Sidney Rittenberg, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1921, is interviewed by Deborah Lipman Cochelin, whose great-grandmother Rachel Rittenberg Sanders was a sister of Sidney’s grandfather Samuel Oscar Rittenberg. Sidney tells stories about his parents, Muriel Sluth (Slutsky) and Sidney Rittenberg, Sr., and his sister Elinor Rittenberg Weinberger. He talks about growing up in Charleston, including the schools he attended and the friends he made. A good bit of the narrative is similar in content to his June 17, 2013 interview with Dale Rosengarten. The cousins recall several members of their extended family and Sidney describes time spent as a child on Sullivan’s Island. See also Sidney Rittenberg’s other interviews on June 19, 2013 and October 27, 2013.
Selden K. Smith, a South Carolina native who taught history for nearly four decades at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, talks about his role in the development of Holocaust education courses. He describes meeting local survivors and says of interviewer Lilly Stern Filler’s mother, “The most compelling person of all—it was all compelling—was Jadzia [Stern].” What started as an experimental course featuring presentations by survivors grew into a standard offering at Columbia College. Dr. Smith notes he was not involved in or even aware of the effort to create legislation that established the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust (SCCH) in 1989. However, he was appointed to SCCH in 1990. He credits Margaret Walden, who then worked for the South Carolina Department of Education, for much of the progress made with Holocaust education in the state. Among SCCH’s projects was a joint effort with South Carolina Educational Television to interview survivors and liberators, resulting in the publication of the teaching guide South Carolina Voices. The interviewee discusses the status of Holocaust education in South Carolina and suggests that the challenge is how to make it “relevant to one’s day and time.”
Rabbi Harvey Tattelbaum shared his memories in an address titled “Rabbinic Reminiscences of Beaufort” at the April 2005 meeting of the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina held in Beaufort, South Carolina, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Beth Israel Congregation. His first pulpit, from 1960 to 1962, was the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina. While serving as chaplain for the recruits and their officers, he was hired to lead neighboring Beaufort’s Beth Israel Congregation. He also traveled weekly to Walterboro, South Carolina, to provide services for the members of Mount Sinai
Rabbi Harvey Tattelbaum delivered this speech titled “Struggling, Growing, Reaching New-Old Conclusions” at the April 2005 meeting of the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina held in Beaufort, South Carolina, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Beth Israel Congregation. Rabbi Tattelbaum, who served Beth Israel from 1960 to 1962, describes his secular and religious education, and how reading Night, by Elie Wiesel, contributed to his “search for religious meaning.” He discusses his evolving concept of God and the “necessary challenge” of “spiritual uncertainty.”
Born in 1923, Jane Murray McCollum is the third generation of her family to live at Jack Daw Hall Plantation, located on Edisto Island’s Frampton Inlet. From an early age, she called Jack Daw home. It is also home to ‘Murray’s Graveyard,’ a spot of land her great-grandfather gave to the black slave families, and a separate graveyard, called ‘Jenkins’ Cemetery, for whites. Jane came of age during the Depression, which the family weathered by living off the bounty of land and sea—’...fish, oysters, clams...and all kinds of vegetables’—and by operating a small store called the Sea Island Bargain. The Murrays also, on one terrifying night, rode out the hurricane of 1940 at Jack Daw. Jane comes from an artistic family: Her mother, Faith Murray, was an artist who taught at Charleston’s Gibbes Art Gallery; her father, Chalmers Murray, was a writer, best known for his novel, Here Come Joe Mungin. Her father had a long-time friendship with the artist Jasper Johns, who also had a house on Edisto, She and her sister (also Faith; also an artist) went to the tiny Seaside School on Edisto—there were only seven students in Jane’s class—and she later attended the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina, after which she joined the WAVES. Having served in the Hospital Corps, she subsequently went to nursing school, receiving her training at Roper Hospital in Charleston. When she married, Jane moved to Greenville, SC, until her husband’s retirement; In response to a question about race relations in the intervening years, Jane responded that she saw little difference: ‘When I was growing up here, I didn't even realize they were black. They were really friends...Coming back, I still feel the same way.’ But she does feel that the relationships between blacks and whites were better in those days. Jane has lived at Jack Daw exclusively since 1986. She crabs and swims off a floating dock on the same waters she knew as a child. Following in the family tradition, she paints. As to how her return to Edisto suits her, Jane says: ‘Just to be able to sit here on this front porch and look over there at the creek and the beach and to hear the wind blowing through. Can’t do much better.’
