Leah Feinberg Chase was born in 1938 in West Point, Georgia, the eldest of three girls of Norma Beryl Goldstein and Morris Feinberg. In this interview, she talks about growing up in the small Georgia town bordering Alabama, roughly eighty miles southwest of Atlanta, then home to West Point Manufacturing Company. Her father opened a shoe repair business in West Point, later switching to ladies' and children's ready-to-wear clothing. Leah was the only Jewish student when she was attending the public schools in town. She says she "never experienced outright antisemitism in West Point," and she had many friends. "We were very cliquish." Yet, she notes "I always felt I was different," pointing out that she spent her weekends doing very different activities than her Christian friends. She and her sisters, Helen and Ina, attended Sunday school in Columbus, Georgia, where her paternal grandparents, Jake and Ida Feinberg, lived. Other weekends she traveled to youth group functions, such as Young Judaea conventions. Leah married Philip Chase of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1957. For a year before their marriage, she studied journalism at the University of Georgia, while Philip finished his last year in college at The Citadel. They raised four children?Stephen, David, Benjamin, and Freda?in Charleston. Leah describes her career in journalism at Channel 5, WCSC-TV; Custom Video; and Charleston Jewish Federation, where she edited the Federation's newspaper, Charleston Jewish Journal, which won national awards at the General Assembly of Council of Jewish Federations. The Journal also attracted unwanted attention during her tenure at the paper. She received death threats, including a bomb threat to Chase Furniture, the family business, prompting police protection. Leah gives an overview of the local civic organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish, that she has belonged to and served over the past decades, in particular the Foreign Affairs Forum. She makes note of her advocacy for and regular visits to Israel. Thirty years prior to the interview, Leah made a career change and became a travel agent. Other topics discussed include how observant Leah is of Jewish traditions compared with her parents, and an antisemitic incident that occurred when she applied for a job at the Evening Post/News and Courier in the late 1950s/early '60s. The transcript contains corrections made by the interviewee during proofing.
Claire Krawcheck Nussbaum, daughter of Polish immigrants Jack and Esther Bielsky Krawcheck, describes growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1930s and ’40s. Her parents were Orthodox Jews who observed the Sabbath and kept a kosher kitchen, with the help of Agnes Jenkins, who worked for the family for decades as housekeeper, cook, and third parent to Claire and her three siblings. The Krawchecks lived downtown on Colonial Street, many blocks from the uptown neighborhood, north of Calhoun Street, where the majority of immigrant Orthodox Jewish families lived at the time. Claire was close to a Catholic girl who lived on the same street, and she attended Ashley Hall, a private girls’ school. She had few Jewish friends, but became quite familiar with Catholic and Episcopalian traditions. Her father had men’s clothing stores both north and south of Calhoun Street—Jack’s on the corner of King and Vanderhorst Street, and Jack Krawcheck’s on King Street between George and Liberty Street. Claire discusses the buildings that housed the latter of the two stores, 311 King Street, which her father built, and 313 King Street, which he restored. Changes to the properties included gardens behind the buildings featuring iron work by Philip Simmons, and specially-designed, second-floor meeting rooms, used by local clubs, with paintings by William Halsey. Jack and Esther were members of Brith Sholom and they were active in a number of Charleston’s civic organizations, such as the Preservation Society and the Garden Club. Claire, who had difficulty relating to Judaism as a child—she couldn’t understand the Hebrew services and no one explained why they were following certain rules—convinced her parents to allow her to attend services and Sunday school at the Reform synagogue, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (KKBE). It was there that she became connected to the spiritual and religious aspects of Judaism. In 1950 Claire married Maurice Nussbaum of Ehrhardt, South Carolina, and they raised four children in Charleston. She discusses her siblings, children, and grandchildren, and her views on religion, antisemitism, and the changes in KKBE’s congregation since she began attending as a teen.
Claire Fund recounts how her Jewish parents survived World War II. Her father Charles Fund and his sister Esther were born in Yeremsha, Poland, in the early 1900s. Charles trained as an engineer in France, joined a branch of the French Army, and ended up in Glasgow, Scotland. There he met his wife, Aurelia Frenkel of Vienna, who had escaped Austria on foot in 1939. Esther, a dentist who had returned home to practice, hid in a farmers barn for more than a year to evade the Germans. Once it was safe for her to come out of hiding, she joined the Free Czechoslovakian Army, where she met her husband, Miroslav Kerner.
