Connecting to Jewish Identity By Exploring Her Family Tree | Fayge Horesh
Stories in Our Roots

Heather Murphy: Hi Fayge, thanks for joining me today on my podcast.

Fayge Horesh: Thanks for having me.

Heather Murphy: So would you start by telling me how you became interested in learning about your family’s history?

Fayge Horesh: I have always been interested somewhat. I’m a public historian so history is interesting to me. And I grew up with a level of disconnection with a lot of my family history. So I was told some stuff, like it wasn’t like a secret but my family had a really weird relationship with Judaism, that meant that that’s part of my family that is Jewish, we went to Seder and I’d learn about the five sisters that came over and things like that. But that, that was it. And on my mom’s side, it was just like a black hole. It still is. Honestly, I found out some stuff, but like, when you have nothing to go off of, it’s hard to find anything. 

so I really got interested though, is when I moved to West Philly and I am living in the neighborhood that my family lived in when they were in West Philadelphia. And I’m literally like, I think, 4 blocks or something from where my grandmother was born. so that just sort of got me actually looking and on top of sort of my, my journey into what sort of is called sort of like, reconfirmation into Judaism.

It’s like, it’s not really a conversion because like I’m Jewish, but like, sort of like a welcome back. Welcome back to the party. I also wanted to have a better idea of that side of the family as well.

Heather Murphy: So your interest in history came before your pursuit to find out your own roots?

Fayge Horesh: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I’ve been a history nerd forever.

Heather Murphy: Okay. But you’d never just thought to kind of put the two together?

Fayge Horesh: mean, I was interested and like at various points I asked questions, like I was a kid who had asked questions at Seder and adults would tell me what they knew. but I didn’t really formally like look for documents and stuff until I was an adult.

Heather Murphy: And what happened when you started looking? Mm 

Fayge Horesh: I found some things that were unexpected and some things that were expected but weren’t quite right. So, the stuff my family has, we have a lot of pictures, which is great. and I knew that there were 5 sisters who came over and this is the test. Now, um, My great grandmother, Laika, was the oldest sister.

And then there was Rose, Blumka, Judith and Naomi. And the only one of those I’ve ever met was Naomi. She was the youngest. And, I found out when I was like 13 or 14 at Seder, there was a son, as well, named Fievel, who died, in, I think he was in the Ottoman army, he was in Palestine at the time. I don’t know the whole story of what was, I don’t know enough about the politics in that time to say exactly what he was doing there, I just know that’s where he was and he died there in like, a tent from like something boring, like dysentery or whatever. 

Heather Murphy: And so when did those sisters come over?

Fayge Horesh: at all different times. So this would have been the early 20th century. so what really happened was their father, who went by Morris, this is the, this is where I found some stuff, that people were like, how’d you find this?

And I’m like, You know, his name wasn’t actually Morris, right? that was his American name. His name was Moshe. And so I looked him up and I was able to find ships, records and stuff. And Morris wanted to come over for a variety of reasons from where they were in Belarus, now Belarus, they called it Poland on all the documentation, but now it’s in Belarus. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. they were at the time living in a Swiss law, which was a, like a Jewish ghetto that was experiencing a lot of pograms. So that sucked. So, you know, wanted to not be a part of that. And he was part of some sort of, I think, I think he might’ve been like a, a bundist or some sort of socialist, something, something that was getting him in trouble politically.

This would have been before America went on it’s like red scare thing. Um, at least the most recent red scare one. We’ve had a number of them over the course of history. so he wanted to go over his wife, but Sarah, she didn’t want to because she didn’t speak English. She was worried that she wouldn’t be able to get a job.

They had a little shop. they didn’t have a lot, but they had something. So it seemed like a really risky prospect. But Moisha just kept going back and forth across the I guess I should call them the same name each time. Morris kept going back and forth across the Atlantic.

he Eventually decided to bring 1 of his daughters, and he brought Rose, who is the 2nd oldest because she was like, a little bit physically bigger than the others. so she would be more likely to get a job and she did not want to go. Um, I actually have, somebody wrote a very, disjointed.

