THE LEGACY OF THE SIX WEINERMAN SISTERS

No part of a family should be without a legacy. Recording the stories from my Aunt Fannie’s renditions during many years of “kitchen talk” in my childhood home and beyond, plus over thirty years of research and getting to know more family members, was a no-brainer.

With patient perseverance, I worked to organize the information, adding documentation, photographs, and charts to make it appealing to a broader audience while educating my relatives. My work continues as I span back another generation in my paternal ancestry.

My paternal grandparents, being 1st cousins, shared that status with the six daughters of my grandfather’s mother’s sister and my grandmother’s father’s brother. Got it? Wait, I’ve charted that for you. “You,” as in my readers and any family members lacking my expansive knowledge of our mutual ancestry.

My Great-great-grandparents, Sura-Sheyndlya and Yevel Temnogorod, had three children, Rachel Leah, Rose, and Yehuda Hersh. For many years, I have known the names of my great-grandparents, Rachel Leah and Yehuda Hersh, and that they had one sister named Rose. Recently the documentation surfaced in the archives from Chudnov, along with an accounting of our ancestry back to 1765. That discovery proved to be tremendously satisfying.

Chart 1 - My Great-great-grandparents Yevel and Sura-Sheyndlya Temnogorod with their three children and their spouses

My Great-grandmother Rachel Leah was my grandfather’s mother. My grandfather Nathan had six siblings. See Chart 2 below.

Chart 2 - My Great-grandmother Rachel Leah Temnogorod Murovanny, her spouse, siblings, and seven children with spouses

My Great-grandfather Yehuda Hersh was my grandmother’s father. My grandmother Sarah had five siblings and four stepsiblings. See Chart 3 below.

All five siblings of my grandmother remain memorialized in recent blog posts, and her stepsiblings were the subject of my July 12, 2022 blog post, My Grandmother’s Stepsiblings in Photos.

Chart 3 - My Great-grandfather Yehuda Hersh Temnogorod, his two wives, their maiden names and the given name of his second wife unknown, are listed with his spouses, siblings Rachel Leah and Rose, and his six children and their spouses

Rachel Leah and Yehuda Hersh had a sister Rose who had six daughters. See Chart 4 below.

The six sisters were 1st cousins of my grandmother Sarah and my grandfather Nathan, who, as noted, were 1st cousins to each other before marriage.

Chart 4 - Rose Temnogorod Weinerman, her husband, siblings, and children with their known spouses

My 3rd cousins, grandchildren of my grandparents’ cousins, and I are in communication. We are designated as 3rd cousins because our great-grandparents were siblings, but we affectionately refer to each other as cousins. Some of us are in very close contact, celebrating many occasions together. Before the pandemic, year after year, there was a spot reserved at our Passover Seder table specifically for one of those cousins and her family.

Rose was the middle sister of my Great-grandmother Rachel Leah and their brother, my Great-grandfather Yehuda Hersh. Her six daughters were Sheindl or Jennie, Tabl or Tillie, Chaika or Clara, Raisel or Reisel, Ayda, and Zisil.

Chart 5 - Jennie (Sheindl) with her husband, five sisters, and her three children and their spouses
Note that Jennie’s daughter was obviously named for her mother, Rose, and she also had a niece named Rose
Another daughter and sister were both Rais(z)el with uncertain spelling

Sheindl (“Jennie”) was the eldest daughter of Rose Temnogorod Weinerman. See Chart 1. Jennie had three daughters. See Chart 5.

Cousin Sheindl (Jennie) in the old country with her three daughters Rais(z)el, Rose, and Ida

Sheindl (Jennie) Weinerman abt. 1950 on a visit to my parents in Roselle, New Jersey

a) Rais(z)el, Jennie’s firstborn daughter, never came to America. Below, on the left, she is pictured with her sister Rose. On the title page, she sits poised with her husband Yankl Mamalad, their daughter Manya, and her aunt and uncle. Jennie’s granddaughter Manya’s life in Ukraine remains a mystery.

Rais(z)el and her sister Rose in Chudnov

Copy of picture from title page: Cousin Sheindl’s (Jennie’s) daughter Rais(z)el was never in America. Here she is pictured with her husband Yankel Mamalad and their daughter, Manya, Sheindl’s (Jennie’s) granddaughter. Seated on right are Sheindl’s (Jennie’s) sister Raisel with her husband Yankel Shusterman, in Chudnov, Ukraine. Picture behind is Sheindl’s (Jennie’s) daughter Rose.

b) Ida (Hebrew name Chayka) was Jennie’s middle child. Jennie had one grandson from her daughter Ida. Her grandson Barry had four children and seven grandchildren.

