Family Memories

by Ethel Navasky Siegel

Contents
Introduction ............................................................ 5 Israel and Ida Wilner ............................................... 7 The Wilner Offspring .......................................... 10 Avraham and Ethel Navasky .................................. 15 The Navasky Offspring ....................................... 17 Charles and Jennie Navasky.................................. 23 Living in the Bronx ............................................ 24 Living in Washington Heights ............................. 25 Living in Brooklyn .............................................. 27 Charles Navasky ................................................ 37 Jennie Navasky .................................................. 41 Second edition, with a new appendix about early family history The Siegel Family .................................................. 45 Nathan Siegel..................................................... 45 Ida Wesnik Siegel ............................................... 53 Sarah Leah Weschenefsky .................................. 58 Milton Siegel ......................................................... 61 Appendix 1: Bernie Navaskys Family History ........ 67 Appendix 2: Early Family History .......................... 82 Appendix 3: Photo Gallery ................................... 102 About the Author ................................................ 111
Copyright 2011 and 2012 by the estate of Ethel Navasky Siegel

Contact siegel@preservenet.com if you have information or photographs to include in a possible third edition of this book. Edited by Charles Siegel

Introduction
These are anecdotes and family stories for Benedict Siegel, Matthew Ulrich, and all family members interested in the life stories of their grandparents, great grandparents and perhaps their great aunts and great uncles. Let me tell you about myself. I had loving parents, Jennie and Charles Navasky, and a carefree childhood. My older sister, Gertie, and my older brother, Bernie, were devoted and solicitous. Milton Siegel was a loving and dedicated husband and father, and my Siegel in-laws were exceptionally ne people. My dear children, Chuck and Ellen, are affectionate and caring. They were excellent students, gifted individuals who were and are a great source of pride and joy. My daughter-in-law, Jeanne Miller, and my son-inlaw, Stephen Ulrich, are outstanding and talented. I am very, very proud of them and their accomplishments and love them dearly. My grandsons, Benedict Siegel and Matthew Ulrich, are exciting, fun people. I couldnt possibly love them more than I do. I have had a lifetime of delight in the company of my brothers and sisters children and their families. They are Theda Gamsa Hale Freedner, Ira Gamsa, Vivian Gamsa Jay, Edward Navasky and Elaine Navasky Ziff. I have had equal joy in the company of their children and grandchildren.

Israel and Ida Wilner

These are reminiscences of my maternal grandparents, Ida Rosensweig Wilner and Israel Mordecai Wilner. These recollections were provided by my mother, Jennie Wilner Navasky, my sister, Gertrude Gamsa, and my cousin, Dr. Lawrence Kaplan. Ida Rosensweig was born in 1852 on a large farm in Poland and married Israel Mordecai Dozorsky, a talmudic student born around 1847. Ida and Israel were parents of the following children, all born in Poland:

Joseph and Nathan were twin brothers born in 1872. Abe, Sam, and Henry were born in that order (birth
dates unknown). The three daughters were Annie (born 1875), Jennie (born 1887) and Essie (born 1889). Charlie was the youngest child (birth date unknown). My mother, Jennie, often related how the children trudged to school in the snow in the boot steps of brother Sam. Israel Mordecai, who had been supported by his inlaws as a student, eventually became a schochet (a ritual slaughterer) to support his family. Nathan and Joseph, the twin brothers, migrated to America during the 1890s to avoid service in the Russian army. Legend has it that they slept in cellars and stairwells on the Lower East Side when they rst arrived. Basically, their family came to America to be with them. Around 1900, the Dozorsky family left their home in Poland in the dark of night by horse and wagon. They crossed the German border secretly and traveled to Hamburg, where they embarked for a steerage trip to America (boat unknown). At Ellis Island, the family was
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Israel Mordecai Wilner in 1923

renamed Wilner, because they came from Vilna, Poland.1 McKinley was then president of the United States.2 In New York, the Wilner family found an apartment on East Broadway (perhaps #165) in a tenement building facing Seward Park. Many similar buildings remain on this site, but their building was replaced by a restaurant. The Wilner household must have been crowded and tempestuous. Israel Mordecai never worked in America, so the household was supported by the brothers Nathan, Joe, Sam, Abe, and Henry. Israel Mordecais sister, known as Tante Hendel,3 was married to Ike Philips, a shirt manufacturer who employed the nephews as shirt cutters. His factory became the Philips Jones Van Heusen Company, a large rm associated with the Philips family, well-known Manhattan philanthropists. Baby brother Charlie was sent to school and eventually became a dentist. I was told that he was deeply resented by his brothers, who supported the family while he studied. My mother, Jennie, went to school for a short while and then was sent to work at a sewing machine in a factory. She always claimed she worked only three weeks. This was long enough to pay for a gray silk hat and matching outt for Sunday promenades on East Broadway. I believe her life-long interest in creative sewing stemmed from this early work experience. Israel Mordecai spent much time at the local Rutgers Street Synagogue, now a Hispanic religious center. He was honored there for his repeated studies of the Talmud. As a child, I recall seeing Israel Mordecai twice. He was a soft-spoken, courtly looking gentleman whose role model was Andrew Carnegie. Thus, he regularly wore a silk top hat and black coat and cultivated a well trimmed
Ida Wilner in 1928
1 Vilna is now called by its Lithuanian name, Vilnius, and is the capital of Lithuania. According to the Russian census of 1897, it had 64,000 Jewish residents, about 41 percent of its total population of 154,500. 2 McKinley became president in 1897 and was assassinated in 1901. 3 Tante is Yiddish for aunt.

white beard to emulate his ideal. Israel Mordecai died suddenly around 1923 at age seventy-six. Both grandparents, Ida and Israel, were strong and vigorous. I was frequently told they had given us a strong, healthy inheritance and that it was their youthful country diet which had made them survive. Ida Wilner had very loyal children. Her sons supported her when she came to America, and when her husband died, my mother arranged for her to live with her daughter and son-in-law, Annie and Joe Cohen, in an apartment on Ocean Avenue, Brooklyn. My mother took care of her rent and shopping and often brought her to our home to see her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. For us, as children, Ida was a stolid, obese lady who wore a sheitel and spoke only Yiddish. We had little communication with her as she sat and watched us chat and play.4 Ida died in the late 1920s at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital as a result of surgery to repair a broken hip.

The Wilner Offspring

The Wilner offspring grew up to be hard-working, family-oriented individuals. I knew all of them and saw them frequently from the mid 1920s to the start of World War II in 1941. Nathan Wilner married Mary Bresky, lived in Long Island City, and had no children. As a widower (1937-8), he moved to a furnished room on Manhattans West Side to be near his sister, Jennie, and his brother, Charlie, whose dental ofce was at Broadway and 72nd Street. Joe Wilner (Nathans twin) married Annie and lived for many years on East 12th Street between Avenues I and J in Brooklyn. Joe had ve daughters, Florence, Goldie,
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One family story about Ida Wilner was often repeated. Her daughter, Jennie, convinced her that she should lose weight and bought her a loaf of low-calorie bread to help her diet. When Jennie came home later in the day, this loaf of bread was gone. Ida explained that she wanted to lose weight quickly, so she ate the whole loaf.
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Jeannette, and Ruth and Beatrice, who were twins. The youngest child was a son named Bernie, a personable, handsome, young Brooklyn attorney who, for some unfathomable reason, killed himself when he was around forty years old. Abe Wilner married Dora Shapiro. Her brothers, David, a physician, and Jack, an attorney, were part of a pleasant extended family, and my parents frequently socialized with all of them. Abe and Dora were close neighbors when we lived on Manhattans West Side. Their daughter, Anita, married and lived in Brooklyn. Uncle Abe died in Brooklyn at the Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Center. Sam Wilner was a man who loved the countryside and thus met and married Sarah, a woman from Kerhonkson, New York. Sam and his family lived in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. His son, Lawrence, became an executive at R.H. Macy. His daughter, Helen, was a teacher in the New York City school system. Sam Wilner was a tall, slim man who outlived all his siblings and died in his mid-nineties. Henry was a warm, gregarious man whose third wife was Clara Wilner. She was an exceptionally pleasant, very short, and remarkably obese woman. My mother entertained Henry and Clara and their children, Marvin and Irma, frequently. During the 1930s, they lived in a spacious apartment on Avenue J (Brooklyn) over what was then Pifkos Bakery. Marvin Wilner married and lived briey on Tennis Court (Brooklyn) where I last saw him around 1950-1955. We have since lost track of him and his sister. Annie married Joe Cohen, who was a most loyal and faithful friend and employee to my father and later to my brother, Bernie. After Grandma Ida died, Annie and Joe Cohen opened a dry cleaning store on East 12th Street off Avenue J. They lived above the store where Annie became famous for serving Postum as a drink to all guests, whether they preferred it or not. Annie and Joe had no children but were extremely attached to their Navasky nieces and nephew. During Joes terminal illness at Kings County Hospital, I recall that my brother Bernie drove from
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Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, to Brooklyn in a snowstorm to be at his bedside. Jennie was my mother. Essie married Harris Kaplan and had one son, Lawrence, who became a professor of economics at City University. Charlie was the most interesting of the Wilner siblings. His rst wife was Dorothy, the mother of their son, Irwin, a Queens podiatrist. Charlies second wife, Dora, an elementary school teacher, was a close friend of my mother when we lived on the West Side (1937-1942). Uncle Charlie had unusual talents. He could drill teeth and smoke a cigar at the same time. He was very proud that he had memorized the works of Shakespeare, and he would recite long quotations whenever he had the opportunity - and some of the best opportunities were when he was working with dental patients, who had to listen. He also wrote a book named Alimony: The American Tragedy, published by Vantage Press in 1952, which he dedicated to Dora B. Wilner without mentioning that she was his second wife.

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Avraham and Ethel Navasky

My father, Charles Navasky, came to America with his mother and two brothers before 1890. He was the son of Ethel Levinson and the Rav Avraham Schmuel Navasky5 (spelling anglicized) of Kovno.6 This accounts for the listing of Lithuania as his birthplace on Charles Navaskys naturalization papers. All we ever heard of Rav Avraham was that he was a practicing rabbi who had died at an early age. I visualized him as a composite of what I saw in his grandsons. I imagined a dark-eyed and dark-complected man of average height and serious demeanor. During the 1980s, an Israeli cousin who had been brought up in Kovno visited Esther and Macy Navasky in new York City. He advised us that Rav Avraham had committed suicide. Perhaps a mortal illness had forced him to violate his religion and abandon his wife and children. This personal tragedy forced Grandma Ethel to leave her home in Kovno and migrate to Leeds, England, to join her Levinson relatives. Her four sons were Barnett (originally Berchik7), Nathan, Charles and David, in that order. I assume it was in England that Grandma Ethel adopted what I call her British music hall name of Ethel. We never learned her original name. There is a memorial plaque for her in a synagogue on Lindell Boulevard in Long Beach, New York, where she is called Eta.8
Ethel Levinson Navasky
5 6

Rav is Hebrew for Rabbi. Kovno is now called by its Lithuanian name, Kaunas, and is the second largest city in that country. According to the Russian census of 1897, it had 25,500 Jewish residents, about 36 percent of its total population of 70,900. 7 Berchik is Russian diminutive of Beryl, a common Yiddish name. 8 In Yiddish, Ethel was pronounced Ettel, which is also the Yiddish diminutive of Eta.
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Above: Nathan Navasky and Fannie Levinson Navasky. Below left: Their children Pauline (born 1892), Abe (born 1897), Macy (born 1895) and Alex (born 1900). Madeline (born 1904) was probably not born yet when this picture was taken.
Photos courtesy of Marjorie Janoff, Madelines daughter.

When Grandma Ethel came to America with her three younger sons (Nathan, Charles and David), they moved into a tenement at in the area of Mulberry, Bayard, and Baxter Streets, an unsavory area of Manhattan at that time. No one knows how Grandma Ethel supported herself and her sons. When my father, Charlie, was about ten or twelve years old, he became what he called a peddler, a street urchin selling needles, pins, and shoelaces on the sidewalk. His brothers probably did the same. As a teenager and young man, my father became a custom peddler and traveled to sell his wares in adjoining neighborhoods. His stories of street life on Mulberry and Bayard Streets included screaming, squabbling and the classic climax of throwing the crockery outside the hardware store. However, by the time he was in his early twenties, my father and Grandma Ethel were owners of a notions store9 at 337 First Avenue in New York City.

The Navasky Offspring

Grandma Ethels son, Nathan, married his mothers niece, Fannie Levinson.10 Her son, David, became the husband of our fabled Aunt Tillie. I met Aunt Tillie once, after World War II when she was visiting in Brooklyn. Her son, Charles, my father, married Jennie Wilner, my mother.
A notions store sells small items used in sewing, such as needles, pins, buttons, hooks, trim, and thimbles. 10 Nathan Navaskys tombstone at the Kedainer Association plot (Section 5, Post 509) at Washington Cemetery, Brooklyn, N.Y. gives his Hebrew name as Nachum ben Avraham Shmuel and says he died on December 26, 1945 at age 78. His wife Fannie Levinson Navasky is buried in the same plot, and her tombstone gives her Hebrew name as Feige Batia bat Meir Natan and says she died May 3, 1934 at age 62 Their daughter Pauline Navasky is also buried there, and her tombstone says she died April 17, 1915 at age 22. No other family members are buried there.
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Below: Though it is not mentioned in family memoirs, this entry in the Trow Directory of 1908 shows that Nathan and Charles Navasky were also partners in a real estate business. The annual report of the New York State Treasurer for 1908 shows that this business paid taxes of $7.50. It has no tax records for earlier or later years.

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Grandma Ethel had at least twelve grandchildren. Nathan had ve children. David and Charles each had three children, and we know of one grandchild in England. Nathan Navasky had three sons and two daughters:

Pauline had a serious accident at age three, remained

an invalid, and died when she was twenty-two.

