I have been working on a video detailing the history of Am Olam and specifically reading through the memoirs of SIdney Shnuer Bailey. He was a neighbor of Lydia's and discussed her family in great detail in his memoirs, but none of what he says matches anything in Geni. I have not attempted to find records for this beyond Sidney's memoirs, although I have no reason to suspect he is wrong or lying about this information.
https://digital.library.wayne.edu/item/wayne:WayneStateUniversityPr...
Jump to page 138 for specific passage:
I can add a chapter about our neighbors, Hirsch and Elka
Rabinovitz. They were flour merchants with three sons and one
daughter—Ephraim-Froike, Yudele, [daughter] Leike, who later
administered the Pasteur Institute in Paris, 1 - and Zusele, whose
brilliant mind made him a banker and competitor with Wall Street
magnates, who forced him to leave America. Actually, the mother
was the wise one, the brilliant one, while the father was a simple
man. Three children took after the exceptional mother, one after the
father. I came to know the household as a boy, and would play little
“baubles & beads" games with them. All the children were strong-
willed. It once happened that Froike installed a pigeon coop, and
one pigeon broke something in the house. When the mother came
home from the store, little Leike tattled on him to her mother, who
either admonished or punished him. From that time on Froike
wouldn't talk to his little sister, who used to take care of him in his
mother's absence. Somewhat later, Froike and I were racing each
other [to see] who could read the Megilla ["Book of Esther"] or the
sedro ["weekly pentateuchal portion"] more beautifully for his
mother, and in the shul ["synagogue"]. That is how I became a
baal-koreh ["a public reader of the weekly Torah portion"]. Froike
went to study at the School of Commerce. He knew Hebrew, and
together we would sing Ha-Chemloh ("Mercy") and other songs of
Adam Ha-Cohen Lebensohn. " When I joined [the] "Am Olam"[movement], I got him interested too. He decided to give up his
studies and come to America. There, being alone, he met a family he
knew called Weitzman, from the Kiev "Am Olam" group, and fell in
love with one of their daughters, whom he wished to marry. He
asked for two hundred dollars from his father in Odessa. His father
sent only half of it. Froike answered his father in Russian.*
Froike obtained a government position somewhere. The fol
lowing kinds of things occurred. When my [own] daughter finished
her medical studies, as did her fianc e, who later became her hus
band, they lacked the money needed to establish themselves in an
office in the city. They got a position for doctors in Arizona, from
which [in years past] a letter would travel five days by Pony Express,
and [today] three by train. My children found Froike working there
as the manager. Imagine the great joy when, after three years of
service, the children decided to return to civilization, he wrote me.
A few years back, while my children were visiting in Los
Angeles, they found Froike a municipal employee. When Froike left
for America, his sister Leike came to me and asked me to be her
stand-in brother. I was preparing her for entrance into the Gymna
sium. Later she went to Paris to study medicine and I went to
America, where we promised each other to be reunited. But fate
decided otherwise. When I first arrived, I felt very lost and soon met
Mademoiselle Mashbir, a graduated Bestuzhevka, who ran a cooper
ative tailor-shop, where my friend [Moni] Bakal and others
worked. ,s Her mother befriended me and advised her daughter to
be more friendly to me. The first time I heard her speaking the real
Berditchev Yiddish, I was amazed. And so we fell in love. Under the
circumstances, I forgot my promise to Leike and married [Esther]
Mashbir. I had met her brother, a functionary in Balta, in 1879.
Meanwhile, Leike's parents, along with mine, arrived here. After
two years of studying in Paris, Leike became homesick and arrived
here, to become very disillusioned. By then I was a farmer near
Vineland, not far from Philadelphia. My parents wrote me that
Leike demanded that I come to Philadelphia and help her gain
admission to Women's Medical College, the only school of its kind
in the country. This I did. We did not see each other. She finished
her studies and took a position in a New York City hospital,
remained there for a short time, could not stand the way politicians
ran the place, and left after making public their "noble" deeds. She
left for Paris, where she became the world-famous biologist and
- Here Froike's reply in Russian is missing. What follows is not what he replied
to his father, but a description of further events in America director of the Pasteur Institute [s;c]. Later she married a Dr. [Walter]
Kempner, had two sons, and a daughter who died young. The
mother, too, died in 1935, and the sons became attorneys. When
Hitler took power in Berlin, the two sons fled. At first they lived for a
few years in Palestine; now they are professors here. One is at the
University of Pennsylvania, and the other is also a professor of law
somewhere. The older one struck up a friendship with me and
called on me a number of times. Now, due to the [World War II]
shortage of gasoline, etc., he writes to me from time to time. Unfor
tunately, the parents ended up in an old age home, forsaken and
forgotten after all they gave of themselves to make their children
prominent.
