Frank Family History | frankfamilycircle

The Frank Family History

Lea Susan Chartock

(January 2000)

In search of genealogy

Recently, I met an Israeli woman, a Sabra, who was able to trace her family history in Israel back several hundred years. She was fortunate that the core of her family had lived in the same area and that despite political upheaval, official and family records survived.

The Frank family has not been so fortunate. When I visited Poland in 1994, I was told by various officials that most documents had been destroyed during World War II.

The State Archives for Rzeszow, Poland -- the region where the Franks lived -- wrote that they did not have records for the towns of Sanok and Smerek, yet from a contact at the Holocaust Museum, I learned that records for these towns should be found in Rzeszow.

Looking at the remains of Jewish cemeteries like the one in Sanok, an empty plot of land with a single memorial marker installed after the war, it is not hard for me to believe that records of births and deaths couldn’t possibly have emerged from World War II unscathed.

Despite the lack of documentation, however, we do have some information, gleaned from the first generation who emigrated to the United States and the documents they brought with them.

Linking the Family Groups

Herschel Frank, the first Frank about whom we have evidence, would have been born in the early 1800s, probably somewhere in eastern Poland. He and his wife Rivka had nine children; one, their son Leibusch (Hebrew name Isaac), married Richa Ames.

It is from Leibusch and Richa Frank that much of the family in the United States is descended. Descendants of the sisters and brothers of Leibusch Frank form another grouping of relatives.

Leibusch’s sister Esther married Jack Fink, from which line we have the Finks, Greeneses and Ginzburgs. Another sister Sarah married Abraham Odzer.

A brother, Liepa (Lipa), who lived in Lemburg, Poland, had a son Max, who had two children, a son Leon living in Canada, and a daughter Esther (married to Moshe Elmalem) in Israel.

Another of Leibusch’s brothers, Jack, had four daughters: Cyvia married Harry Siegel, Yitta married Elya Fink and Cheva married Mortcha Spindler.

Leibush’s third brother, David, had four children. Daughter Lucia married Stanley Dudas, and they later emigrated to the U.S. Lucia lives hear Philadelphia, and has two children, a son in the Philadelphia area and a daughter in the Washington, D.C. area.

Lucia’s brother Herman had one child, Robert Frank, who provides the family with a South American connection; Robert lives in Caracas, Venezuela.

(As you read through the family tree, you’ll note names such as Fink, Spindler, Weiss and Ames popping up in various family branches, indicating that sons and daughters from one family often married sons and daughters from another family.)

Of the other children of Herschel Frank–Joseph, Rivka and Aaron, nothing is known.

Leibusch Frank

Leibusch Frank and Richa Ames had 10 children, seven of whom later emigrated to the U.S. Those seven were Harry, Gussie, Louis, Gertie, Esther, Mary, and Sarah. Leibusch’s three children who did not come to the U.S. perished in the Holocaust; however, Betty Frank Binik and Irving Frank, children of Isaac and Cheva Frank, emigrated to the U.S.; of Hannah Frank Sternbach’s five children, two did not survive the war, two stayed in Eastern Europe (David and Edward), and daughter Rushka emigrated to Israel in 1935 to be a pioneer.

Sarah Frank and Mendel Kornfeld’s daughter Gitta Kornfeld (Fink) preceded Rushka to Palestine in 1934 (the piece by Tamar Arbel discusses the history of Sarah and Mendel and their children in greater detail).

For part of their lives Leibusch and Richa lived in the village of Smerek in southeastern Poland, where their children were born and raised, though we have no documentation of this.

In fact, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service papers show that, on arrival in the U.S., Gertie Frank listed her birthplace as both Sag and Temessar, Hungary, on December 2, 1880.

However, there is no corroborating evidence that the Franks spent time in Hungary during this period. In my own experience going through such records, dates and places of birth were often not reported accurately, either because of language problems on entry to the U.S., or because immigrants wished to appear older or younger than they actually were.)

But back to Poland: The town of Smerek is located in a narrow valley in the foothills of the Bieszczady mountains along the border between Poland and Slovakia.

The area looks quite similar to northeastern Pennsylvania and the mountains around Scranton, where much of the family eventually settled.

Smerek today is a minor vacation spot, with several working-class hotels, and a few farms. In summer it’s a jumping-off point for backpackers headed into the mountains, and in winter for skiers headed for the slopes.

According to Edward Sternbach, Rushka’s brother who remained in Poland during World War II, some Frank family members also lived in Lesko, a small city southeast of Sanok.

Leibusch was in the lumber business, and indeed, lumber is still a major industry in this part of Poland.

Fanny Frank (wife of Harry), who also grew up in the countryside near Sanok, relates that her father, too was in the lumber business, which required his travel during the week, returning to his family for the Sabbath. This was apparently common practice. Betty Binik described Leibusch as a wonderful man, great with children, but having a temper.

