THE RIVKE FAMILY

Each month during the school year, on one Sunday evening my parents, brothers, and I would go to a “family meeting”. This was a meeting of the Rivke Family Verband (“verband” means “society” or organization”), a cousins club of the relatives on my grandfather Jacob Chukerman’s side, and it took place in the basement of a synagogue (for many years in the 1950s the K.A.M. temple in Hyde Park, which later became the headquarters of Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push). Each meeting of perhaps 50-70 people consisted of milling around before dinner, then a dinner served by four or five of the families, then a formal meeting to discuss family matters at which minutes were taken, and lastly entertainment (a singer or a play or dancing, etc.). It was fun and I looked forward to these meetings. Each year on July 4th there was a picnic, and every five years there was a week-long “jubilee” with a dinner dance and at each jubilee a picture was taken of the entire family, and many of the family had and displayed copies of those pictures in their homes.

The picnic picture from the first Rivke Family Verband Jubilee, July 1935

It was often noted that we members of the Verband were all descendants (or spouses of descendants) of one man, Velvel Marinker, and that the Verband had been organized in 1910 in Chicago because of the death of a cousin named Rivke, who had taken ill while she was pregnant with a second child and died. It was felt that if she had been able to afford medical care, she would not have passed, and so the idea was that in times of need, this club would work to help relatives. And the club helped to bring people over from Europe to the United States.

The older descendants knew how they were descended from Velvel, but younger members like me had no idea. It was rare for a child to speak up at the formal meeting of the family but on October 12, 1958, at the age of 15, I am mentioned in the minutes of one meeting as having asked for someone to draw up a family tree so that we would all know how we are related. The request was referred to the Executive Committee of the Verband, where it died.

However, several years later that request was answered in part when Jack Garber, who was my age, took up the task of trying to catalog Velvel’s descendants, and presented his findings at the 1965 jubilee. Jack seems to have been overwhelmed by the task and never completed it, and in 1975 he was out of the country, perhaps in the Peace Corps. Furthermore, by this time, the Verband, like many organizations formed by immigrants, was dying. It was meeting, but only four times a year, and then it lapsed into a coma. From 1967 to 1975 there were no family meetings. But there was still money in the Verband’s treasury, and in 1975 the treasurer of the club, Sam Gluskoter, decided to use the organization’s old mailing list to invite everyone to a picnic on July 4th as was the tradition, and to invite a photographer to take the traditional picture. About eighty people were expected but 177 showed up, the largest number ever to a Rivke Family gathering.

I was sitting at a picnic bench with several of the oldest members of the family – all women – and mentioned my desire to see a family tree of Velvel’s descendants. One of the women explained in her Yiddish-accented English, “It can’t be done.” “They’re all gone.” “No one knows.” “You know who knew? Uncle Max.” (Uncle Max had died decades before.) And then, finally. “It’s very difficult. Cousins married cousins.”

Now imagine me, trained in mathematics. I am faced with a problem that people think is unsolvable. But I think the fact that cousins married cousins makes things easier rather than more difficult, because it closes in the family. Also, the Oboler family tree has shown me an efficient and clear way to display a tree of descendants. And I knew that I could trace myself back to Velvel. Moreover, I was 32 years old at this time, so if I could trace myself back to Velvel, I felt surely the older generation could do the same. Thus creating a tree of descendants of Velvel Marinker was in my mind simply a matter of obtaining information from lots of people. This was like being a mathematics doctoral student and finding the perfect problem to attack – one you think you can solve but others think is too difficult or maybe unsolvable! And so I went home and outlined what I knew: Velvel had 4 children that I knew and there had to be 2 others, and so on…

I made a couple of phone calls to cousins and they all said I should talk to Rose Zukerman, then 84 years old and one of the people at the picnic bench. A month later she and I met for an afternoon and I learned that those who knew the origins of the family were not “all gone”. Rose was an encyclopedia. She was a grandchild of Velvel’s! – I had thought that all from that generation had died. She was born in Bialystok (near where my grandfather was born) and lived in New York, where many of the descendants lived, before marrying her cousin and moving to Chicago (she is the one who remarked that “cousins married cousins”). She told me Velvel’s wife was Chaya Rachel, that they had nine children (!), and gave me the first three generations of the family. It became then only a matter of filling in descendants. Within a year I had an up-to-date hand-written tree of descendants of 8 of the 9 chidren, including 991 direct descendants and spouses, far more than I had anticipated. I typed some explanation and sent that with the tree to 165 households.

In 1978, “Uncle Max”, whose name was Max Zukerman, and who was in fact an uncle or granduncle to most of the family (!) - as was his younger brother, my grandfather Jacob - reappeared in the form of a translation of stories of his early life in Poland and the founding of the Rivke Family Verband. I volunteered to edit the translation because I hoped it would tell about Velvel Marinker and maybe his ancestors. It did not give me information about Velvel’s upbringing, but it did supply a well-written picture of life in our family in Poland and gave many details about relatives who were already on the family tree.

There have been five editions of the tree (see Publications below). The second edition introduced pictures. The third edition (1986) suggested a tree code for each individual on the tree, and the fourth edition made this explicit. The fifth edition (2000) is a book of “coffee-table” quality, designed by Shira Epstein and written with her help.

I still (2022) keep this tree up to date; it now contains over 2000 direct descendants and their spouses. Of course, I have learned much about the people in this family and also that family stories are often inaccurate. The name “Velvel Marinker” is somewhat like that of “Zorba the Greek”; his civil name was Velvel Garber, that surname having been adopted by 8 of his 9 children. (One son adopted the surname “Echt”, probably to pass as an eldest son of another family so as to avoid conscription into the Russian army.) Marinker is from “Malynka”, a very small crossroads about 20 miles southeast of Bialystok where he and his wife ran an inn. The Rivke after whom the Verband was name was poor but she did not die because she lacked medical attention; she had received immediate medical attention after she tried to abort a child and realized that she had caused herself internal injury.

Having the tree brought the family together and we still meet as the Rivke Family, though our 2020 meeting had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. But there is a family newsletter and website under the direction of Sherri Goldstein. The last edition is likely my last; it will be difficult to duplicate the design work of a cousin Shira Epstein on this book.

Presentation:

July 2010: At the 100th anniversary meeting of the Rivke Family Verband. Family History Presentation, viewable at https://vimeo.com/556246040 (1st part) and https://vimeo.com/556246575 (rest)

Publications (distributed to family):

Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Garber. Loose leaf, 28 pages + appendix of addresses, May 1976.

Editor of Max Zukerman’s “Autobiographical Sketches”, translated from the Yiddish at the Spertus College of Judaica, Softcover, 239 pages, 1979.

Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Marinker, A Living Tree. 2nd edition. Softcover, 84 pages, 1981.

Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Marinker, A Living Tree. 3rd edition. Hardcover, 136 pages, 1986.

Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Marinker, A Living Tree. 4th edition. Hardcover, 186 pages, 1986.

Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Marinker, A Living Tree. 5th edition. Designed by Shira Epstein. Hardcover, 387 pages, 1986.

Several of these editions, including the latest, can be found in the Family History Library, Salt Lake City, UT.