I think that they tried to write, I think this is a transcript from an oral interview. I have no idea where the recording is. I. I’d love to hear the recording, but somebody like asked Rose a bunch of questions before she died and she talks about like crying so hard because she didn’t want to leave and she came to Philadelphia and it was terrible. the room that her dad got her turned out to be part of a brothel.

 she had a rough time, but eventually just one at a time. All the sisters came over and eventually Bubby Sarah was convinced to come over. that’s on my, dad’s side of my family.

Heather Murphy: one of the things that you wrote in correspondence before is that you knew elements of history, but that it was different when you had family members that experienced that history. Can you talk about that?

Fayge Horesh: Yeah, absolutely. I have always intellectually known that I probably lost family in the Holocaust. Because there are no Ashkenazi Jews that did not lose family in the Holocaust. It’s just a question of do you know who they are. so there’s this great website. It has a new name. I think it’s called JewishGen now, but it used to be called Shetle Search and I refuse to call it anything else. and if you Google Shetle Search search, by the way, it’ll still come up. They know people know that term. And it’s a great website because you can type in phonetics or words and it’ll grab anything that’s like phonetically similar. And that’s really important because when people translated things from Yiddish into the letters we use in English, they made all sorts of decisions, like on this documentation for Morris. I found like 3 different ways he spelled the name of the city he was born in. so it’s so helpful. looked that city up. It’s a town called bite and it still exists. 

I discovered that there is a, what’s called a memorial book for this town. And this was a common thing to do after World War II, where people from a shetle would all sit down and write down everything they could remember about their town. Because it’s hard to imagine, but an entire culture was decimated.

I’m going to get these numbers wrong, but before the Holocaust, I think it was, 95 percent of the world’s Jews were Ashkenazi, and after the Holocaust, it was like 70 something percent. this was a mass, like, we lost a lot. And so, this was an attempt to lose a little less. I found this book.

It’s only partially translated. But 1 of the parts that translated is the, I can’t this. I’ve looked at other books since then. This is wild that they were able to do this. Somebody must have had, like, photographic memory. They wrote down the name of every single person they could remember from that town who had died and what day they died.

Because it’s really important in Judaism, the day you die. I was like, well, let’s just look and see if I can find our names. I knew we were, Prepstein. Um, but nobody has that name anymore cause it was all girls. so I, you know, scrolled through and I found a bunch of, spelled differently, but it was Prepstein. And it had like their names and this person’s the son of this person and I had the dates that they died, which were pretty much all of them died on the same day, except for 1 of them.

because they that that particular town was decimated when the German army, like, marched into these towns, this was pre concentration camps. They would just march into these towns and gather up all the Jews. And just slaughtered them right there. so they all died pretty much in the first one of those.

And then, there was a second one that got this one person who like, was the dad. Like, I can’t even imagine. but I just remember I was sitting in a cafe in West Philly reading this memorial book, and I grew up in a Jewish community, so like, we learned about the Holocaust every single year, I’ve seen the tapes, I’ve seen, whatever horrific things, I’ve probably seen it, and am fairly, as desensitized to it as one can be, and you know, I read this thing and then it was time for me to go so I get on the trolley and I’m heading into center city and I see someone from the synagogue I was going to at this time.

And, you know, she comes over and says, hi. And I was telling her about what I had found and I just started bawling. And it was just like, it was such the, it was such a gut punch because now I had names. And somehow that made it more real, like this is who they were, and no being able to read like what exactly happens because there were people who survived that so they wrote down exactly what happened that day.

And, you know, it happened, on a holiday it happened on Purim. It’s hard to explain, but it was, it was very, it was very visceral when I first found that information.

Heather Murphy: So how are you able to find these different sources you said you found Rose’s,, that transcript and then other people had written about the events that your ancestors most likely experienced where you mentioned the one website, where else?

Fayge Horesh: So I used ancestry.com for something. So this thing from Rose came from a family member. we have this like email list cause we don’t do the yearly seders anymore since the economic downturn. And it just, it just never happened again. It was really sad. Like it was happening in Philadelphia since like, you know, 19 15 or something. then 2009, I think was the last year. But I sent just some of the like PDFs I’d found of like naturalization documents or something to it. I was like, Hey, look what I found, you know? And somebody was like, Oh, I have this, this interview with Rose, do you want it? And I was like, sure.

