JACOBSONS

Growing up I knew a number of relatives on my maternal grandmother Rose Jacobson Chukerman’s side. My middle name Philip is after a sister of Rose who passed away the year before my birth. I knew none of her other siblings but did know some cousins who were there children and grandchildren.

Having attempted to work on trees of relatives on my father’s father’s side (Usiskin), with an extensive tree on my father’s mother’s side (Obeler/Oboler), and with the Rivke Family taking care of relatives on my mother’s mother’s side (Chukerman), in the late 1980s I decided to tackle my mother’s mother’s side (Jacobson). I contacted two second cousins on that side, Joan Lowenthal and Bea Sarche Owens and sketched out a tree. It was a large family; even this first tree had over 200 names. I learned that my grandmother was one of 8 children. Five of the 8 had come to Chicago; the other three had remained in Europe and their families had not been heard from since. Their families were ostensibly murdered by the Nazis.

I used JewishGen at www.jewishgen.org when I could to find ancestors from Latvia and Poland, and I put my contact information on that site. So did others, and in July 2003 I saw that a man from Brussels named Jean-Paul Jessé was researching both Jacobsons and Berenshtams from Mitau. Within a day we were trading e-mails. I immediately learned that Rose’s younger sister Dorothea (Dori) Michelson and her family had survived WWII.

Story. Dori – like all of her sisters! – was a musician, an opera singer in Hamburg performing under the name Thea Moll. She had married Julius Michelson, a gynecologist and had three children and moved to Hamburg, Germany. Their first child Hans was brain-damaged from a failed breach birth and died in 1941 of natural causes. Their second child Nina was a concert pianist performing under the name Nina Hamson. Nina lived with and may have married Walter Ruttmann, a noted German impressionist film-maker of the 1920s and 1930s, but was forced to leave Walter when Hitler came to power and asked Walter to assist in filming the rise of the Reich. Walter died from wounds suffered while filming the battle of Stalingrad in 1942/3; Nina was found in Amsterdam by the Nazis and gassed in Auschwitz in 1942. The last of Dori’s children was Gerhart, born in 1907. He was an impressionist painter who had studied in Grenoble in the 1920s but he could not make a living as a painter. He had married Ida Bauch who was pregnant with his child, and from 1931 to 1946 they had seven children.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Michelsons realized they had to leave Germany. The choice was either Chicago, where Dori had 5 siblings, or France, where Gerhart wanted to go. They ultimately moved to a hamlet in the south of France, Montagnac-sur-Auvignon (not to be confused with the much larger Avignon), and this saved their lives during WWII. Jean-Paul met Gerhart and Ida’s third child and eldest daughter Ann in the lycee in nearby Agen, and they fell in love. From age 18 to 24, Jean-Paul lived with the Michelsons, Ann became pregnant, they married (following the precedent set by her father), and six years later they divorced. In 1965 Ann died with her second husband in an auto accident.

Jean-Paul became a diplomat for the European Union, starting as an ambassador to a nation in the Caribbean and finishing his diplomatic career as ambassador to Israel (even though he was not Jewish). As one reason he could have such a career, he pointed to Gerhart, with whom he had discussed French, German, and English literature and in this family was naturally inculcated into the arts – music, art, and architecture. Wondering how this family become so literate motivated him to learn more about the Michelsons.

In his genealogy work, Jean-Paul found a set of family trees in an album “Familie Sachs” created in the 1930s by Emma Sachs, a member of the Sachs family in Riga who realized that, if the family did not survive an oncoming war, the only evidence of their existence might be a set of trees accompanied by pictures and signatures of family members. One of the trees in this album is shown earlier in this section. The original album is in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. I have a full copy. The Jakobsohn tree brought my knowledge of the paternal Jakobsohn line back into the 18th century.

In 2014 I received an e-mail from a man I didn’t know, Andrei Makarov. He had seen a family tree on Myheritage.com – I think from Ed Rappaport – and announced that he was a great-great-grandchild of another of Rose’s siblings, her older brother Herman. Herman had migrated east to Russia, not west to the United States, and his children lived in Moscow. The Nazis had come very close to Moscow but had not conquered that city, so this was a second family that survived the war. In 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, Andre’s father was on the government payroll in the middle of a 5-year stint in England dealing with exports. The family simply stayed on in England rather than return to Russia. Andrei then threw in a tidbit – his grandmother Irina Tenson Jacobsohn, was alive at the age of 99 and lived with his parents Yuri and Natalia Makarov (not the famous ballet dancer) in London. I asked, “Does Irina speaks English?” I was told “Yes” because she was educated in British schools for 10 years during Russian revolution times. Not long after receiving Andrei’s e-mail I had a conference in England and Karen and I were at the Makarov home in London and met the entire family and spoke with Irina. She had the accent of royalty, the “King’s English”. A joy of being a genealogist!

Andrei is also very much into genealogy, also on myheritage.com, and he informed me that the family of the eldest of Rose’s sisters, the third family that did not come to the United States, also survived the war but they have no living descendants.

Publications (distributed to family:

Descendants, Forebears, and Relatives of Sara Berenstam and Moses Wulf Jacobsohn. Spiral bound, 43 pages, August 2004. Revised with thanks to Jean-Paul Jesse, 2005.

Descendants, Forebears, and Relatives of Sara Berenstam and Moses Wulf Jacobsohn from Mitau, Courland, Russia. Spiral bound, 48 pages, 2009.