Abraham (who called himself Abe Nevans) married

Lillian and had two talented children, a daughter named Carol and a son named Roy. Abe had been in the clothing business with his two brothers, Macy and Alex, but died at an early age. Macy married Esther Goldberg and had two children, Elinor and Victor, a writer who became editor and then publisher of the magazine The Nation.11 Alex (who called himself Al Nevans) married Dorothy Damsey, a teacher, and had one daughter named Nancy. Al was fun-loving and outgoing, given to clowning, piano playing, and singing. Madelyn (called Maddy) was married three times. Her rst husband was a dress manufacturer, Harry Summers; their children were Edward and Marjorie. When her husband died, Madelyn was married and divorced from Eddie Pantell. Her third husband, Ralph Guttchen, was a Manhattan attorney. David Navasky (husband of Tillie) moved to Alton, Illinois, around 1920 to avoid financial and legal entanglements in New York. He called himself N. David and became the owner of a dry goods store. His children were Mamie, Jeannette, and Charlie:

Above: Nathan and Fannie Levinson Navasky with their granddaughter, Elinor, Macys daughter. (Photo courtesy of Victor Navasky.) Below: Al Nevans (left) with Milton and Ethel Siegel in 1956.

Mamie is the mother of David Wiseman. Charlie came to work for my father in New York in the
mid-1920s but he was extremely shy and unhappy and returned home after a few weeks.

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According to the U.S. Social Security Death Index, Macy Navasky was born February 4, 1895 and died February 25, 1988.
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Charles Navasky, as you know, married Jennie Wilner and had three children:

Gertrude married William Gamsa. Her children were

Theda Freedner Hale, Ira Gamsa, and Vivian Gamsa Jay. Bernie (Bernard Seymour) married Helen Wein and had two children, Edward Navasky and Elaine Navasky Ziff. Ethel married Milton Siegel and had two children, Charles (Chuck) Siegel and Ellen Siegel Ulrich. Berchik, in England, had a son, Philip. My brother, Bernie Navasky, visited these cousins in Manchester, England, and we have snapshots of them.12 Grandma Ethel had raised children who were bright and gentle people. They were honest and hard-working and retained a strong link of feeling for each other which was an echo of Ethels strong commitment to those of her own blood. My sister recalled the scene in the Bronx apartment (1914 to 1915) when the news of Grandma Ethels death arrived. My parents sat around their kitchen table as my mother tried to console my father for his loss. No one knows where Grandma Ethel is buried. The only evidence of Grandma Ethel is a photograph of a small, dark, unsmiling woman standing in front of a shingled veranda.

Above: Gertrude and William Gamsa and family in 1956. Standing: Theda Hale, Gertie Gamsa, Billy Gamsa, Vivian Jay, Rose Lebowitz (not related). Seated: Ira Gamsa, Iras wife Barbara Gamsa, Vivians Husband Murray Jay, Thedas husband Arthur Hale. Left: Bernie and Helen Navasky on their honeymoon in 1931. Right: Their children Eddie and Elaine in 1941.

12 When Bernie wrote in his memoir Suits to Nuts about his visit with Philip Neviasky in Leeds, England, in 1978, he said that Philips wife was named Millie and that Berchik had another son named Morris. See the photo of Bernie and Philip on p. 76. See the complete list of Berchicks children in the family tree on p. 100.

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Charles and Jennie Navasky

In 1904, her older brothers arranged for my mother to meet my father through the services of a marriage broker or schadchen. When my mother protested at this cut-anddried arrangement, she was told she had to accept as my father had such excellent credentials. Not only was he the owner of a business (a notions store on First Avenue and 18th Street), he lived with his mother, Ethel, and was the son of a deceased rabbi. Another motive was that there would be one less person in the household to feed and support.13 We enjoyed a much repeated story about my fathers rst date with my mother. From East Broadway, he escorted her by 1904 public transportation to Coney Island. At refreshment time, he sprung the famous bon mot, Would you care for some fried ice cream, Miss Wilner? My mother, who claimed she was barely sixteen at the time, was as quick-witted in her retort as she remained during her lifetime: Ill have some fried ice cream if you will, Mr. Navasky. They were married on May 28, 1904, after a six-week courtship. After several of the children had married, the Wilner family moved to the Bronx and then to Harlem (7th Avenue and 115th Street) where they lived with Charlie over his dental ofce. My sister often described how much she enjoyed her regular Sunday childhood visits with her Bronx grandparents. There, Aunt Essie played the piano and other aunts and uncles were present. My father recalled these outings for a different reason. Early in his business career, he had an offer to invest some
13 According to another family story, her family made her marry because they needed the space in their apartment for a relative who was coming to America.

Ethel with Charles Navasky (above) and with Jennie Navasky (below).

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money in a movie production project in California. As he repeatedly claimed, he couldnt go there because he had to visit his in-laws in the Bronx on Sundays.

Living in the Bronx

When my parents were married, they lived together with Grandma Ethel at 337 First Avenue, directly above their notions store. The mother-in-law and her seventeenyear-old daughter-in-law did not live too happily together. Poor Grandma Ethel would snivel and sneeze in the dusty shop, and in later years, my mother claimed that all of her colds, allergies, and illnesses were her legacy. Grandma Ethel loudly deplored the culinary and business skills of her daughter-in-law. In 1905, when my sister was born above the store, Grandma Ethel was sure the baby would be scalded by the mothers bathing procedures. Grandma Ethel and my parents lived together on First Avenue for a few years. Later on, she moved to the Bronx in order to be near her family; at times she lived with Nathans family, and at other times had her own apartment. When the two families went to Rockaway for the summer, Grandma Ethel was always taken along. In 1907, thanks to the new elevated subway train to the Bronx, mother, father, and baby sister Gertie were able to move to 1053 Prospect Avenue, where brother Bernie was born in 1908. Gertie went to P.S. 2314 and later to P.S. 39 when the family moved to 881 Fox Street, also in the Bronx. I was born at that address, in the area that later became known colloquially as Fort Apache. While living in the Bronx, my father had gone into the clothing business with his brother Nathan. It was his destiny to be the outside man and go out on the road. He traveled a great deal and left mother at home to cope with two small children. The baby carriages had to be dragged up several ights of stairs, and getting necessary
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milk or medicine often required the help of a local child recruited by calling out the window. The best Bronx story was told to me by my sister. My mother had decided to move to a new apartment when my father was away but had no way of notifying him. Imagine his shock and surprise to return home one midnight to nd strangers in his apartment. He nally located his family by awakening a few neighbors until he was able to learn his new address.

Living in Washington Heights

In 1918, the family moved to 657 West 161st Street in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Charlie Freedman, a distant cousin by marriage to my father, had been involved in the building of several high-rise buildings on this street. My parents, Uncle Nathan Navaskys family, and their Shapiro cousins all relocated here from the Bronx. We lived in a large four-bedroom apartment which had a dark, long, narrow entrance hall. I recall how my six-year-old cousin, Larry Kaplan, would careen through this hall on a tricycle when he visited. During this time, my brother had been Bar Mitzvahed at Grandpa Israel Mordecais shul in the Bronx. My rst outside walk after dark came on a Saturday evening after an at-home post-Bar-Mitzvah celebration for my brother and his friends. Instead of being shipped to bed, I was required to walk along to the grocery store for some needed sugar. This was my rst view of the night sky and the time when I uttered the oft-quoted family joke, How can you see in the dark? I recall the loud re engines racing down the sharply inclined 161st Street and how frightened I was by the noise. I remember also the kitchen dumbwaiter which was a box-sized interior elevator-like convenience used for food deliveries, packages, or garbage disposal. My brother and sister as teenagers had many friends and lively adventures at this address. These are described
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P.S. stands for Public School. Elementary schools in New York City are all named P.S. followed by a number.

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in detail by my brother, Bernie, in his memoir, Suits to Nuts.

Living in Brooklyn
Jennie, Bernie, and Gertie in about 1910. Summer in the Catskills at a boarding house named Raplanskys.

Ethel and Bernie in about 1919.

We moved to Brooklyn because of two families. On East Broadway, mother had made a life-long friend who after marriage was named Hattie Marks; she and her husband and daughter had moved to Avenue J near 18th Street in Flatbush. By coincidence, fathers cousin, Isaac Levinson, a jeweler from Leeds, England, had purchased a house around the corner from the Marks family. Cousin Isaac Levinson was noted for having a tight-sted second wife, Lena Levinson, and a daughter, Bella, who was a school teacher. He also had a granddaughter, Ethel (named for my grandmother) as well as a second daughter, Ada, and a son, Arthur. Visits to these two homes impressed my parents greatly, and in 1921, father, mother, and the three children were living on a quiet, tree-lined residential street at 1056 East 23rd Street, between Avenue J and K (phone number MIdwood 8-0970). We lived on 23rd Street from 1921 to 1932, and I have a multitude of memories of that period. My rst Brooklyn memory was riding my tricycle in front of our house. I was so pleased because I overheard mother tell a neighbor we had moved in order for me to have that freedom. Our street had about twenty-ve houses, each with a front lawn, a back yard, and a one-car garage at the end of a long driveway. The feeling was unconned and rather private. The neighborhood style of the day was to set a small wooden bench in front of the house, about eight feet from the sidewalk, where one could sit, chat with neighbors, and watch the children. I didnt realize at the time that this was an inelegant outgrowth of the East Side and Bronx stoop sitting. Though inelegant, it was very enjoyable.
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Most of the neighbors were quite cordial, but some, although polite, were very reserved. I realize now that the majority of neighbors had not been born in this country but had rst-generation children. Many of the neighbors had accented speech, and practically all of the foreignborn spoke Yiddish. Of course, mother developed close ties with this group. The native born neighbors were younger and educated through the New York school system. The native born children of both groups socialized easily, as the common bond was that, with the exception of one family, we were all Jewish. As a very young child, I sat at our porch window and watched and waited for the lamplighter. This was a man (presumably a gas company employee) who arrived at dusk and used a long pole to put on the streetlights for the night. Another exciting phenomenon was the ice man. A father and son would arrive with huge blocks of ice and an open truck. The son used huge metal tongs to carry the needed ice to the rear door of the house and into the kitchen ice-box. This would happen every other day or so. Yes, there was the traditional pan under the ice-box to catch the drippings. One can relive this on the Jackie Gleason TV reruns, but fortunately, our ice-box was larger than his. The most fun of all was the hokey-pokey man. I wish I knew the derivation of the term, but it meant a small, yellow, horse-drawn, glass-windowed wagon that would arrive regularly in warm weather to sell Italian ices. This was the picturesque forerunner of the Good Humor trucks of a later time.15
A piece of ice cream wrapped in waxed paper was called a hokeypokey, and an Italian ice cream street vendor was called a hokey-pokey man. One speculation is that the term comes from the Italian ecco un poco, meaning here is a little. Another is that it comes from hocus pocus. Al Tabor, a British bandleader of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, wrote a song for children to dance to named Do the Hokey-Pokey, and he said he got the title from an ice cream vendor he had heard as a boy, calling out Hokey pokey, penny a lump. Have a lick, make you jump.
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Household management was very exciting when I was very young. My mother brewed wine in the cellar (for family consumption only) and preserved special cherry preserves to be taken with hot tea as a panacea for potential colds and sore throats. We had a coffee grinder on the wall to insure the coffee was fresh when it was percolated. (No instant coffee yet.) Grinding the coffee beans was always a fun event. The innovative basement washing machine had an attached hand roller to remove water from the clothes after washing. Black chunks of coal rested in a big open basement bin waiting to be shoveled into a huge white stove. The table was set daily for dinner in our dining room, and my brother, Bernie, gave himself the task of checking the meat and dairy atware to avoid mix-ups.16 As was the fashion, we had what was called sleep-in help until I was about fourteen or fteen. My great love was Annabelle, a wonderful black woman who would entertain me at age six by reading aloud the lurid stories from the newspapers of the day. Another lovely worker was Mary ONeil, who was very exciting as she had many evening gentlemen callers who worked for the police force and visited in uniform. My mother loved this, as she wanted her to marry and be happy, but my father always said so many policemen in our kitchen made it difcult for him to get his favorite post-dinner snack, which was an apple. I recall also Stella Kopek, who worked in our house for a short time. She was always irritable and must have disliked her job. Whenever I use and scour the oversized roasting pan that I inherited from my mother, I recall how angry Stella used to be when she scoured it. There was no drip-dry clothing then, and everything had to be ironed. In our house, that meant a regular weekly visit of Rose Brooks, a lovely woman who worked all day for one of my mothers over-sized lunches and

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Kosher laws require you to have two separate sets of dishes and atware, one for meat and one for dairy.

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Left: Ethel in the Cole.

