The People of Motol
Sarah
HELLER’s Family
MORE ABOUT THE
EXPERIENCES OF SARAH HELLER’S FAMILY
Contributed by
her daughter, Tauby Shimkin
My greatgrandfather,
Avrum Leib, came to the shtetl of Motele
in the mid 19th century. He came
with the last name Gurin and then took the name Gofseyeff from a Russian
tombstone.
As was common in those days,
there could be only one son exempted from the Tzar's army and so all but the
first son assumed different family names. Avrum
Leib became the chazan, shochet and a teacher in Motel. (Chaim Weizmann was one of his students.) My grandfather,
Moshe, was the oldest of his seven children, and all seven of those children
raised their families in Motele. Moshe
married Rivka Nissenbaum who was a cousin of Chaim Weizmann and a descendant of
Yom Tov Lippman Heller.
My mother, Sarah, was born in
1902, the first girl after five boys. My
grandparents' first child, a girl, had died in infancy, and so: "The joy of
my arrival had no limits." Her
sister Libby was born in 1904, and another brother, Samuel was born in 1906.
Moshe, a lumber expert, traveled widely but returned home for Pesach and
the High Holidays. Therefore, the
two year sequence can be taken backwards for the five older brothers. The
children were all born during
Chanukah and the celebration of their mutual holiday birthdays gave the eight
siblings a strong bond.
Their affection was life long
and quite evident when I knew them years later.
Also evident were the bright, passionate, boisterous, stubborn
argumentative and proud personalities.
Mom told and wrote vivid
stories about her years in her shtetl "Motele." It was a happy childhood, described as one of comfort and
wealth and, understandably surrounded by relatives.
She loved and was very proud of her grandfather, Avrum Leib, telling how
she used to listen to his choir rehearse and how he composed and wrote down his
own music. A favorite
recollection was of the two little girls being allowed to crawl into his bed and
play with his beard and payot. Her
parent's home, with its many books, was referred to as the “shtetl library.”
Her brothers and their friends would gather round the samovar for lively
discussions on literature and politics.
My grandmother would serve
herring and potato snacks. It was
not surprising, that in this intellectual atmosphere, my mother and Libby
received an education given to few girls in that period.
As much as she loved her many
paternal cousins, I sensed a bit of snobbery when my mother talked about her
maternal connection to the sixteenth century rabbi, Yom Tov Lippman Heller.
As Chief Rabbi of Prague, he had been imprisoned for suspected crimes against
the Kaiser and only those who could claim direct descent observed a fast day
commemorating his release. I must
tell you that there are thousands upon thousands who can claim a similar
relationship to the author of the Mi' she-berach prayer and refer you to a two
volume set called The Unbroken Chain. Yet there was no mistaking Mom's
meaning about the "yichus" conferred on her by the observation that
fast. Of her paternal cousins
in Motele she would say, "They were
not descended from Yom Tov Lippman Heller because THEY did not celebrate the
fast as WE did."
World War I swirled around
Motele. Before the war the
Gofseyeffs had moved to Pinsk to be closer to Moshe and so that a better
education could be obtained for the children.
Now they were evacuated back to Motele, and the borders of Russia, Poland
and Germany often changed to include the shtetl. When it was occupied by the
German army, who were delayed in
their attack on Moscow by the frigid winter and frozen marshes surrounding the
city. The family was displaced from
their cherished home and suffered cold, hunger and the hardships of war. Mom attributed her short stature to a steady diet of potato
peels during her growing years. Strangely
there are two photographs from that period that unless explained could easily be
mistaken for normal times. In
the first picture Sarah and Libby stand solemnly, arms entwined, wearing
identical well fashioned dresses. These had been made by their mother as
yearly new Pesach outfits, and if I had not been told that the dresses
were burlap and their shoes "castoff peasant shoes,"
I would not have known that the girls, fourteen and twelve,
were displaced persons.
The second picture looks like
a picnic in the woods. Young
children, some holding flowers, stand before a line of adults wearing uniforms.
Included in the large group
are the four youngest siblings. In
fact the children are involved in enforced labor, harvesting pitch to be
returned and used in Germany.
After the war the Gofseyeffs
returned to Pinsk.
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Avraham
Leib GOVSEYOV - The Cantor
Contributed
by Itzhak Epstein
[Translator’s
Notes:
I
tried to follow the original Hebrew text with all of its ambiguities and asides.
Where the narrative is brief, the writer assumes that the readers have a
pretty good understanding of Jewish life in Pinsk and Motele in the mid 19th
century.
Also, I did not find any reference to ALG among CW’s teachers, though
there are references to him as a cantor.
I did not try hard to change the Hebrew syntax to a more familiar English
one, so the reader will get some of the flavor of the original writing.
Itzhak Epstein, June 1998]
AVRAHAM LEIB GOVSEYOV THE CANTOR
p.
