As many of you know by now, for the past year I have been working on our
family tree, tracing the descendants of one Efraim Fischel Ticktin who lived in
Lithuania early in the 19th century.
According to family legend, Efraim Ticktin had two wives: the first had
the maiden name of Rittenberg and died young, and the second was named Rohama
Friedman.He supposedly had six children from each wife.
I have been able to trace the descendants from two of the children from
the first wife and all of the descendants from the second.For some reason, the children from the first wife decided to keep their
mother's maiden name and we therefore have a Rittenberg line.One family member told me that when the first wife died, Efraim, who was
a brilliant man, married the maid, Rohama, who was slightly daft.This could explain both the name change and, according to this relative,
the "flaky" strain that runs in the family.
Our family is scattered over five continents and numerous countries,
specifically, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, Australia
and Israel.As far as is known, there are no living relatives left in
Lithuania.
While no one seems to have any information on Efraim, I believe he was a
merchant of some sort and probably lived in Kalvarija,
which is located at 54.27N and 23.14E, between Vilna (now Vilnius) and Kovno
(now Kaunas), near the current Polish/Lithuanian border.Today, Kalvarija
is the home of a nuclear reactor site and little is left of the Jewish community
there.The name Ticktin supposedly comes from a long line of rabbis
and it may be possible to trace this connection back at some point.However, Jews in Eastern Europe did not have last names until the late
1700's to early 1800's and Efraim may have been the first or second generation
to have this last name.The family may have gotten this name by being from the town
of Ticktin (or Tiktin), which I believe was in Poland.
Efraim's oldest daughter, Shayna Mindel, married a man named Wershofsky
(later Wershof), possibly from Vershovitz near Schlbobka which had many
yeshivas, and had three sons and one daughter:Aaron, Max, Yekel and Basha.Aaron
and his wife emigrated to Canada in the late 1890's with their three children.Later, two more were born in Canada.Stanley, our oldest living relative, just died in October at
97.A retired pediatrician, he was
living in Florida.His youngest
brother, Max, was a lawyer and diplomat, a former Canadian ambassador to the
U.N., England, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and a Member of
Parliament.The oldest son, Eli, a
general physician and surgeon, was the first Jewish doctor in Edmonton, Canada,
and has a street named after him, Wershof Crescent, in the Wedgewood Heights
neighborhood of Lessard.He was
also president of B'nai Brith.
Shayna's youngest daughter, Basha, married Barusch Kert from Kert,
Lithuania.They came to Montreal as
young adults before the turn of the century.Barusch was a furrier and helped start the Canadian Pacific Railway.They moved to Los Angeles in the 1930's and one of their sons, Max, now a
retired rabbi, founded the first reformed temple here, formerly the Olympic
Jewish Community Center, now Temple Beth Am, still in existence on LaCienega,
near Olympic Boulevard.
Shayna's other son, Yekel, stayed in Lithuania.Two of his children, Masha and Miriam, emigrated to the United States.Miriam arrived as a young woman during the war, around 1939-1940, and
currently lives in Florida.Her
brother, Fischel, was an opera singer, CPA, and had an import/export business in
England.He was killed in Kovno around 1940-41 under unknown
circumstances.Her sister, Sonia,
was a dentist, married to another doctor, and was a leader of the Schlobodka
ghetto during the war.Although
Sonia was warned about the Nazis coming, she decided to stay and hide in the
basement.She was killed with her
husband, infant child, and her parents when the Nazis burned down the ghetto in
1944.This seems to be our only
family lost in the Holocaust.
Shaul Yitshak Rittenberg and his wife Annie came with their eight
children to Toronto at the end of the last century.The family is currently scattered around the Toronto and Montreal area.I am still missing some information here.If anyone has any leads, it would be appreciated.
From Efraim Fischel's second wife, the oldest daughter was Hannah Ruth,
or Hanna Rusha.She married Sam Lewis and had three children.The oldest, Abraham, had two sons.The
middle son, Charles, had five children.The
youngest, Ida, who married Isidore Siegel, was an extremely prominent woman in
Canada.She was a trustee of the
Toronto Board of Education and helped develop the multilingual public school
system that is known in Canada today.She
also started Hadassah there.From
all accounts, she was very well known and highly respected.Ida had six children.
The second daughter, Sarah
Fagelah, was my great-grandmother.She
married Zev Wolf Kossin
(originally Kozuschnik) in Kalvarija and had eight children.Zev, with second son Maurice,
my grandfather, first came to this country through Canada where they stayed with
relatives, arriving in the U.S. in 1902.Oldest
son, Philip, arrived in 1903, and Sarah arrived with the rest of the children in
1906, sailing from Bremerhaven (near Hamburg), Germany, on the ship Kaiser
Augusta Victoria, arriving into the Philadelphia port.The youngest children, Ben, Tillie and Rohama were born here.They first lived in Harlem and eventually settled in the Bronx. Zev, with
his sons, had a pharmaceutical/wholesale
drug supply store.
One of Zev Wolf's sisters died in Auschwitz with her husband.Another, Rebecca, went to South Africa with her husband.Their grandchildren can be found there, as well as in London,
Australia and, of course, the U.S.
The third daughter of Efraim and Rohama, Tiebel or Tillie, died at a
young age in Lithuania under unknown circumstances.