Below: Charles and Jennie Navasky in the 1920s.

four dollars and ten cents, her salary and carfare for the day. I would like to describe our cars. In 1921, while they lived on 161st Street, the family bought their rst car. Mother, with the help of teen-aged Bernie, selected an open touring car called a Cole. It seated 7 people and had removable, semi-transparent side aps which could be snapped on for protection during bad weather. This car had a running board, which you stepped on before you entered the car and where you might strap luggage by adding a low gate. My mother was the only driver of this vehicle and was in her early thirties when she learned to drive. She remained an excellent, enthusiastic and bold chauffeur for many years. The Cole is the rst car I remember. It didnt take my parents long to replace it with a large, dark green Cadillac sedan, which had room for eight people. In the back half of the car were two folding seats. If you added a board to them, a child could sit there, and that was frequently my seat as I was the youngest. A favorite pastime was to go for a drive. This would usually take us to Coney Island and back or to Long Beach, two favorite destinations. My brothers rst car was a gift for his eighteenth birthday, a blue roadster which had what was called a rumble seat. The rear trunk part of the car had a section which could ip open and provide seating for two. (By denition, a roadster seated two people in the front and two in the rumble seat.) Of course, one had to climb up into this famous rumble seat and be prepared to feel wind, rain or possibly falling debris. I went to a wonderful elementary school called P.S. 193, on Avenue L and Bedford Avenue. It is still in existence and is called the Gil Hodges School, after the ball player. At that time, elementary school grades were divided into A and B. For example, in September you might be in 1A (rst half of rst grade) and in February you would promoted to 1B (second half of rst grade). I started school at P.S. 152 on Glenwood Road while the
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other school was being completed, and I entered P.S. 193 in class 1B. I never went to nursery school or kindergarten, as it was not the fashion of the period. I do well recall my rst day at P.S. 152. I was to enter school with a neighboring boy, Leon Bobrow. Our mothers had reasoned that the rst day of school would be too hectic for us and delivered us to the ofce of P.S. 152 on the second school day. Obviously, the school had to accept us but for some reason didnt know where to place us. They found two seats for Leon and me in the detention room, where about thirty children were sitting at desks with clasped hands and book pasters over their mouths to remind them to remain quiet. This on the second school day! I frequently related this story to my own students in later years, and they all had the same reaction: Were they dumb! They should have torn the pasters off! At P.S. 193, my class was a most homogeneous group. The class had about fty children, most of whom were Jewish. We were devoted to our non-Jewish classmates, and I remember some of their names. Freddy Smith was a small boy with a magnicent singing voice, Dorothy Gaffney was the daughter of one of the teachers, and Muriel Sievers became a good friend. All the students lived within a few blocks of the school, and we went home for lunch every day. Our mothers were all at home and prided themselves on providing a huge - and, incidentally, quite delicious - meal. My favorite midday meal consisted of potato pancakes and canned peaches. I still love both foods. My classmates all tried hard, were eager to learn, and wanted to excel in school work. Generally, the children were extremely well behaved and cooperative. In the upper grades, the girls had cooking classes, and it was there that I learned to line a garbage pail with newspapers. I also got a head start on my reputation as a non-cook by bringing home the tapioca pudding we made in class one day. That pudding was a family joke for many years, as only my two-year-old nephew, Ira Gamsa, would touch it.
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I had two girlfriends on our block, the Rosenberg girls. They were younger, and I intuitively realized that I was a better student than either of them. However, they were available, and we played together. I dont recall all of our activities, but we played potsy17 (boxes on the sidewalk) and hide and seek; we jumped rope and leaped over the low bushes close to the street. We never left our block and stayed within the four house limits of our two residences. After a while, we learned to roller skate together. A major event was our rst radio complete with its own loud speaker horn, built completely by my brother. We were so thrilled and proud! My brother describes his radio building activity in his autobiography, Suits to Nuts. We kept the radio on our porch in keeping with its casual porch wicker dcor. When it got too cold to sit there during the winter, we had a problem, but no one suggested bringing the radio into the warmer part of the house. With this radio, my father and I would listen together to a favorite, Jewish-oriented soap opera called The Rise of the Goldbergs. It related well to new and rst generation Americans. As a teenager, my brother, Bernie, organized a band which practiced in our house. He did magic tricks and held magic shows. He was a ne brother for a youngster and would always do exciting things. His kite ying was legendary on our street, and we have a snapshot of him standing on the roof of our garage with a kite, but I dont recall why. Many girls would telephone him, when he was a teenager, and they usually phoned at dinner hour, causing my mother to be upset because dinner was interrupted. I must mention my piano lessons. My sister had studied piano with Max Willerson, had played in his students concerts in Carnegie Hall, and was a dedicated

17

Potsy is a New York name for the childrens game of hopscotch. Players toss a small object into one section after another of a gure drawn on the ground, and after each toss, they hop from section to section to pick up the object.

33

Above: Ethel with the Rosenberg girls. Below: Bernie in the 1920s.

pianist. My brother was a natural musician who played the banjo as a teenager but later learned and played several instruments by ear or instinct. Im sure some practice was involved. With this family history, I was in line for piano lessons by a patient and pleasant man, a Mr. Harold Levine. We owned an upright Sobiners piano. No one had really explained to me the reason for or value of practice, as Winton Marsalis has done recently on TV. I banged away for about a year or two, and then my lessons stopped. When I was in high school and we had a new baby grand piano, my dear friend Hannah Levin Zauderer and I learned a method of using base chords that helped us play the popular tunes of the day. We played a lot and enjoyed it. I believe this was the Wynn method, a good plan. I recall in great detail the day my sister, Gertie, following the fashion of the times, decided to elope with my fathers premier salesman, Billy Gamsa. The date was January 2nd. I was about ve and a half years old. Suddenly, my mother was screaming and crying because my sister had left the house to go to work at my fathers plant but had not shown up. I am sure she envisioned kidnapping, rape, or death, but I was too young to realize that. When I had joined in with the screaming and had thrown myself on the oor, my mother composed herself in order to calm me. Shortly after that reprieve, the phone call arrived stating that the number one salesman was absent as well. It didnt take my folks long to gure out the sequence of events. They were relieved and happy to receive a phone call from Chicago from the newlyweds on January 3rd. I, of course, had been a witness to all the planning when the newlyweds had sat together on our sofa in our living room on New Years Eve, speaking quietly while I played in the same room and unknowingly watched them conspiring.

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Charles Navasky
My father, Charles Navasky, was a gentle and quiet man who was very affectionate and dearly loved his family. He relished a good joke and had a ne sense of humor. He was bright and hard working and enjoyed working all his life. Our family had moved to Washington Heights from the Bronx when I was very young, but I do not recall any event involving my father until my parents bought their own home in Flatbush in Brooklyn. My father had become a manufacturer of mens clothing some time after the move to the Bronx, and he had taken his brother Nathan into the business. The partnership ended in years of animosity when Nathan insisted his three grown sons be accepted as equal partners in the business. When necessary, it was his lifestyle to travel as a salesman (he called it going on the road) whenever business needed a boost. This was not the pattern at the time of the move to Flatbush. He was involved rather with strikes, union demands, cutters (factory workers who were extremely independent), salesmen (handsome young men who were regularly invited to our home for dinner), and in-laws who consulted him looking for business advice or subsidies when they came to dinner on Sundays. He was a respected member of the community. During my early school years, my mother insisted that my father learn two social graces, to dance and to drive. Not in Leeds, nor on Mulberry Street, nor on First Avenue, nor in the Bronx elevated, had my father been exposed to the art of social dancing. My mother wanted my father to learn to dance so that they could enjoy the various synagogue functions and affairs they were attending together. The recommendation of my Aunt Essie brought Miss Astrid to the rescue. She was a patrician client of my aunts cleaning store who was a resident of the then

Charles Navasky

36

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restricted community of Sea Gate.18 Miss Astrid was to instruct my father, and on the same visit, she was to drill me in social dancing also, with the well publicized goal of making me less clumsy and awkward. Superior housekeeping in pre-air-conditioned days required the use of special summer carpets known colloquially as crocks rugs. They were probably straw, and luckily our living room rug was patterned in alternating gray and green nine inch squares. What a lucky opportunity for the two dancing students to practice the box step, using four squares as our unit. My father practiced diligently with Miss Astrid before the family audience, which gave the lesson the air of a tennis match. I always felt his failure was due to Miss Astrids height and his 5-foot-4-inch stature. Busy looking up at her, he never concentrated on his footwork, and therefore he never danced at any party during his lifetime. It seems somehow a reflection of the times that father never practiced with me, another learner, or with mother, who was an accomplished dancer. My family had owned an automobile by 1920, and in the style of the day, a driver or chauffeur was common. My earliest recollection of my mother puts her behind the drivers wheel when no chauffeur was available. I recall the aura of a miraculous phenomenon surrounding her rather unusual ability to drive a car. For all his business acumen and success, my father was not able to relate to driving his car. There were driving permits, driving lessons, a new open Cole touring car, instructions from my brother who drove up and down the driveway at age 13, and license plates with special digits processed by a mythical Billy Weiner at the license bureau, but despite all this, mastery remained elusive. My sisters new husband shared this limitation. What a pair they were!
18

Sea Gate is a gated community on the western edge of Coney Island, which is the southernmost part of Brooklyn.
38

One quiet weekend, both men determined to attempt solo drives around the block. The younger man drove rst and returned, breathless, to park the car in front of our house. I dont believe he ever drove again. My father was unfortunate in driving last, as he felt obligated to maneuver the car down our long grass-lined driveway into a narrow single garage. Our family support team ung open the two garage doors, but father did not brake quickly enough to avoid battering and displacing part of the back garage wall. The garage was never completely insulated from the winter winds after that, and my father excused himself from any attempt to drive again. It became his pleasure to sit next to the driver on any subsequent excursion and to endlessly suggest exploring unknown and unpaved short-cuts in deance of all pre-planned routes. My father had a life-long obsession with onions and mystery magazines. He loved them both. Our house was littered with paperback, comic-booksize magazines with brightly covered covers depicting variations of violence and crime. The inside paper was of poor quality, as was the print, but the mystery was the thing that was my fathers relaxation. The onions came under the heading of folk medicine, which might have had some basis in fact. My father touted the onion as his cure for the common cold. He would put on a bathrobe, slice a large onion half onto a plate, and proceed to walk around with the onion plate and his mystery magazines until he felt better. I think he ate part of the onion and let the tear-inducing quality of the open onion attack and possibly constrict his nasal membranes. It relieved the discomfort to have his private cure for a prevalent complaint. My father greatly enjoyed a personal joke. When I was to be married, he advised me that under no circumstances would he consider wearing the then traditional top hat or high hat of the father of the bride. He assured me that on my wedding day, when he would escort me down the aisle in my elegant white dress, he would be wearing his
39

dark felt fedora. During our six months of discussions, the compromise worked out was that he would buy a new fedora for my party. The dilemma was pleasantly solved for me. The new hat arrived, he opened the box on the day of the wedding, and it did have a top hat in it. That hat, along with about ten others in the wedding party, made wonderful targets for the January snowballs of the neighborhood boys, who, unlike my Dad, really did love opera hats. Such great targets! Everyone called my father Charlie, employees, neighbors, tradesmen, and his grandchildren. He was friendly and chatty with his family, business associates and cousins, and hospitable to the many friends we three children brought into the house. He was not a casual or social conversationalist. When he traveled for business and then came home, he would be glad to sit, read the newspaper, eat a thinly sliced apple and talk very little much of the time. Otherwise, his degree of sociability depended on his closeness to the people around him.

Jennie Navasky
How do you write about your mother? I think one way would be to say my mothers motto was excelsior (upwards and onwards) even though she might only have known that word to mean wood shavings used to protect breakable packages. She always aimed to achieve what was currently most desirable in housing, neighborhoods, medical care, recreation, clothing, physical appearance, education, family life, and friends. Her aim was to do better. Hard work, physical effort, and early hours did not deter her. She very much regretted and resented the fact that her parents had not continued her schooling in America. She often told me that she would have studied law if she had been given the chance, and well past her 80th birthday, she still lamented this lost opportunity. I recall a visit with mother and Aunt Essie when they both deplored their lost opportunities. Mother loved the
41

Jennie Navasky on Beach 31 Street, Rockaway, in about 1950

40

law, but Aunt Essie loved music, piano, and singing. Mother was a combination of energy and enthusiasm. As an example of mothers high spirits, she made a wager with some women friends that she would be bold enough to kiss the 23 or 24-year-old neighborhood rabbi directly on the lips. This obviously secured her position in the area. She attended luncheons, made large luncheon parties for the women she met, and shopped and cooked and served her children and sisters and brothers with great gusto. All her life, she remained a generous and nurturing cook, hostess, and matchmaker. After my sisters marriage to William Gamsa, the three grandchildren (Theda, Vivian, and Ira) were a daily part of the household, as were my brother, Bernie, his wife, Helen, and their two children, Eddie and Elaine. Mother loved to cook, serve, and entertain, and she used this talent freely. Young and old alike were invited for match-making purposes and lunches and dinners. To develop friendships was a way of life with her. She learned to play gin in her later years and was probably the only hostess in the country serving potato pancakes, noodle pudding, or tegelach (holiday honey candy) to a steady card game. When her rst granddaughter, Theda, was married, we would go to her home for cooking demonstrations and the dictated recipes had to be written as spoken, so mother could be sure we would not be confused. She was sent to a friendly dental specialist a few years before her death and succeeded in closing down the appointment schedule for an hour by arriving one day via taxi with a tray of hot potato pancakes and trimmings, because the doctor was so gracious to her. There was a delectable recipe for lemon meringue pie which could only be completed by having mother stretch out full length with her face to the oven door to check the nal browning process. All her food projects were a great success. Mothers personality was sunny, friendly, and peopleoriented, and she made friends wherever she went. She died in July of 1972 about fteen weeks after she suffered a stroke. As it was her ever expressed and great wish
42

never to be sent to a nursing home, she was kept in her apartment on West 74th Street during her nal illness. Mother was buried in a cousins plot next to her husband at Mount Lebanon Cemetery. We thought mother was 85 when she died but careful recomputation told us that she might have been 86.19 That was just like mother - one step ahead of all of us.

19

According to the U.S. Social Security Death Index, Jennie Navasky was born on September 27, 1886, and died in July of 1972, which would make her two months short of 86 when she died, but according to her petition for naturalization (see p. 13), she was born on September 27, 1887.
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The Siegel Family

Early childhood recollections of Brooklyn include the Siegel family of Rugby Road. My parents had met the Siegel family around 1920, when they were renters at the summer bungalows on Beach 31St Street in Edgemere, New York, owned by Nathan Siegel and a partner named Fogelson. When my family moved to Flatbush, my mother developed a social relationship with Ida Siegel, whom she called Mrs. Siegel. As a child, I knew this family to be hospitable, charitable, and devoted to each other. Nathan Siegel liked children. My one conversation with him was a kindness on his part and took place in May of 1931, when he was a guest at my brothers wedding. In the style of the era, I was an unsophisticated school girl dressed in high heels to elongate my chubby appearance. Nathan Siegel noticed my difculty in maneuvering some marble steps in the unaccustomed heels and exchanged several friendly words with me about my shoes.

Nathan Siegel
Nathan Siegel was born in Bialystok,20 Poland, on January 15, 1872. His parents were Bryna Gittel and Reb Moshe David Pesvesniansky. His Hebrew name was Nachman Ben Moshe David Halevi.21 Nathan was the youngest of their children. His older sister was Riva (later Mrs. Friedberg). His brother Eliezer became the father of the Urieli family of Israel, cousins David, Menachem, Simcha, Ariel, and Gitta.

