Local women share their stories
“We had no money, no jobs, no friends, and we did not know the language, but we decided to stay with our children in Milwaukee, and with the help of Hashem we survived,” said Mehri Rokni, an Iranian Jew who left her country after the revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979.
Rokni, along with Cynthia Herber of Mexico, Camille Ovitsky of England, and Susan Fono of Hungary, made up a panel of Milwaukee women who immigrated to this country.
They were the featured speakers in a program Wednesday, March 3 entitled, “Bringing My Jewish Heart to the U.S.,” held at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
The program kicks off The Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Women’s Division’s twelfth annual Jewish Awareness Series, themed, “The Journey Continues … Searching for our Jewish Hearts.”
Each of the panelists shared her personal story in the centuries-old journey of the Jewish people from country to country, in a seemingly endless search for safety, stability, community, and continuity.
Though the panelists grew up in vastly different surroundings, amid varied social circumstances, they cited many common experiences as Jews. Each woman cited instances of the discomfort of this “otherness,” and all said they feel freer to live as Jews in the U.S.
Rokni revealed her family history and the path that brought her to the U.S. Forced to convert to Islam 150 years ago, her ancestors lived in the town of Mashhad, Iran, seventy miles northeast of Teheran, on the Russian border, Rokni told the group of some 40 women.
Like the generations preceding them, Rokni’s family practiced Judaism in secret until she was nine years old, when they were able to relocate to Teheran. There, under the Shah, they were allowed to live openly as Jews.
Still they were outsiders, Rokni said. Their accent made it difficult to communicate with people in the capital, and their kashrut observance limited their social contact with Moslem neighbors.
After the Shah’s fall from power, Rokni’s husband, who worked for an Israeli agency to help Iranian Jews leave Iran, was blacklisted, making it impossible for them to obtain exit visas.
Instead, the couple left Iran on tourist visas to the U.S., where they had sent their teenage sons to live with a relative in Milwaukee. They left all of their belongings behind.
‘Sephardic Jew first’
Herber’s grandparents left Poland in the 1920s and ‘30s and settled in Mexico City with the hope of crossing to the U.S. when the quotas that barred them from entry to this country were lifted. By that time, however, they had built a community in Mexico, and no longer wanted to leave.
She grew up feeling culturally Jewish, but did not consider it her primary identity, she said. In Mexico, which is 98 percent Roman Catholic and less than 1 percent Jewish, Herber felt that only her Jewish-sounding maiden name, Ickowicz, distinguished her from the rest of the Mexican population.
When Herber came to the U.S. at age 25 to pursue a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania, she became more aware of her Jewish identity, she said, because of her contact with other Jewish students there.
After marrying her husband, Jacob, rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel, she developed her own relationship with Judaism, she said.
Ovitsky was born and raised in Manchester, England, in a Sephardic community. Her grandfather and father came from Syria and Turkey, respectively. Her mother, whose ancestors were from Russia, was born in Buenos Aires and moved with her family to Manchester to work in its thriving cotton industry.
Ovitsky said she never felt English. “I was a Sephardic Jew first, [who] happened to be a British citizen.”
At school in Manchester, Ovitsky sang Anglican hymns and Christmas carols, but had to stand outside the assembly room door every morning for prayers.
“We were always made to feel very different,” she said. Non-Jews had never heard of Chanukah and “they couldn’t even pronounce my name in school; even the teachers could not say ‘Camille.’ It was beyond them.”
Born in 1937 in Budapest, Fono’s childhood was a study in persecution. Her parents survived the Nazis in Hungary only to be driven out by the Communists. Her maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust.
Because she was Jewish, she and her sister were denied the right to go to dancing school, and later, to public school. Eventually her family lost its business and home, and was moved to a ghetto.
One or the other of her parents was detained, arrested, or sent to a labor camp repeatedly, and again and again they escaped. Twice her mother survived after standing in a line-up in which alternate people were shot dead.
After arriving in the U.S., Fono’s mother stopped keeping Jewish traditions because she was angry about her parents’ murder.
Fono, however, felt that denying Judaism would be to allow her grandparents’ death to be in vain, and subsequently became active in her synagogue and Jewish life, she said.
The Jewish Awareness series is co-chaired by Judy Baruch and Lauri Roth. Five more programs are scheduled, for Wednesday mornings in March and April. To register or for more information, call 414-390-5704.
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