A Bygone Yesterday: a Family Story

By Lawrence Freund

A Bygone Yesterday is a remembrance written by a grandson of Samuel and Louise Freund, detailing their roots in 19th century Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and their shoots in the New World, from New York Citys Yorkville neighborhood to Chicago and Florida. It is the history of one couple that stepped aboard a train in Central Europe on a spring day in 1891 and began a journey that would transform their lives and the lives of their descendants. Yet, at the same time, the books broad scope creates a biographical collage, putting flesh on a broad sweep of history. A Bygone Yesterday explores the lives of Samuel and Louise Freund, their ancestors, descendants and kinfolk, as well as the social and historic context of the times in which they lived, touching on, among other things, the restrictive and discriminatory family laws of 19th century Bohemia, early 20th century life in the Yorkville enclave of New York City, the tragedy of the Holocaust and the ultimate triumph of a warm and embracing family life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499078855

Lawrence Freund

Lawrence S. Freund is the great-great-great-great grandson of Jacob Freund of Bohemia. He was born in New York in 1940, the son of Milton Freund and Edith Blinick, and is a graduate of Queens College (CUNY) and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He was a long-time writer, correspondent, and editor for the Voice of America based in Washington, London, Belgrade, and New York. He previously published Imagine My Joy, the story of his maternal ancestors. Mr. Freund is married to Gloria L. Berkenstat Freund, great-great granddaughter of Dawid Berkiensztat and Ester Horowicz, Mordechai Berkiensztat and Kreindl Kempner, Layzer Gliksman and Hana Rozanski, Lewek Ejlenberg and Byna Lewkowicz, and Zelek and Gitl Pilcowicz (all from Poland). They are the parents of Karen L. Freund and Merrill Freund and the grandparents of Merrill’s sons Ben and Sam.

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Copyright © 2014 by Lawrence S. Freund.

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The Freunds of Bohemia

Chapter 3 The Children of Elias Freund

Chapter 4 Marie Freund and the Gach Family

Chapter 5 The Weil Family

Chapter 6 The Arnstein Family

Chapter 7 Rosalia Freund and her husband Abraham Edelstein

Chapter 8 The Wotitzkys of Bohemia

Chapter 9 Rose Wotitzky and her husband Edward Rosenberg

Chapter 10 Emily Rosenberg and her husband Jesse Brenner

Chapter 11 Hortie Brenner and her husband Milton Kroopf

Chapter 12 Moses Lefkowitz (Mel Klee)

Chapter 13 Adolf Wotitzky/Woticky

Chapter 14 The Freunds: On To America

Chapter 15 The Early Years in Yorkville

Chapter 16 The Zwicker Family

Chapter 17 Life in New York

Chapter 18 The Hoffmann and Smrcka Families

Chapter 19 The Ornstein Family

Chapter 20 The Eckstein Family

Chapter 21 Oskar Cervenka

Chapter 22 The Waldstein Family

Chapter 23 Franziska Freund and Sofie Freund

Chapter 24 Samuel and Louise Freund: Continuing Life in Yorkville

Chapter 25 The Children of Samuel and Louise Freund

Chapter 26 Childhood Tragedies – Mary Freund, Julius Freund, Eduard Freund

Chapter 27 Leo Freund

Chapter 28 Rudy Freund

Chapter 29 The Roos Family of Alsace and the Stern Family of Bavaria

Chapter 30 Emanuel Freund

Chapter 31 Milton Freund

Chapter 32 Samuel and Louise Freund–the Later Years

Bibliography

Places of Interest

Timeline

Victims of the Holocaust

Notes on a Visit to Bohemia 110 Years Later

Afterward

Appendix Descendant Charts

Is it surprising that when man thinks beyond himself, into the past and future, when he tries to integrate himself into a larger unit of time, he should feel himself a link in the chain of the generations, look on the fate of his ancestors as his own and concentrate his hopes for the future on his descendants?

From Felix Weltsch, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish-German Symbiosis: The Case of Franz Kafka, in Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute, Volume One.

The title of this book is taken from Psalm 90 (For a thousand years in Your eyes are but a bygone yesterday, and like a watch in the night.)

