May 16, 1954
Irwin Hertzman Dies; Funeral Set Tomorrow
Irwin Hertzman, a general agent for the State Mutual Life Assurance Company here for 33 years died at 7 o'clock last night at Jewish Hospital. He was a director of the hospital.
Hertzman, 57, suffered a stroke yesterday afternoon at his home, 2112 Eastern Parkway.
He and his brother, Alex Hertzman operated the company agency in the Starks Building. Irwin Hertzman was credited in the company's field-service magazine with writing a letter which resulted in the sale recently of a $2,000,000 policy - the largest ever sold here.
Was a Native Louisvillian
A native of Louisville, Hertzman had been active in civic, business and Jewish affairs for many years. He was a member of the board of Jewish Hospital for about six years.
He was a member of the Life Underwriters Association, B'nai B'rith, the Young Men's Hebrew Association, Adath Israel Congregation, and the Standard Country Club.
Hertzman was a colonel in the United States Army Reserve Corps and was a former chairman of the Reserve Officers Association. Hew a captain in World War I, and served two years in China as a lieutenant colonel in World War II.
He has been a member of Jefferson Post of the American Legion since World War I and was a former commander of the post.
Survivors Listed
Survivors are his wife, Mrs. Dorothy K. Hertzman, two daughters, Mrs. Melvin Rosenthal, Fort Worth and Miss Ann Hertzman; four other brothers Aaron, Nathan, Samuel L., and C. Saul Hertzman, and two grandchildren.
The funeral will be at 2 p.m. tomorrow at Herman Meyer & Son Funeral Home, 1525 S. Third. Burial will be in Adath Israel Cemetery.
Over the Rainbow - Legacy & Legends
Friday, January 29, 2016
Thursday, December 25, 2014
Courier Journal - Charles Hertzman October 6, 2008
October 6, 2008
HERTZMAN, CHARLES ALLEN, 87, of Louisville, passed away Saturday, October 4, 2008. He was a graduate of Male High School and attended the University of Louisville before enlisting in the Army during his senior year. He served as a major in the United States Army during World War II.
He was a lifelong entrepreneur, owning numerous businesses including the Radcliff Department Store in Radcliff, KY, a Days Inn Hotel in Elizabethtown, KY, as well as being a franchisee of several restaurant chains including Jerry's, Lott's, Long John Silver's and Rally's. He served on the advisory boards of Jerry's Restaurants and Long John Silver's.
He was a former chairman of the Kentucky State Fair board, appointed by Governor John Y. Brown Jr. He was also a former chairman of Jewish Hospital and served more than 30 years on its board of directors. He was a lifelong member of The Temple and Standard Country Club and a member of The Lakes Country Club in Palm Desert, CA. His passions included golf, reading, spending time with his grandchildren, and philanthropy to such organizations as Jewish Hospital, Jewish Community Federation and Metro United Way.
He leaves a legacy as an astute businessman with the highest reputation for personal integrity, honesty and fairness. He was preceded in death by his parents, Alex and Rebecca Hertzman; and his brother, Robert Hertzman (Cece).
He is survived by his wife, Ann Rosenbaum Hertzman; his children, Joe Hertzman, Allen Hertzman (Michelle) and Jill Hertzman Prolman (David); his stepchildren, Jeff Meltzer (Jill) and John Meltzer; his grandchildren, Nick Hertzman, Julie Hertzman, Rachel Hertzman, Alec Hertzman, Rebecca Prolman, Andy Prolman, Hailey Hertzman, Dana Meltzer, Michael Meltzer, Adam Meltzer, Virginia Meltzer and Leah Meltzer; and many nieces and nephews. The family would like to thank his loving wife, Ann Hertzman, for her loving and devoted care through the many years. The funeral service will be held 2:30 p.m. Tuesday at The Temple, 5101 U. S. Highway 42, with burial to follow in The Temple Cemetery. Visitation will begin at 1 p.m. Tuesday at The Temple and 6-8 p.m. Tuesday evening at the home of Joe Hertzman, 4321 Barbour Lane. In lieu of flowers, expressions of sympathy may be made to the Jewish Hospital & St. Mary's Foundation, the Jewish Community Federation or to The Temple.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/louisville/obituary.aspx?n=charles-allen-hertzman&pid=118476979#sthash.mb7JYgWF.dpuf
Sunday, November 9, 2014
German Jewish Immigrants
A Bavarian influx changed the face of American Jewry.
