1. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Irving Abrams and Marjorie Kohler Abrams
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2. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Jennie Shimel Ackerman
- Date:
- 2/18/1997
- Description:
- Jennie Shimel Ackerman, born in 1923 in Charleston, South Carolina, grew up with a strong sense of Jewish identity in a family where religious observance was limited to the holidays. She discusses her father and daughter’s law careers, and mentions her husband’s involvement in the collection of money for arms to send to Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary defense force in Palestine.
3. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Dorothea Shimel Dumas, Renée Shimel Frisch, and Jennie Shimel Ackerman
- Date:
- 1/2/1997
- Description:
- Sisters Dorothea Dumas, Renée Frisch, and Jennie Ackerman recall their familys immigrant background and share memories of growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1920s and 30s. Their father, New Yorker Louis Shimel, an attorney who married Lillian Fechter of Charleston, served as the assistant district attorney for the Southeast and was the first president of the Jewish Community Center. The sisters also discuss the founding of Emanu-El, Charlestons Conservative synagogue.
4. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Dientje Krant Kalisky Adkins
- Date:
- 4/25/1997
- Description:
- Dientje Kalisky Adkins, daughter of Phillip and Evaline Hamel Krant, was born in 1938 in Bussum, Netherlands. She recalls fond memories of life before World War II in the small village not far from Amsterdam, where she and her parents lived over a store run by her father and his brother. She offers several happy tales about extended family members, including her maternal grandparents who lived in nearby Hilversum. Dientje remembers the German occupation of her hometown and tells the story of being sent into hiding by her parents when she was four years old. She describes emotionally and physically traumatic experiences while under the care of a harsh and abusive Catholic nun. By the time the war ended and her parents returned to claim her, Dientje was eight years old and had become accustomed to a new name and Catholic doctrine. The interviewee discusses the negative effects of the war on her psyche and the difficulties of returning to life in Bussum with her parents. The family grew to include a brother and an adopted sister. The Krants attended holiday services and Passover seders at the only synagogue in town. While her family was Orthodox, Dientje’s parents did not keep kosher, nor did they observe the Sabbath. After college, Dientje worked on an ocean liner caring for children in the nursery. She met her husband Leonard Kalisky while vacationing in Germany, where the Kingstree, South Carolina, native was serving on an American army base. They married in 1963 and raised three children in Charleston, South Carolina. The couple divorced after 25 years of marriage. Dientje discusses her emotional status and her outlook on life as a result of her childhood experiences. Note: the transcript contains additions and corrections made by Dientje during proofing.
5. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Alex Davis and Suzanne Lurey
- Date:
- 2/28/1997
- Description:
- Alex Davis, joined by his niece, Suzanne Lurey, who speaks only briefly, discusses his family history and his experiences growing up in Greenville, South Carolina. His father, Victor Davis, opened an auto parts store in Greenville in 1926 and, after he died, Alex and his two brothers, Jack and Louis, ran the family business for nearly four more decades. Alex married Lillian Zaglin, also of Greenville, and they raised two children. He recalls the early leaders of Congregation Beth Israel, Greenville’s Orthodox synagogue, and describes the relationship between Beth Israel, now Conservative, and the Reform congregation, Temple of Israel.
6. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Alex Garfinkel
- Date:
- 2/26/1997
- Description:
- Alex Garfinkel discusses his father, Harry Louis Garfinkel, who emigrated from Divin, Russia, around the turn of the twentieth century to avoid conscription. He was followed to the United States by two sisters, four brothers, and his father. Harry heard there were landsmen (countrymen) from Divin in Charleston, South Carolina, so he moved there and worked as a shoemaker until he bought a mattress factory. He married Celia Hannah Lapidus of Charleston. At some point, Harry turned over the mattress business to his brother Sam and opened a junk yard, which grew into a successful scrap metal business. Alex grew up on Line Street, one of eight children. He attended Hebrew school at Beth Israel and briefly mentions the split between Beth Israel and Brith Sholom, the Orthodox synagogues. Alex talks about King Street merchants, his father’s businesses, and taking over the scrap yard as a young man, which exempted him from military service during World War II. He invited his cousin Max Garfinkel of Baltimore to join him in the growing business, and they remained partners for over forty years. See also interviews with other members of the Garfinkel family: Helen Rosenshein, Olga Weinstein, Sandra Shapiro, Nathan and Frances Garfinkle (Nathan spells the family name differently), Max and Jennie Garfinkel, and Philip Garfinkel.
7. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Arthur V. Williams and Elza Meyers Alterman
- Date:
- 2/3/1997
- Description:
- Cousins Arthur Williams and Elza Meyers Alterman grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. They discuss the Williams and Meyers family histories, intermarriage and assimilation, and Charleston’s Reform Jewish community, including changes in the congregation and services during their lifetimes. Arthur became a physician and helped to develop an artificial kidney machine in the 1940s. Elza followed her mother into retail and ran a dress shop in the former home of the Williams family on George Street.
8. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Sol Levine and Anita Rosen Levine
- Date:
- 5/14/1997
- Description:
- Anita Rosen Levine, the daughter of Rose Rosenfeld of Romania and Jacob Rosen of Vitebsk, Russia, grew up in Port Chester, New York, a small town with a vibrant Jewish community. She received her Jewish education from students of New York City’s Jewish Theological Seminary, who traveled by train to the suburb to teach Sunday school. Anita was visiting a friend in Charleston, South Carolina, when she met Sol Levine, a native of Savannah, Georgia. His parents, Harry Levine, a cantor from Yekaterinoslav, Ukraine, and Freda Wasserman, a native of Warsaw, Poland, emigrated from Russia in 1906 with their two daughters and Harry’s mother. After Freda died in 1932, Harry and his two youngest sons, Sol and David, moved from Savannah to Charleston, where his daughter Rose lived with her family. Nearly two years later, Harry and Sol moved to Columbia, joining Sol’s older brother Max. David, still a young boy, stayed behind with Rose. Sol belonged to the Herzl Club in Savannah and was the first president of Columbia’s Jewish youth group, AZA, Aleph Zadik Aleph. He clerked in stores in the South Carolina towns of Allendale and Bamberg before returning to Charleston where he worked for his brother-in-law at LeRoy’s Jewelers on King Street. Sol and Anita, who married and settled in Charleston in 1942, talk about their social life, downtown shop owners, and their three children. In the early 1950s, when construction of the Savannah River Site, a nuclear production facility, was underway, Sol was hired to run a store in Barnwell, one of the South Carolina towns experiencing rapid growth associated with the new plant. The Levines lived in Barnwell for two years before returning to Charleston in 1955, the year after the two Orthodox synagogues, Brith Sholom and Beth Israel, merged. Prior to moving to Barnwell, they had been members of Brith Sholom; upon their return to Charleston, they joined Brith Sholom Beth Israel (BSBI). They discuss the merger and comment on the breakaway of Brith Sholom members to establish the Conservative congregation Emanu-El in 1947. Other topics covered include Sol’s contributions to BSBI through the Men’s Club, Anita’s involvement with the Daughters of Israel Sisterhood, the St. Philip Street and Rutledge Avenue mikvahs, and the rabbis, cantors, and sextons who served the Orthodox community. Anita began working for the BSBI rabbis in the mid-1950s, running the office for the synagogue and the Charleston Hebrew Institute (CHI), BSBI’s Hebrew day school. She describes the growth of CHI from just a kindergarten in 1955 to graduating the first class of seventh graders in 1964. “It was like my fourth child,” she says, referring to CHI.
9. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Emma Bogen Lavisky Bukatman and Belle Lavisky Jewler
- Date:
- 3/4/1997
- Description:
- Emma Bogen Lavisky Bukatman and Belle Lavisky Jewler, audio interview by Dale Rosengarten and Michael Samuel Grossman, 4 March 1997, Mss 1035-135, Special Collections, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA.;Emma Bogen Lavisky Bukatman, interviewed with her daughter, Belle Lavisky Jewler, discusses the Katzenelenbogen family history, a name they attribute to a city in Poland, although their genealogy traces the family to Bialsytok, Russia, and long before that, Italy. Emma’s parents, Bella Weinberg and Joseph Bogen (Katzenelenbogen) were first cousins who met and married in New York City. Emma, born in 1906 in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four children, notes that their family moved frequently, and in each location her father opened a general merchandise store. She remembers living in New York City before moving to Denmark, South Carolina, when she was eight years old. Emma recalls that they “felt a lot of antisemitism growing up” in the small town where the Bogens were the only Jewish residents until the Ness family settled there and opened a dry goods store. When she was sixteen, the family moved about fifty miles north to Columbia. She met her first husband, Michael Lavisky at Chaplin’s wholesale shoe business where she was employed as a bookkeeper and he was a shipping clerk. They married in 1926 in House of Peace Synagogue on Park Street. Belle, who was born in Columbia in 1936, offers some background on her father’s family, the Laviskys, who emigrated from Russia to Columbia in 1912. Emma describes her siblings, the Bogen family’s religious practices, and her memories of Rabbi David Karesh of Columbia. She recounts how the women of House of Peace Congregation transitioned from sitting in the balcony in the Park Street building to sitting downstairs, separated from the men, in the new sanctuary on Marion Street. Other topics include Columbia merchants, in particular, the Rivkins; Belle’s brother, Saul Lavisky; letters Emma’s mother wrote to her sister in Yiddish that have been translated into English (copies are available in Jewish Heritage Collection vertical files, Special Collections, College of Charleston); and how Beth Shalom (formerly House of Peace) evolved from an Orthodox to a Conservative congregation, a development in which women’s roles in services were at the heart of the issue.
10. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Ben Stern
- Date:
- 3/4/1997
- Description:
- Ben Stern, audio interview by Dale Rosengarten and Michael Samuel Grossman, 4 March 1997, Mss 1035-137, Special Collections, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA.;Ben Stern, the youngest of Chaim and Hadassah Stern’s four children, was born in Kielce, Poland, in 1924. For a decade beginning in 1930, the family lived in Lodz where, Ben recalls, antisemitism was rampant. The Sterns returned to Kielce in 1940, hoping conditions created in the wake of the German occupation of Poland the year before, would not be felt as harshly in a smaller community. For a time, that was true. Ben comments on Hitler’s strategy and the Germans’ willingness to take part in his plan. His sister Faye and their parents were transported to Treblinka in 1942; he never saw them again. Ben was put to work by the Germans in a number of jobs that required intense physical labor, before being sent to Auschwitz in 1944. He describes how he got to the concentration camp, what happened when he arrived, and the effects the dehumanizing conditions had on the behavior of the inmates. He was transferred to a number of different camps before being liberated by Americans. He was reunited with his sister Sophie after the war. She had been sent to the same camp in Pionki as their brother, Joel, who died in a death march the day before they were liberated. After the war Ben lived in an apartment in Munich, Germany, where he met and married his wife, Jadzia Szklarz, also a survivor. The couple, with their daughter Lilly, immigrated to Columbia, South Carolina, in 1949, sponsored by Ben’s uncle Gabriel Stern, who had left Lodz many years before to escape antisemitism. Ben talks about his first jobs in Columbia, his four children, and how his belief in God changed.