The Oral History Project is a key part of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education’s mission to preserve and present the history of Oregon’s Jewish community. The current project expands and augments the Oregon Jewish Oral History and Archive collection assembled by Shirley Tanzer in the 1970s and the Holocaust survivor and witness interviews conducted by the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center from 1994 until 2012. We aim to collect a comprehensive range of oral histories chronicling the Jewish experience from community members across the state. OJMCHE currently has over 700 interviews and continues to add to the collection with its ongoing project.
In 2014 OJMCHE received a grant from the Oregon Heritage Commission to provide online access to the collection. Our goal over the next two years is to post all of the Oral Histories in our collection. Please check back regularly as we continue to add interviews. Feel free to use the information in these interviews, but please use the following citation: Transcript, (Name of Interviewee) Oral History Interview, (Date of Interview), by (Name of Interviewer), Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. Online: <web address of cited transcript>. (Date of download).
For more information about the project or interviewees, to conduct onsite research, to be interviewed, or reproduction permission contact the Archivist Alisha Babbstein at ababbstein@ojmche.org.
We extend our gratitude to the Oregon Heritage Commission for their support of the development of this webpage.
Search the Collection
Betty Lillian Rosenfeld 1925-2012
Betty Lillian Rosenfeld (nee Coren), an only child, was born in Cleveland, Ohio on May 19, 1925 to Morris and Eva Weinstein. Her maternal and paternal grandparents had both emigrated from Russia, and Betty’s parents were first generation Americans. The family was moderately observant, and they belonged to Rabbi Abba Hillel’s temple in Cleveland. Betty attended …
Eve Overback Rosenfeld b. 1929
Eve Rosenfeld was born on May, 3 1929, the youngest of five children to Esther Nudelman Overback and Oscar Overback. She had four siblings: Murry Overbeck, Sylvia Overback Miller, Howard Overback and Lawrence Overback. The family lived in the Irvington district of Portland where Eve attended Grant High School. After graduating with a BA in Sociology …
Margie Rosenthal b. 1947
Margie Rosenthal was born Margie Kieffer in 1947 in Waterloo, Iowa. Her father was in the clothing business and ran several stores in Iowa and Minneapolis before moving the family to Southern California, where Margie and her brother Max (Mac) spent their childhoods. Margie became interested in Jewish music at Reform Camp Saratoga (later named …
Marianne Rossen 1921-2013
Marianne Rossen was born on February 18, 1921 in Berlin, Germany. Her father owned and operated a bank, allowing her family to live a very comfortable life in the city. Marianne attended public school until 1937 when all Jewish students were expelled. She was 16. Soon thereafter, he fathers bank was seized by the Nazis, …
Louis Rotenberg 1914-2000
Louis Rotenberg was born in Portland in 1914. He grew up in South Portland and later in the Park Blocks, attending Shattuck, Failing, Cleveland and Lincoln Schools. Lou’s father Hyman owned a bakery where Lou and his two brothers worked as boys, although their mother counseled them to stay away from the bakery business as a …
Flora Steinberg Rubenstein 1909-1990
Flora Steinberg Rubenstein was born in 1909 in Lublin, Poland. Her father came to Portland, Oregon in 1913 and her mother and three siblings and she followed in 1921. She attended Failing School and took sporadic classes offered at night school at Lincoln High School and then attended Behnke-Walker Business College. She married Meyer Rubenstein in …
Ted Rubenstein b. 1932
Ted Rubenstein was born in 1932, the second child of Harry and Anne Kaplon Rubenstein. His father had moved the family to Medford, Oregon during the Depression and owned a general store there, which Ted grew up working in during the summers and vacations. Ted’s older sister, Helen (Stern) and his cousin Norman Kaplon and he …
Victor Russo 1927-2015
H. Victor Russo was born August 8, 1927 in Salonika, Greece. His father’s name was Yakov and his mother’s name was Buena. His father was a warehouseman for the railroad station and his mother made chairs. He had two younger sisters: Estrella and Bella. Victor’s family lived in a Jewish ghetto named Baron Hirsch. Though …
Rose Rustin b.1932
Rose Rustin was born December 22, 1932 on a dairy farm in Silverton, Oregon, the tenth of eleven children of Walter and Elise von Flue. Walter was Catholic and Elise was a member of the German Apostolic Christian Church. Rose contracted polio at 18 months forcing her mother to leave the house with her new baby. …