257, Pinsk Yizkor Book, Vol II.
By
M.S. Gshori
Born
in the small town of Pieschena (5610 - Shvat 5682 (1831 - 1912] ) on the Niemen
River, Minsk Geb. The son of Hayim
Meir Gurin the cantor, who was a shochet in town.
Until the age of 18 he studied at the yeshivas of Minsk and married the
daughter of Moshe Symeir.
At
the age of 20 he moved to his relatives in Pinsk -- Levi Yitzhak Nimowitz and
Abba Rosenthal -- in order to continue his studies and to prepare for the
rabbinate. He became very friendly
with the prodigiously brilliant Rabbi Eliezer Moshe Halevi Horowitz and with all
of Pinsk’s scholarly community. While
he studied in Pinsk, his relatives asked him to teach their marriage eligible
sons, because he was a gifted teacher. Against
his will he became a tutor at the homes of Pinsk’s wealthy families and was
known as “Avraham Leib the kapolier”. His
students became prominent persons, including Shmuel Noah Gottlieb -- the famous
Pinsk shohhet and others. (Later on
Chaim Weizmann also became a pupil of his.)
As he was a great musician and a singing aficionado, with beautiful
ringing lyric tenor voice, he became friendly with the unforgettable cantor Yoel
Zelig Strode and started to learn musical notes from him.
At the same time he studied ritual slaughtering and made it his
occupation, from which he made a living until the end of his days.
While at the home of the famous philanthropist Leib Sultz while
completing his cantorial and ritual slaughtering duties, he started to compose
his own works. He served for about
six years as a cantor in Yanove. In
the intermediate days of Sukkot a delegation came from the town of Motele (birth
place of Chaim Weizmann) and than he was appointed as a Cantor-Shohet.
In the beginning there arose a divisive controversy over him,
but Rabbi Eliezer Moshe Halevi extinguished the fire of the dispute
together with the Motele’s community council, and there he remained a cantor
and a shohet. He always commented
proudly about Pinsk’s influence on his cantorship.
At
the age of 81 he died in Motele in Shvat 5682 and one of his sons, Yaakov
Gofseyeff inherited his cantorial talents.
He is the famous cantor at Congregation Shomrei Emunah in St. Louis MO in
America.
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Avraham
Ber the HOARSE
Contributed
by Itzhak Epstein
Ayarati
Motele by Hayim Chemerinsky p. 25
Avraham
Ber the Hoarse -- a splendid expert at making raisin wine for Passover, kidush
and havdalah; Received a license from the authorities for “religious
purposes”. And on this account
kept a saloon and made a good living.
[Translated
by Itzhak Epstein. June, 1998.]
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Joseph
and Mae CHESS (Yasef and Cyrla CZYZ)
Yasef and Cyrla Czyz and their young children lived in Motol in the 1920s. They had three children: Malka,
in 1915; Lejzor, in 1917; and Fiszel, in 1921. In 1922 Yasef came to America and
settled in Chicago, and in 1928 he sent for the rest of the family.
Leonard and Phil Chess came to the U.S. from Motol in 1928 as Lejzor and Fiszel
Czyz. They founded Chess Records and gave the world the bulk of what is now
called "Chicago Blues". Leonard Chess was born in Motol on March 12,
1917 and died in Chicago on October 16, 1969. Leonard was posthumously
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a pioneer.
The PORTNOY Family
According to
the Hebrew inscription shown on a photograph of his son’s tombstone, the
Portnoy family of Motol can be traced back to Reuven Portnoy.
Reuven’s son, Chaim Simcha Portnoy, lived in Motol and
died there in 1907. Chaim Simcha
Portnoy had been married several times. Four
of his five known children emigrated to Chicago.
Their names were Issacher Yehuda “Alter” (Arthur Perlman), Yehoshua
(Pearlman), Benyomin (Perlman), and Malka Trina (Molodofsky/Molodow).
The fifth child, Ruchel Leah (Glauberman changed to Lieberman by
children), was married and died while still living in Motol.
Her children came to the U.S., however.
Reuven Portnoy may have also had a
daughter whose son, Leizer Behrman lived in New York City.
Members of the Perlman/Pearlman
family visited cousins in Tel Aviv in the late 1940s or early 1950s, but the
family has lost track of them.
Contributed by Dan
Silverman and Trudy Barch
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The COHEN/KAGAN
Family
Phillip Cohen
emigrated from Motol with his mother (Minna) and younger siblings (Henry, Ida,
Annette). His father (Max?) had
left some years earlier. Phillip remembered that the family rented a farm large enough
to employ some workers. He also
recalled shooting at wolves from their back porch and carrying his younger
brother (Avram) to a doctor. (Unfortunately, Avram did not survive.) The
family emigrated when Phillip was 13, probably in the summer of 1912.
They settled in Detroit.
Contributed
by Milton Cohen
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