Who Was David Feinberg's Father (Not So Obvious)

For all the great discoveries since I began submitting my spit to the genetic matchmakers, something has been conspicuously missing.

Feinbergs.

Yes, I found many fellow descendants of my great-grandfather David Cecil Feinberg (1871-1934), including many I never met. My goal, however, was to confirm that his brothers and cousins were the people I thought they were. That would be the Feinbergs of Zapyškis in the vicinity of Kaunas, Lithuania.

Their descendants never turned up on my DNA match list. The reason became clear when 23andMe declared me kohen. By tradition, that means I am a father-to-son-to-son descendant of Aaron, brother of Moses and founder of a dynasty of temple high priests. In temple times as in Orthodox synagogues today, kohens recite a special priestly blessing in front of the entire congregation.

The historical veracity of Moses and Aaron may be questioned, but kohen identity is real. Kohen fathers have passed down that identity, and the ritual responsibilities that go with it, to their sons for thousands of years.  In the process, they have passed along what really is their very own mutation of the Y-chromosome.

For the vast majority of Jewish men who are not kohen, some could be Levi, meaning they are descended from patriarch Jacob's son Levi. In other words, they belong to the Tribe of Levi, one of the original twelve tribes and one of only two believed to have survived after Assyria destroyed one of the Hebrew kingdoms in the 8th Century BCE (before the common era). The Levites assisted the kohens in the Temple, and they also play a support role in Orthodox services.

Everyone else belongs to the third category, Yisrael, or Israel. Mordechai Feinberg of Zapyškis was Yisrael. We know this because the Hebrew inscription on David's tombstone does not say "Mordechai ha-kohen" or "Mordechai ha-levi." 

David inherited the Yisrael identity from Mordechai, but someone else gave him his kohen Y-chromosome, an inheritance he probably never knew of. Ninety years after David's death, could we ever know the identity of David's genetic father?

If we do, it is thanks to another David Cecil Feinberg (1943-2024) and to his daughter Amy, who pushed him to send his saliva to Ancestry DNA. Thanks also go to Ancestry itself, for providing a new premium feature within the past year.

When you see someone on your list of "DNA Relatives," as 23andMe calls them, you usually have no idea how that person is related. To help figure that out, you can look at a list people who are "related" to both of you. For instance, if I see that all the people I know on our "shared matches" list are from my father's side, the person I am investigating is also on my father's side.

The trouble is, Basic Ancestry does not tell you how closely shared matches are to that other person. They might share as little as 20 centimorgans (cM). Without trying to explain what that means, trust me that for Jews and other inbred populations, 20 cM is a drop in the bloody bucket. Ancestry's shared matches are rather meaningless unless you pay extra for the feature that tells you the strength of each match (in centimorgans).

When I paid up, I saw that the late David Cecil Feinberg, my late father's first cousin, has a 206 cM match with one Ilene Dunn, who was born in 1934. Based on my own sampling of matches with known cousins, 206 cM with someone of similar age predicts a relation of second cousin once removed or second half-cousin. Either way, the connection would be through grandparents or great-grandparents. I should be able to figure this out.

My own match with Ilene was weak, but two other Feinberg cousins (from the Sam Feinberg and Carrie Pell branches) had strong enough matches that I was confident Ilene was related through the elder David or his second wife Jennie. Since Ilene had no recent ancestors from the region where Jennie was from, it had to be through David.

Besides comparing ancestral regions, I had to see if any ancestral surnames lined up. None did, telling me the connection had to be through the ancestor whose surname was yet to be determined, Old David's birth father. 

Ilene's paternal grandparents were from northeast of Kiev, but her maternal grandparents were from Lida, Belarus, located close to the Lithuanian border and a reasonable distance to Zapyškis. An online photograph of those grandparents' tombstone in a Detroit-area cemetery brought my search to a satisfactory conclusion. 

The tombstone includes the traditional Hebrew inscriptions. Samuel Zalman Slomovitz's father was "Tzvi Hirsch." The father of Mollie Slomovitz (née Berlovich) was "Binyamin ha-kohen[!]." 

From this auspicious evidence it can be reasonably assumed that all three of us David Feinbergs inherited our special, priestly Y-chromosome from Binyamin Berlovich, born 1834, son of Nochim and Bluma (née Aaron), born 1807 and 1808.