Nathan Siegel

20

According to the Russian census of 1897, Bialystok had 41,900 Jewish residents, about 63 percent of its total population of 66,000. 21 Halevi means that he was a Levite, a member of the priestly tribe of Levi.
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Nathans father, Moshe David, was a learned and literate Torah scribe who ran a yeshiva (or academy) in Bialystok. The family story is that he was a Chassidic Jew, but we cannot verify this. Nathan would relate that, when he was six years old, he might be awakened to impress a visitor with a Talmudic interpretation, an esteemed talent in any Jewish household. Nathans instruction in Hebrew and Yiddish by his father started when he was very young. Nathans mother, Bryna Gittel, died when he was two years old. His father died eight years later in 1882, when he was ten years old. Nathan was cared for by his sister, Riva, and according to Hebrew tradition for orphans, Nathan was a Bar Mitzvah at twelve. At twelve, Nathan was tutoring adults in Torah, Hebrew, and Yiddish as his rst paid work. Nathan moved to Riga, Latvia, in 1886 to remain with his sister, Riva, when she married into the Friedberg family there. When he was a teen-ager, Nathan went to work at the army boot factory owned by his rst cousin, Max Hershfeld. In this Riga factory, he was taught pattern making for boots and absorbed many business skills. Nathan remained at the factory until he was about twenty or twenty-one. During this period, a friend named Lazar Wesnik introduced Nathan to his sister, Ida. She became Nathans sweetheart and later his wife. A low induction number in the Russian army lottery induced Nathan to sail for America in 1893, changing his name to Siegel when he arrived.22 In traditional immigrant survival style, Nathan sought out a family member to live with, Samuel Rubin, a twenty-three year old maternal cousin who was the owner of a shoe store in Philadelphia. Nathan settled himself in Samuels apartment above the store, and he worked at making wire hat frames for the large hats which were the female fashion of the day. When
The name Siegel is an abbreviation for the Hebrew sgan leviim, which means deputy of the Levites. He chose the name because he was a Levi.
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22

Samuel Rubin decided to marry, Nathan was asked to relocate. The move out of Samuel Rubins house was a most cordial separation; in the 1920s, Louis Rubin, who was Samuels rst cousin, married Etta Siegel, Nathans second child. He returned to the Lower East Side of New York, where he lived in the apartment of Yetta Hirshfeld Rosenfeld and her family. She was his rst cousin and the married sister of Max Hirshfeld, at whose factory he had worked in Riga. Nathan, who was in his early twenties, supported himself as a cigar maker, a trade that deeply offended his esthetic sense. Nathan sent for his sweetheart, Ida, who arrived on October 5, 1895, and he brought her to live in the Rosenfeld apartment with his cousins. It is a family story that, when Nathan presented himself at Ellis Island to claim Ida Wesnik, the immigrant aid representative interrogated him sternly as to the seriousness of his marital intentions. According to another family story, Ida arrived at Ellis Island wearing a white straw homburg hat, which Nathan threw in the river. The following year, 1896, Idas mother, Sarah Leah Wesnik, migrated to America, shortly before her daughters wedding. Sarah Leah set up a home for herself at 145 Humbolt Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Elegant engagement announcements soon went into the mail. After their wedding in 1897, the bride and groom made their home with Idas mother in Williamsburg. Nathan and Ida were in business together even before they were married. Ida had worked at knitting machines in Riga and learned to use at hand machines at her rst New York job, which lasted six months after her arrival. In 1896, Nathan and Ida together bought a used at knitting machine, which was a hand machine. The owner of this used machine, purchased for $50, was an orthodox gentleman named Rabovin, who was too pious to shake hands with the female purchaser. Ida operated the machine during the day, and Nathan joined her after his own work day as a hand winder of woolen spools. In 1898, the year after their marriage, their factory
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Above: 69 Rugby Road as it looks today. You can still see that this was originally a stately Victorian house, though later owners enclosed the porch and added a chain-link fence. Below: This Williamsburg factory building is similar to Nathan Siegels factory at 20 Bogart Street, which no longer exists.

operation, consisting of eight knitting machines manned by eight employees, was a full-time business, called the Williamsburg Knitting Mills. The rst business address was on Meserole Street in Williamsburg, where the young couple and Idas mother lived above the shop. Their rst two children, David and Etta, were born here. The second child, Etta, was born on her parents fourth wedding anniversary, January 3, 1901. In 1903, Nathan purchased a large building at 202 Varet Street. This former saloon building was converted into a factory. A third child, Rose, was born here in the family apartment above the place of business. In 1907, Nathan became the owner of a multi-story factory building at 20 Bogart Street. In the same year, 1907, Nathan bought a family house at 19 Rock Street in Williamsburg. Nathan at that time was the head of a household consisting of his wife, his mother-in-law, one son, and two daughters. He was then around thirty-ve years old. Two younger sons, Milton and Leon, were born in this home on Rock Street. A combination of business and family interests involved Nathan in additional real estate ventures. From 1907 to 1915, the Siegel family lived on Rock Street in Williamsburg. In 1915, when he purchased a large Victorian house at 69 Rugby Road in Flatbush, Nathan and Ida had ve children ranging in age from seventeen to two. Another business venture involved building fortyeight summer cottages on Beach 31st Street in Edgemere, New York. The land was owned by a Mr. Fogelson, and Nathan provided the nancing. The east side of 31st Street was developed rst, in 1919, followed by the west side of 31st Street and Brookhaven Road. In addition to the cottages, the development included a two-story building on Brookhaven Road, with an apartment above store fronts, used through the 1950s as a corner grocery store and a candy store that operated during the summer only. Another storefront had its windows painted yellow for privacy, and was used as the shop of the caretaker James Thompson, who had also been the Siegel family
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Above: The bungalows on Beach 31 Street in the 1970s. The street is empty because it is off-season. There were also bungalows behind each of these rows of bungalows and on Brookhaven Avenue (background). Below: James Thompsons shop in the row of store fronts on Brookhaven Ave. Notice the apartment above and the FAr Rockaway 7 phone number.

chauffeur. These cottages were always known, until they were dismantled in 1974, as the bungalows. Through boom seasons and otherwise, this property was faithfully managed by Nathan and his offspring. A multi-bedroom summer home encircled by an open verandah on over-sized grounds was built in 1920 in Far Rockaway, New York, less than a mile from the bungalows. Strange to realize that the original moving van from Brooklyn was a horse and wagon routed through Queens. The summer home was used by the parents, the married children and their offspring for about thirty years. It was the locale of countless dinners, parties, and entertainment for many groups of friends. The 1915 move to Flatbush when he was in his early forties reinforced Nathans involvement in community affairs. He was a founder and life-long supporter of a conservative synagogue, Congregation Shaare Torah of Brooklyn, originally located on Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, adjoining Erasmus Hall High School. Nathans fondness for children led him to become the School Board chairman at his synagogue. In the interests of his two younger sons, he was proud to bring the rst Jewish Boy Scout unit to Flatbush. As a successful and prosperous business man, Nathan became an organizer of the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and was a generous donor to many charities. He never forgot his home city, Bialystok, and contributed time and nancial support to a Lower East Side senior residence named the Bialystoker Bikur Cholim, which later became the Bialystok Home for the Aged.23 Nathan was a man of definite opinions. In the Rugby Road household, devoted to sociability, informal get-togethers, spontaneous discussions, and debates, Nathans overt winding of his embossed gold watch,

23

Bikur Cholim literally means visiting the sick, which the Talmud says is a mitzvah (commandment). It is used colloquially to refer to many activities performed to support and comfort people who are ill or homebound. The Bialystock Home for the Aged closed in 2011.
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latching of the windows, and folding of the extra chairs in the living room were well recognized signals to depart. In the later 1920s, Nathan and Ida enjoyed seasonal winter vacations in Florida. En route to Miami in 1931, Nathan suffered a mild stroke on the train. This was complicated by a subsequent and more severe seizure in his hotel room. Despite the attentions of the doctor who arrived from New York to escort him home by boat and the intense devotion and home care of his family, Nathan became a wheel chair patient. He died in August 1932, six months after his fty-ninth birthday. He is buried in the Siegel family plot in the Shaare Torah section of Mt. Lebanon Cemetery, on the border between Brooklyn and Queens.

Ida Wesnik Siegel

The story of Ida Siegel is tightly interwoven with the lives of her husband, children, and mother. Ida Wesnik Siegel was born in Rezan, a small community near Riga, Latvia, in August 1878 to Sarah Leah and David Mordechai Weschenefsky. She had two older brothers and two older sisters with whom she maintained a lifelong attachment. Idas father, David Mordechai, the owner of a leather tannery, was a very tall man who died very young. Ida then moved with her mother to Riga to live with the oldest child in her family, a brother named Yankov Lieb, a factory owner in Riga. As Riga was a manufacturing city, Ida became a knitting machine operator in her early teen years.24 It was Idas second brother, Lazar, who introduced her to Nathan Siegel. In 1895, some two years after Nathan departed for America, Ida was adventurous enough to leave her family in Riga and to face the steerage trip to America and the rigors of Ellis Island in order to be reunited with

Ida Wesnik Siegel at the Rugby Road house in 1943

24

According to the Russian census of 1897, Riga had over 20,000 Jewish residents, about 9 percent of its total population.
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Nathan and Ida Siegel in 1923.

Nathan, Ida, Leon, and Milton Siegel in Atlantic City. It was common to ride on the boardwalk in wheeled wicker chairs like this one.

her sweetheart, Nathan, who had sent for her. Her rst home was the family apartment of her ancs cousin, Yetta H. Rosenfeld, on the Lower East Side. In 1897, Ida and Nathan were married from her mothers Williamsburg apartment, when Ida was not quite nineteen years old. Ida led an amazingly active and productive existence from 1897 to 1915. She raised ve children with the help of her mother and was an active participant, together with her husband, in a large, successful business. In 1915, when Idas mother died and the family moved to Rugby Road, Ida retired from the family rm. Idas children were David, Etta, Rose, Milton, and Leon. Each child was cherished and each matured into a bright and distinctive individual. Their curly hair and cleft chins, a genetic stamp from their father, were the main physical traits that all ve children shared. The ve children were outgoing and related very well to people. Idas ve children and their families provided her with many reasons to be proud and happy. Her three sons were excellent students. The exceptionally personable oldest son, David, was a graduate of New York University, and her younger sons, Milton and Leon, were graduates of Columbia College and Columbia Law School. The two daughters, Etta and Rose, married at early ages and lived near enough to be close and loving companions. Idas rst son and older son-in-law were partners with her husband in their family business. In later years, managing this business became the responsibility of the youngest son, Leon, who ran it until it closed in the late 1950s. Ida was involved with and attended the weddings of each of her children. She had the experience of being loved and admired by the four grandchildren born during her lifetime, Elaine Rubin, Robert Rubin, Doris Goldstein, and Leonard Siegel, the offspring of Idas rst three children. Ida Siegel lived for almost thirty years on Rugby Road, surrounded by family, friends, extended family, charity coworkers, good neighbors, and synagogue co-worshippers.

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Nathan and Ida Siegel at Miami Beach in 1928.

Ida Siegel at her summer house in Far Rockaway, with Milton and Ethel Navasky Siegel, on Labor Day of 1942.

Hospitality and friendliness were the hallmarks of her household. Idas annual birthday lawn party at her summer home in Far Rockaway was a major social event anticipated and enjoyed by a huge circle of family and friends. The music and food on the large, lanterned lawn was highlighted by the rolling out of the beer barrel, an exciting touch during the prohibition era. Ida Siegel was a handsome, fair-complexioned woman of medium build whose major impact on others was her exceptional graciousness, gentleness, and sweetness of manner. It was a rule of her life to offer discreet personal or nancial assistance where needed and to support as many organized charities as she could. Her great dedication was to the aged and inrm at the Brooklyn Hebrew Home and Hospital for the Aged. I went to the hospital ward area there with her when she visited a non-ambulatory former compatriot from Rezan. I remember her riveted attention and sincere compassion and the dignity with which she cloaked the patient as she comforted her. Ida suffered two major disasters during her lifetime. The rst was the long illness and death of her husband when she was about fty-three years old. The second tragedy involved her thirty-eight year old son, David, who in 1936 was shot and killed in his car by an unknown assailant for the money he was carrying from a bank to the family factory for payroll purposes. In later years, Ida also endured the induction of her two younger sons into military service at the start of World War II. Harsh experience did not erode her positive attitudes, and Ida Siegel remained charming, upbeat, and delightful throughout her life. She died unexpectedly of a heart attack in her Rugby Road home on December 18, 1944, in the arms of her daughter Etta and the presence of her daughter Rose. She is buried in the Siegel family plot in the Shaare Torah section of Mt. Lebanon Cemetery, on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, New York.
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Sarah Leah Weschenefsky

Sarah Leah Weschenefsky was a woman who devoted her life in America to supervising the household and the ve children of her youngest daughter, Ida. She is the source of many cousins who were involved with the family of Ida and Nathan Siegel. Sarah Leah was a tiny, fair-haired woman from Rezan, Latvia. Her husband, Moshe David the leather tanner, died of asthma, presumably caused by his occupation. The remarriage of Moshe Davids father in Latvia provided the ancestry of the Slass cousins, the cousins from Buffalo, and of the late Etta Levy, all familiar gures in the family constellation. Sarah and Moshe David had seven children of whom ve survived.

Yankov Lieb, a successful entrepreneur in Riga, never

left Latvia. Daughter Rachel married into a Levy family and lived in England for seventeen years until 1907, when her family came to America. She was the mother of the Levy cousins, Jack, Jerry, Willie, and Bessie. Minnie Wesnik Hendler, the second daughter, eventually settled in Carbondale, Pennsylvania.25 Lazar Wesnik, the fourth child, was an exceptionally pleasant and congenial gentleman in his later years. As a young husband and father, Lazar had left his family in Latvia in 1903 and ventured to South Africa to become an ostrich feather merchant. Sarah Leah eventually arranged for him to be reunited with his family in the United States. Vigorous and strong-minded are the words to describe Sarah Leah. She started her life in America with Nathan and Ida in 1897. She went with them from Humboldt
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Street to Meserole Street to Varet Street and then spent seven happy years supervising the growing family on Rock Street with the assistance of sleep-in help while Ida spent her days at the family factory. It was at Rock Street that she took on the more convenient name of Mrs. Siegel. Sarah Leah was hard working and pious. It was her pleasure to attend Sabbath services regularly. In Williamsburg, she attended the Moore Street synagogue and the First Romanian synagogue on Third Avenue. She shared a bedroom with her loving granddaughter Etta, who has described how she would help dress her grandmother for services by tying her shoe laces and arranging the lace cap over her sheitel, the wig worn by an orthodox Jewess. Sarah Leah was devoted to all her children and grandchildren. When the Siegel children became a little older, their parents used to attend the Jewish theater or the opera on Saturday evenings. Then the grandmother would invite her other Levy grandchildren to spend a sociable evening with her and their cousins. Sarah Leah was seventy-four years old when she died suddenly at a rented summer home in the Rockaways in the summer of 1915. She is buried at the Old Mount Judah Cemetery in Queens. Many surrounding tombstones carry pictures of the deceased, but Sarah Leah provided herself with a different memorial. The iron gates which indicate the plots of the First Romanian Society, Sarah Leahs place of worship, are inscribed as a donation by Ida and Nathan Siegel, because Sarah Leah had requested that inscription during her lifetime.