Cousin Sheindl (Jennie) with her husband Louis and their middle daughter, Ida

Barry Green, z”l with beard (he was the only child of Ida and Carl Green). Ida was the daughter of Sheindl (Jennie). Pictured here is Barry with his family of four children and his three eldest grandchildren. Four others came along since the picture was taken in 1997.

c) A portrait of Jennie’s youngest of three daughters, Rose (Hebrew name Matta Roosie), hangs in the background of the title page photo. While Jennie’s mother, Rose, had six offspring, Jennie’s daughter Rose had three children, two girls, and a boy, making Jennie grandmother of a total of five. Those five descendants procreated 14 offspring, and the numbers of their descendants continue to mount.

Paula Figman, daughter of Rose, granddaughter of Jennie, center with her family

April 2017 New York City Adam and Maddie Merzel standing left in front of Moss, Sharon, Lynne Figman behind Paula Figman, Regina Merzel Campbell, front right, Jeffrey Merzel and Cory Figman standing in the rear Paula’s mother was Jennie’s youngest child, Rose.

May 2022 - celebrating Cousin Paula’s April 26th birthday in the Berkshires with cousins

Letters to “niece” Sheindl…actually meant as “cousin” Sheindl. The first letter tells the gloomy news of Chudnov and in the letter date August 5, 1935, another cousin in Chudnov is bidding Sheindl greetings on the birth of their grandchild as the blessing still exists at the naming of a new baby for the parents and grandparents to live to lead the child to the wedding canopy (Chuppa). The letter tells that Manya was born later than we thought, probably 1935. Translated by Harry Langsam, z”l.

This plea was written by Matta Roosie “Rose” Weinerman when she and her older sister were thinking of emigrating Translated by Harry Langsam, z”l.

Letter from cousins in Chudnov to cousins Sheindl, and her daughters, Matta Roosie “Rose” and Chayka ”Ida” in New Jersey - probably 1930s Translated by Harry Langsam, z”l

Chart 6 - Tillie (Tabl), with her husband, five sisters, and five children, including a daughter, Rose
Her sister Jennie (Sheindl), also had a daughter named Rose, both most likely named for their maternal grandmother, Rose

2. Tabl (“Tillie”) was Rose’s second daughter but the first to immigrate to the United States. See Chart 6. The story I wrote for the New Jersey Jewish News tells more about her importance to our family. The link to the story is on my website at sharonmarkcohen.com. The full article also is printed below.

“Communication Is Key

NJJN December 3, 2014, 12:00 am

Placing a stone on cousin Tillie’s tombstone at the Chudnover section of the Talmud Torah Cemetery in Newark, I said, It’s Sharon, Benny’s daughter…Surah (my namesake) and Nachman’s granddaughter. I just made my yearly trek and visited their graves in the row behind you. You cousins certainly stayed close, even in death.

As my son Moss walked around the Charles Kimmel building at the Maplewood Jewish Center on Rosh Hashana, carrying the Torah dressed in all its glory, I touched my siddur to your name, so that when I brought it to my lips, I kissed the Torah, and you, for helping to establish my family in America.

When my grandfather got off the boat just over 100 years ago, he headed to his cousin Tabl (who took the name Tillie in America). Finding that bit of information came from the various census records I was able to accumulate. The key to the family links came from a small scrap of paper in my aunt’s dresser drawer.

Our connection was rather close, yet with my grandparents gone before I was born, and not yet a teenager when Tillie passed away in 1965, I cannot recall ever meeting her. Her mother Rose was the sister of both my grandfather’s mother, and my grandmother’s father.

Grandpa Nachman (Nathan) had come to America, leaving his pregnant wife (expecting my father) and young son Morris in Chudnov, Ukraine. His wife — who was also his cousin — known as Surkah by some, Surah or Sarah by others, arrived with their two young sons the following year.

My paternal grandparents Nathan and Sarah were 1st cousins to each other, as well as to Tillie. As new immigrants, they were deeply involved in each other’s lives. The next generation, composed of her five children and my grandparent’s six children, apparently got together often, before life went on and there was a disconnect.

When my husband and I asked our parents to record their family histories, we saw how much they either never knew or had forgotten. It took some ingenuity to gather the family tales I had heard since my childhood, which I repeated at Tillie’s graveside:

While I never knew you, Cousin Tillie, the adventures of your life in America always fascinated me. That’s why as my father stood at your grave, the first year I ever visited it with him in the early 1980s, and the stories flowed, I’m so glad that I had the foresight to videotape his words for posterity.

The tales were colorful and as we continued the video session at home, some of the details were off-color. You were a real character.

Eventually, I found and met two of your granddaughters living in New Jersey. Cynthia came to Moss’s bar mitzva in 2007 at the Maplewood Jewish Center and I was able to point out the memorial plaque with your name, not realizing at the time that there was a holiday Torah cover bearing your name. The inscription says “Pres. in Honor of Dr. M. W. Weinstein by Mrs. Tillie Gollin” and all I know is that Dr. Weinstein was the synagogue president and you were a first cousin to both of my paternal grandparents.