George Visanska Rosenberg is joined by his wife, Edith Cochran Rosenberg, in this interview that begins with George explaining how the Visanska, Winstock, and Rosenberg families on his father's side are related and how they came to settle in Abbeville, South Carolina, around the middle of the nineteenth century. George was born in Abbeville in 1916, the second of five children of Solomon Rosenberg and Octavia Harby Schwerin, a Sumter, South Carolina, native. George describes the family business in Abbeville. Rosenberg Mercantile Company, incorporated in 1872, occupied several connected buildings on Trinity Street and carried goods ranging from groceries to heavy farm equipment. The family also owned farm land in Abbeville and McCormick counties where sharecroppers grew cotton. George discusses his upbringing and the family's Jewish identity. Abbeville never had a congregation or visiting rabbis, but George's great-grandfather G. A. Visanska and his family "did maintain their Jewishness." They kept kosher and G. A. provided the kosher meat for his family, slaughtering the meat himself. George notes, however, "I was up in high school . . . at least, before I knew the difference in being Jewish and gentile." He became aware as an adult of having missed a close connection to his Jewish heritage and traditions by not having a synagogue in town. His parents observed the High Holidays, but not the Sabbath, and they celebrated Christmas, but not Hanukkah. He reports he never experienced any "anti-Jewish sentiment in Abbeville." George covers a number of topics, including forebears who fought for the Confederacy; the Eureka Hotel in Abbeville; his father's involvement with Abbeville County Memorial Hospital; the African Americans who worked for the Rosenbergs; the effects of the Great Depression on his family and their business; Rosenberg's Men's Store in Greenwood, South Carolina, run by his cousin Ernest Rosenberg; Uncle Julius Visanska, who ran Bentschner & Visanska in Charleston, South Carolina; and the Poliakoff and Savitz families of Abbeville. The Rosenbergs and interviewer, Dale Rosengarten, consider how certain expressions based on stereotypes can be offensive. The interviewees talk about white-black relations when they were growing up and at the time of the interview. George recalls how he ran his medical practice in the days before integration and contemplates the disadvantages that local African Americans face. Edith was born in 1922 in Due West, South Carolina, and grew up in Laurens, South Carolina. She and George married after he graduated from medical school in 1941. They recount his nearly four years in the service during World War II, followed by his residency in Wilmington, North Carolina. George describes how he established, in 1948, his OB/GYN and surgery practice in Abbeville and briefly discusses some of the changes in obstetrics over the decades. The couple adopted three children, Herbert, Patsy, and Grace. Edith, who was raised Presbyterian, relates how her parents and George's parents felt about their mixed marriage. She tells the story of their divorce after 27 years together and their remarriage ten years later. She converted to Judaism prior to reuniting with George, studying under Rabbi Magidovitch of Sumter's Temple Sinai.
Leonard Cohen grew up in Latta, South Carolina, the son of dry goods merchants, Isadore and Hannah Horowitz Cohen. Isadore emigrated circa 1910 from Lithuania and, after working briefly in Baltimore, followed his brother Harry’s advice and came south. His train ticket got him as far as Dillon, South Carolina. He peddled first, and then worked for Mr. Blum in his Latta store. Baltimore Bargain House extended credit to Isadore to start his own business, which prospered, enabling him to expand his store and, eventually, buy his own building. Two other Jewish families lived in Latta at that time, the Blums and the Kornbluts, and Leonard recalls being the only Jewish child in his classes at school. The Cohens attended services in Dillon, with Rabbi Jacob Raisin of Charleston officiating. Leonard remembers the Fass family, prominent members of the Dillon congregation. At Camp Osceola in Hendersonville, North Carolina, Leonard studied Hebrew with Rabbi Solomon and prepared for his bar mitzvah. He attended The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1941 until 1943, when he was drafted into the army. He describes his experiences in the military, particularly the action he saw in Europe as a soldier serving in the 102nd Division. After the war, on a visit to Baltimore, he met Mildred Friedman, daughter of emigrants from Poland. Leonard and Mildred married in 1948 and settled in Latta, where he had already joined his father in business. They raised three children in Latta and were members of Temple Beth Israel in Florence, South Carolina. Faced with competition from discount chains, the Cohens closed their store in 1987. Other topics mentioned in the interview include: Baltimore Bargain House and changes in the wholesale industry, Charleston Jews Leonard met while attending The Citadel, Mildred’s mikvah experience before her wedding, and the first bat mitzvahs at Temple Beth Israel.
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.