According to Census Bureau records, Minnie was born in 1874, immigrated to the United States in 1899, and was living with Nathan and Ida Siegels family at the time of the 1900 census.
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Milton Siegel
I would like Benedict and Matthew to know about their grandfather, Milton Siegel, father of Chuck Siegel and Ellen Ulrich. Milton Siegel, the fourth child of Ida and Nathan Siegel, was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1910. He was raised in a loving family of parents, two brothers (David and Leon) and two older sisters (Etta and Rose). All of them were cared for by their doting maternal grandmother, Sarah Leah Wesnik, as their parents worked daily at their thriving business, the Williamsburg Knitting Mills. In 1915, the Siegel family moved to 69 Rugby Road in Flatbush. Milton and his brother Leon (younger by three years) attended P.S. 139 and Erasmus Hall High School. They went to Camp Lenox in Massachusetts, together with my brother Bernie. Milton and Leon both graduated from Columbia College and Columbia Law School. Milton was very interested in sports and as a youngster and teenager spent many hours playing ball at the Parade Grounds, a local park area near his house. The ve Siegel children were devoted to each other and spent a great deal of time together. Milton and Leon were such close friends to each other that their mother pronounced them twins born three years apart. Milton had considered studying medicine but his father had chosen law for him as it required less time to prepare and less tuition. After Milton graduated from law school in 1932, he went into private practice with a classmate, Stanley Boriss. They formed the rm of Siegel and Boriss at 292 Madison Avenue in New York City, where they specialized in real estate law. The ofce was impressive, as it was a spacious suite which included a library, two private ofces, two
61

Milton Siegel in 1930 (college graduation picture)

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Milton Siegel in the law ofce on Madison Avenue that he shared with Stanley Boriss.

Milton Siegel with his son Chuck, on Beach 31st Street, Rockaway, May 10, 1947.

women secretaries, and a client who was a real estate entrepreneur named Harry Weinstein. Buckminster Fuller, famous for inventing the geodesic dome, frequented their library during low periods of his own career. This law rm was dissolved at the start of World War II, when both partners enlisted in the army. Stanley Boriss remained in the service and never returned to New York. Milton Siegel volunteered to enlist in US Army in 1941. He served in the Medical Administration Corps (MAC) at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey in 1942 and later served at the Port of Embarkation in Taunton, Massachusetts. He went to Ofcers Candidate School (OCS) at Camp Berkeley in Texas and at the end of the war served on a hospital ship to Naples, Italy, in 1945-6. I note on Miltons discharge papers a line that states Character and written next to it is the word excellent. This was written in 1946 and well summarizes his life style. Milton was devoted to and solicitous of his parents, his siblings, his wife, his children, and his in-laws. He was a great and life-long fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers.26 Every sporting event in the United States or abroad was of vital interest to him. Milton was an excellent dancer, a powerful swimmer, a competent bridge player, and an able driver of every automobile he owned. Milton was a close and faithful friend to James Thompson, a man who originally worked as the family chauffeur on Rugby Road and later became the superintendent of the Siegel family bungalow property on Beach 31st Street in Edgemere, New York. They spent much time buddying together while listening to radio broadcasts of baseball games in the bungalow repair shop on Brookhaven Avenue in Edgemere. Another great passion for Milton was his afliation with the now defunct Congregation Shaare Torah of Flatbush, a

26

He became a New York Mets fan when the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles after the 1957 baseball season.
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Above: Shaare Torah in the early 1970s. The sanctury (foreground) was completed in 1959, in time for the bar mitzvahs of the post-war baby boomers. The community center (backround), where the baby boomers went to Hebrew school, was completed in the early 1950s. Milton Siegel was on the building committee that supervised design and construction of both. Below: With his siblings in the late 1960s. Left to right: Milton Siegel, Rose Goldstein, Etta Rubin Seltzer, Leon Siegel.

synagogue where his father had been a founding member. Milton gave much time, energy, and free legal advice to this organization, which thrived from around World War I until 1975, when neighborhood demographics changed. Miltons specialty was good deeds and good works. He was very caring of my mother, Jennie Navasky, and spent a great deal of time helping and advising relatives and friends in difculty. Milton was an excellent and gifted speaker and was the chairperson of many synagogue events. He was honored many times by these associates and was well respected in all his business afliations. Good character was an important matter to him. Milton died on April 29, 1972, on what was a typical Saturday for him. He attended Saturday morning synagogue services and then went to a local Chinese restaurant on Church Avenue for lunch.27 While eating at a table in this restaurant, he suffered his second heart attack and died. Milton was sixty-two years old.

27

Kees Chinese Restaurant at Church Avenue and East 21st Street, just down the street from Shaare Torah at Albemarle Road and East 21st Street.
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Appendix 1: Bernie Navaskys Family History

This appendix includes additional information about the history of the Navasky family, based on Bernard Navaskys memoir, Suits to Nuts (Owings Mills, Maryland, Watermark Press, 1991).

Bernie and Charles Navasky in 1943

The ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews of eastern Europe lived in Rome and other parts of Italy after the Romans exiled the Jews from Israel in 135 AD. After the fall of Rome to barbarian invaders, they moved northward to Germany, where they began to speak Yiddish, a language based largely on medieval German. In the 1300s, the Germans blamed the Jews for the black plague, and many Jews ed eastward to Poland to escape persecution, where they were joined by Jews eeing from other parts of Europe. The golden age of Polish Jewry began under Sigismund I (15061548), as Polish aristocrats used Jews to administer their lands and collect taxes, making Jews the middle class in a nation of aristocrats and peasants. The earliest known ancestor of the Navasky family, born in the mid-1700s, was named Zev, and was called Reb Velvel. Zev is Hebrew for wolf and is a common Hebrew name; Velvel is the Yiddish diminutive of Wolf, which is a common German name. Zevs family had settled on the Neva River, after receiving a land grant from the Radziwill family. Zevs eldest son, Herschel, was born in 1793. When he reached the age of 17, he was eligible for conscription in the Czars army, and families in the Russian empire were required to adopt a family name if any member was eligible for conscription. Because they lived near the Neva River, the family adopted the name Nevasier. The sufx -er is used in German and Yiddish to mean someone who
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comes from a location; a Nevasier is someone from the Neva, as a Berliner is someone from Berlin.28 Herschel married when he was in his mid-twenties, and he had three sons. He was known for being charitable. He died in 1878 at age 85. (Though there is little genealogical information, it seems that Herschel had a brother whose sons came to America and formed the Navasky family of Westport, Connecticut, and the Naviasky family of Baltimore.) Herschels son Avrom29 was a talmudic student and part-time rabbi. In 1864, he married Ethel Levinson, who attended the synagogue where he conducted services. They had four sons. Barnett (Beryl30) was born in 1865. Nathan (Nachum) was born in 1867. Charles (Yechiel) was born in 1878. David was born in 1880. Avrom disappeared; it is rumored, Bernie says, that he was involved in a situation and may have committed suicide. Ethel used money that was left to her by Herschel and that she had made by selling dry goods to emigrate to England with her four children in 1884. After spending a year in Leeds, England, Ethel emigrated to America in 1885; she could only afford to take Charles and David with her, and the two older sons planned to join her later. Ethel spoke little English. When they arrived at Ellis Island, she told the immigration ofcials that her name was Nevasier, but when the ofcials questioned her and learned that she came from Russia, they assumed that her name had to end with sky, and they gave her the name Neviasky.31

We have learned that the family name comes from the Neviaza River in Kovno, Lithuania, not from the Neva River in St. Petersburg, Russia, and that we are descended from Reb Velvels younger son, Faivel, rather than his eldest son, Herschel. See Appendix 2. 29 Called Avraham in the main text. Nathan Navaskys tombstone gives his Hebrew name as Nachum ben Avraham Shmuel, so Avraham must be the correct rst name; Shmuel was the middle name. 30 In the main text, he is called Berchik, which is the Russian diminutive of Beryl. He took the name Barnett after moving to England. 31 The cousins who remained in England were named Naviasky,and the
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28

Nathan came to America in 1886 and lived with his mother and brothers on the Lower East Side, but Barnett remained in England. The family soon saved enough money to open a trimming store on Second Avenue, near where they lived.32 Charles and Nathan worked in the trimming store, and in later years, Charles often told stories about selling shoe-laces on the streets and working in his mothers store as a boy. Nathan married his cousin, Fanny Levinson, in 1891. Their children were Pauline (born 1892), Macy (born 1895), Abe (born 1897), Alex (1900) and Madeline (1904). Charles Neviasky married Jennie Wilner in 1903, when he was twenty-ve and she was seventeen. Their daughter, Gertrude, was born in September, 1905, when they lived at 20th Street and Second Avenue. Their son, Bernard, was born in September, 1908, when they lived at 1053 Prospect Avenue in the Bronx. Jennies father, Isaac Wilner, had married Ida Rosenzweig,33 and their children, in order of age, were Nathan, Joseph, Abe, Henry, Annie, Sam, Jennie, Esther (called Essie) and Charles. Ike Phillips, of the family that manufactured Van Heusen shirts, was married to a sister of Ida, and he gave all the sons jobs as shirt cutters, except for the youngest son, Charles Wilner. In 1903, the same year that he was married, Charles formed a business partnership with his brother Nathan named Neviasky Brothers, which manufactured boys clothing. Bernie remembers that his father used to take him to his business on Saturdays. When he was about ve, the business had just moved to 68 Walker Street, off Broadway in New York, and he remembers his Uncle Nathan and his father arguing with the sign man one Saturday. It was customary to put the name of the
relatives in Westport were named Navasky, so it seems that the family used the -sky ending before coming to America. It is plausible that, in Russia, they used both the Yiddish -er and the Slavic -sky endings. 32 The main text says that it was a notions store. 33 In the main text, the name is spelled Rosensweig. Rosenzweig is the conventional German spelling.
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Above: 68 Walker Street, where the name Navasky was rst used, as it looks today.

Right: Macy Navasky having his charicature drawn in 1985, at Gertrude Gamsas 80th birthday party.

business outside in large letters, one letter on each bay, but there was not enough room for the full name, Neviasky Bros, so the sign maker had left out the i. He had also misspelled the name, with an a instead of an e. The sign read Navasky Bros, and both brothers adopted that name. In the summer of 1914, Charles and Nathans families shared a large house on Beach 81st Street in the Rockaways. Nathans son, Macy Navasky, had started working for the business and commuted there from Rockaway, like Charles and Nathan. Macy was known for being very shy. One morning, as he left the house to go to the train station, he saw a man lying against the fence of his house, and without saying a word to anyone, he went to get his train. Later, the family found a dead man lying against the fence. Macy had simply walked by the dead body a family story that was retold many times. In 1915, Charles family moved to an apartment on Fox and Tiffany Streets in the Bronx, and the children went to P.S. 39. In the summer of 1916, the summer of the polio epidemic, the family took a bungalow on Beach 65th Street, one of a group of similar bungalows on a courtyard around a boardwalk. On June 6th, 1917, Charles daughter Ethel was born and was named after his mother, who had died a couple of years earlier. Later that year, Charles family moved to 657 West 161st Street in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and Nathans family moved to 162nd Street and Fort Washington Avenue, nearby. Two visitors on their block of 161st Street were Babe Ruth, the Yankees baseball star, who used to park his Stutz convertible across the street, wave to the kids, and go up to visit for the night, and Ted Lewis, the entertainer famous for saying Is everybody happy, who used to drive up in his Ford and sit with the kids on the stoop while his mother made Sunday dinner. In the summer of 1918, the family went to a hotel named the Prospect House in the Catskills, and their
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Above: 1056 East 23rd Street, the Navaskys house during the 1920s, as it looks today.