By Howard Sachar
Between 1815 and the eve of the Civil War, two million German-speaking Europeans migrated to the United States.
From A History of Jews in America, published by Vintage Books.
By 1875, the number would grow again by half. From the Atlantic seaboard cities to the new trans-Allegheny states, Swabian and Palatine regional dialects [of German] vied with English as a daily vernacular. As early as 1851, a group of German communities actually petitioned Congress to declare the United States a bilingual republic.
Why They Came
The initial impetus for this human tidal wave was the ruination left by the Napoleonic Wars. Subsequently, agricultural enclosures and the inroads of the early Industrial Revolution merely compounded economic chaos. From 1815 on, by the tens and hundreds of thousands, villagers and city-dwellers alike sought a new future overseas. Their destination of choice was overwhelmingly the United States.
Gottfried Duden's Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America (1829), with its vivid descriptions of American political and social opportunities, became a catalyst for hundreds of articles, essays, and books, for innumerable discussions on the New World. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, as individuals and family groups alike, Germans traveled by river barge, by horse and wagon, and by foot; piled up in North Sea port cities; jammed the docks, the streets, the poorhouses; overflowed into the countryside. If they could not afford ocean passage, they signed on as indentured servants.
Jews were among them. Indeed, well before the American Revolution, German Jews comprised the majority of Jewish settlement in the colonies. Yet their numbers in the 18th century were minuscule, and during the Napoleonic Wars their immigration stopped altogether. It did not revive until the 1820s. In common with most Central Europeans, Jews suffered from postwar desolation and the trauma of adjustment to a pre-industrial society. In backward southern and western Germany, however, particularly in Bavaria, Baden, Wurttemberg, Hesse, and the Palatinate, Jews experienced an additional refinement of political oppression. Without special letters of "protection" from their governments, they were barred from the normal trades and professions. If a Jewish youth sought to marry, he was obliged to purchase a matrikel--a registration certificate costing as much as 1,000 gulden. For that matter, even a matrikel holder had to prove that he was engaged in a "respectable" trade or profession, and large numbers of young Jews were "unrespectable" peddlers or cattle dealers. Facing an endless bachelorhood, then, many preferred to try their fortunes abroad.
No less than their Gentile neighbors, Jews were seized by the image of a golden America, "the common man's utopia." They, too, read the numerous guide- and travel-books then being circulated by shipping agents and United States consulates. More important, they read and endlessly discussed letters from relatives and friends in the New World or letters published in the German-Jewish press.
Editorial Support
Often these newspapers added their own editorial encouragement to depart. "Why should not young Jews transfer their desires and powers to hospitable North America," observed the Allgermeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1839, "where they can live freely alongside members' of all confessions... [and] where they don't at least have to bear this?" In 1840 a correspondent for the Israelitische Annalen wrote: "From Swabia the emigration-fever has steadily increased among the Israelites of our district and seems about to reach its high point. In nearly every community there are numerous individuals who are preparing to leave the fatherland... and seek their fortune on the other side of the ocean."
The Allgermeine Zeitung des Judentums reported that all young Jewish males in the Franconian towns of Hagenbach, Ottingen, and Warnbach had emigrated or were about to emigrate. From Bavaria, by 1840, at least 10,000 Jews had departed for the United States.
