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 | SAMUEL (SAM) HARRIS was born in Skala in 1873 and emigrated to Great Britain in the early 1890s. He married Bertha Rosenthal in the East London Synagogue on September 10, 1895. They had four children: Miriam (Minnie; born 1898), Rachel (1899). Katie (1901), and Davis (1904). Soon after the birth of her son, Bertha ran off to America with Max Harris (no relation to Sam) and her infant son. Sam, a butcher, was left to raise their three daughters in Black Lion Yard in the East End, the heart of London's Jewish district. He was joined by his younger brother MORRIS HARRIS (who also had emigrated from Skala) and Morris's wife and children Joe, Jenny, and Zola. The extended family lived in a three-room flat that was shared with a Polish servant and a boarder. | ||
| Sam was active at the Jubilee Street Zionist Great Synagogue and the Hove Hebrew Congregation, when he was at his house at the coast. Although it is not known how he amassed his wealth, he apparently did quite well because he paid the entire cost for the renovation of the Hove synagogue. In 1931, at the age of 58, Sam married 49-year-old Rebecca Brown. He contracted a chronic illness (believed to be tuberculosis) and went to Barbados for treatment, which was not successful, as he died in Barbados on December 22, 1935. | |||
| Sam's daughter Minnie lived in Paris prior to World War II and escaped from Europe to Brazil. Her Brazilian visa [right] is part of the family archive. Eventually, she joined relatives in the US. After the War, she returned to England, where she died in 1979. Sam's daughter Rachel (Rae) Harris married Joseph Jacobs in 1922 and had daughters Sonia and Beatrice. In 1939, they were living in suburban London. Sam's third daughter, Katie (Kitty), married Joseph Levcovitch in 1922. They had three children: David (1922), Anita (1926), and Miriam (Mimi) (1929). Mimi married Peter Lever in 1948 and they had a son John, who supplied the information and family graphics for this article and is member of the Skala Research Group. |  |
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| Sam Harris's Last Will and Testament mentioned a nephew and two nieces: Louis Edelstein, Pauline Brearley, and Mina Olinger (born ca. 1900). These were not his brother Morris's children, so Samuel and Morris had at least one other sibling. The ist of martyrs in the Skala yizkor book includes Mina Olinger (born ca. 1900), her husband Baruch, and their children Lea and Fischel, all of whom were murdered in 1943. | |||
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| Who has Samuel Harris? According to his British naturalization papers, he was the son of Davis and Fanny Harris; but these almost certainly were Anglicizations of the family names. In the JRI-Poland records, there is mention of a man named David Shloime Hersher, who was married to a woman named Feige. Samuel's surname Harris could be an Anglicization of Hersher and David/Feige could have become the Davis/Fanny whom Samuel [re]named as his parents in his naturalization papers. David and Feige Hersher's daughter Gittel (whose death at age 22 was recorded in 1893) would have been born around 1871, which would have made her a contemporaneous sibling of Samuel, who was born in 1873. Unfortunately, no birth record for Samuel has been found to date. | |||
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| Also of import to this family's history may be the JRI-Poland record of the death of Hersh Olinger, infant son of Baruch Olinger and Mindi Ruchel Benzion. There is a record of the marriage of a woman named Rifke Hersher, daughter of David Hersher, to Fischel Benzion. Mindi Ruchel Benzion, wife of Baruch Olinger, probably was the daughter of Rifke Hersher Olinger and Fischel Benzion. She likely was the same Mina Olinger who was Samuel Harris's niece named in his Will. This would suggest that Rifke Hersher Olinger was the sister of Samuel and Morris Harris. | |||