Jerry Sadis b. 1943
Jerry Sadis was born and raised in the Sephardic Jewish community of Seattle, Washington. His parents were Sarah Castriano and Jack Sadis. As a young man Jerry worked at his father’s co-owned West Hills Fish Market in Seattle. He attended University of Washington and after graduation in 1965, he married Bunny Mitchell. The couple moved to …
Margaret Salomon 1910-2002
Margaret Muller Salomon was born in Dusseldorf, Germany on May 5, 1910. Her parents were Simon and Flora Muller, and were both born in 1878. Margaret had two brothers: Hans and Walter. Simon owned a men’s store with 30 to 50 employees. During World War I, Flora ran the store while Simon was serving in …
David Sarasohn b. 1950
David Sarasohn was born on August 17th, 1950, in Jersey City, New Jersey. His father worked as an internal revenue agent, and his mother was a schoolteacher. David has one sister who is 11 years his senior. David’s father had a rheumatic fever as a child that resulted in rheumatic heart disease, which kept him very …
Norm Savinar 1916-2010
Norman Savinar was born in Portland, Oregon on June 16, 1916 to Jacob and Bessie (Abrams) Savinar, two years after their families had immigrated from Russia. His parents met in Portland. His father’s family was Orthodox and they established themselves in South Portland. His grandfather never learned English but he was as student of Torah, a …
Paul Schlesinger b. 1951
Paul Randall Schlesinger was born July 3, 1951, in Salem, Oregon, to two native Portlanders. His mother, Bernice Weiner, was known as Bunny. Her family owned Weiner’s menswear in Portland. His father was Ralph Schlesinger and his family owned Sally’s, a women’s clothing store in Salem. He had an older brother, Barry, and a younger …
Edward Schneider b. 1937
Dr. Edward Schneider was born on January 15, 1937 in Tacoma, Washington, where his father Leo Schneider was doing a medical residency. The family returned to Portland soon after he was born. Ed, his mother Rachel, and his sister Sandra moved in with his maternal grandfather Rabbi Joseph Fain when Ed was five years old and …
Martin Schneiderman b. 1942
Martin J. Schneiderman was born in Portland, Oregon, in April 1942, the only child of Leonard Schneiderman and Betty Posner Schneiderman. He lived in the immigrant neighborhood of South Portland and attended Shattuck School. During Martin’s final year of elementary school, Urban Renewal in South Portland compelled the family to relocate to the Hillsdale neighborhood. After …
Sharyn Schneiderman b. 1943
Sharyn Salmenson Schneiderman was born on April 24th, 1943 and raised in Portland. She grew up, along with her parents and sister, in Northeast Portland, outside of the city’s Jewish neighborhood. Both sides of Sharyn’s family originated in Russia. Her mother worked as a bookkeeper and her father was an insurance salesman. Sharyn grew up in …
Edith Schonstal b. 1937
Edith Schonstal was born in 1937 in Budapest, Hungary. Her family endured great difficulty during the Second World War, but counted themselves fortunate until 1944 when they were moved and interred in the Budapest Ghetto. While this was a great upheaval, and life became gradually more difficult, they were all able to survive the war. …
Laslow Lester Schonstal b. 1935
Laslow Lester Schonstal was born in Budapest, Hungary. His childhood was a happy one, and his family lived a comfortable life. It wasn’t until 1944, when the Germans invaded Hungary to be closer to the Russian front that life became increasingly more difficult. He and his family were moved to an apartment building marked with …
Estelle Director Sholkoff 1911-2000
Estelle Director Sholkoff was born in 1911 in a South Portland. Her parents, Anne Shapiro Director from Lodz, Poland and Nathan Director from Charterisk, Russia had immigrated in 1909, joining Nathan’s older brother Sam, who had arrived in 1905. Anne and Nathan played an important role in building the early Jewish Communal life in Portland. Their …
Eddy Shuldman b. 1954
Eddy Shuldman was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1954. Her parents Phillip and Anne were both survivors of the Holocaust and met in Dayton, where both of them had moved after the war. The family moved to Portland in 1956 and settled first in Laurelhurst. They moved to southwest Portland to be close to the …
George Boris Sidline b. 1934
George Boris Sidline was born October 22, 1934 in Kobe, Japan to Boris and Fania Sidline. He had one brother, Alexander. Both boys attended primary and secondary school in Japan before the family immigrated to Canada in 1954. George’s father first immigrated to Japan in 1918. He had fought during the Bolshevik Revolution in Vladivostok, …