Alice Bailey Stevens’ Edisto roots go back to 1720. She was born at Blue House Plantation, where she lived until 1929, when the family moved to Brookland Plantation. In 1945, she married Johnson Stevens of Lambs Bluff Plantation on Yonges Island. They had three children. She attended high school on Edisto, graduated from Winthrop, and did advanced studies in South Carolina history at the Citadel. She taught primary school for 26 years in Charlotte, Charleston, and Yonges Island. Asked to speak about the history of transportation on Edisto, Alice noted that every facet of life was affected by transportation or the lack thereof. She detailed the early modes: long boats owned by the plantation owners that could make their way to Charleston from North Edisto through a series of cuts. Those on the south end side had a much longer way to row. Lack of transportation also affected early Islanders’ opportunities for worship; they had to travel by boat to Church Flats on Dixie Plantation until they successfully petitioned to have their own church. It limited romantic opportunities as well, as travel between islands was challenging: ‘Some just had to marry the local girls,’ Alice noted. ‘They're still doing it.’ By 1910 the Stevens Line Company began providing daily service to Edisto. Alice gave a snapshot of her lineage: In the early 1800s, her great-grandmother married Ephraim Mikell and moved to Blue House, which his son, Ephraim Jr., inherited. It began as an indigo plantation, but also grew rice, some cotton, and had an orchard. After the boll weevil destroyed the cotton industry, truck farming took over (beans, cabbage, and seed potatoes that came from Prince Edward Island). The black women would sit in a circle, cutting potatoes, and singing spirituals, some 60 years after the Civil War had ended. She also talked about other African American traditions that endured: in cooking, in the language, and in agriculture. Other reminiscences: riding horses at Sea Cloud plantation, the bounty of Blue House, Brookland’s devastation, the practices of people from the Burrough, She ended her talk with a dramatic recounting of two catastrophic events on the Island (the 1886 earthquake and the 1893 hurricane), the first of which involved a crack in the earth in which water bubbled up as if it had ‘come straight up from hell,’ the second of which told of a tragedy that left a lone family survivor ‘fierce,’ and determined never to set her foot in water again.
Morris Rosen is joined by his cousin Dorothy “Dutch” Idalin Gelson Cohen and her husband, Mordecai “Mortie” Cohen, in this interview. Morris’s son Robert is also present as interviewer and videographer. Morris, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1919, was one of four children of Annie Blatt and Sol Rosen. Sol and his siblings, including Dutch’s parents, Zelda Rosen and Louis Gelson, emigrated from Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century, following their older sister Ida and her husband, David Goldberg, to Poughkeepsie, New York, where Dutch was born in 1919. The cousins talk about the Rosen (Rachelkin) and Gelson (Getchen) families of Poughkeepsie and their ancestors in Russia. Morris briefly mentions his maternal grandparents, Mamie Wildman and Morris Blatt, who ran a bakery in Columbia, South Carolina, before moving to Charleston. Morris and Dutch describe how the Rosens wound up in Charleston. Their uncle Sam Rosen moved to the area from Poughkeepsie for reasons unknown and opened a store in Awendaw, a small settlement about twenty-five miles north of Charleston. In about 1919, Sol Rosen and Zelda and Louis Gelson followed and bought an established country store from a member of the Geraty family in Yonges Island, nearly twenty miles south of Charleston. Louis died within a year, and Sol sold his interest in the store to Zelda, who moved the business and her three children to Meeting Street in Charleston after a few years. Sol was in the grocery business and later opened liquor stores. Morris traces his father’s moves from Yonges Island to King and Romney streets in Charleston, to the town of Meggett, and back to Charleston at King and Race streets. Morris and Dutch discuss growing up in Charleston in an area of the city where there were no other Jewish families. They did not experience antisemitism and Morris blended easily with the Catholic teens who lived nearby. The cousins did connect with other Jewish children when they frequented the neighborhoods around the synagogues and while attending religious school. They didn’t notice any friction between Charleston’s Reform and Orthodox Jews and played with children from both groups. Dutch was confirmed and Morris became a bar mitzvah at Brith Sholom on St. Philip Street. The two consider the degree to which their parents were observant Jews and speculate as to why their parents and others of their generation did or did not adhere to certain Jewish traditions. Mordecai “Mortie” Cohen was born in 1916 in St. Matthews, South Carolina, where his father, Isaac, ran a dry goods store and two farms. All the general merchandisers in St. Matthews while Mortie and his two brothers were growing up were Jewish. They met for High Holiday services in the town’s Masonic temple and were joined by families from Orangeburg, Ehrhardt, and Elloree. Most of Mortie’s friends were Christians; he doesn’t remember experiencing any antisemitism in St. Matthews. Mortie recalls how he came to know the Rosens, and he and Morris describe the role of the drummers, or sales reps, who visited retail storeowners when their fathers were in business. Morris talks about how he met his wife, Ida Tanenbaum. Her brother Lou Tanenbaum came to Charleston and opened a clothing store with his brother-in-law Louis Lesser. Morris, an ensign in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, was assigned to a LST (Landing Ship, Tank) in the Pacific. The group discusses what they and other American Jews knew about what was happening to Jews in Europe under Hitler.
