Goldfoot Genealogy

Nadene Goldfoot                                             

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST The Ottoman Empire lived for 400 years. It was a state and caliphate that controlled much of Southeastern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. It was founded at the end of the 13th century in northwestern Anatolia in the town of Söğüt by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I. The Turks of the Ottoman Empire teamed up with Germany and lost the 1st WORLD War (1914-1918), losing all this land to the Western forces, the Allies. The Middle East and Eastern Europe went to the United Kingdom, France, Italy and USA.  The Axis were the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Germany.

Did we know this history?  Polish–Ottoman War (1672–1676) was a conflict between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, as a precursor of the Great Turkish War. It ended in 1676 with the Treaty of Żurawno and the Commonwealth ceding control of most of its Ukraine territories to the Empire. Ottoman forces, numbering 80,000 men and led by Grand Vizier Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed and Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV, invaded Polish Ukraine in August 1672. 

So the lands occupied by Jews were invaded by the Muslims of eastern Europe.  Russia would later keep Jews out of Russia proper; allowing them to live in the Pale of Settlement.   The Pale of Settlement was a western region of Imperial Russia with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917, in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. This was under the decree of Catherine the Great. 
                                                            

                                                                 

Lazdijai, Lithuania was the birthplace of my paternal grandmother, Zlata Hattie Jermulowske b: January 11, 1886 when it was on the border between Poland and  Lithuania, at that time a part of Lithuania, she said.  Zlata immigrated to the states in 1900 at about age 14.  She came  speaking only Yiddish and had had no education.  She ended up in Council, Idaho, a mining town in the mountains of Idaho where her half-sisters and brothers had found a spot for them.  Zlata worked in a nearby mining town of Cuprum, serving food and washing dishes.  She married at 19 to  34 yr old Nathan Abraham Goldfus.  


Lithuania was established by Sigismund II Augustus in 1570 and granted Magdeburg Rights by Sigismund III Vasa in 1587.

Lithuania was mostly in the Russian side (purple). 

Large numbers of Lithuanians had emigrated to the United States in 1867–1868 after a famine in Lithuania. Between 1868 and 1914, approximately 635,000 people, almost 20 percent of the population, left Lithuania. Lithuanian cities and towns were growing under the Russian rule, but the country remained underdeveloped by the European standards and job opportunities were limited; many Lithuanians left also for the industrial centers of the Russian Empire, such as Riga and Saint Petersburg. Many of Lithuania's cities were dominated by non-Lithuanian-speaking Jews and Poles.

Partitions of Poland, (1772, 1793, 1795), three territorial divisions of Poland, perpetrated by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, by which Poland’s size was progressively reduced until, after the final partition, the state of Poland ceased to exist.

Lazdijai (Lazdey) in Yiddish is located in the SW part of Lithuania with several big lakes nearby at the junction of roads leading to Mariamol and Alite and was established in 1570 by King Zigmunt.  It was part of the Polish Lithuanian kingdom up to 1795; then became part Russian and part Prussian.  From 1807-1813 it belonged to the Great Dukedom of WArsaw and was part of the Bialystok district.  In 1827 the population was 1988 living in 272 houses.  By 1887 about 1500 Jews had been affected by fires.  

Jews lived in Lazdijai by end of 16th century (since late 1500s.)  In 1879 200 houses were destroyed by fire and owners became homeless.  In 1886 another fire consumed  250 Jewish houses;  in 1888 another 70 houses.  

Those territorial divisions were altered in 1807, when the emperor Napoleon of France created the duchy of Warsaw out of the central provinces of Prussian Poland, and in 1815, when the Congress of Vienna created the Congress Kingdom of Poland. However, the main result of the partitions—i.e., the elimination of the sovereign state of Poland—was in effect until after World War I, when the Polish republic was finally restored (November 11, 1918).
                                                                   

Where  is Lazdijai, Suwalki, Lithuania/Poland?  Lazdijai (pronunciation (help·info) Polish: Łoździeje) is a small town in Lithuania located about 7 km (4.3 mi) east of the border with Poland.  



The last and most tenacious of the Polish uprisings of the mid-19th century erupted in the Russian-occupied sector in January 1863 (see January Uprising). Following Russia's disastrous defeat in the Crimean War, the government of Tsar Alexander II enacted a series of liberal reforms, including liberation of the serfs throughout the empire. The high-handed imposition of land reforms in Poland aroused hostility among the conservative landed nobility on the one hand, and a group of young radical intellectuals influenced by Karl Marx and the Russian liberal Alexander Herzen, on the other.

