Thursday, May 12, 2022
Here's Looking At The Ups and Downs of Jewish American immigrants Compared to my Father's Experience
Nadene Goldfoot
My father's DNA shows us that his Y haplogroup is of QBZ67 a Q line of Jewish men. Moses/Morris/Maurice Goldfoot was born in Portland, Oregon on July 1, 1908 to Nathan Abraham Goldfoot of Telsiai, Lithuania and Zlata Goldfoot nee Jermulowske of Lazdijai, Suwalki, Lithuania/Poland.
I'm going to take a look at two other Jewish men born at about the same time in Chicago and see what advantages they had in life.
Dad attended Failing Grade School and Commerce High School, having to quit after his junior year to work and help support his family, fatherless since 1912 when Nathan was killed in his horse and wagon accident. Dad became a kosher butcher which led to having his own business of Lincoln Wholesale Meats to designing, owning and running his own business called Silver Falls Meat Packing Co. in Portland. He died on July 23, 1967 at age 59. He had a brother, Charlie, who moved to Grand Coulee, Washington with his wife and son sometime in the late 30s.. Portland only had the two families of Goldfoot left, Morris's mother with his sisters and his own new family.
Portland's city college wasn't built until the 1950s as Portland State U. " We first opened in 1946 as the Vanport Extension Center for 220 students in Vanport, a city built to house wartime shipyard workers. After surviving a devastating flood in 1948, we moved three times before finding our permanent home in 1952 in the heart of downtown Portland, Oregon." I was the first to enter it from our family in 1956. I was able to take my 2 babes to Fruit and Flower Nursery School a few blocks away while I attended classes. My dad had worked at the shipyards during WWII, keeping his own business going and working at his 2nd job at the shipyards as a boss of crew.
Dad's DNA shows that we match such people as the Rubensteins and the Oppenheim/Oppenheimers. They are all in the group of FTDNA of Halpern & Matches.
Jews arrived in Chicago immediately after its 1833 incorporation. The Ashkenazi were the first Jewish group settling in Chicago. In the late 1830s and early 1840s a group of German Jews came to Chicago. Most of them were from Bavaria. On Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) 1845 the first Jewish religious service in Chicago was held. Many Jews peddled items on streets. They later opened small stores, which were the basis of several companies. In this time the Jewish community was constantly growing, and when the American Civil War began, the community itself recruited a company of 100 Jews to join the 82nd Regiment of Illinois Volunteers.
Originally the Jews lived in the Downtown area, but this changed after the Great Chicago Fire occurred in 1871. Many moved to lakeside communities such as Hyde Park, Kenwood, and South Shore.
By 1930, I find a Boris B. Rubenstein attending U. of Chicago and living in the dormitory on April 30, 1930 at the age of 22. He was also born in 1908 but in Massachusetts. His father was from Germany and mother was from Russia. All eastern European countries were then labeled as Russia. He was not working. I found that Boris had become a doctor, an Endocrinologist and died at age 67 in Chicago, Illinois in 1975. CHICAGO, Jan. 1 (AP)—Dr. Boris B. Rubenstein, an endocrinologist noted for research on the relationship between ovarian hormones and human... I had found him on the 1940 census in Cleveland, Ohio, married to Dorothy with a daughter, and he was a doctor, a medical researcher.
Then I found a Paul Rubenstein, my 4th cousin, living near Portland, not too far from me. We got together several times. That was a fantastic find; We found that we had many of the same interests, such as our ancient history. We had some weird coincidences, too, like having Hillsboro, Oregon as part of our history.
In FTDNA, I have 81 Rubenstein matches including Paul. Some are 3rd to 5th cousins, most are all 4th cousins.
Joseph Allen Hynek (1910-1986) whose father was from Czechoslovakia. J. Allen Hynek studied astronomy at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty at Ohio State University. He died at age 76.
Both men were in the same dormitory at the same time as Joseph Allen Hynek who became a famous astronomer who is best known for investigations of unidentified flying objects and efforts to promote "ufology" as a legitimate scientific pursuit..No, I have no DNA connection to any Hynek.
