Broida Family (Click for Family Tree)

Who is Mlle. Sarah Broida??

Was she a Karklinski-Broida, who had gone to France to get a job? Was she a Broida from the Lithuanian Rabbi line? It would be very interesting to learn more about her life- she probably had some great stories to tell!

How wonderful that she was a doctor in 1908, when there were not that many female doctors.

The Mixte Steamship Company was based in Marseilles, France, and operated between 1855-1981 under various owners.

Mlle. Broida kept good company, at least in the newspapers- note the next paragraph, mentioning Marie Curie! Women were making in-roads, finally, in the sciences.

The last paragraph about Dr. Dontchakova, helps to give us some context. If Dr. Sarah Broida was a Karklinski-Broida, her roots were in Lithuania, often a part of Russia. Where did she go to medical school? Where was she licensed? Apparently she would not have been able to go to school in any of the Russian settlements. Many women doctors of that time period (and men as well) were Doctors of Osteopathy (D.O.s), which was more accepting of women and those who did not choose the path of a formal medical school.

If you know anything of this Sarah Broida, please do share!

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1. “Honors for Foreign Medical Women” Mlle. Sarah Broida, MD, in The Woman’s Medical Journal, Volume 18, page 209, 1908, via GoogleBooks.
2. Compagnie de Navigation Mixte (Shipping company, France)– http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/fr~hfcnm.html

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Broida Family (Click for Family Tree)

Ad for “Miss Manhattan Coats” that includes the Broida store in West Virginia.

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1. Citations in captions.

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Broida Family (Click for Family Tree)

Jacob S. Broida and his wife, Anna M. Broida, were owners or part-owners of a retail store in Parkersburg, West Virginia, for many years. The store sold “dry goods” which, as Wikipedia describes it, were “products such as textiles, ready-to-wearclothing, and sundries.” (Sundries are personal care items, like soap.)

Their store evolved to carry just fine women’s clothing, and they later opened a second store in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

In November of 1921, Jacob S.Broida arrived in New York City on a buying trip for his store. We found a list of the products carried at the store:

[Note: “Pennsylvania” is listed at the end of his entry but unsure what it means.]

Businesses are required to provide a “Biennial Report” to the state in which they are incorporated, so we learned that Jacob’s store was still in Parkersburg in 1922, sold clothing, and employed two men and nineteen women.

The Broida store was bought out by Stone & Thomas in 1956. For a short while it was called, “Broida’s, Stone & Thomas” and the chain grew to 19 stores. The stores were sold to Elder-Beerman, Peebles, and Belk in the late 1990s.

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1. See captions for citations.
2. “Dry goods” definition and image– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_goods
3. Stone & Thomas buyout– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_%26_Thomas

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Last week we posted the 1991 note from Hilda Fish Broida, in which she told the family legend of how the Karklinskys became Broidas once they got to America. Cousin Mitch added some good comments to the blog, including one on John Zelig Broida being long gone, and since he likely was the first immigrant, we cannot know why the name was changed. I wanted to add a version of the family legend that was told to me.

John Zelig Broida’s granddaughter, Gertrude Belle (Broida) Cooper, told me many years ago (probably early 1980s) that she did not know for sure why the Broida name was chosen, but she believed it was to honor a rabbi from the Old Country (Lithuania).

Simcha Mordechai Ziskind Broida (his birth name) was a Lithuanian rabbi who lived in the northwest part of Lithuania. The Karklinskys were in the southeast, but word of the Rabbi’s Talmud Torah would have spread far and wide.

Known in later years as Simcha Zissel Ziv, he was a student of Yisrael Lipkin Salanter, a proponent of Musar, or Jewish ethical considerations, including moral conduct and discipline. Salter had set up a school in Vilna, which was near the ghetto of Eishyshok (now known as Eišiškės, Lithuania), around the 1840s, when John Broida’s father was a young man. A traditional yeshiva focused on studies of the Torah exclusively, but Rabbi Salanter added in Muser studies and even non-Jewish courses to help encourage students from drifting away from Orthodox Judaism. When Salanter left Vilna in 1848, his students, including Simcha Zessel Ziv, carried on with schools of their own.

After the death of Simcha Zissel Ziv, his brother and son, both also named Broida, continued the movement to change education.

Since John Zelig Karklinsky Broida was born in 1857, and immigrated to the US in 1874 or 1875, the time frame and place does fit for them to know about Rabbi Broida. Perhaps someone in the Karklinsky family, such as John’s father, even attended Rabbi Ziv’s school.

So we have established that John Zelig Broida, our ancestor and the first Karklinsky immigrant, could have known about Rabbi Broida and his progressive school.

The idea that names were changed by the workers at Ellis Island is a false one, and probably so at Castle Garden as well. (John’s immigration was before Ellis Island opened, but we have not found him in the records of Castle Garden, so he likely disembarked at another port.) Ellis Island employed workers of many nationalities who could speak the language of the immigrants who did not know English. They were able to spell names and places correctly because they were so familiar with the language. This may not have been the case at all other ports, thus possibly Hilda’s statement about John being given the name Broida as it was the name of the Irishman in front of him could be true. As Cousin Mitch stated in one of his comments last week, however, there really are no Broidas in Ireland, and we would find Irish Broidas in America if that man in front of John was truly named Broida. (We have not found any Irish Broidas in the US.)

Instead, consider the number of Irish persons named “Broidy” or “Broda”- definitely similar to “Broida” depending on the pronunciation. So it is possible that there was an Irishman in front of John Zelig Karklinski whose name was Broidy or Broda, and the government employee gave that name to John as well. Another possibility was that when John heard the man in front of him give the name Broidy or Broda, he thought of the Rabbi back home named Broida. Then, when asked his name, he gave the name “Broida” instead of “Karklinsky” to honor the work of the Rabbi, and perhaps, give him one tie to his former home that was then so far away.

As Mitch said, we will never know this answer for sure, but there are definitely a few possible pathways that the name “Broida” became the surname for so many persons now living in the United States.

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1. Simcha Zissel Ziv– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simcha_Zissel_Ziv
   
2. Helm Talmud Torah– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelm_Talmud_Torah
3. Musar movement– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musar_movement
4. History of Eishyshok–   https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shtetl/

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Broida Family (Click for Family Tree)

Hilda was a very interesting person, and she knew everything Broida. Hilda’s mother was a Broida, plus Hilda married a Broida, so she got a double dose of the family.

Hilda became a Zionist in her early years, and lived in Israel for some time. In 1986, Hilda was interviewed as part of an oral history program conducted by Youngstown (Ohio) State University. She explained how her mother, Theresa Broida, came to the United States in 1900 with her parents and three sisters. Their first American home was in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and then they moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and finally Youngstown, Ohio by 1905. Hilda’s father had immigrated to the US about 1904. Asked why her family immigrated,  Hilda replied that they came because of the poverty in Europe. She did not know if they had been victims of the violent pogroms, but stated that her father had left behind his Orthodox Judaism when he came to the States.

Hilda did contribute one additional bit of information to the Spring, 1991 issue of the Broida Family News:

Hilda passed away in 2005, and she is missed very much by the family.

Notes, Sources, and References: 

1. Youngstown (Ohio) State University Oral History Interview with Hilda (Fish) Broida– http://www.maag.ysu.edu/oralhistory/cd2/OH467.pdf
2. Broida Family News, Spring, 1991, Vol. 1, No. 2. Self-published.

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