It was an emigration largely of poorer, undereducated, small-town Jews. Most were single men. Unlike their Gentile neighbors, Jewish families rarely were able to sell a homestead large enough to cover a group departure. Afterward, however, once settled and solvent in America, émigrés could be depended upon to send for brothers, sisters, fiancées. Thus, Joseph Seligmann (later Seligman), who would achieve eminence in America as an investment banker, departed Bavaria in 1837 at age 17, sent for his two eldest brothers in 1839, and for a third brother two years after that. By 1843, seven more brothers and sisters and his widowed father had been brought over. It was a chain reaction of emigration.
Yet, even the trek to a European port city was a harsh challenge in the early 19th century. In common with other Germans, the early Jewish emigrants made their way by coach, wagon, or foot to staging points at Mainz and Meiningen, before continuing on to Hamburg, Rotterdam, or Le Havre. With them they took packages of dried kosher food, and often family Bibles and prayer books....
Growing Numbers
The migration never stopped. In 1820, some 3,500 Jews were living in the United States. By 1840, their numbers reached 15,000; by 1847, 50,000. Like their predecessors, most of the immigrants gravitated to the cities. New York continued as their first choice. In 1840, 10,000 Jews lived there, in 1850, 16,000--30 percent of the American Jewish population. By 1850, 16,000 Jews lived in Philadelphia, 4,000 in Baltimore.
There were valleys as well as peaks in the new Jewish demography. Charleston's Jewish community shared in their city's dignified decline after 1820, when steam vessels became less dependent on the southern trade wind route to America. By contrast, a new and vital Jewish nucleus sprang up in the inland city of Cincinnati. From the 1830s on, paddle steamers served as the backbone of western commerce, and Cincinnati's location on a convenient bend in the Ohio River made it a natural gateway to the markets of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. By 1840 some 115,000 people lived there--a major ity of them German immigrants. Possibly 1,500 of these were Jews. By 186o, 10,000 were Jews.
Urban concentration also reflected a Jewish vocational pattern. As in Europe, Jews in America dealt extensively in clothing. Portable and nonperishable, clothing resisted the vicissitudes of the market. Cheap, secondhand garments were particularly merchandisable. Indeed, prior to the Civil War, trade in "old clothes" outweighed that in new clothing. As early as the 1830s, secondhand clothing became virtually a Jewish monopoly.
From A History of Jews in America, published by Vintage Books.
Friday, June 27, 2014
Moses Falk
Miami County,
Indiana’s Jewish Population
Miami County,
Indiana, located northeast of the state’s center along the banks of the Wabash
River, was organized in 1834 on land purchased by Joseph Holman from the Miami Tribe
of Chief, John B. Richardville, in 1830. The Miami moved from their historical
home in Wisconsin to central Indiana over a century before Indiana Territory
was established in 1800, but lost much of their land through a string of 1830s
treaties, starting with the 1834 treaty which dissolved the Eel Creek Reserve
and forced inhabitants to move to other land within Miami County. The federal
government quickly purchased the newly-available land and started the Wabash-Erie
Canal. Peru, the county seat, was established shortly after Miami County, and became
the hub of commercial and social activity in the county as those eager to work
on the canal or sell goods to the canal workers trickled into the area. The first
canal boat arrived in Peru in 1837, followed by additional treaties culminating
in the 1840 treaty which forced the remaining Miami to cede their land and
leave the state by 1845. This removal opened up Miami County for more
development including the Lake and Western Reserve Railroad which reached Peru
in 1854.
Miami County’s first Jewish citizen was Moses Falk, an
immigrant from Wurtemburg, Germany arrived in Miami County around 1838. Falk was
a trader originally based out of Cincinnati who made his living by offering
goods to European and American residents, as well as local Native Americans.
Falk eventually organized a store known as the “Dutch Grocery” in Peoria, a
pioneer Miami County settlement located southeast of present-day Peru, along
the shore of Mississinewa Lake. Moses and his brother Loeb were the two of the
first three Miami County residents to become naturalized United States
citizens after filing naturalization papers in 1844.
In 1850 Moses decided
to move to Peru, starting the Falk Store, which he would manage until his death
in 1878. His resulting commercial success made Falk “the first Jewish communal leader
of importance” in the state, according to the Jewish Post and Opinion.