 In that process, I found out on my mom’s side, they are not, I was always told they were German Jews and they are absolutely not German Jews. They’re Russian, and there’s a big class difference in the United States with that. German Jews tended to be the ones who owned the factories, and the Russian Jews were the people who worked in the factories. I don’t know exactly what happened there, because that’s the black hole family, that’s the one that’s like, there was a falling out or something, because I’d ask my grandfather stuff, and he’d be like, I don’t remember, and I’m like, you don’t remember who your mom was? Like, like, you were part of founding the EPA. Like, come on, sir. 

Heather Murphy: so do you have any idea when your mom’s side of the family came over to the United States?

Fayge Horesh: Around at the same time, I think a little bit later. The story I was told, which, I was told we were German, so this all might be entirely made up. Because we are absolutely not a drop of German blood in this. one of the kids, like, got into Harvard and so they all came over because you, it was, I guess, difficult. I mean, not I guess I know it was very difficult to get into any university anywhere as a Jewish person, but Harvard would take Jews.

and they did settle in Boston. So that part checks out. it’s weird though, because then he married a not Jewish woman. I got went to ancestry and somebody from her family, like, went whole hog and it was, it was incredible.

It was wild because it was like the Flatman stuff, which is my mom’s mom just went way back, like, all the way to, like, I don’t know, since the last day. Like, yeah, like, like the 1600s. In Britain or something like they were English. So like it was, they had records from going all the way back. but like, I’m lucky that I have records that go back to the early 20th century. 

 My Welsh side of the family, I can’t figure anything out either, but that’s for an entirely different reason. That’s because everybody and their mom is named David Hughes. And like, that was the family name. And that’s like being called John Smith.

Heather Murphy: Yeah.

Fayge Horesh: So unless you have more information than I have and also speak Welsh, which I do not, that was a, that was a, that was a dead end. Cause that was like, well, I’ve found plenty of David Hughes. there was like 10 of them in the town we were from.

Heather Murphy: Yeah.

Fayge Horesh: one’s us. 

Heather Murphy: so how has learning what you have been able to learn about your ancestors affected you feel or how you see yourself?

Fayge Horesh: It has definitely made me feel more connected to the Jewish community. I, you know, growing up, it was a little tough. Like my, my grandfather was like an aggressive atheist and my dad inherited that and my mom didn’t really care. So we were an atheist household and they would, um, you know, like we celebrated like Christmas because christmas is fun. You get presents, you know, like, and my dad literally was like, we’re celebrating capitalism, like, great. Your ancestors be rolling in their graves. I now know, um, not because it’s Christmas, but because you’re celebrating capitalism.

Heather Murphy: Yeah.

Fayge Horesh: So I had felt really disconnected. Like we would go to Seder and that was it. And I remember like, turning 13, and people asking me when my bat mitzvah was going to be, and telling them that I was not having a bat mitzvah, and they’d ask why, and I’m like, because we’re not Jewish, and they’re like, But you, you are like, you’re our family.

and growing up in a Jewish community that had a very, um, where I grew up was very, like, it was one way to be Jewish. and you like went to all the right summer camps and you joined the right youth groups and you went to one of like five different synagogues and you know, you had the like, ridiculous Bar or Bat Mitzvah.

Um, I went to so many of them. It was wild, The only wedding I’ve been to that was bigger than these barbat mitzvahs was the wedding of one of these people that I was friends with. I’d always felt so disconnected and I’d like, I’d tried to join one of the youth groups, but they wouldn’t take me because my dad wouldn’t say he was Jewish, even though it’s like, not religiously, no, but like, you don’t actually have to, I now know enough about Judaism to tell him like, You don’t actually have to believe in any of this stuff to be Jewish, like, it’s a long, proud tradition of, Jewish atheists.

 When I started doing this research, even though I knew intellectually that I had this connection to Judaism, because the whole, like the, the generation through generation is so important in Judaism. And so being able to really pinpoint and say like, yeah, this is where I came from, this is generation over generation, helped me feel a little more like justified in my, sort of, search for feeling like I belonged. now it’s been over a decade and now I’m like, whatever, take me or leave me. But, you know, when I first started going to synagogue, like, I, I needed that. 