This will remain my assumption unless even stronger countervailing evidence emerges. In the meantime, one wonders how it happened that Binyamin from Lida, 160 km southeast of Kaunas, conceived a child with the young widow Chaya Goldring from Šakiai, 60 km west of Kaunas.

We know there were Berloviches in the Kaunas area. They were kohens, so they were probably relatives that Binyamin might visit. Maybe Chaya also had a connection to the Kaunas area. Maybe they had a short-lived marriage. Maybe they had an affair. 

Whatever the circumstances, we know the aftermath. Chaya married Mordechai Feinberg to be the father of her son Moshe-Shmuel Goldring and her newborn baby David. Moshe-Shmuel was old enough to know Mordechai was his stepfather. David did not have to know.

Meanwhile, within a year before or after David's birth, Binyamin's wife in Lida gave birth to a daughter, Ilene Dunn's great-aunt Celia. Was Binyamin trying to get away with having two families at once? Such a scandal is not unheard of.

Thirty years later, David moved his family from Chicago to Des Moines. Just around the corner lived  William Berlovich, a kohen. His wife's grandmother, Feiga Ginsberg Markson, a cousin of my Ginsberg ancestors, was from Zapyškis. From 1893-1904 he worked for another Ginsberg relative, furniture merchant Kassel Ginsberg.

The Ginsberg aspect of David's neighbors was equally if not more important than the Berlovich aspect. Either family may have played a role in his decision to move to Des Moines. To understand David's connection to the Ginsbergs, please read my blogpost from December 2021.

As genetic relatives of Binyamin Berlovich, we should know that Ilene's uncle Philip Slomovitz (1896-1993) was the founder and, for over forty years, editor of the Detroit Jewish News. His son Carmi Malachi Slomovitz (1933-2012) was the newspaper's owner and manager.

As for the Berloviches of Des Moines, the most notable story is that of William and Sarah's son Dewey (1893-1972). By the late 1920s, Dewey was so successful that he built one of the finest mansions in Des Moines, at 2200 Chautauqua Parkway. One issue of the Des Moines Sunday Register featured the architect's rendition at the top of the front page. (See my photo below.)

Dewey and his wife Edna moved into their three thousand square foot Tutor Revival house on a two-acre lot in 1930, but they had to sell after just two years as Dewey fended off a series of criminal accusations. He avoided jail until 1935, when he gunned down a man inside his downtown night-club, the Sportsman Garden.  It took only a few weeks for a court to sentence him for life at a different big house, the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison.

The 1936, Joe and Sarah (Pidgeon) Feintech became the fourth owners of the house that Dewey built. Sarah's brother Dave Pidgeon lived two doors to the south. (Sarah and Dave were niece and nephew of Great-Grandma Jennie Feinberg.) 

In 1944, Joe and Sarah made history. They defied a neighborhood "covenant" and sold their house to a Black couple. After a year in court, the sale went through. Archie and Audra Alexander lived in the house the rest of their lives, except for 1954 and 1955 when Archie was President Eisenhower's appointed Governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Governor Robert Blue commuted Dewey's sentence in 1948 and he was set free on parole in 1950. Dewey and Edna lived at separate addresses at least through 1960, but they are buried in separate but adjacent plots at Laurel Hill Cemetery. His tombstone has a Star of David, and her tombstone has a cross.

Known as the Berlovich-Alexander House, the moniker overlooks the Joe and Sarah Feintech's contribution to breaking the color barrier.

Grandpa Maurice's Poor Sisters

Regarding the family of my grandmother Esther Rubinson Marcovis: One of the biggest remaining mysteries has been the fate of her paternal aunts and uncle.

Esther's father Maurice (Moshe Leyb) immigrated to Iowa with his father Rubin in 1891. Initially, they landed in the town of What Cheer, the location of Rubin's sister Chaya Cohn. We can assume that because they used the surname Cohn on the boat that took them to New York. 

While Maurice remained in Iowa, moving to the nearby city of Oskaloosa, Rubin returned to the city of their disembarkation. Rubin Rubinson had made his home on the Lower East Side where his newly-arrived wife and three younger children joined him in 1896.

Those children included daughters Sarah, 19, and Rifky (Yiddish for "Rebecca"), 16, and their 8-year old brother Yossel (Joe). None of the three married. When they died, it is not clear if anyone notified Maurice's family. Maurice's oldest son Sam Robinson listed the three in his brief family history, but made no note of how or when they died. (When Sam wrote about his mother's siblings, he always included some death information.)