My father, his older brother, and their sister often repeated stories of Cynthia’s father, Monte, the eldest son interred next to Tillie, who suggested to my father that he work for the post office. Yet their contact appears to have ended with Monte, for I only knew Cynthia’s name from that lone paper in my aunt’s drawer.

I actually found Cynthia after reading her grandnephew’s birth announcement in the New Jersey Jewish News in 2001, simply by remembering her mother’s name and the scrap of paper my aunt saved, showing Cynthia’s brother’s name…the paternal grandfather.

My Uncle Morris met his wife at Monte’s house and truth be told, he had a crush on your daughter Sadie. There are remembrances of your other three children, Smitty, as the family called him, and Rose, who both lived in Maplewood, and Fanny, who died so young.

A perfect season to reflect and remember, I will contact your sister Clara’s son on Long Island, your sister Sheindl’s granddaughters, and your granddaughter Cynthia to tell them about my discovery on Rosh Hashana. That for sure will breed more stories of your life in the 20th century in America.

Without my recorded remembrances, you may not otherwise have had a legacy. That’s one more reason I wrote a book, the draft of which I presented to my children this year for their respective birthdays. It took me four months to write and five years to get it to the point where I am ready to publish. A family saga interspersed with how-to’s, with humor and poignancy, leaving out the lashon hora, it encapsulates who you were and the story of our relationship, along with all of my children’s other ancestors, including your own descendants.

Seeing your name on the Torah cover, I discovered a new side of you. I also gathered another way of teaching others how to find more clues about their family members not suggested on popular genealogy websites.

While I never knew you, if it weren’t for you, would I be here now?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Who were the descendants of this tremendously important family member of our ancestry?

a) Monte or Morris had one daughter and one son. His daughter is the mother of three, and his son, no longer living, was the father of two.

Cousin Tillie’s granddaughter, Monte’s daughter, Cynthia Gollin Kramer, with my sister-in-law Shelly Mark January 1, 2017 South Orange, New Jersey

December 2018 Cynthia and Sharon South Orange, New Jersey

b) Ira (aka Isidor or Smitty) Baron Gollin married a woman nearly a quarter of a century his senior and had no children. Disappointingly, I have no image of either of them.

c) Rose, namesake of her maternal grandmother, had a daughter who married and bore three children. Rose also had a son who remained single. After Rose’s daughter and I met, she soon followed up by sending pictures of her mother and Aunt Sayde.

d) Sayde was married twice. The one time I spoke with her daughter, an only child, she hauntingly revealed she didn’t know which man was her father.

e) Fanny died prematurely at age 28. Her picture radiates from her tombstone. My notes show that she was a saleslady in a bakery. If my memory serves me correctly, she died of kidney disease.

Fanny Gollin (March 2, 1915 - May 27, 1943)

The line continues through to Tillie’s eight grandchildren, from Monte’s two children and Rose’s daughter. Rose’s son and Sayde’s daughter never married, and Ira and Fanny had no offspring. According to the grandchildren whom I’ve met, the feelings of a grandmotherly love from Tillie were absent.

In this undated letter bef. 1916, my grandmother’s brother is telling her that her father, my great-grandfather, went to Chudnov to see his niece Reisl (more about her below) to get her sister’s address in America. My grandfather first went to his cousin Tabl (shown in the letter translated as Tavel or Tova) when he immigrated in 1911.

Chart 7 Clara (Chaika) was Rose’s third daughter of six and the last of three to immigrate to America
She is listed with her husband, five sisters, and three children with their spouses

3) Chaika (“Clara”) was the other sister of Jennie and Tillie, who also immigrated. See Chart 7. Clara settled in New York. Our family referred to her using her Yiddish name, Chaika, but occasionally used the most common English version of Chaika, Ida. It was not until I found her son, Bernie, that I learned that her English name was Clara. Cousin Clara had three children.

Bernie’s mother Clara Weinerman Leppo (June 15, 1890 February 21, 1973)

Bernie’s mother Clara Weinerman Leppo at an older age

a) Arthur, born in 1912, sadly died of kidney disease before Bernie was born. Arthur passed away in 1925, shortly after he became a bar mitzvah.

Top left: Arthur Leppo, 1925; right: Bella Leppo and Louis Ozur 1940, Bottom left: Clara Leppo; right: Arthur, Bella, and Clara Leppo

b) Bella married the same year as my parents, 1940. My mother said she was probably at the cousins’ wedding. Bella had one son and one daughter. Records online show her daughter died at age 64 in 2014. Bernie had cautioned me not to try contacting her and informed me that he was close with his nephew but could not get me any family information from him. Bella’s son Jeffrey has a daughter and a son with abundant offspring.

c) Bernard (Bernie) and his wife had a daughter first and then a son. His two grandchildren were a son and a daughter from his daughter Rena. The closest I have come to a relative with the same name as any of our children, Judd, Rina, or Moss, is Bernie’s daughter, Rena, albeit with a different spelling than our Rina.

