Nissim Meshoulam

Appears in New York Immigration records for 1820-1925

Arrival: New York, New York

Departure: Cherbourg, France

I ko Meshoulam , 3 Feb 2003:

My late father, Nissim Mechoulam (subsequently: Meshoulam) was born in Plovdiv (Pillipopolis) which is a large commercial city in Bulgaria. The community he was born into was Sephardi: they spoke Ladino at home and French was their other language, in addition to Bulgarian and Turkish. Their synagogue followed the Sephardi tradition. His parents' names were Yitzchak (I was named after him) and Rivka (Rebecca) after whom my sister Rivka (Rika) was named. I know that my father's mother died when he was very young and his father remarried. In 1917, when my father was 17 years old he left Plovdiv to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army (this was during the first world war) and he went to Istanbul where he could "hide" at the home of one of his cousins. He worked at an office of Customs Clearers so by the time the war ended he had acquired some knowledge of the shipping world. His hope was to go to Vienna to study Medicine, but quite by chance he attended a Zionist meeting where he was "ignited" by Zionism and in 1919 came to settle in Palestine. He first lived in Jaffa and then in Tel-Aviv. His first customs clearing / forwarding / shipping agency firm was called "Benbassat & Mechoulam" - and a company called the Eastern Express was probably their first shipping / forwarding agency. The "office" was located in the old port of Jaffa - where today you find a fish restaurant called "the Taboon". When the port of Haifa was built, my father moved to Haifa where he opened his firm of shipping agency and customs clearing. My father's brother David then also came to live in Palestine, sometime in the 1020's and settled in Tel Aviv. Since then and throughout their life my father and his brother David were partners in business via their firm "Meshoulam Bros." A book on the Bulgarian Jewish community in Haifa was published a few years ago and in it you may find some further details of my father's very active life in Israel.