After the war he returned to Poland, but to the larger city of Sanok (northwest of Smerek) where he died, reportedly in 1923. His wife Richa, however, had died some years before (after bearing 10 children, one after another, this was not unusual).

Leibush had remarried a widow, Rischa Weiss, who had nine children of her own (two of which, Shlomo (Solomon) and Morris Weiss, were later to marry two of Leibusch’s daughters, Mary and Esther).

Several of Leibusch’s children emigrated to the U.S. prior to World War I (1914-1918). During the war Leibusch took the remaining family and moved them to Slovakia (then called Bohemia) to get out of harm’s way.

This region of Poland was under Austrian rule until the end of World War I and was known as Galicia. After the war it became part of the new Poland. Germans entered the town of Sanok on September 8, 1939.

By 1941, the Jews of the Sanok area, about 8,000 in all, were concentrated in a ghetto, from which they were eventually transported to Zaslow concentration camp and later to Belzec death camp. We don’t know if any of the Frank family members who remained in the area were among these. Only a few hundred Sanok Jews, however, did survive the Holocaust.

One cousin who remained in Poland throughout the war was Edward Sternbach (known in the U.S. as Odik), son of Hannah Frank Sternbach. Edward reported being in Lesko when the Germans invaded.

He said he witnessed people being pulled out of buildings and shot in the main square. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica (Vol. 11, p. 46) "In the folkore of Galician Jews, Lesko Jews were considered as 'wise fools' like those of Chelm... In June 1941 the German Army entered the town.

On August 13, 1941 the entire Jewish population was deported to Zaslaw and was exterminated together with the Zaslaw Jews.

Edward was able to survive the war, first working for a non-Jewish dentist and concealing his Jewish heritage, then later by hiding in the woods with the partisans. Among the people who helped him to survive was Irene, whom he married after the war.

Edward’s brother David apparently went east and ended up in the Soviet army during the war. Edward and Irene had two daughters, Anna and Barbara. Both lived in Rochester, New York during the early 1990s, but Anna and her husband returned to Poland in 1997, and Edward died the following year.

Two other family members who survived the Holocaust are the sons of Mendel and Sarah Frank Kornfeld, Joe Kalina and his brother Mundik (along with his wife and daughter Hedi and son Palo).

Prior to World War I, Mendel and Sarah lived in a town called Rostik in Czechoslovakia. By the time Joe was born, they had moved to Dlhe, Slovakia to get away from the Russian army during the war. Sarah was not Mendel’s first wife, and Joe had four half sisters and brothers from his father’s first marriage.

Mendel had first been in the cattle business and had owned a lot of land; before World War II, lumber was a side business for him. After brother Mundik went into the lumber business, however, Mendel did, too.

Joe’s brother Louis had gone to the U.S. in 1920; brother David Kornfeld came in 1935; Mendel and Sarah followed in 1939, but because of a bureaucratic snafu, Joe wasn’t on the visa.

Joe survived the war and has written a book about his experiences with Stanley R. Alten titled A Holocaust Odyssey. Another sister of Joe’s, Enya, was deported with her husband and killed by the Nazis.

The Ames Connection

Leibusch’s first wife Richa also had many brothers and sisters, and it is the descendants of these siblings who form the other major part of the extended Frank family.

Brother Isaac Ames married Molly Siegel, and they had seven children. One, David, married Sarah Frank Odzer’s daughter Fanny; daughter Celia married Victor Drucker; and sister Miriam married a Kornreich.

Their daughter Frieda, 99 years old in 1999, is possibly the oldest living member of the extended family at this writing. Frieda lived in Sanok as a girl but during WWI her family fled to Budapest, then to Prague.

Eventually her father was drafted and served in Italy. Their house in Sanok was destroyed, and they never returned. After the war, Frieda went to Vienna, married her cousin Leo Kornreich and in 1929 they came to the U.S. together. Leo had been born in Sanok, too.

In an interview in the late 1980s, Celia Drucker explained that she lived in Rostik, Czechoslovakia as a girl. The family was well enough off to have a maid, but since the town had no school, her parents sent her to live with her grandmother (whom she disliked) for most of the year.

Celia said that they spoke Polish, Yiddish, some German and some Russian, and she described the Leibusch Frank family as being more like “country people” than her own family–perhaps because Smerek was an even smaller town than Rostik.

Her family grew a lot of their own food, and had a cow, ducks, chickens and geese. Fanny Tanne Frank (wife of Harry Frank) reported a similar lifestyle, growing up in the country with her grandmother. Food was kept in the cellar, they roasted their own coffee, brought water uphill from the river in a barrel everyday.

