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.
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Frances Schnitzer Bricker 1909-1997
Frances Schnitzer Bricker was born in Portland on August 6, 1909. Her family had immigrated from Russia around 1904. Her father Moishe Schnitzer worked as a junk man in Portland. It was the only job he could find that didn’t interfere with the Sabbath, to save enough money to send for Frances’s mother and her older …
Isidor Brill 1888-1976
Dr. Isidor Brill was born in Yaldemeresk, Poland on October 1, 1888. He emigrated to New York to join an older brother in 1903, and arrived in Portland in 1905 where he attended the Shattuck School for one year. In Poland, Isidor had no access to a public school education but did attend a Yeshiva in …
Bernard Brown 1918-2013
Bernard Brown was born in Viseul-de-Sus, Romania to a religious family. He had an older brother and three younger sisters. During the Second World War he was sent to several concentration and work camps and was the only member of his family to survive. He married his wife Libby after they both survived the camps. They …
Charlotte Gellar Brown 1924-2020
Charlotte (Lotte) Geller Brown was born on April 2, 1924 in the small town of Lackenbach, Austria. Following the German occupation of Austria, all Jews were required to move into the cities and she went with her family to Vienna. Very soon, she was sent to England as part of the Kindertransport program. She lived in …
Joan Campf b. 1942
Joan (Joanie) Campf was born in Northeast Portland in November 1942 to George and Sylvia Davis Campf; her brother is Melvin Campf. Her grandparents on her father’s side were Sam and Molly Sherman Campf. Sam was the head tailor in the Men’s Department of the downtown Meier & Frank Department Store. Before that time, he …
Jack Capell 1923-2009
John Carver “Jack” Capell was born on June 11, 1923 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. When he was three his family moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where they lived for a few years before the family settled in Seattle, Washington. Jack attended both elementary and high school in Seattle, and after graduation in 1943, he …
Milt Carl 1925-2017
Milt Carl was born in Portland in 1925, the third of four surviving children of Russian immigrants. The children were: Sid, Bess, Milt and Eva (Walleston). They lived in South Portland at Third and College until the early 1930s, when they moved to Park and Jackson. His father owned a men’s clothing store. Milt worked as …
Bernard Carr 1923-2012
Bernard Carr was born in Berlin, Germany in 1923. His family was not religious but he did attend a private Jewish school. His family had a summer home about 50 miles from Berlin. They fled Germany under unusual circumstances, partially because his father had a successful private banking business. They lived in Nice, France for two …
Anthony Casciato 1917-2015
Judge Anthony Casciato was born in South Portland on November 1, 1917. He was one of eight sons of an immigrant, Italian family. His father arrived in Portland in 1906. He had left economic hardships in Italy to work with a cousin in construction. The whole family lived in South Portland (he was one of …
Carol Kane Chestler b. 1935
Carol Kane Cheslter was born on September 16, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, the second child of Mary and William Kane. Carol’s large extended family (her mother was one of ten children) lived in Cleveland and she grew up in Cleveland Heights with many cousins. Carol met her husband Sy while still in high school and married …
Sy Chestler b. 1930
Seymour “Sy” Chestler was born in Cleveland, Ohio on September 12, 1930. His grandparents were from Lithuania, and his father was born in New York and his mother in Cleveland. He grew up in a Jewish neighborhood with the elementary school almost entirely Jewish. He graduated high school in 1949 and went to Western Reserve University, …
Arnold Cogan b. 1932
Arnold Maurice Cogan was born on December 3, 1932 in Bath, Maine; he was the fourth of six children. His parents moved the family moved to Portland, Oregon in 1948, where he attended Grant High School. Arnold went on to study engineering at Oregon State University, where he met and married his wife Elaine (nee Rosenberg) …
