Updated on April 30
J. recently marked our 130-year legacy of preserving local Jewish history with an event that invited people to share stories from their past.
Our March 22 event at Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley featured a panel of local scholars, a walkthrough of our online archives, an exhibit of early 1900s covers and rotary-style phones where attendees could record when and how they or their family ended up in the Bay Area.
Whether for religious freedom, to strike gold or to escape a bar mitzvah, the reasons that led readers to the Bay Area are fascinating. In leaving voicemails at the event, two participants even found out they are distantly related.
Following the event, J. kept the voicemail line open for a month for community members to dial in and share their stories with us. Below are stories of 11 participants.
If you’d like to share your family’s history with us, call 415-263-7200 ext. 953 and leave a voicemail.
These transcripts have been edited for length and clarity.
1851 — Steven Dinkelspiel
The fifth-generation San Franciscan shared his family’s long-running involvement in the Jewish community at Congregation Emanu-El, most recently with the Hebrew naming of his grandson, who is a seventh-generation San Franciscan.
My name is Steven Dinkelspiel, and I am a fifth-generation San Franciscan. My great-great-grandfather, Lazarus Dinkelspiel, came here in about 1851. He married a woman named Pauline Hess, who’d come here the year before, from New Orleans. They became members of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco pretty much right away.
We’ve been members since then. My grandson George is 6 months old, and he is a seventh-generation San Franciscan and seventh-generation member of Temple Emanu-El.
My family has been very involved with the Jewish community forever. My grandfather, Lloyd Sr., was a very committed volunteer in the Jewish community. He was the first president of the Jewish Federation, also the president of Temple Emanu-El and president of Stanford University.
His daughter, Frances Dinkelspiel-Green was the first female president of the Federation, and also very involved on the board of the [Judah L.] Magnes Museum.
My sister, Frances Dinklespiel, is a historian and author of a terrific book entitled “Towers of Gold,” about the other side of my dad’s family, I.W. Hellman, who came to Los Angeles in 1857 and moved to San Francisco in 1890. He also joined Temple Emanu-El then and was quite involved with Mount Zion hospital, among other Jewish institutions. Mr. Hellman was a pioneer banker in Southern and Northern California.
In searching the archives of J., you can find an occasional mention of my family members.
I am now very involved with J. [Dinkelspiel is co-president of J.’s board.] It’s a terrific publication. And this is an exciting project.
1854 — Ann Saunders Gordon and Kathy Saunders
These fifth-generation Bay Area-born sisters recounted their family’s experience as business owners during the 1906 earthquake and fires.
My name is Ann Saunders Gordon, and I’m here with my sister Kathy Saunders. Our family came to the Bay Area first in 1854. They came from London and Bavaria.
Their last names were Emanuel and Neugass. The Emanuel side of the family had a furniture factory that lasted at least 100 years. It was called E & L Emanuel. We think they had around 200 employees.
Their factory burned down several times, and they had to move.
They manufactured the interiors of I. Magnin in San Francisco and in Oakland. Their children, as adults, lived in hotels on Nob Hill in the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins.
They lived through the San Francisco earthquake and fire. My grandmother would talk about going to live in the park because their house burned down.
And speaking of fires, we found out today that when we met Sue Morris [former curator and executive director of the Judah L. Magnes Museum] that we are distantly related on our father’s side through a mutual relative named Greenberg, whose family made the fire hydrants and manhole covers in San Francisco!
Our grandmother, on our mother’s side, was raised in San Francisco. Her family came around the 1890s, I think, and they came from Russia or Poland. Her widowed mother owned a small market in the Mission, and they lived nearby, around Dolores Street.
Our grandmother worked at Homewood Terrace, a Jewish home for orphans. Not all the kids actually were orphans. Some of their parents just couldn’t afford to keep them at home, and they put them in Homewood Terrace. We know some people who experienced that.
We grew up in Berkeley. And our mother, Jane Saunders, founded the Body Shop in Berkeley in 1970, so businesses and small businesses run in the family.
We are all retired now from our businesses and enjoying life in the Bay Area.
1855 — Susan Smith Morris
Fourth-generation San Franciscan and author of “A Traveler’s Guide to Pioneer Jewish Cemeteries of the California Gold Rush” relayed her family’s history in the Bay Area.
