Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz

Freida Sima (Bertha) Eisenberg Kraus was among the two million Jewish men, women and children who emigrated from Europe to the United States during the Great Wave of Immigration (1881–1914). This book tells her story and that of her family, from her birth in the Bukovina to her immigration to New York City alone at age fifteen in 1911, her immigrant work life, her marriage to a widower with four sons, and the birth of their only daughter right before the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. It describes how she and a whole immigrant generation survived that Depression, sent their children off to fight for America during the Second World War while worrying about what was happening to the families that they had left back in Europe. It takes the story further, describing what happened to her European family and how she was reunited with her surviving siblings after the war. The book continues for almost a half century after the war’s end, portraying the «Golden Years» of these former immigrants through their retirement and until the final years of their lives.

“The Next Generation” tells the story of a unique group: the American-born granddaughters of early twentieth-century Jewish immigrants to the United States who were also children of Holocaust survivors, particularly those who later moved to Israel. Through an examination of her own life and experiences, the author presents it as a case study of this group, and sheds light on how the combination of being both the “Next-generation” and the “Second Generation” – children of Holocaust survivors – and moving to Israel, affected their lives.

This is the story of Shirley Rosalyn Kraus Tydor, the American-born daughter of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her father was an atheist\communist and her mother a traditional Jew. Shirley, the rebel, became a career woman and married her boss, an Orthodox Holocaust survivor and a widower twice her age, with two adult children. The couple lived in South Dakota and Montana, returned to NY in 1959 where their daughter was born, and worked as travel agents before moving to Israel in 1974. Shirley traveled the world when few Americans even possessed passports. "For the Love of Shirley" provides readers with an intimate glimpse into one Jewish woman’s challenges and choices in postwar Jewish America.

This book tells the story of mid-20th century Jewish America through the eyes of Bernice Cohen Schwartz, born in NYC in 1923. The oldest daughter of a family of Eastern European origin, Bernice had an American-born mother, but in other things was similar to her contemporaries, reflecting the lives of a generation of pre-WWI urban Jews in America with immigrant parents. Her life story reflects much of the development of American Jewry during the middle of the 20th century: the Great Depression, the Second World War, the development of Zionism, the response to the new State of Israel, and the development of Jewish suburbia. We follow Bernice's school years during the Depression, her connection with the Bronx Y, her college studies, her stint in the Women's Land Army, study trip to Israel in 1949, and marriage to Arthur Schwartz, a young army veteran and social work student from Nyack, NY. After the couple's odyssey through several East Coast Jewish communities, they and their sons settled in Teaneck, New Jersey. We follow Bernice's response to her oldest son immigrating to Israel, and the couple's move to Riverdale, NY and life there during their "Golden Years" in the 21st century.

What makes us what we are? How does our gender affect our identity? Who are our heroes and heroines and how do they mould the decisions we make and the way we live our lives? In what ways does our connection – or lack there of – to our birth religion shape our adult selves? These are just some of the questions which Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women addresses. In examining the lives and deaths of various Jewish women during the 20th and 21st centuries this study focuses on the dynamic by which they formed their identities at times of crisis, whether in pre-State Israel, during and after the Holocaust in liberated Europe, or throughout Israel’s formative years. As refugees, survivors, new immigrants or veteran citizens of a country these women’s lives are probed and analyzed in terms of their relationship to each other, to their surroundings, their past, their future, their ideologies, and their geographic and virtual communities, presenting us with a mosaic of contemporary Jewish women’s lives.

This is a book about, Chaskel Tydor, an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor, who was at various times a bookkeeper, metallurgist, kibbutz founder, Hebrew book publisher, uranium mine manager, and travel agent. Spanning close to ninety years of life, his story takes the reader through three continents, two marriages, and one Holocaust. At the same time, it is also the story of much of the Jewish people during the twentieth century, or at least those who found themselves wandering between countries, learning to function in new languages and societies, building and joining various Jewish communities, and continuously adopting different outward ways of life while trying to maintain their Jewish beliefs and practices. Through the story of one, albeit unique man, we learn the history of an era: Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the First World War, events in Weimar and Hitler's Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the struggle for survival in Nazi camps, the creation of the State of Israel, Jewish life in the United States after the Second World War including in far-flung areas such as Montana and South Dakota, and finally, the events in Israel following the Yom Kippur War and up to and including the first Intifada (1987). This a book of Jewish survival and triumph chronicling the transformation and rebirth not only of one man but of an entire Jewish world. Throughout the book Dr Baumel-Schwartz provides substantive Further Reading lists and bibliographic information which allows readers to source and compare other scholarship and writings on the places and historical circumstances presented.