Yiddishe Mamas (27 page)

Bettina Donau was born on June 2, 1861. She married Albert Steinfeld in Denver in 1883 and settled in Tucson, where her husband had a small business. The couple had four children. As their fortunes grew, they eventually built a mansion but never failed to respond to a community need. They also had a large cattle operation, and were one of the first families in Tucson to own an automobile, a Pierce-Arrow. The
Tucson Citizen
ran this headline: “FIRST ARREST FOR SPEEDING IN THIS CITY.” Their chauffeur was fined $25 for exceeding the twenty-mile per hour speed limit!

Terese Marx was born in Germany in 1846 and immigrated to San Francisco with her family. She married Joseph Ferrin there and the newlyweds soon relocated to Tucson.

Terese raised three children, while engaging in philanthropic work. In 1890, she was president of the Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Association, and was instrumental in planning Temple Emanu-El. In 1910, she was present for the laying of the cornerstone of the first synagogue in the territory of Arizona.

Terese, known as “The Angel of Tucson,” often accompanied one of the town’s doctors on emergencies. She was a self-trained holistic practitioner and herbologist, and it was said her remedies never failed.

Julia Kaufman was born on July 14, 1850, in Tennessee and married Charles Strauss in 1868. The couple had four children, including one who died from diphtheria. They moved to Tucson in 1880 because of Charles’s poor health and then became extremely active in their new community. Julia made her home a cultural center, often played piano, and hosted the first meeting of the Lotus Club, which included many prominent Jewish area women. Charles ran for mayor in the 1880s, and despite anti-semitism from his opponent, he became Tucson’s first Jewish mayor—thanks to his wife’s encouragement.

Jewish mothers and early settlers contributed to their communities all over America. Talk about Jewish mothers! The following is an account of a mother of twenty-one.

“Rebecca Machado was born into an eminent Jewish family of Portuguese descent,” reports Dr. Yitzchok Levine, professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in his column, “Glimpses into American Jewish History” that appears in the
Jewish Press
each month.

A secret or crypto-Jew, Rebecca’s family had lived a double life for years. Even after their move to America, they recited Hebrew prayers—with a Catholic rosary.

In 1762, at the age of sixteen, Rebecca married Jonas Phillips, who had been trained as a
shochet.
Within a year, she gave birth to the
first of their twenty-one children
in New York. When her husband’s business failed, Jonas secured a position as a
shochet
and
bodek
(one who performs the ritual slaughterer and examiner of meat). Tragedy followed the young couple from 1763 to 1772, when four of their children died before reaching their first birthday.

In addition to raising her growing family, Rebecca, like most eighteenth-century women, manufactured cloth, and prepared processed comestibles to keep them through the winter.

In 1769, when Jonas went into business again, this time in Philadelphia, their fortunes turned. They became quite wealthy and contributed generously to Congregation Mikveh Israel. Rebecca took an active part in communal affairs and fund-raising, and at age fifty-five, she was one of the founding members of the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances, to help the sick and indigent. She was widowed two years later, leaving her a single mother of her huge brood.

Yet, at age 74, Rebecca served as first directress on the board of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society of Philadelphia.

This uncommon colonial mother of twenty-one children was a tireless community activist and philanthropist—roles that Jewish mothers would continue to embrace in this new land.

Bilhah Abigaill Levy Franks (1696-1756) was a born letter writer. Her letters to her son Naphtali (edited by Isidore Mayer
and Leo Hershkowitz) are housed in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society.

She was born in London in 1696, the eldest of Moses Raphael and Richea Asher Levy’s five children. She dropped the name Bilhah when she came to New York City with her family around 1703. In 1712, when Abigaill was sixteen, she married Jacob Franks. Her husband grew to be a primary supplier of food, clothing, and ammunition to Britain’s colonial forces.

Abigaill had nine children. When her eldest, Naphtali, moved to London to represent the family business, her letters to him revealed the life of a colonial Jewish matriarch.

While in New York, Abigaill organized the ladies of the Spanish-Portuguese Congregation into a fund-raising unit to help build a new synagogue. Every single Jewish woman in New York contributed, and Abigaill was considered the spiritual mother of all synagogue sisterhoods.

Her childrens’ education, both Jewish and secular, was her priority and she sent them to a
melamed
(teacher) and to a Protestant educator. The girls were sent to Mrs. Brownell’s, a finishing school, and Abigaill’s letters speak of their fine progress.

Finding a suitable match for her daughters was no easy matter, since New York’s Sephardic society looked to the Caribbean for brides. On June 7, 1743, Abigaill, heartbroken, wrote Naphtali that his sister, Phila, secretly married Oliver Delancey, a prominent Huguenot. This was the first (known) case of an American Jewess marrying out of the faith.

Despite her teachings, not one of her family passed on Judaism, a story that is relevant to Jews today—the conundrum of maintaining Judaism in an assimilated society.

In 1874, the highly educated and outspoken seventeen-year-old Flora Langerman married Willi Spiegelberg, in what was the first wedding in the new Reform Temple in Nuremberg, Germany.