 As a kid, you’re just like, why am I going to this weird thing where we’re speaking a language I don’t understand? I don’t understand what’s happening, like, the Seder is mystifying if you don’t know what’s happening.

even when you do know what’s happening, if you don’t have a really good sense of it, it’s mystifying. Um. And I was mostly like running around, hallways getting yelled at by the hotel workers, so it wasn’t until I was an adult and started doing my own outside research also that some of this stuff came pouring in because then once I said, like, I found this, this and this, all of a sudden, people were like, oh, I’ve got this entire stack of naturalization records for all five sisters, oh, okay. for telling me, I guess,

Heather Murphy: Yeah, well, people don’t assume anybody’s interested, especially younger generations that maybe older generations just see as not having an interest in the past, and yet, You ask and everybody’s like, Oh yeah, I have this or sometimes they don’t even know, like I just interviewed someone else. They went to do their laundry at their parents house and find this box of cassette tapes that their parents had sent back and forth across the ocean.

So like, a lot of times you just have to ask people and eventually they’ll remember that they have something that you’d really like to see.

Fayge Horesh: Yeah. I mean, that was how I got this interview with Rose. And then, I was actually looking for this and ahead of this and I couldn’t find it. But in much that way, my uncle on my dad’s side, found this, it wasn’t a cassette tape. It was like a, like reel to reel.

It was like, Oh, this was from like the fifties or something. And my grandfather got really into recording stuff for a minute. We’ve always been like tech people, I guess,

And he would sit at the kitchen table and record. It’s like him. And then my grandmother, Faye. And, uh, my aunt Abby, I think was the only one who is alive at that point, and he would like read the headlines off the paper. And he did interview Layka, at one point is my great grandmother. Um, and you can tell that they do not like each other. Um, he goes on this whole thing. It’s like, we don’t always see eye to eye, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, Dave, shut up. I want to hear like, and then also my dad found in much the same way, like cleaning out the garage found these old letters that were written from the family that stayed in Wales on the Hughes side. And it was basically, it was a bunch of stuff that was like, here’s the list of all of our kids, which is great, that’s very helpful. And, saying like, oh, no, no, no, no. Don’t come back to Wales. You can’t get a job here either. So this, I think, was like in the 30s. And I think my great grandfather was thinking maybe he’d go back to Wales because he couldn’t find work here in the United States. And his brother was like, no, no, no, man. It’s terrible everywhere. Just stay where you are.

Heather Murphy: So what hope do you have for the future in learning more about your family? Like, if there was one thing you could learn and figure out, would that be?

Fayge Horesh: I want to find more living relatives, because part of what happened with The pogroms and the holocaust and so forth is families just scattered. So, like, I know we have family in Canada. We lost touch, like, 2 generations ago, but we know they’re up there somewhere. and I have to wonder, like, do I have other family in the U. S.? Do I have family in Israel? Like, I don’t know. I’ve always been really tempted to get a DNA test, but I’m also really reticent to let a private company have my DNA. I know a little bit too much about how not secure servers are to be comfortable doing it. But I go back and forth every, sometimes I’m like, you know what, I’m going to do it. And I still haven’t done it. 

I have the relatives that I grew up with and knew, like, I just know intellectually as a historian, like, there’s other people out there that we have a connection to and it’s just because of how things happened in history.

Unless I do a DNA test and they also do a DNA test, we’re never gonna find each other. So that’s kind of the dream, is to find, like, a lost relative kind of thing.

Heather Murphy: Well, you might have some luck just doing descendancy research where you pick an ancestor of yours and then you work forward in time and then like couple that with Facebook searches and just internet searches and you’d be I’ve been able to find people that like, for instance, somebody’s dad. He thought his dad was dead. Using just general searches because they have, like, public records. I was able to find him and they reconnected. So, it is possible. It’s way harder than a DNA test. It takes a lot more time. But, that might be an avenue that you could pursue.

Fayge Horesh: Yeah. I hadn’t even thought about doing it in that direction. Um, 

Heather Murphy: Well, thank you so much for talking with me and sharing about your family.

Fayge Horesh: Thank you.