FOREWORD

The pages that follow tell a story. On the one hand, it’s a simple, unsensational tale of immigrants who left their homes, traveled to a new land and established a base of opportunity for themselves and their descendants. On the other hand, it’s a story of bravery, tragedy and triumph. The writing of this story has been a journey of discovery. Literally – discovering who these people were. There was, for example, a kind, smiling woman who I had known in my childhood. But she was simply Mrs. Stern. There was a man named Ruby. Who were they? Where was the unknown place where my grandparents, along with my uncles and aunt who had died in childhood, were buried? Where was the mysterious village where my family originated, written on a scrap of paper by my aunt as Hbit?

The search for this story began with two slips of paper, a 1914 note certifying that my seven year-old father had been vaccinated on June 9th of that year and my father’s 1923 high school registration card. By the time I discovered those small, motivating documents, my father had long been dead. But the registration card bore an address on Manhattan’s First Avenue, the place where he had lived at the time. How not visit the building? And so I walked one day along that avenue, hoping that the building had somehow survived the destruction/construction cycle that is so common in New York. Sadly, it had not. But the trail was fresh enough to launch the research that is now this book.

Warning: the path from the Introduction to the conclusion of this story is winding and full of detours, reflecting my own curiosity and inability to stop pulling on a thread once I have a grip on it. So be prepared for diversions into an interconnecting family patchwork, 19th century Central European history, early 20th century midwifery and police work, the American Civil War and the agonies of the Holocaust.

I’ve also done my best to clarify family relationships as the story progresses, but keeping track of the begats can be confusing. That’s why I’m including as many charts as possible. So if you begin to lose track of who married whom, put the text on pause and check the chart. Also, a few words about name spellings. They vary, depending on time, language and place. Josef (in Bohemia) became Joseph in the United States (sometimes). Luise became Louise. Oberhbit (German) became Horni Hbity (Czech). Wotitzky (German) became Woticky (Czech). I’ve tried to account for the transitions in the story, but may have missed some. Be warned.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

O n a spring day in 1891, Samuel Freund, his wife Louise and her two sisters Anna and Rose stepped aboard a train in Pribram, Bohemia, and began a journey that would transform their lives. The journey from Pribram was a bold, optimistic leap into uncertainty. The journey back to Pribram and beyond reaches progressively into a haze of similar uncertainty but to reach and touch that past is to gain an understanding of what became and will become.

Samuel and Louise Freund emerged from a community in Bohemia that extends back to at least the 10th century. Traces of the 13th and 14th century community have been identified in the Altneuschul in Prague and in that city’s Jewish cemetery as well as in the 17th century Jewish town hall in Prague. But Jews lived apart from the larger society, barred from routine legal rights and inflicted with enduring and frequent persecution. From 1726, they lived under an order of the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI limiting the number of Jewish families to 8,541. The edict was enforced by a Familianten order giving permission to only the first-born son of a family to marry, and only after the death of his father. The marriage permit was sold if there was no son to inherit the permit. At the same time, those ineligible for official permits often married secretly, their offspring considered illegitimate by the state. A law allowing all single Jews of marriageable age to wed only went into effect in March 1849.

The status of Bohemia’s Jews had begun to improve in the late 18th century. In October 1781 the Austrian emperor Joseph II issued an Edict of Toleration for Bohemia, affirming religious toleration in that sector of his empire and intending to make its Jews more useful. The edict allowed Jews to enter commerce and open factories, but did not give them citizenship or allow them to own farmland. Also, the edict banned the use of Yiddish and Hebrew in business records. A law adopted six years later required German personal and family names. Yet even as Bohemian Jews were enveloped by German culture and language, Czech-centered political and social forces began to emerge. Prof. Wilma Iggers, in her valuable documentary history of Bohemian and Moravian Jews, explains that Bohemian Jews, like Jews elsewhere in Central Europe, faced limitations on where they could live and how they could earn a living … together with mass murders, expulsions and even rules on what they could wear. About 10,000 Jews lived in Prague in 1850. But Prof. Iggers writes that small villages in Bohemia often had only a couple of Jewish families, perhaps only one. Their isolation, she believes, probably contributed to their assimilation.