After an elegant European honeymoon, the couple set out for Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Flora endured a grueling trip
over rough country with the cuisine consisting of dried buffalo, bear meat, buffalo tongue, buffalo steaks, beans, and chiles—not exactly haute cuisine.

The bumpy stagecoach ride caused Flora to miscarry, as she was “terribly frightened” when she saw Indians for the first time. When the couple finally stopped at a hotel in Las Animas, Colorado, she was the first woman the men had seen in months. Under the gaze of cowboys at the ramshackle hotel, she had to climb a ladder to her bed while the men looked on. Flora was so anxious and uncomfortable that she slept clothed.

When the couple finally arrived in Santa Fe, they were greeted by the Spiegelberg brothers and their families, while a band played Lohengrin’s “Wedding March.” The local people cheered Willi and his tenderfoot bride.

Instead of going into culture shock, Flora devoted herself to improving her new community. She organized literary and dramatic clubs and in 1879, she helped establish the first nonsectarian school and the first children’s playground and garden in Santa Fe.

Flora conducted two religious schools herself, one a Sabbath school on Saturdays for Jewish children and the other, a Sunday school for Catholic children. Among her Jewish students were Hyman Lowitzy, who became a member of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and Arthur Seligman, who went on to become governor of New Mexico in 1930.

Flora also had her share of decidedly “frontier” experiences. One night in 1887, an angry mob insisted that her husband join in lynching two Mexicans who allegedly murdered an Anglo physician—but she convinced the mob to leave. On another occasion, she met the infamous Billy the Kid when he came to the Spiegelbergs’ store in 1876 to buy new duds.

In the late 1880s she insisted that her family join the other Spiegelbergs in New York City so their daughters, Betty and Rose, could eventually marry Jewish men.

She became a social activist in New York, organizing the Boys Vocational Club and, in 1889, the first Jewish Working Girls Club. Flora was the leading force behind the creation of a modern system of garbage collection in the city and Thomas Edison even
made a film about her plan. She was dubbed “The Old Garbage Woman of New York.”

Although criticized at times for her “unladylike” concerns with garbage, Flora explained that health and cleanliness was “quite within the province of women.” She also served on the New York City Health Commission, the Street Cleaning Department, the Public Water Commission, and the Daylight Savings Commission, and even had a moderately successful career as a writer. In 1937, Flora published some of the stories from her own life in “Reminiscences of a Jewish Bride on the Santa Fe Trail,” which appeared in the
Jewish Spectator.

Despite her remarkable achievements, the name Flora Langerman Spiegelberg has remained largely unknown.

Florence Prag Kahn was born November 9, 1866, to Polish Jews who were early settlers in California. In the mid-1860s, the family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where her father became friendly with Brigham Young. Her mother was an educator and early “feminist” who wrote
My Life Among the Mormons.

Florence was a teacher when she married Julius Kahn in 1899. They later moved from California to Washington, D.C., when her husband was elected to Congress.

When Florence and her husband were invited to dine with President McKinley, they walked to the White House, as a carriage cost one dollar to hire. “In what country,” asked Julius Kahn, “could two poor Jews be on their way to dine with the head of state?”

The Kahns, Republicans, were dedicated to Judaism and their two sons were bar mitzvahed at Temple Emanuel. Florence, known as a brilliant, take-charge woman with great humor, was once asked “Would you favor a birth control law?” She replied: “I will if you make it retroactive.”

In 1924, after her husband’s death, a special election was held and Florence took his seat, making her the first Jewish woman to serve in the United States Congress. She completed five congressional terms and was also the first woman to serve on the Military Affairs Committee. Florence traveled throughout California encouraging women to become involved in national politics.

She remained dedicated to Judaism and was in involved in numerous Jewish organizations. Florence Prag Kahn died on November 16, 1948, of heart disease.

Rebecca Gratz was born in Philadelphia on March 4, 1781 into a wealthy Jewish family. She was a very beautiful and religious woman who gave up the love of her life because he wasn’t Jewish. She had no children of her own, but after her parents’ early deaths she raised her siblings and then was mother to her late sister’s children.

At twenty, she organized the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children of Reduced Circumstances in Philadelphia, serving as its first secretary and fund-raiser. Rebecca was also one of the founders of the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum. In 1819, she founded the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, and then in 1855, she created the Jewish Foster Home and Orphan Asylum.

In addition to her groundbreaking work on behalf of orphans, Rebecca presided over the establishment of the first Jewish Sunday School, on February 4, 1838.

The Philadelphia Hebrew Sunday School Society was based on the Christian Sunday school and offered free weekly classes to children from early childhood to the early teens. It also gave Jewish women an unprecedented role in the education of Jewish children, with its teacher training program. Rebecca was the school’s superintendent for over twenty-five years.

The school was an immediate success and branches were opened all over Philadelphia and the country. Her 1838 design for supplemental Jewish education is still used in the United States today.