Posts

Home

Image
The Freedman Family Saint John Jewish Family Tree - Introduction The Saint John Jewish community was made up of between 200 and 300 families who came to the city from England and Eastern Europe between 1858 and the late 1940s. Some families arrived together and those who arrived alone encouraged other family members to follow – spouses, children, siblings and parents. Marriage within the community further consolidated family connections. Attempts to trace one family inevitably lead to links to other families in the community and new ways of connecting the community together as a whole. If one had a large enough space, it is quite possible that nearly every Jewish resident of Saint John and their descendants could be linked through a family tree. Exploring those connections and delving into family stories is the focus of this project. Information for the family stories will be gathered from documents (family trees, synagogue and organization records, newspaper clippings, etc.), oral int
Post a Comment
Read more

About Us

Image
Saint John Jewish Historical Museum  Saint John Jewish Community - Historical Overview The Saint John Jewish Historical Museum was created in 1986 to preserve the history of the Saint John Jewish Community and share it with the visitors from around the world. Our mandate is to collect, conserve, display and educate. We show documents and artifacts related to the Saint John Jewish community. The Museum features a number of permanent and changing exhibits.  The Museum also gathered an archival collection of documents and photographs recording all facets of the community's life, as well as genealogical material and created a library of books in English, Hebrew and Yiddish.  The Saint John Jewish community was founded in 1858 with the arrival from England of Solomon and Alice Hart and their family. The first synagogue, Ahavith Achim (Brotherly Love) was dedicated in 1899. The community consisted of about thirty families, many of them cigar makers. The second wave of Jewish immigration
Post a Comment
Read more

Contact Us

Image
Saint John Jewish Historical Museum Saint John Jewish Historical Museum 91 Leinster Street Saint John, New Brunswick Canada          E2L 1J2 Telephone - 506-633-1833 Email : sjjhm@nbnet.nb.ca Executive Director / Curator: Katherine Biggs-Craft Website: http://jewishmuseumsj.com Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/jewishmuseumsj Donations to support our Museum and programs are gratefully accepted by cheque, etransfer ( sjjhm@nbnet.nb.ca ) and through Canada Helps ( https://www.canadahelps.org/dn/12227 ) To comment on this story please send an email to sjjhm@nbnet.nb.ca  This project is made possible with funding from the Archaeology and Heritage Branch, Province of New Brunswick through their Exhibit Renewal Digital Component program and the unwavering support of the Jewish families who made Saint John their home.      
Post a Comment
Read more

Families - Saint John Jewish Family Tree

Image
Families - Saint John Jewish Family Tree The Zatzman and Brym Families Learn more about these Saint John families through our Jewish Family Tree Blog: Bernstein Bloom Boyaner Calp Cohen Davis Elman Franklin  Freedman Goldfeather Goldstein Grosweiner Guss Hart Hoffman Holtzman Isaacs Kanter Kashetsky Levine Lieberman Meltzer Paikowsky Tanzman Wiezel  Zatzman  To comment on this story please send an email to  sjjhm@nbnet.nb.ca This project is made possible with funding from the Archaeology and Heritage Branch, Province of New Brunswick through their Exhibit Renewal Digital Component program and the unwavering support of the Jewish families who made Saint John their home.  
Post a Comment
Read more

Bernstein Family, Part 1

Image
The Bernstein Family - Part 1   Mitchell S. Bernstein (1895-1967) and Clara (Goldfeather) Bernstein (1902-1964)  Clara and Mitchell Bernstein Mitchell Sidney Bernstein was born in New York City and moved with his family to Montreal, Quebec when he was ten years old. His career started in New York in 1914 with a film exchange for Warner Brothers, before he moved on to Metro Pictures. He arrived in Saint John in 1916 and was working with the booking and staging of vaudeville shows at the Queen Square Theatre and films for Warner Brothers. In 1917, he was working with Famous Players theatres out of New York City traveling from theatre to theatre with the first talking moving pictures (talkies). Mitchell Bernstein and Joshua Lieberman Mitchell Bernstein partnered with Joshua Lieberman to form B & L Theatres in 1928. In the early days, they travelled by car to small towns in the Maritimes, rented the local hall, and hired a pianist to play for the silent movies. One of them collected t
Post a Comment
Read more

Bernstein Family, Part 2

Image
  The Bernstein Family -  Part 2   Erminie Bernstein Cohen (1926-2019) and Mortimer Bernstein (1927-2013)   Mortimer and Erminie Bernstein, 1930s Erminie and Mortimer Bernstein were the children of Mitchell S. and Clara (Goldfeather) Bernstein. Erminie Bernstein Cohen w as a graduate of Saint John High School and Mount Allison University. In 1948 she married her childhood sweetheart Edgar R. Cohen and had three children. She joined her husband in business when her children were older, as a buyer for their women’s retail fashion shop, Hoffman’s. She was an ardent volunteer from an early age and worked tirelessly as an advocate for social justice and to improve social and economic well-being of New Brunswick ’s most vulnerable citizens. In 1978, she was appointed to the first New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women and as a result founded the non-profit organization, Saint John Women for Action, which worked with others to create a shelter for abused women and their
Post a Comment
Read more

Bloom Family

Image
The Bloom Family   Lazar Bloom (1876-1963) and Chia Jacobson Bloom (1866-1966)   The Bloom Family Lazar Bloom Lazar Bloom left Dorbian, Lithuania for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, leaving his wife, Chia in Europe with their two children – Joe and Mary. After a year of peddling and learning to speak some English, he returned to Lithuania to pack up his family to move to Harrisburg. They sailed from Hamburg, Germany. They settled in the United States, where their next child, Sarah, was born.   Chia Bloom His wife, Chia Jacobson was a daughter of Hirsh and Chana Jacobson. Four of her sisters remained behind in Dorbian with her parents. All of them were murdered by the Nazis as the result of pogrom that destroyed the Jewish community in that town in September 1941. Once in Harrisburg, she was lonely without the company of two of her sisters - Esther (Mrs. Ben Jacobson) and Lena (Mrs. Aaron Cohen) – who had already settled in Saint John with their husbands. Her brother, Joseph settl
Post a Comment
Read more