The fourth child, Samson or Shimson, with his wife Sara, had six
children.Samson may have been a
pushcart peddler.From six children, three of the sons became doctors, as did
some of their sons.One of their
sons, Ethan, won the Canada lottery.Their
descendants are mostly in the Toronto area.
The fifth child, Asher or Usher, married Bela Warshofsky (possibly
related to the other Wershofs?) from Vilkovish and had four children.Asher was a happy-go-lucky sort and left his wife and
children back in Lithuania while he came over and worked for several years,
bouncing between Canada and New York.Finally,
Hannah and Sarah saved enough money and brought over the rest of his family and
they moved to the Detroit area.His
son, Efraim Ticktin, moved to Israel, then Palestine, as a young man.He was killed in a sniper attack with two other young men on the Ein
Hashofet kibbutz in 1938 when his wife was pregnant with their son, also named
Efraim.This family stills lives in
Israel.
The youngest daughter, Ida Gittel, married Louis Sakowitz (later Saks)
and moved to Massachusetts.Louis
was a scribe, a writer of Torahs.They
had four children, and their descendants are mostly still in the Massachusetts
area.
The last Ticktin family on the chart is there because although I have not
been able to trace the blood connection, I have become friendly with them and
they were able to help me track George and Gladys Ticktin since, coincidently,
Adrienne is related to George through their mothers.If we go back far enough, I am sure we will be able to find some other
link and I am speculating that Tudris was a brother of Efraim.The name Ticktin does not seem to be that common.Tudris started the first orthodox synagogue in Chicago, Temple Anshe
Tiktin, which still exists although it is now a reformed temple.
From current generations, there seem to be a lot of professionals:
doctors, lawyers and professors; overall a solidly upper middle class family
with a strong educational emphasis.There
are no major scandals, at least none anyone shared with me, and no serious black
sheep.However, many people do
report evidence of the "flaky" strain in their branches.
One of the things I have noticed as I have been calling what are
essentially strangers is the immediate warmth and openness and eagerness to
connect with family and with one's roots.If
anything is consistent in our blood line it is that so many of us are very
family oriented and still maintain close ties with other relatives.It is because of that that my job in tracking everyone down was not
nearly as difficult as it could have been.Virtually this entire tree evolved from telephone conversations with
relatives who were able to put me in touch with yet another branch of the tree.
Without exception, everyone I have spoken with has been extremely helpful
and supportive of this project.I
would particularly like to thank the extra efforts on behalf of Eliot
Phillipson, Rivie Gurau, Rohama Schweig
for remembering the names of long lost relatives and giving me some clue as to
where to start, Richard and Ruth
Rosenbloom (also working on a tree), Adrienne
Ticktin for connecting me to George and Gladys which was the first
connection to the long lost branches, Nahum
Lewis for the biography of Ida Siegel, Norman
Itzkowitz for his search through Kalvarija
on his recent trip to Lithuania, and, of course, my mother, Carol
Kossin Cleveland, who got me started on this by continually reminding me all
of these years that I come from a very big family- even if I had never heard of or ever met most of them.
I would also like to say how much I have enjoyed hearing from new
relatives that have called when they were in Los Angeles this past year: Joe
Schimmel, Alan Jacobs, Merwin,
Joan and Michael Rubin, Michael
Menczer, and Sam and Myrtle Peires with
their daughter Michelle Werbeloff and her husband Ronnie and their children, and
the others that I have met on my travels: Paul and Marilyn Wershof in London,
and seeing Sam and Myrtle again there.
If there is incorrect or missing information on the tree, please forgive
me and send me whatever you have as soon as possible.If anyone has additional stories and anecdotes or know of people that
have been omitted, let me know.I
would also be interested in keeping a medical history if everyone could
contribute what they know about their relatives' deaths and illnesses.This could be beneficial to all of us.I would appreciate being kept posted of family announcements (births,
marriages, divorces, deaths) for inclusion on future editions of the tree.Also, send in any address changes or additions for the family address
book I have enclosed.
In order to celebrate our new discovery of each other and to renew lost
ties, I am proposing that we have a family reunion.I have already spoken with my cousins (first and second) here in Los
Angeles and we would like to invite everyone here next Labor
Day Weekend 1993 (first weekend in September) for a large barbeque/picnic.Many of us live in California or have relatives here so I hope everyone
will make an effort to come, or at least send a representative from your branch.If people could drop me a note or phone saying whether they would be
interested in coming, we will organize it.I already have a tentative confirmation from the Wershofs in London and
some of the Canadian relatives, so some of you closer relatives should certainly
try to make it.With my immediate
relatives in the L.A. area alone, we could easily organize over 100 people.
In the meantime, I hope people will take advantage of staying in touch
with their new-found relatives and I look forward to meeting anyone who ventures
to this part of the world.
The second daughter, Sarah
Fagelah, was my great-grandmother. She
married Zev Wolf Kossin
(originally Kozuschnik) in Kalvarija and had eight children.
Zev, with second son Maurice,
my grandfather, first came to this country through Canada where they stayed with
relatives, arriving in the U.S. in 1902. Oldest
son, Philip, arrived in 1903, and Sarah arrived with the rest of the children in
1906, sailing from Bremerhaven (near Hamburg), Germany, on the ship Kaiser
Augusta Victoria, arriving into the Philadelphia port.
The youngest children, Ben, Tillie and Rohama were born here.
They first lived in Harlem and eventually settled in the Bronx. Zev, with
his sons, had a 