In 1848, there were, according to Prof. Iggers, 3 million Czechs, 1.1 million Germans and 66,000 Jews in Bohemia. Jews moved from countryside villages to small towns in the second half of the 19th century and the number of Jewish communities increased. But according to Prof. Iggers, Jewish ties began to erode. At the same time, anti-Semitism continued, bolstered by the emergent Czech nationalism and German national anti-Semitism.

1848 was the year of revolution in Europe. On February 14th that year, word reached Prague by mail that the French monarchy had collapsed. The reaction among many Czechs was electric and they called for an assembly on March 11th to approve a petition to the emperor in Vienna, demanding certain rights. The demands were presented on March 22nd and plans were drafted for an election to a new diet or parliament. Although the parliament never assembled, the elections were actually held. But by June an uprising in Prague was suppressed by troops of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The uprising was evidence of an emerging Slavic nationalism in Bohemia and popular resentment of rule by the German-speaking minority. The even-smaller Jewish minority became the target of anti-Semitic outbursts during the unrest, especially on May 1-2, 1848, with attacks against bakers and Jewish merchants and anti-Jewish rioting. Historian Stanley Pech, writing of the events of 1848, describes it as a year of wonder, of excitement and of suspense; a year of hopes conceived and abandoned, of hatreds laid to rest and reawakened, of experiments never before attempted, of freedoms never before savored, of illusions never before entertained. In contrast, the Bohemian Jewish writer and journalist Moritz Hartmann commented at the time that the Czech revolution, which brought so many impressive, great, and noble things to light everywhere, made everything in Prague wretched, vulgar and disgusting. The heroic mood of the Prague rabble, with its desire for freedom, first turned against some bakeries. Encouraged by this triumph, the rabble turned against the Jews (quoted by Wilma Abeles Iggers in The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia).

Another example of that climate occurred in a town with links to the Freund family, Dolni Kralovice. During this period, about 50 Jewish families lived in the Bohemian town, their homes near the Zelivky River on Zidovska Street which was divided from the rest of the town by a rope or wire. The Jews were required to wear yellow bands on their sleeves. In April 1899, Leopold Hilsner – a Jewish cobbler’s assistant in another small Bohemian town, Polna – was accused of murdering a Christian girl. Hilsner, who was said to have murdered the girl for ritual purposes, was convicted and sentenced to death in September by a court in Kutna Hora. The next month, in reaction to the trial, a group of about 30 people in Dolni Kralovice, mostly teenagers, gathered one evening and walked through town singing nationalistic songs. The crowd was dispersed by the police, but it gathered the next night and smashed the windows of 10 houses occupied by Jews. Police reinforcements were summoned, but the following night many villagers took part in demonstrations, breaking the windows of Jewish homes. At that point gendarmes dispersed the crowd. The Hilsner trial led to riots in several other towns in Bohemia and Moravia and contributed to the growing anti-Semitism in the Bohemian countryside and the decision of Jews in many small rural communities to pack their bags and leave. (Hilsner’s sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment and still later he was pardoned.)

The early years of the composer Gustav Mahler also suggest conditions in small-town Bohemia in that same period. Mahler’s father Bernard had opened a small drinking shop in Iglau (Jihlava); his mother Marie had 12 children, five of whom had died in infancy, reflecting the 50% infant mortality rate in rural Bohemia. Sarah Gainham in her history of the Habsburg Empire writes that in the year Gustav was born, 1860, changing domicile was made much easier for Bohemian Jews who had previously needed special permission. At the same time, she also notes, intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews was common in remote districts, especially where Jewish families were scattered. Meanwhile, in Prague, writes Prof. Wilma Iggers, religious piety declined as Jews adopted the values and lifestyle of the surrounding secular society. That evolution was reflected in a letter that writer Franz Kafka (born in Prague in 1883) wrote in 1911 to his father: On four days in the year you went to the synagogue, Kafka wrote, where you were (to say the least) closer to the indifferent ones than to those who took religion seriously, you patiently went through the prayers in a purely formal manner. That was how it was in the synagogue; and at home, if possible, it was even more pitiful. To some degree, these cultural patterns were reflected in the Freund and related families whose stories occupy the following pages.

