an opportunity and everyone signed off on it.

 From my great-grandfather down to my grandson. That's six generations.

It was not meant to be something big. The invitation went out to family members in Pittsburgh, including some we barely knew, as well as to a few old classmates of mine.

Pittsburgh Week - the first days
Sunday I returned the rental car in Philadelphia and flew to Pittsburgh where I picked up another. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I did alot of visiting with Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken and Monday I did a round of cemeteries on the north side of Pittsburgh. Probably a dozen of them.

Sig Rosenzweig - Zelig ben Moshe

Tuesday morning my wife arrived from Israel, to join the party.

Wednesday I drove to Cleveland to pick up Avrohom from camp. On my way up I stopped at the Ridge Road Cemetery where I photographed nine family graves. On the way back to Pittsburgh, Avrohom and I went to the Kinsman Road cemetery and visited the grave of my grandmother's brother Sig Rosenzweig who had died in1918 of influenza. He was twenty-seven.

The inscription is very difficult to read and finding the grave took quite a long time. I am guessing that we were the first family members to visit in decades.

Once in Pittsburgh, we made a stop at the Old Poale Zedeck Cemetery in Sheraden, where we visited the graves of my great-grandparents Regina and Moritz Rosenzweig (he of the shul building committee), my grandparents, Uncle Joe and Aunt Helen and some other family members. Avrohom appeared interested.

By the time we got back to the house, my son and family were there.

Thursday
Everyone was up early Thursday. How could we not be.

There had been some serious flooding earlier in the week, with deaths, and there would be more in another month, but this night was wind. And fallen trees. Rain as well.

We were only five houses away from the shul, but even that was something of a project. A number of our local guests did not make it, much as many had missed my own bar mitzvah years before due to an eighteen-inch snowfall the day before.

But we had out-of-town guests, despite the fact that we had only invited locals. Uncle Bob and his wife drove in by trailer from Baltimore ("Why go to a party in Chicago where there is an actual Torah-reading in Pittsburgh?") His daughter Linda - never one to miss a family occasion - came up from West Virginia. Three Kwoczka cousins - two of whom I had met less than two weeks previous - drove up from Baltimore. And a "new" third cousin from the South Hills and a classmate from Fox Chapel came despite the weather.

And sometime along the way, we heard that my great-grandfather, Moritz Rosenzweig, had made an appearance. He was on the building committee, but died in 1928, weeks after the first High Holiday services in the new building, but while they were still holding services in the old building in the Hill District. His wife had a stained glass window installed in his memory, at the top of the front wall of the main sanctuary, to the right of the Aron Kodesh. There was a heavy glass plaque.

During Shabbat services, less that two weeks previous, the plaque fell and shattered. They say it nearly hit the shul's executive director on the head.

It was as though Great-Grandfather was saying that we shouldn't forget him on this occasion.

We had the regular Thursday morning service. Avrohom read the Torah. I was saying kaddish for my mother that year, so there was that.
Afterwards we adjourned to the social hall downstairs, a room that had seen many family celebrations over the years. A buffet breakfast with enough left over that the kids made sandwiches for the drive to Chicago.


I spoke. My son spoke.

On the occasion of my father's bar-mitzvah seventy-five years previous, his grandmother, the wife of Moritz Rosenzweig, had given him a set of five machzorim, with the prayer services for the holidays.. Those came to me after my father died and I had them rebound a couple of months earlier. There - in the same place where my father had celebrated his own bar mitzvah - I turned them over to my grandson.

Afterword
Then everyone went home.

And because I have just spent a full week with Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken while in town for my DNA course. After having spent three days with Uncle Bob and Ro in Maryland.