Right: 721 Broadway, the location of Charles Navaskys factory during the 1920s, as it looks today.

father, Charles, came to join them on the weekends. In the summers of 1919 and 1920, they went to the bungalows owned by the Siegel family on Beach 31st Street in Rockaway. David, Milton, and Leon Siegel used to visit the bungalows, and their family became friendly with Charles Navaskys family. In 1920, Nathan Siegel had a falling out with his partner, Mr. Fogelson, who built another bungalow complex on 32nd Street, right behind the Siegel bungalows. A few years later, Milton and Leon Siegel and Bernie Navasky went to summer camp together at Camp Lenox in East Lee, Massachusetts. And in 1942, Milton Siegel married Ethel Navasky. After World War I, Nathan Navaskys sons Abe and Al began working for Navasky Bros. like their brother Macy. In 1920, Nathan wanted his three sons, himself, and Charles Navasky to become equal partners in the business. Charles thought this was unfair, and so the business split up, and each brother ran his own business making boys clothing. Charles Navasky & Co. operated in a loft at 721 Broadway, just a couple of blocks east of Washington Square in New Yorks Greenwich Village. In 1920, the family bought a Cole touring car and hired a chauffeur to drive Charles to and from work. Jennie Navasky took driving lessons and became an excellent driver, but Charles never learned to drive well. That summer, he tried driving out to their bungalow with the chauffeur at his side, and when he tried to park, he ended up on the sidewalk. In 1921, their daughter Gertie graduated from high school and started working for the family business after taking a brief business course. The family sometimes visited a distant relative named Isaac Levinson in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and they decided they wanted to live there. In the Spring of 1920, they bought a house on 1056 East 23rd Street in Midwood, Brooklyn, where they moved on October 1, shortly after Bernie was Bar Mitzvahed at his maternal grandfathers orthodox shul in Harlem. To get to work in the city, they got on the BMT subway at East 16th Street and Avenue J; Jennie would drive them to this station in the morning
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and meet them there in the evening. Bernie went to P.S. 152 at Glenwood Road and East 22nd Street. In mid-fall of 1922, Charles had some difference with his star salesman, Billy Gamsa, and laid him off. Without any notice, his daughter Gert, who had just turned seventeen, ran off with Billy to get married. Charles and Bernie went to check Billies residence at the Hotel Pennsylvania, and were told that he had checked out the day before. That night, they got a call from Baltimore, where the couple had been married and were staying at the house of a customer. The newlyweds returned two days later, and Billy was rehired. In 1923, Gert gave birth to a daughter named Theda. In early 1924, Billy asked Charles for a share in the business, and when Charles refused, started a business of his own with another of the salesmen, making boys clothing on the 8th Floor of the same building where Charles Navasky and Co. was located; a few months later, vandals broke into his loft and slashed his inventory, and a week later, Billy was beaten on a side street near his ofce, leaving him with two black eyes. In 1923, a brick had been thrown through the windshield of Charles Navaskys car while he was being driven somewhere. Presumably, these attacks occurred because both of them were using non-union labor. Some time earlier, Charles Navasky had allowed a friend named Al Tisch to use one table in his loft to set up his business, Cornell Pants Company. Bernie remembers that, in 1923, Al Tisch offered him a cigar (jokingly, because he was only fteen at the time) and announced that he and his wife Sadie had just had a son they named Laurence Alan and called Larry. The Navasky family remained friendly with this family as Larry grew up. Laurence Tisch got an MBA from Wharton School at the age of twenty, invested in hotels, then in Loews theaters, and then in CBS, becoming a billionaire. From 1978 to 1998, he led a $1 billion fund-raising campaign for New York University (NYU), which made it a rst-rate university. The building where Charles Navasky let Al Tisch use a table is now being converted to NYUs Tisch School of the Arts.
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In 1925, Bernie dropped out of high school early in his senior year and started working in his fathers business as a sweeper and cleaner, earning $15 per week. Not long after, he moved into shipping as a packer, and they hired a Harry Belafonte look-alike named Herbert Preston to take his place as sweeper. Though Charles and his brother Nathan were no longer on speaking terms, Nathans company was just a block away at 707 Broadway, and Bernie often saw him and his sons. Macy Navaskys assistant was Esther Goldberg. Both Al and Abe changed their name from Navasky to Nevans. Nathan retired in the early 1930s, and Macy, Abe, and Al started a business named Sturdibilt located at 7 East 20th Street. Their younger brother David had moved to Alton Illinois years earlier, after many business failures, and changed his name to David David.34 Macy married his former assistant Esther, and he was so shy that he had his father propose for him. They had two children, Elinor and Victor. Victor Navasky later became editor and publisher of the Nation magazine, and his book about Senator Joseph McCarthy, Naming Names, won the National Book Award for 1981. In 1927, Gert and Billy Gamsa had a son named Ira, and in 1929, they had a daughter named Vivian. In 1928, Bernie met the Wein family and fell in love at rst sight with their daughter, Helen, who was seventeen years old at the time. They started to date two or three times a week, were engaged two years later, and married on May 5, 1931. In the late 1920s, many clothing manufacturers were having trouble getting payments from retailers, and so opened their own retail stores. Charles Navasky opened stores selling menswear as well as boyswear in Knoxville, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; Huntington, West Virginia; and Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Business was slow through
34

The main text says he used the name N. David. Victor Navasky remembers that he used the name Charlie David. It seems that he used a number of aliases.
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Jennie Navasky (seated left) with her three children Ethel, Bernie, and Gertie, in the 1960s.

In 1978, Bernie (right) vacationed in England and visited Berchiks son, cousin Philip (left), in Leeds. Philip Naviasky (1894-1983) was an artist based at the Leeds College of Art.
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1929 and collapsed when the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929 and the Great Depression began. Charles Navasky & Co. took an inexpensive loft at 3 East 14th Street. Its retail stores all closed, and Bernie went to retailers around the city, selling them mens suits for $10 or $11 each. Bernie drew about $25 a week and Charles drew about $35 a week in salary. Their building was in poor condition, and when its ceiling started to leak, they moved to 830 Broadway, on the corner of 12th Street. Bernies future father-in-law, Ralph Wein and his brother Alex, had been successful importers of watches, doing business as Weinstrum Company, but because of the Depression, they liquidated their business and Ralph started a printing business. After they married, Bernie and Helen lived in his parents house, but they soon got their own apartment on Ocean Avenue for $50 per month, which stretched their budget and left them without enough money for furniture. In 1932, both of their parents sold their houses and moved into apartments nearby, and they furnished their apartment with their parents discarded furniture. In March, 1933, Bernie and Helen had their rst child, Edward. Business was better, so Bernie was drawing $50 and Charles was drawing $65 per month. Because they were getting more orders than their union cutter could handle, Bernie would continue working after the cutter left at 5 oclock and would cut one or two hundred suits, which Herbert Preston ticketed and shipped to sewing contractors by 9PM, so the union cutter would not know about them. When the cutters union went on strike, Bernie did all the cutting himself, hired a truck to take the cut pieces to the sewing contractor, and loaded the pieces in the truck himself. To keep the union pickets from interfering with Bernie when he was loading, Herbert pulled a stocking over his face and waved the sixteen-inch dart knife that they used for cutting in one hand and his razor blade in his other hand. After the strike ended, the union required the business to hire a cutter who was less productive than their previous cutter. Bernies mothers brother, Uncle Henry Wilner, was
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working for the Works Progress Administration (a makework program of Roosevelts New Deal) doing road work for $15 per week. The business hired Henry to help them do cutting at night and weekends, without the union knowing. In 1933, on the advice of their accountant, they turned the business into a partnership, with Bernie as half owner. His parents moved from their apartment to an apartment in a two-family home on East 27th Street between Avenues I and J. When Bernie and Helens rent was raised by $10, they could no longer afford the rent and moved into their parents apartment, living with their infant son in one bedroom. In 1934, they were able to get their own apartment again, on the second oor of a twofamily house on East 14th Street near Avenue J. In 1936, they had their second child, Elaine. In 1936, the union announced there would be a wage increase, all the clothing businesses overproduced to beat the rise in labor costs, and production virtually stopped when wages rose. Many manufacturers left New York city to get away from the union. In 1936, Bernies friend, Joe Gross, moved his factory to Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania. In 1938 alone, thirty-two manufacturers left New York. Tensions with the union continued to rise, and Bernie habitually carried an eighteen-inch lead pipe wrapped in newspaper, in case he had to defend himself. In May, 1938, Charles Navasky was walking on a side street near their business and was attacked and beaten by several men, putting him in the hospital. The next morning, Bernie received a letter from the union saying that work had been stopped on his job at the Fenishel Pants plant in New Haven, and he had to come to the union ofce to discuss it. His father had not come to work that morning, and when Bernie found out that his father had been beaten, he was furious. He writes:
We [Bernie and Herbert] went to Union Square where the [union] ofce was located. Herbert pulled the stocking over his face, opened the razor, and entered with [sixteen-inch dart] knife and razor in hands. As we entered the ofce, which contained twelve desks with
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men at each, everyone scattered and ran through an exit door I caught a meek, mild mannered man, Mr. Heller, the secretary, at his desk. I pulled out the letter and said, Mr. Heller, I received your letter this morning. You will call Mr. Fenichel and have him release the pants immediately. Mr. Heller was too nervous and physically shaken to dial. I dialed, got Mr. Fenichel on the line and said, Mr. Heller wants you to release my pants. I handed the phone to Heller and in a quivering voice, he conrmed my request. I turned to Mr. Heller and said, My father was beaten up by members of your union, and for this I am ruining your ofce. With that, I started on the nearest desk, turning it over and scattering the papers piled on top. Piece by piece, I broke the legs and smashed the chair to bits. Herbert stood guard while I repeated the process with every desk and chair in the ofce. It was total destruction. With this, Herbert and I walked out, expecting at any moment to be attacked by some strong arms of the union. . It was time to consider leaving New York City.

Charles Navasky recovered from his beating after several weeks. In June, he and Bernie drove to Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, and found a location there. On August 25, 1938, they loaded everything their business owned into four large moving vans, while union observers watched from across the street. Bernie carried his lead pipe and did not feel safe until after he and his father had gotten off the street and into the subway. Bernie and his family moved to Philipsburg, where he managed operations of the factory. Charles continued to live in New York, traveling by train to sell the factorys merchandise to retailers, and stopping in Philipsburg regularly. In 1937, Charles and Jennie Navasky and their daughter Ethel moved from Brooklyn to an apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan, 545 West End Avenue at 86th Street, so that Jennie could be near her daughter Gertie when her husband traveled. In 1942, Ethel married Milton Siegel, and they rented an apartment at 590 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.
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In May, 1944, while Charles was visiting Philipsburg, he complained that he did not feel well. The doctor found that his heartbeat was irregular, and he rested several days before getting on the train back home. A few weeks later, Bernies brother-in-law, Milton, phoned and told him that Charles had suffered from a heart attack. Bernie and his family went to New York to be with him for several days, and he seemed to be recovering at the time. But ve days after they left, Milton phoned Bernie and told him that his father had a second heart attack and died. After Milton Siegel left the army in 1946, Bernies mother, Jennie, moved to 253 West 74th Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue, where she lived for the rest of her life. On April 29, 1972, when Bernie received the news that his brother-in-law, Milton, had died suddenly in a Chinese restaurant, he and Helen drove to New York to tell his mother. She was baking a cake when they arrived, and he gradually broke the news to her that something had happened to Milton and then that Milton had died. She ran to the oven to check the cake, saying, It cant be. I spoke to him yesterday morning, and I am bringing Ethel and Milton this cake. Though she was very upset, they drove her to see Ethel in Brooklyn, but by the time they got there, she was sick, and by the time the doctor arrived, she had had a stroke. She never recovered, and she died in her home in July, 1972. The business in Philipsburg is still a going concern. Charles Navasky, who was born in 1878, died in May, 1944. Charles son, Bernie Navasky, who was born in 1908, died on December 27, 1996. Bernies son, Eddie Navasky, who was born in 1933, died on November 5, 2010. At that time, Eddies son, Charles (Chuck) Navasky, who was born in 1955, began to run Charles Navasky & Company, the business founded a century ago by the great-grandfather he is named after.

Above: Charles Navaskys draft registration for World War I. Below: Charles Navaskys draft registration for World War II. Note that his address at 545 West End Ave. is crossed out and replaced with 590 Ocean Ave. It seems that he and Jennie moved in with Ethel while Milton was in the army. The draft cards have the same birth date but different years, 1877 and 1878. It seems that, like Jennie, he was uncertain about his birth year.

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Appendix 2: Early Navasky Family History

After we published the rst edition of this book, a distant cousin, Peter Gardner, found our family tree on ancestry.com. He is from a branch of the family that I had never heard of: His ancestor Isadore Neviasky changed his name to Isadore Nathan when he came to America. He provided us with some of his family documents, and he also put us in touch with an expert on Jewish genealogy, Harold Rhode, who has done extensive research on the Neviazhsky family, as he spells it. This appendix includes information about early family history from these sources, keeping the spelling of names used in the source documents.

Letter from Zeev Niv

This section contains excerpts from a letter that Zeev Niv, a distant relative who lived in Tel Aviv, wrote in 1989. Zeev Niv was a son of David N. Naviasky (1842-1915), son of Faivush Naviasky, son of Reb Velvel. The nephew he was writing to was Philip Nathan, son of Isadore Neviasky (1868-1925), son of David N. Neviasky, son of Faivush Neviasky, son of Reb Velvel. He says in this letter that Reb Velvel was his great-great-grandfather, but according to our family tree, he was actually his great-grandfather. He mentions that he is enclosing a book from another relative in Israel, Mr. Nievies. The next sections include excerpts from this book. Tel Aviv, November 29, 89 My dear nephew Phillip, Shalom. Now: I enclose a book from Mr. Nievies, whose grandfather emigrated from Lithuania to England. The writer
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Esther Lurie: A Courtyard in the Old Slobodka Quarter, Kovno Ghetto Jews were not allowed to live in Kovno and could only live in the nearby town of Slobodka, also called Williampole. Reb Velvel Neviasky was one of the rst to break this rule and build his home in Kovno.

is now living in Israel, and is making efforts to make the full family-tree of the famous family Neviasky. As you will see from his efforts, the rst was my great-great grandfather, Velvel / in Judisch Zeev / Zeev Neviazsky. The Prince Radzivil ... had thousands of peasants / de facto land-slaves, who had to work for the landlord and got no payments. In general, Prince Radzivil was also the owner of the river Neviaza, and Velvel-Zeev got the concession of shing. It was during the Napoleon wars in Europe and Russia, and neither the Jews nor the non-Jews had family names: as the founder of the Neviazky family, in a klein stetele/borough/javoni about 40 miles from Kovno, he got his family name as he was at the small river Neviaza.35

