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.
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