Morris (Israel Moshe) Goldman

prepared the following information:

Morris Goldman

Hebrew Name: Israel Moses Gershuney Born October 18, 1866 in the Oblast (Administrative Territory within the Soviet Union) of Grodno in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic of the U.S.S.R. His father was Samuel Goldman (Shlomo Menachem Gershuney) and his mother was Rose Garsham.

When Morris was a young boy, the territory was part of Lithuania and under Russian rule. With Alexander III there existed a strong policy of “Russification” of non-Russian people and this continued under Nicholas II who was strongly anti-semitic and pursued a policy of discrimination in the economic as well as cultural life of the Jews.

The trend among Russian Jews was various forms of socialism but there was also a new international movement towards Zionism.

When Morris was roughly 21 years of age, married and about to be drafted into the service, he took his three children- Max, Mary and Nathan and while disguised as a woman slipped over the Russian border into Poland. Morris’s daughter, Bessie [Sandy%E2%80%99s mother] seems to recall to recall Gdynia (a town in the Gdansk Province and one of the three main seaports in Poland). Looking at a map of the area we can only guess as we try to reconstruct Morris’s journey to the United States. Since the town is on the Gulf of Danzig, they may have taken the “Northern” route over the Baltic Sea and on to Scandinavia, across to England, the Atlantic and on to America; like almost all Russian and European Jews during that era, the eventual arrival at Ellis Island. It was only a short while later that his young wife, Annie and the children in Worcester where he had begun work in the furniture business.

A few years later, Morris and his family, now numbering close to 9, moved to North Billerica. He then bought a farm house in Chelmsford, using it as a slaughterhouse and purchased a meat market on Broadway and Fletcher Street in Lowell.