A. D. Hirsch Goes Back to Mlynov

In 1935, "A. D." Hirsch, his wife, Ellen, and daughter Ruth, went back to Mlynov for a visit. He brought a movie camera with him. This is the only known footage of Mlynov and its residents before the end.

A. D. was born Abraham Hirsch in Mlynov in 1881. He left Mlynov in 1907 at the age of 16 to follow two of his brothers to New York, where they first settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan before moving uptown to East Harlem. They were there only a few years before purchasing a small laundry business in Jersey City, across the Hudson River from New York, where they moved in 1911.

There the Hirsch family capitalized on a new technique called "wet-wash laundry" which was taking the industry by storm and which enabled the Hirschs to grow prosperous. Over time, they would eventually employ hundreds of people and become significant philanthropists in Jersey City, contributing to many of the early Jewish communal institutions that were emerging.

In 1935, A. D. and his family went back to Mlynov, stopping first in Warsaw, and afterwards going on to Mandatory Palestine to visit cousins who made aliyah. Sometime after the movie was a made a voiceover was produced by one of those cousins he visited, a woman by the name of Luba (Goldenberg) Kravitz, in which she identifies people she recognizes in the movie. If you listen carefully you can hear her say "there is A.D. Hirsch and Ellen and Ruth."

The Story of the Home Movie

The story of how this footage resurfaced and arrived in my hands is perhaps interesting as well. One day in 2020, after a gathering of Mlynov descendants in Baltimore, my cousin Saul emailed me. His father Ted Fishman had passed away not long before.

"Here is a movie of Mlynov," he wrote. "It was in my Dad's collection." Saul's paternal grandparents were both from Mlynov.

Excited, I asked him, "Where did your father get it?"

Saul explained that his father's cousin, Irene, gave it to him. Irene's parents were first cousins from Mlynov. The story Saul heard was that Irene at some point went away on an adult education weekend. A woman there happened to mention her family was from a small shtetl. Irene asked her which one. Serendipity. It turned out to be Mlynov.

"Perhaps," Saul wrote in his email, "You can figure out who the Hirsches were."

Eventually, I did. Eventually, I connected with the granddaughter of A. D. Hirsch and heard the story of that trip back to Mlynov. Read more about the Hirsch family from Mlynov.

Compiled by Howard I. Schwartz, PhD
Updated: Nov. 2024
Copyright © 2021 Howard I. Schwartz, PhD
Webpage Design by Howard I. Schwartz
Want to search for more information: JewishGen Home Page
Want to look at other Town pages: KehilaLinks Home Page

This page is hosted at no cost to the public by JewishGen, Inc., a non-profit corporation. If it has been useful to you, or if you are moved by the effort to preserve the memory of our lost communities, your JewishGen-erosity would be deeply appreciated.