Nachum Nievies on Reb Velvel Neviasky

This section contains excerpts from Nachum Nievies book with details of the life of Benjamin Zev Neviasky (Reb Velvel). Most of the book is about branches of his family that are not related to us. Nachum Nievies got this information from many sources in Israeli libraries; one sentence is taken verbatim from the Toldot quoted below. Nievies book was not published. Copies were given out at a family event in Israel in the 1970s. Most of it is typeset, but the family trees in it are written by hand. Zeev Niv mentioned in the previous letter that he sent this book to the Nathan family. It was a cold wintry night when Reb Benjamin Zev ben Reb Yehiel, more popularly known as Reb Velvel, set out from Kovno in Lithuania to perform a mitzva visit in a distant town. He was used to travelling alone. He often did so on business or to fulll a mitzva, or to visit government ofcials or the count of the district to ask their help in overcoming the local antisemitic elements who were always making life unbearable for the Jews of Kovno. As usual, staff in hand, he went his way on foot, and
These places are now known by Lithuanian names rather than Russian names. Kovno is known as Kaunas, and the Neviaza River is known as the Nevezis River.
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taking to heart the saying He who walks unaccompanied should occupy himself with the Torah, he raised his voice and repeated in the stillness of the night, the commentary of Rabbi Alshech on the weekly portion of the Torah that he had been learning with his father-in-law, the famous Rav Nathan of Kaidan. Loud and clear rang out the verses as Reb Velvel strode along over the ice-covered River Neviazar, which ows from Ponyavesh towards Kovno, and so immersed was he that he did not pay attention when he came to a part of the river where the ice was thin. Suddenly there was a cracking of ice, and Reb Velvel found himself in the icy waters. Clinging desperately to the ice around the hole, he called and called in vain for help, hearing the echoes of his cries in the stillness of the night, but knowing that at that hour no one would be about to help him. He started to say the Vidduy, the prayer of a man about to die, and prepared himself for the end, when suddenly there appeared before his eyes a vision - a distinguished looking Jew was helping him to get out of the hole in the ice. He found himself back on rm ice, and then his deliverer said, Because of your merit of studying the commentary of the Alshech, I hurried to help you. Now, go your way in peace. When word of what had happened became known, Reb Velvel got the name Navyasher or Nevyasky meaning from the river Neviazar, and the commentary of the Rav Alshech on the Torah became more popular than ever among Lithuanian Jewry. Fighter for Jewish Rights Reb Velvel Neviasky was very active in the ght for the rights of the Jews of Kovno. In the middle of the 18th century, there had been anti-Jewish pogroms there. The Jews were expelled from the city and not allowed to keep their land. They ed to nearby Villiampole-Slabodka, where there was a long established Jewish community. In 1782, they were allowed to return but many difcul85

ties were put in their way, and it was not until 1798 that the Russian authorities put an end to the provocations. The Jewish part of Kovno was restricted to a small area, but Reb Velvel ignored this and built his home outside it, and other Jews followed his example. The repeated attempts to prevent it were foiled by Reb Velvel and his son Reb Hirsch, who became leaders and Ne-emanim of Kovno Jewry. Jews from Slabodka were allowed to go to Kovno for trade and business, but had to go back to Slabodka in the night, or face the risk of being arrested and ned heavily. Slowly, as a result of gifts in the right places, Reb Velvel got permission for more Jews to go back to Kovno until a blind eye was turned to their presence. Later, in 1813, he and Reb Eliezer Lieberman rebuilt the hospital there, and his son Hirsch, in 1854, was instrumental in gathering enough funds to erect a stone building for the institution. Some of Reb Velvels wealth came from the lease he had to exploit the natural resources of the Navyazar river, and he also acted as the agent of the Graf Tishkovitz. Refuge for the Poor Despite the pressures of his many business activities, which included the export and import of timber and agricultural products from and to Prussia, and the affairs of the houses he owned, his own home was a center of Torah and charitable activities, and the poor wandering Jews, refugees from pogroms and other anti-semitic outbursts, could always nd there food, shelter and a helping hand. On reaching the age of 60, Reb Velvel Navyasky called his sons to him and said, My sons, I have lived six times ten years, and now the seventh ten years must be dedicated to the Almighty. From today, I am leaving to you all my business affairs. He did so, and spent all the rest of his long life in the study of the Torah, helping his fellow Jews in their difculties, and performing acts of charity. He passed away at the age of 86, happy in the knowledge that his sons were also devoted to the welfare of their fellow Jews and were staunch supporters of the Torah.
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Nachum Nievies on Reb Hirsch Neviasky

This section contains excerpts from Nachum Nievies book with details of the life of Herschel Neviasky. Because he was the eldest, Herschel was the wealthiest and most prominent of Reb Velvels sons. He is not our direct ancestor; we are descended from his younger brother, Faivush. The work which Reb Velvel had carried out so ably was taken over by his sons, especially by Reb Hirsch, or Herschel (1793-1878). While he, too, was very busy with his various trading activities, which he took over from his father, he was never too busy to lend a sympathetic ear to the pleas for help from his fellow Jews. The Kovno Jewish community came to him with all their problems, whether it was to ask him to intervene with the authorities to get some antisemitic ban or provocation cancelled, or to decide on the course they should take in communal affairs. Knowing the Russian language, and acquainted with many government ofcials and other inuential people, he could often achieve favorable results when other efforts had failed. His home was always a center of religious and charitable activities, and where the physical needs of the poor wandering Jews, refugees from pogroms, etc. had to be dealt with, his help was always forthcoming. The Klaus Naviasky When his home became too small to receive all the poor Jews who came to him for food and help, he built another home for them where, without payment, they could nd food and shelter at his expense. There were restrictions on building synagogues, appointing a Rav [rabbi], Chazan [cantor] or Shamash [sexton], or setting up a rabbinical court in Kovno, according to an agreement that all these services should be supplied by the authorities of nearby Villiampole [Slabodka] alone. But Reb Hirsch built in 1841 a big religious center which combined a synagogue and a Beit Midrash [study house],
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known as the Klaus Naviazar, which became famous in Kovno and in all Lithuania, particularly when to counter the attacks of the Haskala [enlightenment] movement, R. Hirsch invited the famous Rabbi Israel Salanter to come from Vilna and take over the Klaus and preach there, in addition to Talmud, the teachings of the Mussar movement [which emphasized traditional Rabbinical ethics]. Salanter agreed, and the Klaus Naviazar became one of the most famous Mussar centers in Europe. [You can nd more information by searching the internet for Nevyozer Kloiz.] Fighting Antisemitism At frequent intervals, Reb Hirsch had to give evidence in high places because of the many complaints of illegal settlement by Jews in Kovno or of antisemitic actions by non-Jews. Government ofcers would come to his home, and on one occasion, they even tried questioning his eightyear-old daughter about whether a government ofcial suspected of receiving bribes had come to their home. Reb Hirschs wife, mother of the little girl, had died a few years before this (in 1827), and her death gives us a picture of the difcult times in which our people lived, and the dangers they had to face. We are told that, in that year, the Czars army doubled the large sum they demanded of the Jews for exemption from military service, and seized, in Kovno, a large number of yeshiva bocherim who did not have the money to give them. For them serving in the army was a terrible thing, as they could not keep the laws of the Torah about food, prayer, and so on, among the Christian soldiers, and also faced the danger of being killed and not buried in a Jewish grave. Reb Hirschs wife, seeing for the rst time the heartbreaking sight of young Jews being dragged away and locked up, with their hair shaved off, was so shocked that she became ill and died, leaving a daughter of 18 months. (This daughter was later to become the wife of Rabbi Eliahu Merkel and mother of Rabbi Shimon Merkel, ghters for orthodox Judaism and supporters of the Naviazer Klaus and of Mussarism.) One of the great tasks Reb Hirsch had undertaken
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together with Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spector, Rav of Kovno, was providing food, care and help to Jewish soldiers in the Czars army while they were in Kovno. On one Rosh Hashanah, on the rst night, a large number of Jewish soldiers turned up at the religious service at the Klaus. When Reb Hirsch arrived in the morning, not a single soldier was present, and he learned that they had been called back to the barracks for military exercises. Reb Hirsch was wild with rage. He knew that, according to regulations, Jewish soldiers had to be released on the Jewish holy days except in the event of war, so the recall of the soldiers was illegal. Afraid that this act would create a precedent, Reb Hirsch, on Rosh Hashanah and while the congregation watched, rode off in a wagon to the commandant in the barracks, afraid he might arrive too late to stop the Jewish soldiers from participating in the exercises. Reb Hirsch returned late in the evening, during the prayer Aleinu Leshabeyach at the end of the service. He rode the wagon to the barracks, even though it was Rosh Hashanah, to get there before the exercises started. After he had accomplished this, he walked the long way back, because there was no longer a need to desecrate the holy day by riding. Many tongues wagged at the sin he had committed, but in the eyes of Reb Hirsch, what he had done was a mitzva, not a sin. Tongues stopped wagging when Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spector, Rav of Kovno, came to him and wished him a hearty Shikkoach, showing his approval. A Friend and Advisor to All As the ne-eman (trustee) of the community, Reb Hirsch had many problems to solve. I found the story of one in an old book in the Tel Aviv library. It did not have anything to do with religion or politics, but because he was an inuential leader in the Kovno community, people came to seek his help in many matters. In this case, it started innocently enough. A tailor, named Zvi Greenberg, went on a visit to Leipzig for a couple of months, and when he returned to Kovno, he
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Left: Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spector (1817 March 6, 1896), the chief rabbi of Kovno from May, 1864 until his death. He is the rabbi who approved of Herschel Neviasky riding on Rosh Hashannah to prevent Jewish soldiers from performing exercises on that day.

brought something new to help him in his shop - a sewing machine. Because Greenberg was the only tailor in the city with a machine, he charged lower prices for his work, undercutting his competitors. The other tailors called a protest meeting against this threat to their parnossa [livelihood], and they decided to ask Reb Hirsch Naviasky to go to the Kovno authorities and have them pass a law forbidding the use of sewing machines in the city! The account states that these conservative tailors did not succeed in holding back the wheels of progress. Like his father, Reb Hirsch retired at the age of 60 and went to live in his Klaus, devoting all his time to prayer, study, and charitable acts until he passed away, deeply mourned by all the community, at the age of 85.

Neviasky History from Toldot Kovna

This section contains excerpts about Reb Velvel and Herschel Naviasky from David Matityahu Lipman, Letoldot ha-Yehudim be-Kovnah u-Slobodkah min ha-et hakhi kedumah ad ha-Milhamah ha-olamit (From the History of the Jews of Kovno and Slobodka from Earliest Times until the World War), published in Israel in 1930 or 1931 and in 1967. This book has the alternate title Toldot he-arim Kovna u-Slobodka u-gedolehen (A History of the Cities of Kovno and Slobodka and their Prominent Citizens). This excerpt was translated by Harold Rhode. Reb Velvel Neviazher, His Son Reb Hirshel, And The Attempts Made To Settle [In Kovna] Residence permission was, of course, permitted only to those who owned property in the Jewish quarter. Nevertheless, settling outside of the two limited streets was - at least during the rst decades of the 19th century - completely illegal. The Jews of Slobodka spent the day doing business in Kovna; and because they were not permitted to sleep in Kovna, they would return home to their houses in Slobodka at night. We nd an example of this in the Middle Ages in Krakow, where Jews were allowed to sleep only in the suburb of Kazimerz, and other examples in many other cities in Western Europe.

Below: The one remaining synagogue in Kaunas (Kovno), which now has a Jewish population of about 500. Before the holocaust, Kaunas had about 25 synagogues.

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But Diaspora Jews did as Jacob our forefather had done. They would also use his second strategy [bribery]. Slowly but surely, the more daring among them would sneak in and settle temporarily. With time, these temporarily settlements would become permanent. All this would happen due to the goodness of the gift because they would bribe those who needed to be bribed. Among the rst most important householders who settled in Kovna in the manner described above was, besides the above-mentioned Abba Soloveichik, Reb Velvel Neviazher (Benjamin Zeev, son of Yechiel, who together with Eliezer Lieberman, re-established in 1813 the hospital in Kovna) who was one of the supporters of the community. His wifes father was Nathan of Keidan, who was a very learned man who read the entire Talmud forty times; he would get up at four in the morning and wake up the Jews of Keidan so that they would pray and study Torah. When his wife died, Reb Velvel refused to give the burial society all of the sum of money she allocated for her burial. The society ned him because he dared do this to them, and this fact was written in the register (which was at that time in the possession of the Rabbi; this was the second register that was started after the Napoleonic war in 1813.) He had many businesses. And when he turned sixty, he called his children together and said to them, I have already lived for six decades; the seventh will be devoted to God. So I hereby declare that I will no longer spend time with my business interests. And he did exactly what he said he would do. He spent the rest of his life studying Torah and Judaism. He was born in 5552 [1792] and died at a ripe old age in 5638 [1878], at the age of 86. In 1820, the Christians went to the authorities and complained that the Jews had illegally taken up permanent residence in Kovna. As a result, an investigator was sent from Vilna, the capital of the province, to see what was going on. Those being investigated went to Reb Hirshel Neviazher, the son of Reb Velvel, who knew government ofcials, to request that he intervene on their behalf with the investigator, so that the investigator would not make problems for them. So Reb Hirshel Neviazher did so, using the well-known way of doing so [bribery], and everything stayed as it was before he came. Nevertheless, in approximately 1836, the Christians
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again complained to the authorities about both the Jews and the investigator, accusing Reb Hirshel Neviazher of having bribed the investigator in Reb Hirshels house. This time, the authorities sent another ofcial to investigate the situation. During the investigation, the investigator talked with an eight-year-old girl, Reb Hirshels daughter who later become the mother of Shimon Merkil, to nd out the truth, taking advantage of her youth and innocence. (When she was an eighteen-week-old baby, her mother - Hirshels wife - died suddenly. And this is what happened: In that year, 1827, they began to take recruits. Military service was required of Jews who were not able to pay the sum of twice the usual Jews head tax leveled by Tsar Nicholas I. When Hirshels wife saw this horrible scene for the rst time, that young Jewish boys whose head were shaved and who were being incarcerated in the Kaziane Palate in Kovna, she went into shock and then died, leaving this young girl.36) The investigator asked the girl in Yiddish, whether she had seen this thief, who had taken the bribe and whom the new investigator had brought with him, in their house before. Apparently nothing came of this investigation. Reb Hirshel Neviazher was one of the great protectors of Kovna and its grandchildren, and he took his fathers place as one of the supporters of the community. As one who was extremely religious, he invited Rabbi Israel Salanter to come to Kovna from Vilna (ca. 5604 [1844]) to teach Torah and ethics [Musar] as a spice and antidote against the Haskalah movement, which the author Abraham Mapu and his supporters were espousing, and they later became the main characters of Mapus book Ayit Tsavua [The Hypocrite]. When Mapu opened the rst government Hebrew school, on present-day Mapu Street, the rst school of its kind, Mapu tried to woo the Jewish students away from Torah in every way he could by bringing them and the heads of the community to his school. Shimon Merkil told me that when he was young, Mapu tried to woo Merkil as well but nothing came of it. In the Year Torah [5611 or 1851], as it is written on
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According to the Neviazhsky-Levite family tree compiled by Harold Rhode, this girl was Ita Deikha Neviazhsky (born 1827) who married Eliahu Merkel, (born 1823) and had ve children, including Shimon Merkel (1862-1935). The name of her mother, Herschels rst wife, is not known.
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Left: No pictures of Yisroel Salanter survive; this picture of his son, Rabbi Yitzchak Lipkin, who resembled him, is commonly used to show what he looked like. Salanter, founder of the Musar movement, ran the Kloyz Nevyozer from 1848 to 1857. The Russian government invited him to run a school it established in Vilno, but he worried about government control and instead accepted Herschel Neviaskys invitation to run his Kloyz in Kovno. He was born Yisroel Lipkin, but he was known as Salanter because he studied in Salant.