In the same dormitory I also found Alexander Oppenheim, age 27, born in England in 1903. Both his parents were from "Russia." He was not working, either.
Oppenheim was born on 4 February 1903 in Salford, England to an immigrant family from Lithuania. His first language was Yiddish. He grew up in Manchester and attended Manchester Grammar School, where he was recognised as a mathematical prodigy. His teachers considered him too young to attend university and delayed his entrance to scholarship competitions until 1921, when he received a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In each of his three undergraduate years at the University of Oxford, Oppenheim was the Oxford University mathematical scholar. He also captained the university chess team.He graduated with first-class honours in 1924 and was the senior mathematical scholar in 1926.
He was awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship to study at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. He completed a PhD at the University of Chicago in 1930 under the supervision L.E. Dickson with a thesis titled Minima of Indefinite Quadratic Quaternary Forms. Oppenheim received a second doctorate, a DSc, from the University of Oxford in 1954 for his academic work later in his career.
Sir Alexander Oppenheim, (4 February 1903 – 13 December 1997) was a British mathematician and university administrator. In Diophantine approximation and the theory of quadratic forms, he proposed the Oppenheim conjecture. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Malaya, the University of Singapore, and its predecessors. During the Second World War, he was a prisoner of war in the Changi Camp and helped organized a "POW University". After the war, he served as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya before holding two professorships in Ghana and Nigeria. He died at age 94 despite being held in a prisoner of war camp.
I personally match 4 male Oppenheims that are all my 4th to remote cousins, and a female who is 3rd to 5th cousin and another female that is 4th cousin. They are all on FTDNA. In all, I have 70 Oppenheim and Oppenheimers in FTDNA.
OPPENHEIM, town in Germany. Jews are first mentioned there in the tax register of 1241, according to which they were obliged to pay the emperor an annual tax of 15 marks. The Jews of the town, legally the property of the emperor, were placed under the protection of the officers in charge of the local fortress, to whom they paid their taxes. They also paid a house tax to the archbishop of Mainz.The burden of their taxes appears to have caused several Jews of Oppenheim to join the group that fled from the Rhineland and, under the leadership of *Meir b. Baruch of Rothenburg, attempted to emigrate to Ereẓ Israel (1285). At the end of July 1349, during the persecutions that followed the *Black Death, most of the Jews of Oppenheim were murdered, while others chose martyrdom (*kiddush ha-Shem) and burned themselves to death in order to escape forced conversion at the hands of the mob.
Some time later the community was reestablished. After 1400 the right of residence was made renewable at the end of every six years, and the amount of taxes to be paid was fixed. In 1422 a plot by two Christians to kill the Jews of the town was frustrated by the municipal council. Certain protection fees and "gifts" that the Jews of Oppenheim were compelled to pay weighed upon them so heavily that despite the additional support of such communities as Worms, Mainz, and Frankfurt, Oppenheim Jewry could not meet their payments and were therefore penalized (1444). In 1456, R. Seligmann Bing (or R. Seligmann Oppenheim) attempted to establish a union of the communities of the Upper Rhine, but because of community
The community suffered during the wars of Louis XIV, and by 1674 only three families remained in the town. By 1722 the number had grown to eight. Many Oppenheim Jews settled in Frankfurt and other south German cities, where they were known as "Oppenheim" or "Oppenheimer," and the name became widespread. The community numbered 20 families in 1807; 257 in 1872; 189 in 1880; and 56 in 1933. Of the 17 Jews who remained during World War II, 16 were deported. In 1970 no Jews lived in Oppenheim.
There were poor Jews and wealthy Jews who came to the USA who made an impact, even though we are only 0.02% of the population. Though our grandfather, Nathan died in his 40s, he left 4 children who produced 9 grandchildren, of which 2 are PhDs, 1 with a Master's degree and all were college graduates. with the great grandchildren doing well, too.
ancestry.com April 30, 1930 census of U Chicago dormitory
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/02/archives/dr-boris-b-rubenstein-endocrinologist-67-dies.html
https://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2021/05/oppenheim-or-oppenheimer-connection.html
https://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-gaon-of-vilna-connection-rubenstein.html
Labels: Goldfoot, Oppenheim, Rubenstein