Isadore Cohen (b. 1918) and Samuel Rosen (b. 1929), Charleston natives and sons of immigrants from Russia and Poland, share their early memories of the Orthodox synagogues, Beth Israel and Brith Sholom, and discuss the relationship between the two congregations before and after their merger in the mid-1950s. They describe their Hebrew education, including their teachers—a number of rabbis plus a Mrs. Allen, daughter of Rabbi Gillman. Topics relating to the first half of the twentieth century covered in the interview include Jewish merchants, the Kalushiner Society, founded by immigrants from Kaluszyn, Poland, popular venues for Jewish functions, and the Cohen and Rosen family businesses, both small grocery stores. Interviewer Professor Jeffrey Gurock from Yeshiva University also provides information he discovered while conducting research for his book Orthodoxy in Charleston: Brith Sholom Beth Israel and American Jewish History.
Lisa Collis Cohen, born in 1958 in Kingstree, South Carolina, is the elder of two daughters of Jennie Goldberg and Moses Collis, both natives of Charleston, South Carolina. Lisa discusses her grandparents, Rebecca Leah Kirshtein and I. M. Goldberg, whose families migrated from Kaluszyn, Poland, to Charleston. Lena Schiawitz and Meyer Collis, who emigrated from Bialystok in the early 1900s, owned a Jewish bakery at 165 King Street in Charleston, and Lena ran a kosher catering business. Lisa describes the bakery, which closed, she believes, sometime during World War II. Her father, Moses, began working as a young boy for Charleston plumber W. K. Prause, whose shop was across the street from the bakery. Ultimately, Moses became "the state's youngest licensed journeyman plumber at age sixteen." His sister Becky married Harry Schreiberg. Harry's brothers Morris and Nathan had a store in Lane, South Carolina, and they lived in Kingstree. Morris encouraged Moses to come to Kingstree, where there were no plumbers. With help from his sister Sadie, Moses pursued the opportunity and, by 1947, he was in business in the small town about seventy-five miles north of Charleston. Later he became a licensed mechanical contractor. Lisa talks about growing up in Kingstree where she joined her Christian friends in their religious activities and went to their camps. The Collises observed the Sabbath on Friday nights with a family meal and services at Temple Beth Or in Kingstree. Lisa recalls the other Jewish families that lived in Kingstree and surrounding small towns, who were members of Beth Or, which was founded in 1945. The congregation relied on rabbis from Charleston's Conservative Synagogue Emanu-El to preside over bar mitzvahs and recruited students from Jewish Theological Seminary for the High Holidays. Lisa recounts how the family kept kosher, adding that every summer her father made large quantities of kosher dill pickles. Lisa went to Jewish camp in the summers and was involved in the Temple Youth Group that met in Sumter. "My Judaism, for me, was a very natural thing." When she was young, Lisa's mother, Jennie, tried to keep Lisa and her sister, Rhonda, "almost shomer Shabbat." Moses didn't agree with that degree of observance and encouraged assimilation. "My father didn't want me to feel different." Lisa, who attended public schools through sixth grade, discusses why her parents sent her to a private academy when integration was enforced in South Carolina. Among the topics covered in this interview are the Collis connection to the Mazo family of Charleston and Lisa's memories of her aunts and uncles, including Davy Collis, his band, Buddy Shaw, and his music company, Carolina Instrument, competitor of Fox Music House. Note: transcript includes comments and corrections made by interviewee during proofing. See Mss 1035-550 for part two of this interview. For a related collection, see also the Collis family papers, Special Collections, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston.