 Repeating the pattern of 1830–31, the open revolt of the January Insurrection by Congress Poland failed to win foreign backing. Although its socially progressive program could not mobilize the peasants, the rebellion persisted stubbornly for fifteen months. 

After finally crushing the insurgency in August 1864, Russia abolished the Congress Poland altogether and revoked the separate status of the Polish lands, incorporating them directly as the Western Region of the Russian Empire. The region was placed under the dictatorial rule of Mikhail Muravyov-Vilensky, who became known as the Hangman of Vilnius. All Polish citizens were assimilated into the empire. When Russia officially emancipated the Polish serfs in early 1864, an act that constituted the most important event in history of nineteenth-century Poland, it removed a major rallying point from the agenda of potential Polish revolutionaries.

Nadene Goldfoot
                            War and Flu Pandemic                                   

Camp Funston's hospital unit with soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, one of the places in Kansas thought to have brought the virus here.

 "On 22 May 1918, the epidemic was a headline in Madrid's ABC newspaper. The infectious disease most likely reached Spain from France, perhaps as the result of the heavy railroad traffic of Spanish and Portuguese migrant workers to and from France. ..Although a great deal of evidence indicates that the 1918 A(H1N1) influenza virus unlikely originated in and spread from Spain, the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic will always be known as the Spanish flu...It is likely that >260,000 Spaniards died of influenza; 75% of these persons died during the second period of the epidemic, and 45% died during October 1918 alone. "

"The 1918 influenza pandemic was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus, with the second being the swine flu in 2009. The Spanish flu infected 500 million people around the world, or about 27% of the world population of between 1.8 and 1.9 billion." That's 3 different flu attacks.

It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. (update)
                                                 

American army uniforms in WWI

 
What was bad was that World War I, also known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918.  By 1918, the world was in a flu pandemic.   

Charles 6 and Morris 4  Goldfoot in 1912 just before WWI They only spoke Yiddish like their mother, Zlata Goldfoot nee Jermulowske.

  My father was 6 years old and my mother was 1 year old in 1914; both living in Portland, Oregon.  My father, Meshke (Morris) had an immigrant mother that didn't speak, read or write English and his father-Nathan Goldfoot,  had died in an accident in 1912.  My mother had an immigrant mother and Yankee American father-Frank Hugh Robinson,  who did.  

"From January 1918 to December 1920, 50,000,000 people died." " By October 1918, the United States had been an active participant in World War I for more than a year. And while the declared enemy was overseas, there was a killer working stateside as well. Cities were gripped with fear: school was canceled; theaters, places of worship, and other places of “public amusement” had been shuttered. That month alone 195,000 Americans died, making it the deadliest month in American history; the killer was none other than influenza."Though the pandemic lasted just 15 months, 500 million people worldwide fell sick and it killed between 3-5% of the world’s population.

The major UK troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples in France has been theorized by researchers as being at the center of the Spanish flu. The research was published in 1999 by a British team, led by virologist John Oxford. In late 1917, military pathologists reported the onset of a new disease with high mortality that they later recognized as the flu. The overcrowded camp and hospital was an ideal site for the spreading of a respiratory virus. The hospital treated thousands of victims of chemical attacks, and other casualties of war, and 100,000 soldiers passed through the camp every day. It also was home to a piggery, and poultry was regularly brought in for food supplies from surrounding villages. Oxford and his team postulated that a significant precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated and then migrated to pigs kept near the front.

 This Spanish flu pandemic resulted in a higher than expected mortality rate for young adults.  A 2007 analysis of medical journals from the period of the pandemic found that the viral infection was no more aggressive than previous influenza strains. Instead, malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene promoted bacterial superinfection. This superinfection killed most of the victims, typically after a somewhat prolonged death bed.  

The pandemic mostly killed young adults. In 1918–1919, 99% of pandemic influenza deaths in the U.S. occurred in people under 65, and nearly half in young adults 20 to 40 years old. In 1920, the mortality rate among people under 65 had decreased sixfold to half the mortality rate of people over 65, but still, 92% of deaths occurred in people under 65. This is unusual, since influenza is typically most deadly to weak individuals, such as infants under age two, adults over age 70, and the immunocompromised. In 1918, older adults may have had partial protection caused by exposure to the 1889–1890 flu pandemic, known as the "Russian flu".

 In 2018, it was estimated the total to be about 17 million people worldwide, though this has been contested. With a world population of 1.8 to 1.9 billion, these estimates correspond to between 1 and 6 percent of the population.

