Finding Your Roots

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Narrator

Louis Dershowitz was nine years old when he arrived in this country in 1891, and settled with his family in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The seeds of a bustling Orthodox Jewish community were being sown there. And the Dershowitz men would eventually establish the neighborhood's first shtiebel, a small, Orthodox community synagogue, in the basement of their Tenth Street home. This was a synagogue without a rabbi. This was a family synagogue. And the cantor was my grandfather, the lay leader was my great-grandfather. -

Narrator

Decades later, this synagogue would play a surprising role in Alan's family history. The Nazi menace was growing throughout Europe. Jews, desperate to escape, were fleeing in great numbers. In response, the United States resorted to immigration quotas, and other onerous visa restrictions to control the flow of Jewish refugees. In 1939, the Roosevelt administration turned away the St. Louis, a ship carrying 907 passengers, most of them German Jewish refugees, forcing its return to Europe, where hundreds of them would ultimately die in concentration camps. Given this climate, we wondered about the fate of Alan's ancestors who remained behind in Europe. Scouring documents from the time, we were surprised by what we found. Alan, this is a set of passenger records from 1939. Amazing. I've never seen these before. Can you read the transcribed names? Yeah, Herschel Dershowitz, Aron Deresiewicz, Hirech Deresiewicz, Wilf Deresiewicz. I knew all these people. This is absolutely remarkable. -

Narrator

How could so many of Alan's family members have gained entry into the United States, when so many others were being denied? What we learned astonished us. Alan's grandfather Louis hatched an ingenious plan. He used his tiny basement synagogue to rescue his family. By issuing affidavits guaranteeing that they had employment, Louis proved that his relatives had a purpose for coming to America. My grandfather would have affidavits saying, "Our synagogue needs a rabbi, it needs a hazzan, it needs a circumcisor, it needs a shohet, it needs a shamash," So they would have an opportunity to say, "We have a job!" and they would come over. They weren't real rabbis, they were people from all aspects of life, and these are the relatives that my grandfather saved.