Elsie (Simonofsky) Chomsky was born in l903 in Bobruisk, a town near Minsk in

what is now Belarus. At the time of her birth Bobruisk was home to a bustling,

diverse Jewish community of about 20,000--over half the town’s population-- with

a wide range of institutions and organizations. It was a center of Bundist

organizing and of early Zionist fervor, yet also home to circles of Hasidim and

misnagdim. It had a vital Yiddish theater, lively journals and newspapers, and a

noted publishing house. Bobruisk was the birthplace of important figures in

Jewish political and cultural life, including Zionist leader Berl Katznelson and

Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin.2

Elsie was the youngest of six daughters of Elimelech and Fanny Simonofsky.

The family became part of the massive migration of East European Jews to the

United States. Her oldest sister Rose, accompanied by an uncle, was at fourteen

the first to leave. In New York Rose boarded with a family, took the ferry every

morning to work in a bed-making factory in Hoboken, New Jersey, and began

saving for the others’ passage. Elimelech Simonofsky then emigrated to New

York in l904, when Elsie was an infant.3 Fanny and her remaining five daughters-