This war  led to the mobilization of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history. It is also one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated nine million combatant and seven million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the resulting 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide.

Zlata came from Poland/Lithuania, and Nathan came from Lithuania. What was going on in Lithuania in 1889-1890?

In Lazdey Suwalki's summer of 1879, 200 houses burned down causing the owners to become homeless.  In 1886 another fire caused 250 Jewish houses burned down again, and again in 1888 70 houses burned down.  This time the old synagogue and the Beth-Midrash with all its books were destroyed, and a Jewish woman had died in the fire.  Another large fire happened in 1910.  All this destroyed the economic chances for the Jews who numbered 1500 in 1887.  They had been using straw for roofs in the middle of the town which finally were prohibited. 
Lazdey was sitting in the middle of a Jewish farm community until WWI.  Many Jewish families had vegetable gardens behind their homes.   
                                                   

WWI German Uniforms

 In 1915 the Germans occupied Zlata's town of Lazdijai, Suwalki that sat on the border between Poland and Lithuania.  She had left sometime in 1900 as she married Nathan in Boise, Idaho in 1905 as she had been living near Council, Idaho in a little mining town.  After the war by 1919, the Polish army had taken over in Lazdey but was expelled after several days.  It remained inside the border of Lithuania while their district administrative center,  Sejny, was included in Poland.  Lithuania was independent from 1918 to 1940 with Germany's invasion in June 1941 causing the demolition of almost all the town. 

The “Spanish” influenza pandemic of 1918–1920 took place in Poland in 3 epidemic waves. The peaks of morbidity and mortality occurred in the capital, Warsaw, in December 1918 and in December 1919 to January 1920. It is estimated that throughout the pandemic period of 1918–1920 in Poland, 200 000 to 300,000 people died.

Telz remembered their years of famine from 1869 to 1872.  In 1870 their population was 6,481 people including 4,399 Jews making up 68% of the town's population.  By 1897 it had dropped down to 51% in a town of 6,000 with only 3,088 Jews.  The 1880's had been years of persecutions and pogroms against Jews in Ukraine and other places.   All were taken into the army for a 6 year period.  It became the years of immigration to Palestine and the USA.  The Telz Jewish hospital was established.    

In the middle of the Pandemic on February 16, 1918, Lithuania had become an independent state.  The German army withdrew from the area and life in Telsiai (Telz) gradually returned to normal.  The Jews numbered only half of their previous number before the war, started to reconstruct their businesses and their spiritual life.  The first government census was in 1923 and there were then 4,691 people in Telz, including 1,545 Jews who made up 33% of their population.  


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
https://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Great-flu-pandemic-leaves-its-mark-on-family-4227641.php
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320355717_The_Lethal_Spanish_Influenza_Pandemic_in_Poland
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/47/5/668/296225

Nadene Goldfoot                                        

Elijah ben Solomon Zalman Vilna Gaon (1720-1797) The Gaon of Vilna was born on April 23, 1720 and died October 9, 1797 in Vilna, Lithuania. Stanley Goldfoot thought his family was related to the Gaon.  I cannot find proof of this for our branch as  the Goldfoot surname, but it's possible. From 1740-1745, the Gaon traveled among the Jewish communities of Poland and Germany, settling in Vilna and taught and founded his own academy.  He was against the Hasidim in Lithuania.  Once tried to get to Palestine but didn't make it, difficult journey in those days. Vilna's Jews were banished in 1527 by Sigismund 1st at burgher  request, able to return in a few years.  4,000 Jews died in a famine from 1709-1710.  Vilna became a center of rabbinical study.

The farthest I have been able to trace our Goldfoot line is Iones or Jonah Goldfus born in 1730 in Telsiai (Telz), Lithuania, listed in the encyclopedia as Tels, a Lithuanian townlet.
                                                                             

Telsiai, Lithuania on Lake Mastis today.

In Yiddish, the town was called Telz.  It was one of the oldest towns in Lithuania and was on the NW part of this country, called the Zemaitija region.  It is on the shores of Lake Mastis.

Settlement was there by 1450 with a royal estate.  Merchants and artisans began to settle around it.  In 1710 the Swedes invaded the land, and 2/3 of its population were killed by epidemics.  By 1750, a court was established in Telz, helping the development and growth of the town.  Telz was granted the Magdeburg Rights of self rule by King Stanislaw-August in 1791.  "2,500 people lived in Telz in 1797, of them 1,650 were Jews (66%).

