The Haberman (Arbeitman) Family

Haberman Cousins (L-R): George Haberman, Marion Haberman Reiter,
Ann Haberman Lebenberg, Edith Haberman Recht Aberte,
Edith Haberman Levin, and Shirley Haberman Richman Oppenheimer

The first members of the Haberman (Arbeitman) family to emigrate to the U.S. from Linitz were Malke (Molly) Arbeitman, her husband Morris Zlotnikoff and their daughters Chane (Anna) and Beile (Rebecca), who settled in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Morris arrived in 1910 and was joined by his wife and daughters in August, 1911. A son, Abe, was born in Elizabeth in 1912.

Molly's brother Harry and Bela (Becky) Schwartz were married in Linitz in 1910 and shortly afterwards immigrated to Toronto, Canada, where they had two children, Ann (1911) and Louis (1914), before moving in 1915 to Akron, where Harry opened a dry cleaning business and where Edith was born in 1921.

Brother Lieb (Louis) joined his sister Molly's family in Elizabeth in April, 1913, at the age of 18, and in 1917 married Sprinza (Sadie) Abramovitz, who had come to the U.S. from Minsk in 1905. Their son George was born in New Jersey in 1918, just before the family moved to Akron, Ohio, where Louis joined his brother Harry in the dry cleaning business. Daughters Edith and Shirley were born in Akron in 1925 and 1929 respectively.

A third Arbeitman brother Lazar (Morris), who had also originally immigrated to Canada, moved to New Jersey from Toronto in 1919, and was joined in Akron in 1921 by his wife Udja (Helen) and their children Mahlia (Marion), Ghers (George), Jankel (Harry), and Rosa (Rose). The father of the Arbeitman family, Beryl, who had accompanied Helen and her children on their trip from Linitz, took sick and died during the voyage and was buried at sea.

In 1920, Sam Arbeitman immigrated to Akron, where he married Minnie Zimmerman in 1925 and raised his children, (Edith 1927), Bernard (1928), Marjorie (1930), and Audrey (1940). Sam also went into the dry cleaning business.

The fifth Arbeitman brother Cheil (Phillip) came to the U.S. in 1921, and lived in Newark, NJ, where he married Beatrice (Betty) in 1924 and had two children Bernard (1925) and Shirley (1928). Phillip worked as a fruit and vegetable seller, first from a wagon and later from a fruit stand. Bernard died as a member of the crew of the USS Indianapolis, which was attacked by the Japanese on July 29, 1945, after delivering critical components of the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima one week later.

There are several family stories of how the Arbeitmans became Habermans. One has to do with immigration agents not understanding them in Canada and another was that customers of their tailoring and dry cleaning businesses in Akron could not pronounce their name correctly so they changed it to Haberman.

According to Marion Reiter, daughter of Lazar (Morris), the Arbeitmans lived on a farm outside of Linitz, where her father and uncles were apprenticed as tailors. They left Linitz because the government wanted them to go into the army and they didn't want to be Jews in the Russian Army.

Marion, now in her mid-90s, also remembers pogroms in which many Jews were killed and "a soldier picking up a child with a spear." Her mother hid her in a large earthen oven to keep her alive when the soldiers came, she said, and "the gentiles were very demanding on the Jews and wouldn't let them do anything" and "people had to sneak into the synagogue to pray."

Marion also remembers the voyage to America on "a big beautiful ship" and that when she and her sister wanted to go to the bathroom, they didn't know about flushing the toilet since such conveniences were unknown to them.

We also know that the Haberman family in Akron and the Kolinsky family in Cleveland were friends (see group photo 1926), but we do not know if their relationship goes back to Linitz, or was developed in the U.S.

(Information provided in 2008 by Sandy Schoemann, granddaughter of Louis Haberman.)