Joseph Meidenberg and Solomon Maidenberg were brothers.
[The different spellings of the name are inconsequential. Both are transliterations from the Russian. Plus there are documents which show Solomon’s last name spelled as Meidenberg.]
Joseph Meidenberg emigrated directly to Philadelphia in 1900. See arrival record. Solomon remained in Russia. His son David emigrated to Ellis Island and then Philadelphia in 1906.
Both Joseph and David were linked to Ida Cohen (Ida Feldman after her second marriage), known to the Indiana Maidenbergs as Tante Haika. She was the sister of Perel, Solomon’s wife. Hence she would have been David’s maternal aunt, and Joseph’s sister-in-law.
Joseph Meidenberg’s granddaughter, Sylvia Meidenberg Rosenberg (1924-2013), was deeply interested in her family’s history. She and Milt Maidenberg had an exchange of correspondence in 1978 (see her letter). Later she and Mike became close, jointly conducting genealogy inquiries, visiting cemeteries and attending a Jewish genealogy conference.
Sylvia wrote Milt in 1978: “My grandfather Joseph was a rabbi who was your father’s uncle.”
There is additional detail of the history of the two families:
Joseph arrived in America a few years before the arrival of Ida Cohen (“Tante Haika”), the sister of Solomon’s wife Perel, and the relative with whom David and Rosa lived after their arrival in 1906. It is likely that Haika sponsored David and Rosa’s voyage.
David had a long, warm relationship with his aunt, who on occasion visited the family in Marion, Indiana.
Joseph’s descendants included Morris Meidenberg, who in the 1930’s moved to Miami Beach, where he built hotels. The Indiana Maidenbergs visited the Florida Meidenbergs. There is an 8mm film showing them. There is a photo of Toby and Mike as children in front of one of Morris’s properties, the Sunrise Court Bungalows. Behind them is Abe Meidenberg, Morris’s son, who died in 1958.
These close ties ebbed away over the years. The Meidenberg and Maidenberg families lost touch with each other until the tie was restored first by Milt and then by Mike.
In the letters, Amnon writes (1982):
When I was quite young I heard that Solomon had a brother whose name I cannot recall, to my shame. Prior to 1900 he left the Ukraine for France and a year or two after he went to another country. From that time his tracks have been lost and attempts of Solomon and my father to find out where he lived were not crowned with success.
The date that Amnon gives is consistent with the possibility that this brother is Joseph, who arrived in America in 1900.
From the trip journal:
I ask him about a brother of Solomon who, Amnon had written in one of letters, had gone to France.
Amnon explains that when the brother reached France, he wrote a letter to Dzygovka saying that was where he was. The brother was never heard from again. It is possible he remained in France, but he could also have emigrated to America or somewhere else. We do not know the brother’s name.
While the Indiana Maidenbergs retained a longtime memory of Haika, there was no mention of Joseph. It is possible that David was in touch with him. In any case, the fact that Toby and Mike visited Joseph’s son Morris’ hotel shows ties were retained up to 1950.
Over the years, when Sylvia and Mike talked he would make notes of her memories and reflections. For example:
Her Grandfather Joseph came over to serve a congregation which was tied to an “Otek-Malov” congregation, which in today’s geography would be Otaci-Mogilev, two towns on either side of the Dniester River. They are now in different countries, Moldova and Ukraine, but once were both part of the Russian Empire.
- Joseph would use a Yiddish term meaning “knotted and tied” to describe the closeness of the Jewish shtetls in the region. He was born in Mogilev, which is 30 miles from Dzygivka, where Solomon settled. We have assumed Solomon was born in Dzygivka, but he too may have been born in Mogilev.
- Sylvia had assumed that Tante Haika brought over her grandfather because Haika was known to have brought over many relatives, including David Maidenberg. But when it was discovered that Joseph arrived in 1900, she wondered if in fact Joseph preceded Haika. We still do not have and arrival document for Haika. We do have a 1910 census record which gives her year of immigration as 1901.
- Abe Meidenberg, a grandson of Joseph, ran a shoe store in Philadelphia for a while. A business card has been preserved.
- Sylvia could not recall who “D. Oxenfoldt” was. He was listed on the 1900 ship arrival record as the “uncle” to whose address the family was going. She gave his name as David.
- Sylvia liked to recall that she had a photo of her infant father wearing a “McKinley for President” button. McKinley was elected in 1900. Her father would have been four years old.
- Sylvia described Mordechai or Morris as a “little roly-poly fellow.” His second wife was Gittel (became Kate) Balaban, who likely was related to other Balabans in Dzygivka, including David, husband of Malkeh and father (by first wife) of Shimon. Kate was a “red-headed activist,” Sylvia recalled, who had been a “revolutionary in Russia.”
- Most intriguing is Sylvia’s memory that Morris went out to Portsmouth, Ohio, around the time of a big flood there. That would have been 1913. Her father Harry joined him. Sylvia recalled that he was 26 at the time. That would square with the flood date because Harry was born in 1896. There is a Maidenberg family memory that David headed west from Philadelphia to meet with a relative in Ohio. Ben Maidenburg thought the name of the place was Piqua, Ohio (there is such a place). But perhaps it was Portsmouth, which would reinforce the story of staying with a relative.
- Joseph’s tombstone gives his father’s name as “Yitzhak Isaac”, with “Yitzhak” written in Hebrew, and “Isaac” as in the English pronunciation also written in Hebrew. Solomon’s stone says his father was “Meir Isaac”, thus there is a discrepancy. But the preponderance of evidence, along with the fact that the name Isaac is cited, still argues for the conclusion that Joseph and Solomon were brothers.
In 2019 Ancestry.com located Joseph’s Petition for Naturalization and his death certificate. The death certificate provided new information, the name of the mother of Joseph and Solomon: Malka. With this information, we can conclude from other records that Joseph and Solomon had two sisters: Fraidia-Devora, born in 1874 in Dzygivka; and Ita, born in 1876 in Dsygivka. We have no other information about them.
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