Elaine Cogan b. 1932
Elaine Rosenberg Cogan was born September 24, 1932 in Brooklyn, New York to Belle and Lou Rosenberg. Lou and his father had a fur business. The family moved to Portland, Oregon in 1948 where her dad worked at Ungar’s Fur Company. The family originally moved to outer southeast Portland and then eventually closer in to northeast …
Moses “Scotty” Cohen 1902-1982
Moses (Scotty) Cohen was born on March 10, 1902 in Glasgow, Scotland. He immigrated to Portland in 1911 with his mother and siblings; his father came to Portland five years earlier. Scotty lived with his father, mother, five brothers and three sisters in a small apartment in South Portland. His family was very poor. Scotty’s father …
Howard Cohn b. 1927
Howard Cohn was born in Portland on May 25, 1927, as was his father Sol. The family immigrated from the Russian/Polish border at the beginning of the 20th Century. The family lived on Portland’s east side and attended Temple Beth Israel. Howard grew up at the Jewish Community Center, serving on the board of the …
Sally Cohn b. 1934
Sally Cohn was born on September 26, 1934 in Portland, Oregon. Her parents Henry and Helen, lived in Heppner, Oregon, where Henry ran first a Dodge dealership and later raised sheep. Henry was the great grandnephew of Henry Heppner, for whom the town is named. Her grandparent’s came from the Posen area of Germany and came …
Doris Colmbs b. 1928
Doris Colmbs was born in 1928 in Meiningen, Germany to very upper-class parents: a German Jewish father and a Russian Socialist, American-born mother. She had two older sisters and remembers a very comfortable childhood in Berlin, Germany. As a child, she had little awareness of her Jewish heritage and was only vaguely aware of the …
Boris Dayyan (born Mosessohn) 1907-1996
Boris Dayyan (born Mossesohn) was born on November 4, 1907 on Johnson Street in Portland, Oregon. Boris was from a prominent local Jewish family. His grandfather, Nehemiah Mosseyavich Dayyan, immigrated to the United States from Odessa, Ukraine in 1882, and was a rabbi at Neveh Zedek. His father, David Mossesohn, was very active in the …
Marguerite Dilsheimer 1904-1976
Marguerite Swett Dilsheimer was born on March 20, 1904. Marguerite’s family were Jewish pioneers in Oregon. Her mother, Julia Segal Swett had five sisters: Molly Segal, Bess Segal Bogen (Idaho), Esther Segal Goldman (Kansas City), Ann Segal, Evelyn Segal Savinar. Marguerite’s father, Isaac Swett was eight years old when their family arrived in Oregon. Isaac and …
Stephanie Gerst Douglas b. 1936
Stephanie Gerst Douglas was born in Germany in 1936 to Yitzach Gerst and Rita Daiczer Gerst. Her father was arrested as a Communist when she was a baby and sent to a death camp in 1941. Her mother was also arrested in 1941 and Stephanie was orphaned. She lived with an aunt in Belgium for …
Felice Lauterstein Driesen 1919-2009
Felice Lauterstein Driesen was born in Portland, Oregon on February 17, 1919 to a family that had been in Portland for several generations already. Her grandfather, Rabbi Henry Nathan Heller was born in Pressburg, Austria-Hungary from a family with a long rabbinical history. A trained musician, he attended the Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen under …
Nadine Bricker Dunker b. 1938
Nadine Dunker was born in Seattle, Washington on May 22, 1938, the third child of Barney and Frances (Schnitzer) Bricker. Her siblings are Sue Dorn and Monte Bricker. She is the granddaughter of Morris and Bertha Schnitzer and part of a very large, extended Schnitzer family in Portland. The family had connections in many of …
Stuart Durkheimer 1921-2009
Stuart Durkheimer was the second son of Sylvan and Dorothy Durkheimer. His paternal grandfather had come from Bavaria in the mid-19th century and was one of the early Jewish pioneers in Oregon. Stuart and his siblings, James, Marian (Jaffe) and Eloise (Spiegel) grew up in Northwest Portland and attended Chapman Elementary and Lincoln High School. The family …