Falk was soon joined by other men from his native Wurtemburg
throughout the 1840s, creating a successful pioneer Jewish community centered
in Peru. Early Jewish settlers included the Sterne brothers, the Strouse
brothers, and Moses Oppenheimer. Falk originally sent for Charles and Herman
Sterne, partnering with the brothers to create the Falk & Sterne Mercantile
Firm, which operated from 1850 to 1859.
The Sterne brothers
then purchased the Peru Woolen Mill. Falk continued to run a store until his
1878 retirement when he passed the company to his son Julius. Moses Rosenthal,
Moses Falk’s nephew, traveled to Peru by foot from Carrollton, Illinois to work
as a clerk in his uncle’s shop, eventually starting his own mercantile shop and
becoming a partner in the Peru Woolen Mills after giving considerable capital
to rebuild the mill after a 1868 fire. The Strouse brothers, Harry and David,
also got their start in the Peru Woolen Mill after immigrating from Wurtemburg
in the 1870s. They ended up building Peru’s first gas plant to operate with
their mill and contracted with the city to provide street lights.
Many of the Jewish individuals in Peru became community
leaders by owning successful businesses, undertaking civic enterprises, joining
fraternal organizations, and acting on various boards of directors. For
example, Moses Falk became the first man to receive a degree from the Miami
Lodge No. 67 Free and Accepted Masons.
Julius Falk, son and
business heir of Moses Falk, was a member of the Masons, Knights of Pythias,
Odd Fellows, Red Men, Elks, Eastern Star, Royal Arcanum Maccabees, Foresters,
and Ancient Order of United Workman while still finding time to run his store,
be part owner of Peru Novelty Works, and serve on the committee to create the
Peru Commercial Club.
Julius Falk and Moses
Rosenthal were two of the founders of the Miami County Driving Park and
Agricultural Society, founded in 1890. Milton Kraus, a local attorney, acted as
the Peru Lodge No. 365 Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks’s first
Exalted Ruler and was a big proponent of a railroad extension, which would have
connected Peru directly to Chicago. David Strouse originally wrote to Andrew
Carnegie asking him to help fund a local public library years before he
eventually gave the community money.
Some of Peru’s Jews were active in state and national politics.
In the late nineteenth century Harry Sterne served as the U.S. consulate to
Budapest. Jerome Herff was the Democratic nominee for Indiana State Treasurer
in 1896 and 1900. Milton Kraus, a native of Peru and son of Peru Flax Mill
owner Charles Kraus, served as the Miami County Chairman in 1910 and eventually
represented Indiana Republicans in Congress
Even though most of Peru’s Jewish community met great
commercial success in Miami County, the majority of Jews left Peru by the
1930s. By that time, the first generation of businessmen and mill owners who
arrived in Indiana during the 1840s and 1850s had passed on and many of the
second generation of store owners, who gained success during and between 1880
and 1910, were also retiring from business. Many decided to move to be closer
to their children who had left Peru once they reached adulthood.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Star Tribune - Macy Ruvelson
Aaron Ruvelson, 100, Minneapolis Businessman
Chuck Haga, Star Tribune March 13, 2000
Aaron (Macy) Ruvelson offered proof long ago that a person
could survive cancer.
His colon cancer was diagnosed in the 1940s. In the 1950s,
he had to deal with prostate cancer.
He died Sunday, but not of cancer. He was 100,
daughter-in-law Sally Ruvelson said, and he just decided it was time.
"He said, 'I look back on my life like a good day's
work -- it was done, and I feel satisfied with it,' " Sally Ruvelson
said.
"He beat cancer twice, and he decided then to give
his body one hour of exercise for every 24 hours of service it gave him,"
she said. "He went to the boxing gym, and he did long-blade ice-skating.
People thought he was strange back then for all the attention he gave to
exercise."
He was born Jan. 17, 1900, in St. Paul, the son of
Lithuanian immigrants.