 I don't know who Iones's wife was, but Abram and Mark Goldfus were his children, born in about 1752 and 1753.   Abram had 4 children; Iankel "Yankel", Leib, Mikhel and Meyer "Meier".  Mark had 3 children;  Iankel "Yankel", Iosel "Josel," and Ionta.   I wasn't sure who Iankel's father was.
                                                                       

1930's Yeshiva students

  What was life like then?  From then on, how were Jews treated?  Telz was noted for its yeshivah (Jewish school primarily for study of Talmud and rabbinic literature)  which flourished from its foundation in 1881 until World War II.  Lithuania is the country most noted for the growth of the yeshiva in modern times, beginning with the establishment of the yeshivah of Volozhin in 1803.  Others were Tels. Slobodka, Mir. and Kamenetz.   After the war, its surviving teachers founded a yeshivah in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.  Many Cleveland Jews  live in Israel, and were there when I lived there from 1980 to 1985.

Jews started living in Lithuania as early as 1321.  Lithuania  had Karaites ( Jewish sect who rejected the Oral Law)  living in Troki by 1398. By 1495, 10,000 Jews were living in Vilna, Grodno and Kovno.  That large figure must have been helped by the 1492 Spanish Inquisition against Jews when they were compelled to leave Spain or convert to Christianity.  From 1495 to 1502, they had been excluded from Lithuania.

They actually received a charter in 1519 guaranteeing freedom of movement and employment and soon monopolized foreign trade and tax-farming.  By 1566 through 1572, the Jewish badge was introduced and Jews were disqualified from giving evidence in courts.

There was a Council of the Four Lands, had once been 5 lands, and Jews had been a part of it at first, so the formed the separate Council of Lithuania in 1623 when a separate tax- system was established.  Already one can see anti-Semitism  at work separating Jews from Christians.

I and a few other members of my family have discovered through DNA testing including triangulation of matches, to be connected to Rabbi Samson Wertheimer (1658-1724) Worms, Germany.  He lived in Vienna, Austria and Hungary.  Our surname of Goldfus was German Yiddish, so we had a good feeling of our roots after leaving Jerusalem in 70 CE would have been Germany. It was anglicized to Goldfoot while in England.   This is the common route taken by Ashkenazi Jews anyway, going through Germany and France to finally migrate into Russian lands.  There are Gentile Goldfuss found in Germany as well, with a different haplogroup.  Jews would have had names like David ben Moshe, minus a surname until forced to take one by a government, usually for tax purposes and for serving in the military.

From 1795 to 1918 Lithuania was part of Russia. Jews suffered from a famine under German rule in Vilna in WWI and from a pogrom at the hands of the Polish troops in 1919.    Many yeshivot were part of the cultural life here.  Leading rabbis were born.  It was the seat of the Musar movement and a center of Haskalah.  In 1870 Telz had 6,481 residents, including 4,399 Jews (68%), and in 1897 there were 6,000 residents and of them 3,088 were Jews (51%). It was in 1880 that the first aliyah to Israel had happened, and Telz was a big center of Zionism.  Yet at the same time, "the Telz "Yeshivah", which had been established in 1880 by three young men (Avreikhim)-Yitskhak Ya'akov Openheim, Meir Atlas, Zalman Abel- with the help of a German Jew - Ovadyah Lakhman from Berlin - developed and prospered, and after Rabbi Eliezer Gordon was nominated as its head in 1884, it became the main institution of orthodox education. At the end of 19th century it had about 400 students and was counted as one of the greatest in the world. Next to it there was a preparatory class (Yeshivah Ketanah) for boys aged 10-16."

"The local Jews made their living in Telz from commerce, crafts and peddling. In 1841 there were 25 Jewish artisans: 14 tailors, 10 shoemakers and one watchmaker, not counting wandering artisans. Until WW1 there was a strong organization of Jewish artisans, which helped its members with loans for buying raw materials and tools. Among the Jewish merchants there were several who had big businesses of grains and flax and made a good living.  "The story I had received was that a Goldfus dealt in grains and was able to leave Lithuania for this purpose.  "There were also several textile merchants who imported merchandise from Germany, one of them being Ya'akov Rabinovitz." My ggrandfather, Movsha ben Josel Goldfus (Morris) Goldfus b: 1836, was a distiller, a maker of whiskey or wine.  I don't know about his distilling, but my grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfus/Goldfoot's wife, Zlata Jermulowske, made her own terrific wine that I tasted at Passover.  It was strong!  Manischewitz wine cannot hold a candle to hers.  I was only 3 at the time.  I'm so glad my Bubba allowed me to imbibe!  She was born in Lazdijai, Lithuania, a real Litvak, black curly hair, brown eyes!  