Mortimer Bernanke, the youngest of three sons of Pauline and Jonas Bernanke, recounts the history of his family in Dillon, South Carolina. Jonas was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I when he was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia. Mortimer describes his father's escape through China, whereupon he returned to Austria in 1920 and married Pauline, who had trained as a doctor at the University of Vienna. The couple immigrated to New York City and Jonas earned his pharmacy degree at Fordham University. The Bernankes moved to Dillon in 1941, when Mortimer was thirteen years old. Pauline, who had practiced medicine in New York for two decades, found her career as a physician cut short when she was refused a license by South Carolina. Instead, she assisted Jonas in his pharmacy, Jay Bee Drugs, in Dillon. Mortimer joined his father in the drugstore after studying pharmacy at the University of South Carolina. He describes how his brother Philip joined him in the business, the changes they made during their time as partners, and their decision to sell to a large corporation in the 1990s. Mortimer married Rita Lee Strobing of New Jersey in the mid-1950s and they raised two children in Dillon. They were members of that town's Ohav Shalom Synagogue. Mortimer was among the men who conducted lay services for a congregation of about twenty-five families, a number that fell to three or four by the 1990s. He discusses how the Ohav Shalom members that remained decided to sell the building and divide the proceeds. The interviewee talks about his love of theater; he and another New York transplant, Tom Fletcher, started a theater group in Dillon and, over the course of four years, put on over a dozen plays in a tobacco warehouse. One of their productions was written and performed in celebration of Ohav Shalom's fiftieth anniversary in 1961. Among the topics discussed: the attention Mortimer and Dillon have received thanks to nephew Ben Bernanke's renown as chair of the Federal Reserve; the reorganization of a B'nai B'rith chapter in the Florence area, spurred by Latta resident and businessman Moses Kornblut; and Beth Israel Congregation, Florence, where the interviewee has been a member since the 1990s. Mortimer was joined in this interview by long-time friend Patricia "Pat" Siegel; the interviewer was Beth Israel Congregation's part-time leader, Rabbi Leah Doberne-Schor.
When Pierre Manigault was a child, his grandfather Edward owned Rochelle Plantation. When his father Peter took over Rochelle’s management in Pierre’s high school years, Manigault was put to work cultivating a ten-acre rice field, giving him insight into the difficulties of this job. He recalled Herman “Duff” Holbrook, who went to work for his father as president of White Oak Forestry and manager of Rochelle. Holbrook was like another grandfather for Manigault, and a mentor with a vast fund of knowledge about wildlife and the Santee Delta. He worked with Holbrook for a number of summers and spring breaks. Manigault’s great-grandfather, Arthur, after discontinuing rice cultivation, purchased controlling interest in Charleston’s newspaper. His father Peter, when manager of the newspaper, invested in pine lands in the Delta for the raw materials necessary for newspaper, and set up White Oak Forestry, a subsidiary of Evening Post Industries. Conservation for wildlife habitat was a priority, and Peter Manigault’s conservation efforts including his leadership in establishing the first conservation easement in the Santee Delta by a private landowner. Manigault discussed the impact of the October 2015 floods on the Delta. He talked about his father’s good friend, Ted Turner, who purchased Kinloch Plantation next to Rochelle. They shared interests in media and yacht racing. Manigault reflected on the early Huguenot Manigaults who immigrated to America and the Santee Delta; he also imagined the transformation of the Delta from forest to rice fields. He considered the labor required for that massive undertaking, and the incredible craftsmanship of enslaved workers seen in such buildings as St. James Santee Church, and various Delta plantation houses. He described the significance of the Santee Delta as an internationally recognized conservation area. Manigault has followed in his father’s footsteps in working to conserve the Delta.
Interview with Marcellus Forrest by Lee Drago, Eugene Hunt, and Margareta Childs, February 21, 1981, AMN 500.001.002, in Avery Normal Institute Oral History Project, of the Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston.