Finding Bernie was quite challenging. My Aunt Fannie had his contact information in her address book. Yet when I reached out to him about ten years after her 1993 passing, we could not establish a friendly connection. Again, with patient perseverance, I ultimately realized that a granddaughter of his mother’s sister Jennie may have better luck. She agreed to reach out, and rewardingly, that worked.

Our mutual cousin connected with Bernie in 2005 and suggested he be in touch with me. Without delay, the blanks in his branch of the family tree were filled. To solidify the bond, my husband and I, along with two of our children, paid Cousin Bernie an unexpected visit in 2006.

Sharon with Cousin Clara’s son Bernie Leppo at his Long Island home 2006

Bernie was never so surprised as when we rang the doorbell at his house on Long Island. In 2018, Bernie passed away at age 90, but not before handing down the baton to his daughter, who, to my delight, remains in communication with me.

4) The fourth daughter of Rose, Raisel (“Reisel”), is pictured with her husband Yankl Shusterman, above, on the right. My only notes on the couple say, “Rose Merzel (Jennie’s youngest daughter) lived with them when her parents emigrated to live in America. The aunt and uncle never had children of their own. They were well off, and they treated their niece Rose like a Princess.”

Partial letter from Shumlik to his brother Nachman (my grandfather Nathan) thanking him for a package sent to Chudnov. In the letter he mentions Yankl Shusterman, husband of his cousin Reisel Weinerman, pictured in the title page of this blog post on the right - Letter translated by Harry Langsam, z”l

While scouting for clues in the letters from our ancestors, I came across a letter from my grandfather’s sister Fruma in which she mentions seeing Reisel in Chudnov with her sister Sheindl’s (Jennie’s) two daughters who were still living in the shtetl. The two Raisels (uncertain spelling of their names), one of the six Weinerman sisters and her niece by the same or similar name, stayed back in Chudnov. We do not know the fate of the elder Reisel. Family lore is that Jennie’s daughter, by the same or similar name as Jennie’s sister, died of natural causes before 1941, and her husband remarried. To this day, the fate of Jennie’s son-in-law Yankl Mamalad and her granddaughter Manya is unknown.

Reading that letter from Grandaunt Fruma had me lost in my thoughts; it felt like I was watching a Broadway show. I thought of Paula remarking about her bubba (Jennie), saying, here is this immigrant to America pining for her daughters back in Ukraine, and her cousin sees them there on the street.

I wanted to reach out and speak with Fruma. The first thing I wanted to ask about entailed the names of Sheindl’s (Jennie’s) children. My mind went adrift. What were they wearing? Did they stop to chat? Where were they going? How was the weather? Did they mention that one of the daughters was going to emigrate? Did they say the other was staying in Chudnov?

5) Ayda was the second of the three sisters who never made it to America and sadly lost all contact with the family. It is unknown but doubtful she survived the Holocaust.

My notes indicate, “They raised Rais(z)el, Sheindl's [Jennie’s] firstborn daughter when Sheindl [Jennie] immigrated to America.” No information on Ayda’s spouse is known. Did Ayda have children of her own?

6) All we know about the youngest of the six Weinerman sisters, Zisil, is that she lived in Paris, France, and sent beautiful dresses to her sisters in America. We have a picture of her sister Rose dressed quite fashionably and holding a parasol.

Jennie’s daughter Rose as a teen with a parasol

Confirmation that Zisil lived in Paris appeared in a letter from my grandfather’s brother Louis in Philadelphia, dated May 9, 1923. He requested my grandfather, who lived near the cousins in Newark, ask Toybe (Tabl) [Tillie] for her sister Zisil’s address in Paris. He was desperate to write and ask her to help his wife. Granduncle Louis wrote, “I will ask Zisil that she should talk in the office, because Bluma doesn’t talk French.” It's marvelous that we have this testimony.

May 9, 1923 letter from Louis Mark in Philadelphia to his brother Nathan, my grandfather in Newark, New Jersey - page two in Yiddish below translated by Harry Langsam, z”l

May 9, 1923 letter from Louis Mark in Philadelphia to his brother Nathan, my grandfather in Newark, New Jersey - page two in Yiddish translated by Harry Langsam, z”l

That is the tragic unfinished history of a family of six sisters. We are carrying the torch, trying to find what happened to Cousin Jennie’s three sisters, who never touched American soil, and her eldest grandchild, Manya Mamalad. Manya is the child in the photo on the cover page. My research continues.