I’m named after Jacob, my grandfather, who was named after Yaakov Bienenfeld, the patriarch of this family and my great-great-grandfather who came to the US in the 1840s. When he first came to New York, he settled in Harlem, where a Jewish community existed at the time. Many of the big churches in Harlem today used to be shuls.
When I was growing up, small farms still existed in Boro Park. I remember there were goats and chickens. It was a time when the majority of Jewish immigrants assimilated. Observant Judaism was perceived as being old fashioned, a relic from the Old Country.
When my parents, Peretz and Annie Scheinerman, lived in Washington, DC [in the early part of the twentieth century], you could just walk onto the White House grounds. There were these beautiful green rolling hills where my brothers and their friends used to play ball.
It’s a fallacy to say that Orthodox Judaism in America existed only from the 1940s onward. My grandchildren mark six generations since the arrival of the Fertig family in the US.
Many of the books on the history of American Orthodoxy include the names Bruder, Weberman, Fensterheim and Jacobs. These families helped build the spiritual foundation that enabled American Orthodoxy to flourish decades later.
My great-grandfather, Henry P. (Tzvi Pinchas) Cohn, was a Kohen. He left Germany because they had strict laws against Jews there, one of which imposed limitations on how many Jews in a family could get married. (This is why one of Yekke minhagim is that talleisim are worn by both single and married men; this way, German officials weren’t able to tell who was married and who wasn’t.)
My wife’s paternal grandparents, Chaim and Sora Feiga Siegel, moved to Baltimore in 1900. The couple named their second American-born son after Chaim’s father, Yechezkel. But the midwife refused to put Yechezkel on his birth certificate. She said she would not burden an American boy with such a foreign name. One of his sisters solved the dilemma. A street in East Baltimore that she crossed on the way home from school was called Chester Street. It sounded a little like “Chezkel,” so that is how he got the name.
With Rosh Hashanah approaching, we asked leading thinkers and educators to share with us their favorite books or seforim they rely on to help prepare for the holiness and awe of the day. Charlie Harary As told to Bayla Sheva Brenner What inspires me the most are different pieces from modern-day ba’alei machshavah […]
Another year—and another Rosh Hashanah—is upon us. Last year, we all made resolutions to change and, in many cases, we never did. How can we make this year different?