"He was most proud of saying that he was an
American," his daughter-in-law said, "because he was broke, he was
nobody, yet he could make a good living and have all the fruits of being an
American."
He owned a business, Macy Signs, in northeast Minneapolis, and he didn't retire until he was
86. In his 80s and 90s, he mentored young businessmen.
"For him, a contract was a shaking of hands,"
Sally Ruvelson said. "He never had a lawsuit in 47 years of business, and
he was proud of that."
He was proud, too, of maintaining good relations with the
four unions that represented his employees.
"He thought it was a very good thing that they were
represented," she said. "He really believed in the men helping him
and him doing the same back."
Survivors include daughters Irene Broom and Ellen DeMuth
of Santa Fe, N.M., and 12 grandchildren.
Private family services are planned.
Star Tribune - Buddy Ruvelson
Buddy Ruvelson, Visionary Businessman
Tim Harlow, Star Tribune Updated: October 31, 2009
He was a founding father of venture capitalism and was a friend
to small-business owners and education.
Owners of small start-up businesses found a friend in Alan
K. Ruvelson, who for more than 40 years provided capital for scores of
companies along with sage advice once they were up and running.
Ruvelson founded First Midwest Capital Corp. in St. Paul
in the late 1950s. It was one of the first Small Business Investment companies
in the nation to be licensed under a program launched by the Eisenhower
administration to funnel capital into promising businesses.
"He was one of the founding fathers of venture
capitalism," Samuel L. Hayes III, an investment banking specialist at
Harvard University, told the New York Times in April 2000. "He was a
visionary."
Ruvelson, known to many as Buddy, died of natural causes
Oct. 23 at the Shirley Chapman Shalom Home East in St. Paul. He was 94.
His desire to aid small-business owners, along with his
impeccable ethics and ability to get people together, allowed him to take First
Midwest public in the 1960s and subsequently to mark up many achievements in
the field of venture capital, including the first leveraged buyout and being
the first to invest in a software firm, said Steve Mercil, president and CEO of
Rain Source Capital in St. Paul.
"He was a pioneer in lots of things the industry
takes for granted," Mercil said. "He had values and set the bar high.
He was the one you went to for advice, and he'd give you an honest
answer."
Ruvelson was a lifelong resident of St. Paul. He graduated from
St. Thomas Academy and went on to the University of Minnesota Business School,
where he graduated first in his class in 1936. He worked as a salesman for his
father's diamond-importing business and did volunteer work for the presidential
campaigns of Harold Stassen in 1948 and Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. His work
landed him a position as regional adviser for the Small Business Administration,
said his son Richard, of Minnetonka.
Ruvelson, a Republican, was president of National
Association of Small Business Invest Companies, the Minnesota Association of
Commerce and Industry and served on the state's Economic Development Commission
under four governors.
Ruvelson was a strong supporter of public and private
education. He sat on the boards of the College of St. Catherine and the College
of St. Benedict and was president of the University of Minnesota Alumni
Association. He was active with the Minnesota Jewish Council, Mount Zion Temple
and Jewish Community Relations Council. For his efforts in business and civic
commitments, he was presented with the national Supporter of Entrepreneurship
award by Ernst & Young in 1994, honored with the University of Minnesota
Outstanding Achievement Award in 2001, and twice was given awards by St. Thomas
Academy for his contributions to the school and community. He also was inducted
into the Minnesota Business Hall of Fame in 2000. St. Paul named him an
"Outstanding Citizen" in 2004.
"He was proud of being able to bring people together,
not just in business, but in politics and in the community," Richard said.
His hobbies included riding horses and attending races at
Canterbury Park. Ruvelson also enjoyed music, especially opera, his son said.
In addition to his son Richard, he is survived by another
son, Alan, of West St. Paul; a daughter, Judie Goldetsky of Minnetonka; a
stepdaughter, Connie Schutta of Hillman, Minn.; a brother, Bob of Los Angeles;
nine grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
Services have been held.
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