Leaving the Old Country Behind: The Kobre Family’s Journey from Russia to Lynchburg (Part II)
by Austin Gaebe, Museum Experience Leader
Content warning: This blog contains descriptions of ethnic violence.
David Kobre, year unknown. Uploaded by Isabel Mandelbaum on Ancestry
In December 1905, David Kobre left Russia and boarded a ship in Hamburg, Germany, sailed to Liverpool, England, then finally arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in January 1906. His wife, Fannie Mary Golub, and their three children would join him four years later. Like his brother Isaac, David worked with his brother-in-law William Levine in Lynchburg as a shoemaker and eventually owned his own store on Twelfth Street. At the time, Rev. Julius Cohen was the rabbi of Agudath Sholom Synagogue and most of its congregants still adhered to Orthodox Judaism as they did in the old country. In 1910, a group of congregants purchased a plot of land in Madison Heights to serve as a cemetery for the local Jewish community to bury their dead in accordance to Judaic tradition.
The Beth Joseph Agudath Sholom Cemetery rests on a small hill alongside Meade Cemetery, a Protestant burial ground on Old Wright Shop Road in Amherst County. It contains family plots for many of Lynchburg’s Jewish families. The land purchase came just in time because in 1915, tragedy would strike the Kobre family again. Fannie Mary, David’s wife who had only lived in the United States for five years, passed away at the age of 39 of influenza, leaving behind her husband and the couple’s four children. She is the only member of the Kobre family with a gravestone at the Beth Joseph Agudath Sholom Cemetery.
Fannie Kobre's grave. Photo taken by Austin Gaebe
A few members of the Kobre family still remained in Kobryn during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Radical change was quickly approaching, but political violence, anti-Semitism, and nationalism still affected the Jews who remained. Russian Jewish communities were the victims of the fighting between Polish troops and the Soviet Red Army, experiencing an increase in ethnically-motivated violence never before seen since the 1881-84 pogroms. By this time, most of David’s cousins had already immigrated to the United States and scattered as far west as Michigan and Texas.
Finally, in February 1921, as the Polish-Soviet War came to a close, the last known Kobres left the old country behind to start a new life in the United States. Rebecca Bosniak Kobre and her two sons Jacob David and Philip joined her other children in Brooklyn. News of their safe passage reached the Kobres in Lynchburg, spurring them to leave the Hill City sometime between 1921 to 1924. David Kobre and his daughters Sadie and Tillie moved to Newark, New Jersey, and reconnected with their cousins who David hadn’t seen in over a decade. Tillie married her second-cousin Philip, cementing the reunion of the two branches of the family.
Records of the Special Board of Inquiry, Philadelphia Immigration and Naturalization Services. Found on Ancestry.
By 1930, virtually all of he Kobres who had been living in Lynchburg had moved. Isaac and Freda moved to Charlottesville with their children, Abraham and Matilda, while their eldest daughter lived in Wytheville with her husband. Louis and Eve Levine lived with their father’s second wife Lena and half-siblings in Brooklyn, New York, where they stayed for the rest of their lives. The Kobres only lived in Lynchburg for a quarter-century, but it was here where they were first introduced to American culture and experienced many of their family losses. However, in Lynchburg, they found a small yet tightly-knit Jewish community, many of whom, like the Alpers, the Scheinbergs, the Eichelbaums, the Kaplins, the Oppermans and the Weinsteins, were also Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. In America, the Kobres enjoyed a more politically stable environment where they could go to school, travel freely, conduct business without anti-Semitic state regulations, and practice their religion.
As the Lynchburg Jewish congregation began construction on a brand-new synagogue on Langhorne Road in the 1950s, the synagogue in Kobryn, Russia fell into disrepair. Today the Kobryn synagogue’s bulky and roughly-worn façade sits abandoned as a sad reminder of the once vibrant Jewish community that lined the streets of Kobryn. During the Holocaust, the Nazis brutally massacred almost all the remaining Jews in Kobryn, almost erasing their memory from the landscape. A handful of Kobryn Holocaust survivors tell a story of unimaginable terror and cruelty that shattered their city’s Jewish community beyond repair. But in Lynchburg, Agudath Sholom at 2055 Langhorne Road stands as a proud symbol of Jewish resilience in the face of great adversity.
Groundbreaking ceremony, ca. 1950s. Courtesy of Agudath Sholom Synagogue
At the moment, the synagogue is preparing to raise funds to restore the Beth Joseph Agudath Sholom Cemetery in Madison Heights in order to better educate the public on Lynchburg’s strong Jewish community. Through this restoration, they hope to honor the memory of those who made the tiresome voyage to the United States and find a freer life among the Agudath Sholom congregation.