World War I occurred from 1914-1918.  During this period, 100,000 Jews were expelled or emigrated to the Russian interior.  Poland took over Vilna, Lithuania in 1919 which weakened the Jews politically and socially.

Jews received National Autonomy from 1918 to 1924, and a Jewish national council was established under a Ministry for Jewish Affairs.  The communities had the right to levy taxation under government auspices. In 1923, there were 300 Jewish elementary schools with the majority teaching in Hebrew.  A minority taught in Yiddish.   After 1924, Jewish autonomy was restricted  to religious matters, while the economic position of the Jews deteriorated in the following years.  Our grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfus, immigrated to England, then Ireland and finally to the USA starting in 1893.
                                                                           

Jewish Wedding in Telz; all perished in WWII.

World War II broke out in Europe earlier than in the USA's 1941 .  Lithuania's started in 1940.  The Jewish population then was 175,000.  About 25,000 were deported by the Russians from Lithuania and Latvia in July 1940. "The cruelties of first Soviet occupation, of a scale not seen in Lithuania since the Russian Empire rule, led to a widespread despise of the regime in less than a year. For example in four days between June 14 and June 18 of 1941 alone some 40 000 people from educated families were exiled to Siberia and Soviet labor camps (almost half of them 16-year-old or younger, 556 infants under 1 year, families typically separated), most never to return alive. Others were arrested with many later tortured and massacred in places like Rainiai and Cherven."

"The new Nazi German occupation brought a relief from the Soviet persecutions but it had its own target: the Jews. Some of them have fled Europe (never to return), most of the rest were killed (often after a brief life in forced ghetto or a deportation to a concentration camp in German-ruled lands elsewhere). The number of Jews living in Lithuania declined by ~88% by the time of 1959 census."

 The Germans established 2 ghettos in Vilna and 30,000 Jews were killed there by the end of 1941.  Those that had been able to remain in Lithuania were massacred by the Germans and Lithuanians by 1943.
                                                                     

Stanley Goldfoot b: South Africa 1914, died: Jerusalem, Israel 2006 Tall and slender, he could still wear his youthful uniform when I met him in 1981.  We remained in touch while I lived in Israel.  He had become a speaker, an advocate of Israel, speaking to football fields of listeners in different parts of the world.   An amazing man to listen to.

      Leaving South Africa after graduating from his high school yeshiva, Stanley Goldfoot, my 3rd cousin,  immigrated to Palestine and became the Chief of Intelligence for the Stern Group.  The English holding the mandate called it the Stern Gang.  It was the most extreme of the rebelling Jews against the English before May 14, 1958.  Uri Gobey, also formerly of South Africa, IDF and citizen of Israel, wrote about him:  "He was born in South Africa in  1914. then in 1932, when he was 18 years old, left the good life in South Africa and went to Palestine, after he heard a speech of Ze ' ev Jabotinsky. He joined the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz. After a short time he was deported, because it was illegal to be in the country. He joined the army of South Africa, where he learned to shoot. Then went back to Palestine in 1939 and joined the Stern Group. Eventually he became an intelligence officer  and worked with Yitzhak Shamir.  He became friends with Rabbi Kahana and drove him around in Israel.  After setting up the state of Israel. He moved to the United States. Then he went back again to Israel  legally in 1956.  In 1964, he decided to establish a newspaper in the English language, because he sensed that the Jerusalem post, " was too leftist. He founded a Zionist newspaper in the English language as "de times ugh Israel", published in Israel, New York and the west coast of the United States. In 1969, he wrote and posted the letter to this incredible new magazine of his, who talks about Jerusalem, in his LETTER TO THE WORLD. He was a member of THE TEMPLE MOUNT FAITHFUL.  and had plans for the 3rd Temple.    He died in Jerusalem in 2006, at age 92.

1959's census found there were 24,000 Jews who had returned after the Holocaust to raise families despite the previous problems there.  Language and finances helped to make decisions, no doubt.  By 1989, half of these had left for Israel.  Those that were left numbered 12,312.

I think that Iones or Jonah as we would call him, would be very proud and have many nakhus from his descendants.  Little did he know who would follow or if any would live to be able to follow.

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia -Lithuania
Preserving Our Litvak Heritage by Josef Rosin, Joel Alpert, Editor by JewishGen, Inc.
http://www.truelithuania.com/world-war-2-in-lithuania-1940-1944-249
http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/telz/Telz1.html