A Once-Lost KALISCHER Family Line

In the beginning, after there were FALKs and FREUNDs, there were KALISCHERs; really just great grandmother Johanna FALK geb. KALISCHER and her father R. Zwi Hirsch KALISCHER, father (or uncle) of Zionism.  In 1986 when Hertha MENDELSON (geb. MENDLOWICZ) (1893-1988) moved to Israel and I moved the contents of her room in Frau BUECHLER’s apartment in Manhattan to my house in Philadelphia, I found Hertha’s copy of the “Familientafel Kalischer” (Berlin 1935).

From the Familientafel Kalischer, I eventually noticed that R. Zwi Hirsch KALISCHER had brothers Moses and Löbl and a sister Hanna.  (I later learned from the 1806 Lissa Judentafel that there was also a sister Sara.)  Hanna married a DANZIGER, lived in Posen, and had the children Karoline, Jakob, Isidor and Robert.  In contrast to the extensive information about the families of the boys, that was the full extent of the information about Hanna’s family. That limited information made it into the family tree file on 19 May 1995, my 10th wedding anniversary.

Other than learning Hanna’s approximate birth year in 2008 from the 1806 Lissa Judentafel (she was 5), that is were where things stood for almost 20 years.

In 2014 when Berlin civil records (Standesamt records) became available on Ancestry.com, I started looking for anyone with a connection to Berlin, and even some folks with no known connection to Berlin.  I think that Hanna DANZIGER geb. KALISCHER fell into the latter category.  But, as it turned out, she had moved to Berlin, and died there in 1877.  From her Sterberegister entry, in addition to her death date, I learned the name of her husband and that her son Isidor was a Kaufmann in Berlin.  Hanna husband was Hirsch DANZIGER, a rabbi who died in Posen.

Knowing the family was in Berlin, there was more to learn:
Son Jakob DANZIGER — He married Johanna HEIMAN and they had a son Hugo and a daughter Regina.  Jakob died in 1896 in Berlin, Johanna in 1897.  Hugo married Emilie FELTENBERG in 1911, but he died already in 1912.  Regina married Otto FREUND in 1895 and died in 1920.  No sign of any children.

Son: Isidor DANZIGER — He married Therese HEIMAN, who turned out, not surprisingly, to be a sister of Johanna.  They had a son Fritz and a daughter Klara.  According to the Sterberegister entry on the death of Therese (1882 and the later Heiratsregister entry for son Fritz (1897), Isidor was living in New York.  That was intriguing, but I did not follow-up on that, or did not succeed, if I tried, back in 2014.

Son: Robert DANZIGER — He married Bertha LOEWY.  Robert’s Hebrew name was Ruben.  He died in Berlin in 1916; Bertha probably died ca.1925.  They had daughters Ida and Else.  Else died as a one-month-old.  Ida apparently did not marry.  She lived in Berlin until she was deported to Litzmannstadt — the Lodz Ghetto.  She was deported from Berlin on 18 Oct 1941 and died in the Ghetto on 14 Mar 1942.

Daughter:  Karoline DANZIGER — Nothing new back in 2014.

When my research focus cycled back around to this family in 2016, I found information about an Isidor DANZIGER who died in New York in 1913 at age 78 (born ca.1835).  When the 2017 cycle brought me back to DANZIGERs, I found census and marriage information that made it seem likely that this same Isidor DANZIGER married Rosalie KOCHMANN in New York in 1883 (or 1884) and had the children Hannah (b.ca.1885), Elsie (b.ca.1888) and Oscar (b.ca.1895).

To find out whether this was the right Isidor DANZIGER, I ordered a copy of his New York City death certificate  It arrived sooner than I expected and nicely confirmed that his parents were Heinrich DANZIGER and Hanna KALISCHER.

I had already started to trace New York Isidor’s family in the hope of finding living descendants who might might know of their KALISCHER ancestry.  Hanna married Maurice FRIEDMAN and had a son Irving and a daughter Leonora.  Irving had a son Mark, and I suspect he also had a daughter Myra.  Attempts to reach this FRIEDMAN family in New York and Florida (via Facebook) have not yet yielded results.

Elsie married Maurice’s brother Samuel FRIEDMAN.  They had a daughter Ruth who married Frederick NICHOLS in 1937.  I found their death and burial information, but no information on any children.

Oscar married a widow Frieda FINE.  She had children from her first marriage, but none with Oscar.  He was a US Customs Clerk according to the 1910 US Census, and was later a customs broker.

After some success in finding members of Isidor’s US family, I tried again to find what became of his German family — his son Fritz and daughter Klara.  Fritz (b.1868) married Ida WRESCHNER in Berlin in 1897.  Ida was from Frankfurt am Main.  Her father Julius Moses WRESCHNER (1843-1906) was born in Lissa, son of Elias WRESCHNER (ca.1793-1859).  Unfortunately, I have, so far, been unable to connect this family to the WRESCHNERs of Zerkow, including Wolff WRESCHNER (1837-1926) who married my grandfather’s first cousin Charlotte FALK (1836-1922). I have also not found information about any children of Fritz and Ida.