My name is Susan Smith Morris. I am the daughter of Barbara Hilp Smith and Robert H.F. Smith, called “Bob.”
I was born on June 18, 1941, at Mount Zion Hospital. I am a fourth-generation San Franciscan on my mom’s side, and third-generation San Franciscan on my dad’s side.
In 1962, I married Mark Morris, who was also third-generation; he passed away in 2010.
Both of our families came during the Gold Rush in the mid-1850s searching for gold and religious freedom. They were German Jews.
My great-grandmother’s name was Emma Greenberg-Hilp. Emma was born in San Francisco in 1855 and her parents were Henry and Marie Greenberg. Henry Greenberg, from Germany, arrived in New York in the early 1850s and was previously a salesman in the Deep South. Emma was very active in San Francisco governmental politics and when women could get to vote, she served on a commission looking into accessible milk service to San Francisco youth.
Emma Hilp and her father Henry Greenberg were members, first of Emanu-El, then Ohabai Shalome when it started on Bush Street.
1867 — David Gabriel
This fourth-generation San Franciscan described his great-grandfather’s move from Savannah, Georgia, to San Francisco.
My name is David Gabriel. I was born here in 1948. My great grandfather, Jacob Gabriel, was a teacher of ancient and modern languages as well as an ordained rabbi. He arrived in Savannah, Georgia, to become a rabbi there, and they said, “Go West, young man!”
So he came to California, where he was warden of Congregation Emanu-El. He became a citizen on July 31, 1867. I’m a fourth-generation San Franciscan and proud of it, even though I’ve moved to Marin.
1919 — Ednah Beth Friedman
The born-and-raised Californian recounted her connection to San Francisco through her parents’ meet-cute.
My name is Ednah Beth Friedman. My maternal grandfather, grandmother and mother came to San Francisco in 1919.
They were Orthodox, from what is now Belarus, and continued to be completely observant until they died. My grandfather lived to be almost 101.
They settled in a part of San Francisco where there was a lot of poverty and a lot of Jews. It’s where the Moscone Center is now, on Moss Street.
And later, of course, they moved to the Western Addition, the heart of the Jewish community. They remained members of an Orthodox shul all their life, the last one being in the Mission District.
My mother lived in San Francisco until 1946. My father came to the United States in 1933 when he was 20 years old. He was born in Jerusalem under the Ottoman Empire in 1913. He followed his father and older siblings who had already come to the United States and were citizens.
He brought his mother and his younger sibling. They went directly to Los Angeles, where the other family members had settled. He learned English going to adult school in L.A.
At some point, roughly in 1938, he heard that a person in San Francisco needed “a somebody” who was fluent in Hebrew to catalog documents from the famous Cairo Geniza.
So my father came up to San Francisco and did that. On the side, he volunteered for the Jewish National Fund collecting the blue boxes from various Jewish organizations.
My mother was still in college at San Francisco State. She was the secretary of the Central Hebrew High School after-school program that she had attended, alongside many famous rabbis and scholars in the Bay Area. My father came to the Central Hebrew High School to collect the blue boxes, and that’s where they first saw each other.
Later on, they ran into each other at a young persons Zionist function. My mother was there with friends. When the function broke up, as my mother was going home with all of her other friends, my father — I can’t even imagine him doing this, it’s just so unlike the man I knew — told her friends, “I’m taking Miss Morse home!”
They were married in June of 1940. I was born in San Francisco at Mount Zion hospital in 1947.
I grew up in the Central Valley and came up to Cal to go to college and never left.
1920 — Marcia Goldberg Tunik
Goldberg Tunik’s family owned the Fillmore District’s Goldberg Surplus in the 1950s. Her father hopped on a train from Denver to San Francisco in 1920 at 13 to “escape a bar mitzvah” due to his dyslexia.
This is Marcia Goldberg Tunik calling about my father’s store on Fillmore Street at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue in the ’50s to ’60s.
My father ran away from his Denver home when he was 13, I think, to escape a bar mitzvah because he was dyslexic, which they didn’t know about in those days. That would have been in the ’20s.
The train he hopped on must have stopped in San Francisco, where he sold newspapers as a young man on the streets.