Last month (August 2024) I found "Sarah Rubinson" and "Rivka Rubinson" in records of the Hebrew Free Burial Association (HFBA). But how sure was it they were the relatives I was looking for? Although the 1896 ship manifest shows them to be born in 1877 and 1880, later census records showed them born as late as 1889 and 1890. The HFBA records are in line with the unlikely census data. At least the women would have been consistent about undercounting their age.

While one might expect the unmarried sisters to go by "Rubinson," their father Rubin had actually changed it to Robinson, as would most of Maurice's sons. Maybe the sisters used "Rubinson" out of habit.

My first attempt to verify their identity was to visit the graves. The HFBA buried Rivka Rubinson at Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island on March 27, 1961. On July 8, 1966, they buried Sarah Rubinson in a plot a few steps away. The graves, I discovered, were chiseled solely in English; they lack the traditional Hebrew inscription that might say "daughter of Rubin." 

My second thought was to check the death certificates, which list parents if known to the informant. But while death certificates through 1948 are public, the New York City Department of Health makes getting later certificates difficult. An email to DOH requesting just the parental information received a prompt, terse refusal.

Luckily, I found an email for the HFBA, which responded the next day. Immediately after explaining that I was, presumably, a great-grandson of their brother, Dana Riess attached facsimiles of the burial applications. Rivka's application, submitted by Sarah, listed the parents as Rubin and Ida (Cohen). The application for Sarah's burial just said "Rubin."

Both Sarah and Rivka died at the Home and Hospital of the Daughters of Israel, located in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue at the corner of 108th Street.  Both were welfare recipients. The only compensation for burial expenses was provided by the Home: $150 in 1961 and $250 in 1966. 

The 1961 application gave Rifky's address as 225 Henry Street. The small, red-brick three-story building, which dates from 1901 and still stands, is three blocks from where the Rubin's family once lived on Madison Street.

Sarah's application did not show any address other than that of the Home. If we trust she was 19 when sailing from Europe in 1896, she was close to 89 at the end and must have received long-term care at the Home. 

Maurice's daughter-in-law Annette believed the sisters and their brother always lived on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, but this was the first evidence of that. Already in 1915 Rubin's family lived on East 103rd Street, in an area now known as Spanish Harlem.

In 1948, when Annette and her groom Norton Robinson were in town for their wedding, Uncle Joe Robinson brought them to Henry Street to meet Sarah and Rifky. Norton recalled that they still looked and dressed like they were from "another country." He did not think they spoke any English despite having lived in the US for 52 years. The sisters did not attend the wedding.

When Uncle Joe registered for the draft in 1917, he claimed his entire family was dependent on him, including a "sickly sister." Did he mean one sister or both sisters? A second cousin of theirs, who nonetheless knew the family well, told me the sisters were delusional, always believing Joe was in danger.

Thus, it would be no surprise if Maurice's sisters relied on a charity to cover their burial arrangements. Joe, according to that same cousin, survived the sisters. He might have asked Maurice or a nephew for assistance, but maybe he was too embarrassed. When the Rivka in question died on March 25, 1961, Maurice, debilitated by a stroke, was himself a nursing home resident in Des Moines. Grandma Esther was one year away from dying of cancer.

Meanwhile, the fate of Joseph Herbert Robinson remains even murkier. His last known residence, in 1950, was the Irvington Arms Rooming House on Riverside Drive and 95th St. on Manhattan's Upper West Side. When Rifky died on a Saturday, according to HFBA notes, "Joseph" pushed to delay the funeral by one day. This was a determined effort, as he made several telephone calls to the cemetery. Did he need extra time to arrange transportation for Sarah, coming from the Upper East Side to the middle of Staten Island?* 

The application for Sarah's burial in July 1966 made no mention of Joe. The second cousin, however, remembered a conversation with him in November 1966. Joe does not appear in records of the Hebrew Free Burial Association. Whenever he died, there was nobody to report the incident to the Social Security Administration, let alone to next of kin.

* A similar predicament clouded the burial plans for my grandfather Max Feinberg. My Aunt Betty pleaded with the Orthodox Rabbi Malcolm Berg to wait longer than the religiously-mandated three day maximum in case my father could not return in time from a business trip to Japan.