Mordecai "Mortie" Cohen, born in 1916, the middle of three sons of Raye Needle and Isaac Cohen, was raised in St. Matthews, South Carolina. The Cohens had settled in the small town about forty miles southeast of Columbia, South Carolina, around 1912, and opened a general merchandise store. Isaac also owned two farms, raising corn, cotton, cows, and hogs. About St. Matthews, Mortie says, "It was a good life for a kid, growing up." He recalls five other Jewish families who lived in the town at one point: the Savitzes, Pearlstines, Bergers, Yelmans, and Goldiners. They held High Holiday services in the Masonic Hall over a store in St. Matthews and were joined by families who lived in neighboring towns. "My mother kept halfway [kosher] because you couldn't keep kosher in a small town." He and his brothers, Harold and Leroy, didn't have a Jewish education. "My parents were involved in the Christian community a good deal." Isaac played poker every Sunday in the back of his store with the prominent men in town, including the mayor. Growing up, Mortie socialized mostly with Christians and even attended church with them. "Never in all my growing up did I ever feel like I was different, that I was not wanted." Mortie, a pharmacist, describes how he met his wife, Dorothy "Dutch" Idalin Gelson, who joins him in this interview shortly after it starts. Dutch and Mortie settled in Walterboro, South Carolina, in 1941, after living briefly in St. George, South Carolina. Mortie, who ran one of seven drug stores in Walterboro, notes that they "were very active in the Christian and Jewish community there and I never felt out of place." He relates a story about his working relationship and friendship with a black doctor who settled in Walterboro in the mid-1940s. Mortie and Dutch traveled to Brith Sholom in Charleston to attend services until Walterboro's small Jewish community organized Temple Mt. Sinai in the late 1940s. In 1954, the couple moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where Dutch had grown up. Mortie opened South Windermere Drugs in South Windermere Shopping Center, part of a new suburban residential and commercial development across the Ashley River from the Charleston peninsula. Dutch remembers feeling happy about the move to Charleston because of the larger Jewish population: "I was happy to come back to a Jewish environment." Mortie and Dutch made connections with prominent Charlestonians?Mortie was on a bank board and a member of the Country Club of Charleston?and they were invited to high-profile social events, but they declined because they wanted to reserve time for involvement in Jewish organizations and activities. The interviewees discuss the effects of intermarriage on Jewish identity, citing examples in their family and others of "the vanishing American Jew," a reference to The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century, a book written by their son-in-law, Alan Dershowitz, and published in 1997. Mortie recounts an instance of antisemitism at the Country Club of Charleston when a Jewish person applying for membership was blackballed, but when the vote was re-cast openly at the insistence of Mortie's non-Jewish friend, the negative vote disappeared. When asked about "the relationship between the white community and the African-American community in St. Matthews," Mortie tells the story of a black man, a plumber, who was beaten and run out of town by white men for being "arrogant." The Cohens, who have two children, Marvin and Carolyn, talk briefly about daughter and son, Joyce and Stephen, they lost to illness while living in Walterboro.
Lisa Collis Cohen, in the second half of a two-part interview, talks about her nursing career at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where she worked in obstetrics and gynecology, and at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, where she says, "I found my home on the cardiothoracic service." In 1996, she retired to take care of her family, which consisted of her husband, Sherman Cohen of Atlanta, and her young children, Michael and Meredith. Lisa and Sherman are founding members of Congregation Or Hadash in Atlanta. The interviewee describes the Conservative congregation's break from Ahavath Achim Synagogue in 2003; their spiritual leaders, Rabbis Analia Bortz and her husband, Mario Karpuj; and their synagogue, which was created through the "adaptive reuse" of a Chevy dealership's auto repair shop. The Cohen children attended Jewish day school, and, for that reason, Lisa feels, "it's been a lot easier for them to be Jewish" than it was for her. Contrasting her children's constant exposure to other Jewish Atlantans with her own childhood in the small rural town of Kingstree, South Carolina, where there were few Jewish residents, Lisa thinks her children take Judaism for granted more than she did. Lisa's parents kept kosher in their Kingstree home, but not outside the house. About her mother, Jennie Goldberg Collis, Lisa says, keeping a kosher home "was the one thing she did that would still cement her Jewish identity." Lisa believes it's important to give your offspring an identity and hopes Michael and Meredith will incorporate Judaism into their homes in some way. She explains why she is proud to be a Jewish southerner and offers her thoughts on the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments. She honors her family's past, stating, "I'm really proud of the fact that I am keeping the ideals that my grandparents risked their lives for to come over to this country." Lisa has not experienced antisemitism as an adult, nor did she as a child in Kingstree, recalling that she and her Christian friends were respectful of each other's religious traditions. She remembers one headmaster of her private school in Kingstree as a bigot who "espoused a lot of commentary about Hitler and the Nazi party." When her parents brought it to the attention of the board, he was fired. That single instance of intolerance from her childhood contrasts sharply with her current outlook: "I think in the last few years I have personally felt like there is more of a mandate that supports hate in this country across all borders... I think this is the first time in my life, as an American Jewish citizen, that I really feel like we are facing a credible threat to what everybody knows as their... way of life." Other topics covered in this interview include how the Collises celebrated the holidays when Lisa was young and how Lisa and her husband celebrate now; the impact the Holocaust had on her family; Lisa and Sherman's support for Israel; Lisa's observations of the Jews of Atlanta; and Lisa's connection to Marian Birlant Slotin?now deceased?of Charleston. Note: transcript includes comments and corrections made by interviewee during proofing. See Mss 1035-549 for part one of this interview. For a related collection, see the Collis family papers, Special Collections, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston.
