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Rose Birth Certificate


Born in 1902 in Chumalovo{Comolovo} to Israel Slomovic and Pessel{Pepi} Motjovic. There were five  daughters in all. No sons that I know of, although there may have been a still birth and an infant death. My mother was the third in line. Peril and Sura came before her and Rachel and Mariam followed. My mother's yiddish name was Rifka. The birth certificate was sent for in 1931 when my mother decided to become an American citizen.

In 1902, Chumalovo was in the Maramoros province of Austria Hungary. My mother called herself Hungarian.The Slomovic family spoke yiddish and Hungarian. They were also able to converse with their Ukrainian neighbors in a kind of Russian which they called "goyish". In order to exist, they needed to be multi lingual. They were agrarian. My grandfather owned a plot of land and they grew most of their food supply. They raised geese and had chickens, a cow and a team of horses. I know that they had an apple tree, because my mother confessed to me that she ate most of the apples that were stored in the hay during the winter. I don't know much about the shtetl at all. There are no pictures or post cards. Was there a shule? How about a Cheder? or a rabbi? It was a true Shtetl buried in the Carpathians.

My mother talked  about the Tereblya River which separated Chumalovo {Somanfalva} from Krichovo where her grandmother lived. Her grandmother was Chaya Broina Motyovich {I'm named for her}. If Rifka wanted to visit her grandmother, there was no bridge, so she swam across in the summer and walked across the ice in the winter. She was feisty, my mother was!  When I was growing up in Detroit, we had a little farm in Michigan and my mother grew all her own fruits and veggies and canned everything for the winter. She even knew how to pick mushrooms in the woods. She always said " I haven't poisoned you yet." My father trusted her. My brother and I weren't too sure.




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Compiled by Helen Ganz Kastenbaum
last updated December 20, 2009
copyright © 2009 Helen Ganz Kastenbaum




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