Elsie Chomsky

Elsie (Simonofsky) Chomsky was born in 1904 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.

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 1904, when Elsie was an infant. Fanny and her remaining five daughters-