Fritz’ sister Klara DANZIGER (b.1869) married Moritz LEWY (b.1869) in Berlin in 1897.  They had a daughter Käthe Therese LEWY in 1899.  After finding no information about this family in Germany, I began to broaden the scope of my searches.  Trying the name “Clara LEWY”, I found a US passenger list from 1948 with Clara LEWY (b.ca.1875) traveling with Kathe SIMONSON (b.ca.1899) from Haifa to New York.  Their destination was 221 East Sidney Avenue in Mount Vernon, NY.  Clara was Stateless at the time; Kathe had Israeli citizenship.

The Israel National Archives database of naturalization applications was my next stop.  There, I found that Kathe SIMONSON was born Käthe LEWY in Berlin on 26 Jan 1899 — a complete match for the daughter of Moritz LEWY and Klara DANZIGER.  She left Germany for Palestine in 1934.  She had married Max SIMONSON who died in Palestine on 11 Mar 1942.  Kathe became a US citizen in 1954 and she may be the same person as the Kathe SIMONSON living at 328 West 76th Street in Manhattan in 1960.  After that, I lose the trail.

From the New York Death Index, Kathe’s mother Klara / Clara may be the Clara LEWY who died in New York on 26 Sep 1951 at age 81 (b.ca.1870).

I wrote to the town of Mount Vernon, NY to see if they could identify from old directories or other sources who was living at 221 East Sidney Avenue in 1948.  There could have been a son of Klara’s or some other relative.  So far, no response.

All that success tracing Isidor’s family inspired me to try to find information about Karoline DANZIGER’s family.  A search on Ancestry.com using her maiden name (the only information I had) led back to Berlin Standesamt records and her 1915 Sterberegister entry.  She had been married to Hirsch Joel LEVY.  He was born in Labischin, Kreis Schubin, in West Prussia.  He later lived in Posen and then in Berlin where he died in 1895.  The informant for the death record was Salo LEVY, Kaufmann in Berlin.  From the Berliner Adressbücher, I found that Salo was living at the same address as Karoline, so it seemed a safe assumption that he was her son.  Salo had the firm Levy & Wolfsohn in Berlin until it was “Aryanized” in 1939.

I was stuck there until I found Pages of Testimony submitted to Yad vaShem in 1956 by Marianne BECHER geb. LEVY.  The information she provided about her uncle Salo confirmed that he was the son of Hirsch LEVY and Karoline DANZIGER.  Marianne also submitted Pages of Testimony for her aunt Regina LEVY, her mother Ella LEVY geb. MEYER and her brother Julius Joel LEVY, and her aunt Selma LEVY.  Ella was the widow of Benno LEVY.  Another Page of Testimony was submitted in memory of Julius Joel LEVY by his niece Aliza BAR LEV in 1987.

Benno LEVY was born in Posen in 1862.  In 1892, he married a Hamburg woman Ella MEYER.  Benno was only 43 when he died in 1905.  It appears that they had only two children Julius Joel LEVY (1893-1943) and Marianne Hanna LEVY (b.1894), who married Dr. Heinrich BECHER, a physician in Hamburg in 1919, had a son Hans Adolf (b,1920) and a daughter Alice (b,1923), got to London in July 1939, and emigrated to Palestine in January 1940.  Heinrich BECHER happens to have been born in Wongrowitz, the same town where Hertha MENDELSON was born four and a half years later.

Further searching led to a bit of information from a family posted on MyHeritage by a professional genealogist.  Alice (Aliza) seems to have died earlier in 2017.  She had three children.  With the help of that genealogist, I received an e-mail address for one of Aliza’s children and after a few weeks of suspense, I had a nice e-mail from my new 4th cousin once removed at the end of September.

I am still curious to learn whether any knowledge of their KALISCHER family roots survived down to the present generation.  And I will be interested to learn whether the descendants of Klara DANZIGER in Israel and the descendants of Isidor DANZIGER in the US know of each other and have any contact with each other.  More to find out.

My grandfather Dr. Hermann FALK (1875-1932) had three 2nd cousins living in New York City.  It might have been helpful if his widow Gertrud or his children, my aunt Eva and my father Hans, had known of these cousins in the 1930s when they were all looking to escape Nazi Germany.  Better living, or just living, through genealogy…


(Written on 7 Oct 2017 – on United Airlines flight no. 664 from Vancouver to Chicago, en route to Chapel Hill; and 12 Oct 2017 – on United Airlines flight no. 600 from Houston to Vancouver, on the way home to Point Roberts.)

(Posted on 30 Oct 2017, my grandmother Gertrud FALK geb. RAPHAELSOHN’s 131st birthday.)