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.