1. Jewish Heritage Collection Speech: The Jewish Community of Beaufort in 1905 and the Founding of Beth Israel Congregation
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2. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Doris Lerner Baumgarten
- Date:
- 12/4/2006
- Description:
- Doris Baumgarten tells the story of how her husband, Peter, and his family escaped Vienna in 1939 after the Nazi occupation of Austria. Peter and his brother, Hans, left on the Kindertransport and were taken in at a boarding school in Bournemouth, England. Their mother worked in London as a maid, but was able to join her boys in Bournemouth when the school hired her to clean their facilities. Their father was in Sweden during the German annexation and was unable to return to Vienna because of an invalid passport. Instead, he made his way to New York, arriving in the United States a year before his wife and children.
3. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Bernice Prayzer Rubin
- Date:
- 2005-09-13
- Description:
- Bernice Prayzer Rubin relates the stories of her parents, Esther Fromovitz and Mayer "Mike" Prayzer, who survived the Holocaust. Esther, originally from Romania, was held in Auschwitz for eleven months. Mike, who was from Poland, lived in ten different concentration camps over five years, and was freed from Dachau by the United States Army on April 1945. Esther and Mike met and married in Germany where they lived for two years after the war. In 1949, they and their firstborn, Morris, immigrated to the United States, settling first in Asbury Park, New Jersey, with the help of Esther's brother Al Fromovitz, who had arrived before World War II. They moved to Lorain, Ohio, following, Esther's sisters, who wanted to live near an uncle who had helped sponsor the surviving family members' immigration. Bernice, Morris, and younger brother Kenneth grew up surrounded by a large extended family. Bernice describes her parents' outlook on life and how they made a point of helping others. "The thing that just amazes me about my father and my mother is the fact that going through such a horrendous experience, they came out of this as people who were the kindest people . . . ." Mike spoke publicly to church groups and schoolchildren about his wartime experiences "because he always felt it was an important story and never to forget what had happened." Esther, who needed prodding, would not share her stories with Bernice and her brothers until they were older, Bernice reports, because she didn't want to "poison our minds against anything or to make it a traumatic experience for us." And there were some things her mom would never reveal. The transcript includes additional written information provided by the interviewee that expounds upon interview topics and discusses her parents' lives growing up in their respective villages, how her mother's family was rounded up, and what happened when they arrived at Auschwitz. For a related collection, see the Mike Prayzer papers, Mss. 1065-043, Special Collections, College of Charleston.
4. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Raymond Rosenblum, Caroline Rosenblum, and Irvin Rosenblum
- Date:
- 6/28/2008
- Description:
- Caroline, Irvin, and Raymond Rosenblum reminisce about growing-up in Anderson, South Carolina, recalling their older siblings, relatives, neighbors, and Jewish religious observance. Their parents, Nathan and Freida Rosenblum, Polish immigrants, lived in several small South Carolina towns and Miami, Florida, before settling in Anderson in 1933. Caroline recounts her work history, and Irvin describes his eleven months in the navy at the end of World War II. Raymond served in the Naval Reserves while he attended medical school. Under the Berry Plan, his active duty was deferred until he completed his residency in urology.
5. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Claire Fund
- Date:
- 10/26/2005
- Description:
- 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.
6. Jewish Heritage Collection: Speech given by Harvey Tattelbaum
- Date:
- 4/2/2005
- Description:
- 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
7. Jewish Heritage Collection: Speech given by Harvey Tattelbaum
- Date:
- 4/3/2005
- Description:
- 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.”
8. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Mickey Dorsey
- Date:
- 1/24/2006
- Description:
- Mickey Dorsey, a member of the Seventy-first Infantry Division, United States Army, discusses his experiences serving in Europe during World War II. He outlines the movement of the troops through France and Germany, into Austria, where they discovered Gunskirchen Lager, a concentration camp near Lambach. The American soldiers found hundreds of starving prisoners and thousands of dead bodies locked inside. He recalls that he and his fellow soldiers were shocked to learn of the existence of the concentration camps, and he describes his reaction to encountering the Gunskirchen inmates. During the interview, he refers to photographs taken by their division photographer, Joe Daurer, which Dorsey donated to Special Collections, College of Charleston (see Mickey Dorsey papers, Mss. 1065-046). Despite being born with only one finger on his left hand, and in the face of repeated rejections, the Chester, South Carolina, native describes his efforts to enlist in the military. Ultimately, the army accepted him for limited duty, but, after basic training, Dorsey convinced his superiors to allow him to join a combat unit. The interviewee also discusses his work history and reunions with his army division and Gunskirchen survivors.
9. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Helene Ejbuszyc Diamant
- Date:
- 5/12/2005
- Description:
- Helene Ejbuszyc Diamant, born in Warsaw, Poland, immigrated to Paris, France, as an infant with her parents, grandparents, and brother. She was in high school when the Germans invaded France in May 1940. Her father fled with an uncle and was never heard from again. Helene describes how she and her mother were arrested by the local police and detained at the internment camp in Drancy, near Paris, and released once she showed her work papers. Her brother was also detained at Drancy; during the interview, Helene reads a postcard he sent from the camp to inform them that he was leaving soon “for an unknown destination.” Sometime in late 1943 or early 1944, Helene and her mother fled with her grandparents, an aunt and uncle, and two cousins to Aix-les-Bains in France’s so-called free zone, where they spent nearly a year before escaping to Lugano, Switzerland. She met and married her husband, Maurice Diamant, in Lugano, and they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
10. Jewish Heritage Collection: Oral history interview with Henry Windmuller
- Date:
- 12/4/2006
- Description:
- Henry Windmuller, born in 1924, in Andernach, Germany, describes the town’s small Jewish congregation and his family’s religious practices, as well as the schooling he received as a boy. He was boarding at a teacher’s college in Wurzburch when the anti-Jewish violence of Kristallnacht broke out in November 1938. He recalls how he and a friend escaped the perpetrators and arrived safely home. His father, Max, was arrested and held at a camp in Dachau for about a month and then released. Stepmother Rosa arranged for Henry and his sister, Ilse, who was a year younger, to leave Cologne for England a week later on the Kindertransport. They were placed with separate families in Edinburgh, Scotland. With the help of his brother, who sent money from South Africa, Max escaped Germany a week before the start of World War II. The family was unable to secure the money needed to get Rosa to safety and they never saw her again. In the spring of 1940, with the Nazis moving into Western Europe, Henry and his father were among the foreign nationals living in Great Britain who were detained by the British. Max was sent to the Isle of Man and Henry was placed in an internment camp in Lingfield, England. Henry recounts his experiences at Lingfield, then on board the Duchess of York en route to Canada, and, finally, in a camp in Red Rock, Ontario. In all three locations German prisoners of war—airmen, submariners, naval officers, merchant marines—made up the vast majority of prisoners detained alongside Henry and his fellow Jews. “It was like being back in Germany,” he notes. A Jewish doctor, who was tending to the Red Rock prisoners, discovered that Jewish inmates were being forced to live with Nazis. He and his Montreal congregation successfully lobbied for the relocation of the Jews, who were then transferred to Sherbrooke in southeastern Quebec. Henry was allowed to return to Scotland in 1942, where Ilse still lived with her foster family. By that time Max had immigrated to Hartford, Connecticut. In 1943 Henry joined his father in the United States. He traveled alone, however; Ilse had died of diphtheria in Scotland. The transcript includes comments inserted by the interviewee during proofreading.