Finally, in this introduction, some thoughts on drink, as in alcohol. In the following chapters, there’s a clear occupational pattern that emerges among many of my village ancestors, that is, their association with taverns and distilleries, so much so that the practice continued into the New World. It was not a coincidence. Owning or leasing one of those establishments was among the relatively few occupational options at the time. One Jewish journalist, Jacob Kaufmann, wrote in 1841: In most Bohemian villages one sees isolated, rather extensive farmsteads with stables and outbuildings. And if one asks the farmers what they are, they say it is the Jew’s house, which is synonymous with … the brandy tavern. Kaufmann, quoted by Wilma Iggers in her invaluable book, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, went on to write: Everything has acquired a different aspect in recent times. Jewish families are only seldom the owners of brandy houses now. Mostly they are only tenants and make a miserable living from their sad occupation, the only one they may have in the villages. Those circumstances changed immensely for those who immigrated from village to town, from town to city and from continent to continent, but, for some, the tradition remained alive.

CHAPTER 2

The Freunds of Bohemia

Jakob Bunzel/Freund and his son Elias Freund

J akob Freund is the earliest Freund twig on this family’s tree. The familianten book that includes Zebrakov lists 15 Jewish families in this Bohemian village, each with its province-wide and local registration numbers. Jakob Freund was awarded number 2,178 (out of the 8,541 officially recognized Jewish families in Bohemia), number eight locally. The familiant record states that he was formerly known as Jakob Bunzel, suggesting that his immediate origins were in Boleslav (Bunzlau in German), a town north of Prague. According to the familianten book, Jakob received permission to marry in Zebrakov in 1779 (his wife’s name is unknown).

Jacob’s only known child was his son Elias Freund, born in about 1785. According to the Zebrakov familianten record, Elias became the head of the Freund family in Zebrakov on March 1, 1817, succeeding his father as a Zebrakov familiant. Soon after, on June 27, 1817, Elias received permission to marry in Zebrakov (permission number 29,559). His wife was Anna Pollak. Jakob Freund died March 26, 1831.

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Pribram Region of Bohemia, 1893

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Horni Hbity, Zduchovice, Zebrakov, Bohemia

In 1834 Elias Freund received permission to manufacture potash (made from, among other things, distillery waste, for use as fertilizer and the manufacture of soap) in the village of Wlkowa in the Caslav region. He is described in that document as having a small figure, gaunt face, black eyes. Another document from about a year later, giving Elias Freund permission to travel to Brandys (Brandeis) via Prague, describes him as a distiller, middle figure, without hair. In 1839 he received permission to travel from Zebrakov via Zduchowitz and in 1845 to travel from Zebrakov via Prague to Brandys. In his 1862 death record, he is described as a landweinbrauer or regional wine brewer. Elias Freund died April 16, 1862 at 10 o’clock at night in Zduchovice of altersschwäche (infirmity – his age is given as 75 in the official record, although that is likely approximate). He was buried two days later at the Radobyl cemetery in Drazkov.

Elias Freund and his wife Anna Pollak Freund were the parents of five children: Abraham, Joseph, Barbara, Anna and Rosalia. This is what followed:

• Abraham Freund married Eleanora Woticky and they had five children: Franziska (1862), Sofie (1864), Rosa (1866), Luise (1868) and Anna (1870). After Eleanora’s death, Abraham married Rosalia Porges and they had two children: Josef (1876) and Mina (1879).

• Josef Freund married Josepha Arnstein in 1849. They had three children: Marie (1851), Karl (1853) and Sophia (1857).

• Barbara Freund married Moises Schwarzkopf. They had at least two children, Jacob (1858) and Sophie (1861).

• Anna Freund (husband unknown). She was the mother of Samuel (1843) and Ignatz (1847).

• Rosalia Freund married Abraham Edelstein. They had four children: Josef (1857), Rosa