Then he worked for the [Pacific shipping company] Matson lines, where he shipped out to see the world. And then he joined the Merchant Marine and married my mother in 1943. She was a nurse at Mount Zion hospital. She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
They were married at Beth Israel Synagogue and settled in an apartment on Vallejo Street followed by a flat on Fillmore Street in the Marina.
I was born in 1946 and so now that makes me 80 years old. I’m sorry to say that my father’s store was demolished for urban development, and we had no pictures of it. But it was called Goldberg’s Surplus, and he always hired African American locals. It was a really rough street at that time, on Fillmore, except there was the Fillmore Auditorium just a couple blocks away. There were also some Jewish-owned stores on McAllister Street around the corner.
1920s-1930s — Roslyn Sholin
Sholin discovered a long-lost great-uncle who moved to San Francisco in the 1920s.
My name is Roslyn Sholin, and this concerns a great-uncle of mine.
He and his brother emigrated from Poland to Quebec in 1893. They crossed into Maine and lived there for a handful of years until they got citizenship in 1899. Then they moved to Brooklyn, New York, for a period of time.
In either the 1920s or ’30s, he moved to San Francisco. He was married, had several children and flitted between San Francisco and the East Bay. He passed away out here, and he’s buried in the Hills of Eternity in Colma, California.
I found all this out by doing very intensive research a few years ago, when I was determined to map out who these people were and how they came to be.
1938 — Nicole Dannenberg Sorger
Dannenberg Sorger discussed her findings after conducting intensive research about her family’s roots in San Francisco and the East Bay.
My name is Nicole Dannenberg Sorger, and my family came to the Bay Area in 1938 by way of New York, Amsterdam and Germany.
They left from Dessau, Germany, in 1937 and decided to come to the Bay Area because they already had relatives living here. Martha Hertz, I believe, was the first of our family who moved to San Francisco in 1934 and she lived in the Marina District.
Because she was here and established here with her son, Walter Hertz, the rest of the family knew that they had a place to settle. So my grandfather, Hans Dannenberg, came and originally settled in Berkeley. His wife, Lizbeth Hertz Dannenberg, was with him, as was my little uncle Albert, who was, I believe, 2 years old at the time. They lived in Kensington for a long time, and then eventually my grandfather, Hans Dannenberg, moved back into San Francisco until he died in the 1990s.
1960 — Robert Brodsky
Brodsky’s father traveled across the country from the Bronx, New York, to San Jose, California, in hopes of pursuing his career as a milkman without having to trudge through snow.
My name is Robert Brodsky. My parents are Herbert and Zena Brodsky, and they had three children. We moved to the Bay Area from New York in the mid-’60s.
My father, Herb, had sold the family deli in the Bronx a few years early and became a milkman. He was fed up with delivering milk in New York in the snow, so he hopped in his ’57 Ford and drove across the country to San Jose. Once in San Jose, he found another milkman job, put a down payment on a house in Campbell and sent for the family.
Just wanted to add a little note here: My father was so proud of being a Californian that he used to sit when he had spare time and practice talking without a New York accent because he didn’t want to be identified as a New Yorker. He wanted to be a Californian.
1969 — Adele Rosenzweig Amodeo
A former New Yorker told the story of how she made it to the West Coast.
My name is Adele Rosenzweig Amodeo and I came to Berkeley to go to graduate school at the School of Public Health at Cal in 1969.
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a couple of years, and then my then-fiance’s best friend came out to San Francisco in June of ’69. He called his friend, my ex-husband, and said, “It’s terrific! Come out!”
And then my ex-husband came out and called me and said, “Yep, you made the right choice. Come out and we’ll do your Berkeley stint together.”
And that’s how that went.
2018 — Fima Zaltsman
A recent San Francisco arrival discovered he shares ancestry with a prolific cantor who called San Francisco home 100 years prior to his own family’s move to the U.S. in 1990.
My name is Fima Zaltsman. I moved to San Francisco in 2018. My family moved to the U.S. in the late 1990s. As I was moving to San Francisco, I learned that one of my ancestors had moved to San Francisco from Lithuania in the late 1890s. Over 100 years prior!
His name was Joseph Rabinowitz, and he was a cantor in San Francisco. I found that there’s records that are part of the Magnes that detail some of his contributions and photographs. It was really cool to have that connection.