Right: Avraham Mapu, the rst Hebrew novelist, is pictured on an Israeli stamp, and a street is named after him in Kaunas (Kovno). He was known for his idealistic novels about life in Israel, such as Ahavat Yisrael (Love of Israel). His realistic novel about life in Kovno, Ayit Tsavua (The Hypocrite), features characters based on Yisroel Salanter and Herschel Neviasky.

one of the walls of the house, Reb Hirshel Neviazher built the Kloiz, that was named after him - the Neviazher Kloiz - where Rabbi Israel Salanter taught Torah and Judaism to outstanding students, many of whom later became Rabbis in Zamot. Reb Hirshel was charitable and kind, and his house was always open to those who needed help from him; in his house, Torah and greatness merged. Reb Hirshel was a very wealthy man. He started with a few stores and ended up getting involved with foreign trade. He would send to Prussia ships laden with agricultural products and timber. Later, he became a builder and became very rich, so much so that when he died, he left behind thirteen houses that he built on his own. He built the Kloiz from his personal wealth. It contained highly adorned silver vessels, like ornaments for the Torahs, Torah crowns, and two pitchers for the Kohenim to wash their hands before they gave the priestly blessing. One of these vessels was engraved with pictures and various patterns; the other was adorned with ancient coins like The Berlinkes. As one of the pillars of the community and one who intervened with the government on its behalf, people would ask his help when anything difcult occurred. For example, the following incident occurred: Sometime around 1860, there was a tailor named Zvi Greenberg who lived in Kovna. He traveled to Yaptziga where he stayed for about two months. When he returned, he brought back with him a sewing machine. When he began working, he caused a lot of damage to the tailors of Kovna because he lowered the prices of sewing. Thereafter, the affected tailors gathered and made a big disturbance, and decided to go to the house of the head of the community, Reb Hirshel, to plead with him to go to the ofcials and ask them to forbid Greenberg from using the sewing machine which caused them to lose their source of income. But it appears that the tailors of Kovna did not succeed in preventing the wheels of history from turning. ... When he got old, Reb Hirshel did what his father had done: he left his house and slept in the Kloiz that he had built. He died at the ripe old age of 85. Even so, residence permission for Jews in Kovna was only de facto. De jure, the situation remained as it had
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previously. The Christians of the city continued to ght vigorously against the right of the Jews to settle there while the Jews fought just as hard to be able to do so. The Christians did everything in their power to counteract what the Jews had done to stay there. The Christians even managed to decrease the area in which the Jews were permitted to live according to the city plan authorized by Tsar Nicholas I in 1847. According to this plan, the Jews were only permitted to live in an area next to Janova St. This situation continued for many years. Only in 1857, when the government published an announcement stating its intention to unify the Christians and Jews, the General-Governor of Vilna, Nazimov, tried to abolish the oppressive limitations in the cities of Zhitomir and Kovna, in order improve their situation. The result was that on October 27, 1861, the government accepted the recommendation of The Committee to Organize Jewish Matters and these limitations were lifted completely.

Levite and Israelite Neviaskys

There have long been doubts about whether all the people with this name are related. Nachum Nievies wrote: It is not denite that all the Naviaskys are one family, as claimed by some of the old-timers. Some say we are all belonging to the family of Reb Velvel Naviasky, while others - a minority - say the name may include people who lived in settlements along the banks of the river Neviazar, which runs from Ponyavesh towards Kovno in Lithuania. Since he wrote, the question has been resolved by genetic analysis. Harold Rhode wrote an article discussing several genetic analyses he had done to resolve genealogical questions. It includes the following case study. Case 1: Are Two Neviazhsky Families from Kovna Related? Two different families with the surname Neviazhsky lived in Kovna, Lithuania, in the late 18th and 19th centuries. One family, my fathers, was Israelite; the other family was Levite. Documentary evidence reveals considerable social and commercial interaction between these
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two families dating back to the 18th century. This family name was not common; we have wanted to know if they are related and, if so, how. Since Jewish religious status i.e., Kohen, Levite, and Israeliteis passed via the male line from father to son, these two families should not be related via a common male ancestor, despite their same last name and numerous interactions. We tested the Y-DNA (i.e., male chromosome passed down almost totally unchanged from father to son) of Israelite and Levite males who still carry this surname. Before the DNA test, we only had family tradition to show that they could not have been descended from the same male, because one family was Levite, the other Israelite. The results of the DNA tests proved that the two families could not have descended from the same male within the past 10,000 or 20,000 years. The haplotype of the Levite Neviazhsky family came back as R1a1, a haplotype shared by about 45 percent of Ashkenazi Levites. The haplotype of the Israelite Neviazhsky family came back as Q1. Excerpted from: Harold Rhode, DNA Analysis Provides New Insights for Genealogists, Avotaynu, Volume XXV, Number 2 Summer 2009, p. 28. Harold Rhode said, in a personal communication, that the Naviaskys of Baltimore are part of his family, the Israelite Neviaskys, not part of our family, the Levite Neviaskys. In addition, Nachum Nievies is not on our family tree because he was an Israelite Neviasky. He wrote in his book: I met in Jerusalem a family of Nievies from Kovno, but they were members of the tribe of Levi whilst we are Israel, so it seems as though they are not related to us unless, as frequently happened in the past few generations, the man would adopt the name of his wife for various reasons. We are lucky that he researched and wrote the stories of Reb Velvel and Herschel, without knowing that they were not really his ancestors.
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Neviasky-Levite Family Tree

This section summarizes information from the Neviazhsky-Levite family tree compiled by Harold Rhode, who has done extensive research, lecturing, and writing about Jewish genealogy. It only contains information that would be of most interest to our branch of the family. A complete family tree is available on ancestry.com. To nd it, search on ancestry.com for Avraham Shmuel Neviazhsky, who was the father of Charles and Nathan Navasky, and go up and down the tree from there. Binyamin Wolf/Zev Neviazhsky, known as Reb Velvel (born in Kovno, 1779; died in Kovno, 1865 or 1866) was the son of Yechiel Neviasky (born before 1759 in Yoshvan). He married Roza bat Natan (1779 - before 1834), daughter of the famous Rav Natan of Keidan. They had eight children: Their eldest child, Hirsch (or Herschel) Neviazhsky, was born in 1798 and died in 1878. He had three wives and six children. Their seventh child, Faivush Neviazhsky, was born in 1817, and the date of his death is unknown. He had seven children with his rst wife, Chaya, born in 1819, and one child with his second wife, Raikhla, born in 1838. Faivush and Chaya had the following children: Nochum Neviazhsky, born in 1838, married Nekha, born in 1842, and they had two children. Avraham Shmuel Neviazhsky, born between 1836 and 1841 in Kovno, married Ethel/Etta Levinson, born in 1842. These are our immediate ancestors, and their descendents are listed in detail below. David Noach/Nossel Neviazhsky, born in 1842 in Kovno, died in 1915 in the Ukraine, had nine children with his rst wife Esther F. Shores, born in 1846, and had three children with his second wife, Chana Ginsburg, who died in 1919. One of David and Chanas children was Zev/Vulf Niv, one source of family documents.
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Many of David and Esthers children changed their last name to Nathan. One of them was Nachum-Itzik Neviazhsky, (born 1868/69 in Kovno, died Nov. 29, 1925 in Brooklyn), who changed his name to Isadore Nathan when he came to America. He is the origin of the Nathan branch of the family that provided some of the source material used here. Faivush and Raikhla had the following child: Elchanan Neviazhsky (born 1845), whose wifes name is unknown, had one child: Morris Navasky (born January 7, 1865 in Kovno, died May 26 1940 in Norwalk, Connecticut) married Ethel (Yetta) Baron (born 1872 in Vilnius, died 1961 in Norwalk, Connecticut). They had seven children. Four of their children changed their last name to Nevas, and they are the source of the Nevas family of Westport, Connecticut. The Navison family is another branch of the Neviasky family that we have contacted through ancestry.com. According to Harold Rhodes family tree: Reb Velvels sixth child, Moshe Neviazhsky (1816 1874) married Tsipe Karpas (1820-1887) and had six children. Moshes youngest child, Louis Neviazhsky (1839 1916) married Chaya Reiza Karpas (1838 - 1911) and had eight children. Their daughter Annie Neviasky (1877-1948) married Goodman Cohen (died 1923) and they have children and grandchildren who are still living, forming the Cohen and Pollack families of Massachusetts. Their son Yosel Kalman Naviazhsky (born 1859 in Slabodka) is in Harold Rhodes family tree without children, but we have learned that he changed his name to Joseph Navison when he came to America, that he died in 1929, and that he is the ancestor of the Navison family of Massachusetts.
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Our Branch of the Family Tree

Here is more detail about our branch of the family from the Neviazhsky-Levite family tree compiled by Harold Rhode. We are descended from Rav Avraham Shmuel, son of Faivush, son of Reb Velvel. Avraham Shmuel Neviazhsky (born between 1836 and 1841) married Ethel/Etta Levinson (born 1842), and they had ve children: Berel (Barnett) Neviazhsky (born 1861 in Kovno, died 1919 in Leeds, England) married Fanny Levinson (born 1866, died May 7, 1948 in Leeds, England). (Note that, purely by coincidence, both Berel in Leeds and his brother Nathan in New York married women named Fanny Levinson.) They had four children: Abraham M. Naviasky (born 1889 in Leeds, died 1944 in Leeds) married Minnie Cohen (born 1894, died 1977). They had two children: Sidney Neville (born 1918 died 2003) had a wife and children who are still alive. (Names of living people are concealed on ancestry.com) Bernard Neville (born 1928, died 1982) married Maureen Stanley (born 1934, died 1966), and their children are still alive. Anne Naviasky (born 1892) had no husband or children. Philip Naviasky (born 1894 in Leeds, died January 19, 1983 in Leeds) married Millicent Astrinsky (died 1994), and they have one daughter who is still alive. Miriam Naviasky (born 1897 in Leeds, died December 13, 1961 in Leeds) had no husband or children. Nochum (Nathan) Neviazhsky (born 1866) married Fannie Levinson and had five children, who are described in earlier parts of this book.
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David Neviazhsky (born 1873) does not have his wife or children listed in this family tree. This is the brother, described in earlier parts of this book, who adopted an alias and moved to Alton, Illinois. Yechiel (Charles) Neviazhsky (born 1878) married Jennie Wilner (born 1886), and had three children, who are described in earlier parts of this book. Hirsh Volf Neviazhsky (born before 1871, died November 11, 1926 in Kovno) married Jenny Blumenthal (born before 1871). They had six children, and there are no records of spouses or children for any of these children: Yechiel Neviazhsky (born 1891) Rachel Neviazhsky (born 1892) Chaim Neviazhsky (born 1894) Moshe Neviazhsky (born 1897) Betty Neviazhsky (born 1901) Jacob Neviazhsky (born 1905). It is odd that this fth brother, Hirsch Volf, who remained in Kovno, is not mentioned in any of our American family traditions, though the brother who remained in Leeds is.

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Appendix 3: Photo Gallery

Ethel Navasky

Above left: Milton Siegel Right: Milton and Leon Siegel

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Above left: Ethel in 1938-1939. Ethel, her parents, and friends in the 1920s. Above right: Ethel, Bernie, and Jennie at Tisch Camp, Blairstown, NY, in 1940-41. Right: Ethel in Long Beach in 1943.

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Left: With Chuck at 590 Ocean Ave. in 1947. Wedding at Temple Anshe Chesid January 4, 1942. Below: With Chuck at 69 Rugby Road, Dec. 7, 1947. Murray and Rose Siegel Goldstein were living in the family house at the time.

Military service in Taunton, Massachusetts 1944.

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Above: Ellen at the bungalow in Rockaway in 1950. Below: The family at the bungalow in 1957. Front: Ellen and Chuck. Rear: Jennie Navasky, Ethel, Murray and Rose Goldstein, Milton.

Above: Ellen (second from left) at the bungalow in 1958 with her friends. Below: Ethel driving the family Buick on Albemarle Road in June, 1960.

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About the Author

Ethel Navasky Siegel was born on June 6, 1917. These memoirs tell the story of her grandparents, her parents, and her early life, living in the Bronx as an infant, moving to Washington Heights in 1918, moving to Midwood in 1921. She graduated from James Madison High School and Brooklyn College. In 1937, her family moved to 545 West End Avenue on the upper West Side of Manhattan. On January 4, 1942, she married Milton Siegel, and they moved to 590 Ocean Avenue, apartment 5H, in Brooklyn. Their son Charles (Chuck) was born on February 14, 1947, and their daughter Ellen on December 21, 1950. In 1957, they moved to a large four-bedroom, three bath apartment in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, 1701 Albemarle Road, apartment D-14. From the 1940s through the 1960s, they went to the family bungalows in the Rockaways for the summer, living in a bungalow on Brookhaven Road at rst but moving in about 1950 to 326 Beach 31st Street. She taught French and Spanish at Bildersee Junior High School, in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn from about 1960 until she retired. Her husband, Milton, died in 1972. In 1978, she moved to a one-bedroom apartment at 303 Beverly Road, apartment 8N. She died on May 21, 2010 and is buried next to her husband in the Siegel family plot in Mount Lebanon Cemetery.

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