Arnold Silver 1933-2016
Arnold Silver was born in Portland, Oregon on May 13, 1933. Growing up in South Portland, Arnold didn’t know a lot of other Jewish children, but visited Neighborhood House often, and played with a lot of Italian kids who also lived in the old South Portland neighborhood in the 1930s and 40s. Arnold described his …
Frances Stein Slifman 1913-2004
Frances Stein Slifman was born on March 8, 1913 in Portland, Oregon. Her family came to Portland from Odessa in 1910-11 and settled near her father’s family. A fruit and vegetable salesman, her father, Samuel Stein, eventually opened a grocery store in South Portland where she was raised in a complex, vibrant Jewish community, attended public …
August Smoorenburg 1921-2008
August Smoorenburg was born on October 14, 1921 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He was the second of eight children in a large Dutch Catholic family, and grew up in Wessen, and then Heemstede, on the west coast of Holland. In school, August took courses in Dutch, as well as French and German. In 1937, August …
Gus Solomon 1906-1987
Gus Solomon was born on August 29, 1906 in Portland, OR. His mother was from Russia and his father, who worked in the men’s wear business, was from Romania. He went to Shattuck School and Lincoln and Jefferson High Schools. His family belonged to the Neveh Zedek Talmud Torah Synagogue. He began college at the University of …
Chedwah Van Tijn Stein b. 1921
Chedwah Stein (nee Van Tijn) was born in Amsterdam, Holland. Her mother was Francesca Cohn and her father was Jacques van Tijn. She had one brother, David. Jacques was a geologist, and the family traveled a lot for his work, so she lived in South Africa, Mexico and Uganda as a child. In 1940, after …
Morris “Moe” Stein
Morris “Moe” Stein was born and raised in Canada. He and his wife, Lilian, had two children: a son, Joshua, and a daughter. He came to Portland in 1967 to be the Executive Director of the Jewish Federation of Portland. Moe’s philosophy as the Executive Director of the Portland Jewish Federation was that in order …
Trudi Schnitzer Stone b. 1944
Trudi Schnitzer Stone was born in Portland, Oregon on January 2, 1944 to Manuel and Ruth (Rosumny) Schnitzer. Her maternal grandparents, William and Annie Rosumny, owned the Star Bakery, where Trudi’s mother and her siblings grew up working. Trudi’s uncles Marvin Rosumny and Ben Medofsky continued to run the bakery as Trudi grew up. Trudi’s family …
Menachem “Manny” Taiblum 1928-2018
Menachem “Manny” Taiblum was born on July 22, 1928 in Warsaw, Poland to an Orthodox family. In 1940, Manny and his family were forced to move to the Warsaw Ghetto along with nearly 500,000 other Polish Jews. In 1942, on the eve of his 14th birthday, Manny snuck out of the ghetto to find food for …
Fannie Rosenfeld Tanzer 1899-1897
Fannie Rosenfeld Tanzer was born on April 3, 1899 in Podlachia, Poland to Hirsh Zvi Rosenfeld and Braindel Rosenfeld. She had six brothers and sisters: Pessie, Anya, Moshe, Yeshia, Abraham, and Ben. Fannie’s three older brothers immigrated to the United States immediately after the First World War, with Fannie, her mother, and her younger brother following …
Jacob Tanzer 1935-2018
Jacob Tanzer was born in Longview, Washington in 1935 and lived there until his family moved to Northeast Portland in 1945. In 1953, he graduated from Grant High School. He earned a BA in 1956 from the University of Oregon. In 1959, Jake received his Juris Doctorate from University of Oregon School of Law, and in …
Stella Tarica b. 1931
Stella Varon Tarica was born in 1931 in Rhodes and was raised in a close-knit Orthodox Sephardic community on the island. She lived with her parents, two brothers, and a sister. She went to grade school and junior high before being arrested by the Germans and deported to Auschwitz at age 14. Stella survived dysentery, …
Sharon Rosenblum Tarlow 1933-2021
Sharon Tarlow was born in Spokane, Washington on September 18, 1933 to Herman R. Rosenblum and Mollie Kors Rosenblum. They moved to Longview, Washington in 1935 where Herman joined Mollie’s relatives in a retail grocery business. Sharon graduated from Robert A. Long High School and attended Lower Columbia College in Longview and the University of Washington. …
Morris Tiktin 1921-2019
Morris Tiktin was born in New York City, in 1921, to Samuel and Miriam Tiktin, who came to the US from Palestine where his mother was born. He was the youngest in a large family, and grew up in a religious home, which he scorned and avoided. After high school, he was drafted into the US …