***Feivel (Fajwel) Grinberg was a merchant in Narewka. According to the 1899 Pruzhany Uyezd Vsya Rossia (Russian Guide), Faiv. Yosel Grinberg had a drugstore on Volkovisskaya Street. He is also said to have been a rabbi in Narewka in 1900 (Kagan and Levin, Yiddish and Hebrew Encyclopedia of Lithuania; Wisniewski; Pinkas HaKehillot). According to the 1906 Voter's List for the Pruzhany District, Feivel Grinberg's father was Josel.
Rachel Levitzky was the wife of Morris Levitzky, a cotton goods merchant and secretary of the Narevka Aid Society (1911-1912). They immigrated to New York in 1906. According to her death certificate, Rachel Levitzky's father was Philip Greenberg, probably Feivel Grinberg from Narewka. Rachel and Morris Levitzky are both buried in the Narevker Untershtitsungs Verein (Narevker UV) plot at Mount Hebron Cemetery.
Dora (Devora) Goldfarb was the wife of Tobias (Tevye) Goldfarb. According to her death certificate, she was born in Narewka and her father was Philip Greenberg, probably Feivel Grinberg from Narewka. Her gravestone inscription states that he was Shraga Feivel. In 1906 Dora immigrated to New York with her children, joining her husband, who had arrived a few years earlier. Dora is buried in the Narevker Untershtitsungs Verein (Narevker UV) plot at Mount Zion Cemetery.
Sarah (Grinberg) Rosenberg was a daughter of Feivel (Fajwel) Grinberg. The inscription on Sarah Rosenberg's gravestone at Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Glendate, New York, reads:
Sarah Grinberg and Israel Rosenberg (Lomza, 15 March 1875 - Brooklyn, 26 January 1956). were married in Narewka on 1 April 1895. Rabbi Rosenberg studied at the yeshivas in Slobodka and Novaredok, where he was ordained by Yechiel Michel Epstein, the communal rabbi of Novaredok. Due to the financial hardships of his father-in-law, Feivel Grinberg, who could no longer support him, in 1902 Rosenberg immigrated to New York, where his brother-in-law was living.
His wife Sarah and two daughters followed a year later, leaving Narewka to join him in Poughkeepsie, New York,
where he was a rabbi from 1902-05. Rosenberg also served congregations in Burlington, Vermont (1910-12),
the first ordained rabbi in that state, and Bayonne (1905-10), Paterson (1912-18) and Jersey City (1919-20), New Jersey.
He was a founder of both the Central Relief Committee (of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Fund)
and the Ezrat Torah Fund, which raised money for indigent rabbinical scholars in Europe, and served as president of the Agudas HaRabonim, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada. During World War II he was a member of a special committee of representatives from the major American-Jewish organizations who met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss the Nazi persecution of European Jewry. Orthodox Judaism in America: a Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook, by Moshe D. Sherman states that, "Rosenberg emerged as one of the important Yiddish-speaking communal leaders of American Orthodoxy in the first half of the twentieth-century."
Rabbi Rosenberg was actively involved in relief efforts, assisting Jews in Eastern Europe and Palestine. From 1914 until 1936 he served as vice-chairman of the Central Relief Committee, the Orthodox Jewish organization affiliated with the Joint Distribution Committee and, in 1936, became its chairman. After World War I, along with other rabbis, he traveled abroad to help provide assistance to devastated Jewish communities.
(According to "The Bulletin of the Joint Distribution Committee," in the year 1916 the Jewish community of "Narevka" was the recipient of financial assistance totaling at least $4,000.)
Among the papers of the Central Relief Committee are a cable transfer and cablegram personally sent by Rabbi Israel Rosenberg in 1938 to Efroim Kagan of the Jewish Community of Narewka. These were sent just nineteen months before the German invasion of Poland and the Russian occupation of eastern Poland and Narewka.
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© 2011 Joy Kestenbaum
May 2011, updated 2013,
last updated 28 June 2018