Sylvan Durkheimer 1893-1984
Sylvan Durkheimer was born March 14, 1893 in Burns, Oregon. Both of his grandfathers immigrated to the United States in their early teens to escape the military draft in Germany. His paternal grandfather, Kaufman Durkheimer, came to the US from Bavaria in 1839 and to Portland in 1865 by boat around South America. His maternal grandfather, …
Ruth Doctor Egert 1913-2005
Ruth Doctor Egert was born in Vienna, Austria on January 18, 1913. She grew up in a middle-class, observant family there and became a teacher for the city of Vienna in 1933. When the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, she lost her job. The family saw that life was going to be very hard and …
Victor Egert 1911-2005
Victor Egert was born in Eisenstadt, Austria on April 20, 1911. Victor lived with his parents, his brother and his sister in Vienna, Austria until he was 22 at which time he took a job in a carpet factory about 20 miles outside of Vienna. He worked there for several years until the Anschluss in early …
Eline Hoekstra Dresden 1923-2018
Eline Hoekstra Dresden was born the youngest of four Jewish children on January 4, 1923 in The Hague, The Netherlands; two years later her family moved to Utrecht, The Netherlands. It was apparent to Eline’s family that some parts of Europe were no longer safe for Jews as soon as the beginning of the Second World …
Martha Mayer Emerson 1901-1997
Martha Emerson (nee Mayer) was born on December 30, 1901 and raised in Frankfort, Germany. Her father, Otto Mayer, was a traveling salesman before being drafted into the German army during the First World War. After serving only six weeks Otto was killed at the front. Needing to support the family, Martha’s mother started her …
Morris Engleson b. 1935
Morris Engleson was born in 1935 in Vilna, Lithuania. He was six years old in 1941 when the Germans invaded the small town of Podbrodzie, near Vilna in Poland, where his father’s extended family lived. Ironically, his family was saved after the Russians came because they did not have money, which would have made it …
Myra Enkelis b. 1937
Myra Enkelis was born August 5, 1937, the daughter of Jacob and Jennie Enkelis. She was born into a large extended family that stemmed from the marriage of twin sisters Rose and Celia (Simma) Himmelfarb to Joseph Enkelis and Shia Sussman, respectively. The two twins raised their children as closely as siblings and Myra grew up …
Robert Epstein b. 1940
Bob Epstein was born on April 17, 1940 in Philadelphia, where his father had a dry cleaning store. He was raised in a Modern Orthodox synagogue there. He met his wife Mimi at Penn State University and joined the Navy immediately out of school. After his military service he attended the University of Pennsylvania School of …
Miriam Epstein b. 1942
Miriam Esther Monicar Epstein was born October 4, 1942 in New York City, but grew up in a catholic neighborhood in Philadelphia with her parents and two sisters. She was the middle child. She and her sisters’ few Jewish friends were from the synagogue or the golf club outside of town that was started by …
Mike Falkenstein 1938-2021
Michael Falkenstein was born on September 2nd, 1938, in Frankfurt, Germany, as the third child of Gustav and Hedwig Falkenstein. He had two older sisters: Ruth and Ingeborg (deceased). His parents ran a textile business out of their home. After Kristallnacht, Mike’s father smuggled the family out of Germany via the Tran-Siberian Railway, ending up in …
Leonard Carroll Farr 1921-2008
Leonard Farr was born in Coquille, Oregon on October 16, 1921. His family owned a feed, seed, and farm supply store in Coquille until after the Second World War, at which time they expanded operations to Coos Bay. Leonard went to the University of Oregon business school where he met his wife, Joyce. Leonard was drafted …
Sylvia Lipcyc Feld 1923-2015
Sylvia Feld was born on May 25, 1923, the fifth of ten children. Her parents were Avrom and Sarah Lipcyc, and they ran a leather shop in Zloczew, a small town outside of Lodz. The family lived a very comfortable, observant life, and her father even built a small synagogue in the town, as well …