Of Celia’s brothers and sisters, two remained in Europe and died in WWII. A younger sister Edith went to Israel, married and had two children, Tzvi and Mira. Brother David was the first to come to the U.S. Celia came by herself in 1912 when she was 17.

She reported being seasick the entire two weeks of the crossing. Both Fanny Tanne Frank and Gussie Frank Englander reported being similarly miserable on the crossing, describing the accommodations as “like hell.”

Settling in America

Celia’s first home in New York was with a woman they called “tanta Odzer” and her family. Tanta Odzer had a four-room, fifth floor apartment under the Brooklyn Bridge with no hot water. Many family members were living there, paying rent—among them Harry Frank, Gussie Frank and Fanny Frank.

They slept on cots all over the place and paid 25 cents to go to the bathhouse, where Celia said there was a hole between the men’s and women’s sides.

She reported that both sexes used to peek at each other through the hole. Fanny Frank said she slept on a bed in the kitchen, and Gussie told her daughter Rose about being kept awake at night by people going in and out at all hours and the dripping water under the sink.

Emigrants to the U.S.

Of the seven Leibusch Frank children who came to the U.S., five came before WWI, Harry was the first to arrive, followed by Gussie, Louis, Gertie and Esther, but not necessarily in that order.

The confusion over dates and ages abounds. On the 1920 Census form, for example, Harry said he was 34, which meant he would have been born in 1886. However, the family celebrated his 80th birthday in 1969, which would have meant an 1889 birthdate.

In that same 1920 Census, Gussie Frank was reported to have immigrated in 1909. She was listed as 28 years old, which contradicts her marriage license of 1912, which gave her age as 24, making her 30 in 1920.

Gertie Frank supposedly came to the U.S. with Louis in 1910 aboard the boat U.S. President Grant; however, according to INS records, she arrived in April 1908 aboard the S.S. Potsdam.

And talk about name changes! Gussie Frank married Harry Englander –who had come from Hungary with his family in 1898. We can only guess where the “Englander” came from.

Mary Frank came to the U.S. in 1922 and married Solomon Weiss in December 1923. Esther later married Solomon’s brother Morris Weiss. The last of the Franks to immigrate to the U.S. were Sarah Frank Kornfeld and her husband, who came in 1939, following their children Louis and David.

As for the daily life of the emigrants in New York in the first decade of the 20th century, it was a tough one. Like Harry, Celia, Fanny and Gussie, most of them seemed to have rented “rooms” from relatives—often a cot stuck in the corner of a room with little or no privacy.

The women worked in sewing factories, and some of the men were waiters. At one point, Harry Frank and a partner had enough capital to open up a restaurant, and Fanny worked there as a cashier, but the business was not successful, and Harry went back to being a waiter. Most apartments didn’t have hot water, and toilets were more often than not only one per floor.

They lived in the mostly Jewish world of the lower East Side of New York, spoke Yiddish, although they all seemed to have learned not just to speak but read and write English rapidly, if imperfectly. Life was not without entertainment, however; Fanny Frank talked about the dances and picnics in the parks, and occasional trips to Coney Island, which Fanny did not care for, as she herself has said.

Much of the family ended up in Scranton, Pennsylvania due to Harry Frank. He was hoping to open another business so he could marry Fanny, and wrote to a cousin Greenes who had been successful in Scranton, hoping that he could get a loan. Instead, Greenes suggested Harry come to the Scranton area and become his partner in a new grocery business.

So Harry went, liked what he saw and signed on. He returned to New York, and according to Fanny, they got married on a Friday and were on their way to Scranton Saturday night.

Harry opened a grocery store in the small town of Sibley, where his customers were mostly miners. Fanny recalled loving their house above the store, because it was large, and had a yard in front and back where she could grow vegetables.

Fanny said they sold not just groceries, but everything the miners needed—generally on credit until payday. After Gussie Frank married Harry Englander, they, too, came to the Scranton area, and for a time Harry Englander worked in Harry Frank’s store as a butcher.

Later, both Harrys owned grocery stores in different parts of Scranton, and after WWI, when Esther Frank married Morris Weiss, they, too, moved to Scranton and Morris went into the grocery business, as did Louis Frank and his wife Blanche.

Family lore has it that Harry Frank was the first to “discover” Crystal Lake, which is about 25 miles north of Scranton at the southeastern corner of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania.

As mentioned earlier, this area is very reminiscent of the foothills of the Bieszczady mountains in southern Poland where the Franks grew up. Harry was going up to the lake from at least the early 1930s.

As Leonard Weiss talks about in his reminiscence of Crystal Lake, it wasn’t long before whole families were renting Klein’s cottages and enjoying the air that, at 1,600 feet above sea level, brought welcome relief from the heat of Scranton and New York summers.

Klein’s accommodations were eventually replaced by the relative luxury of indoor plumbing at Spitz’s cottages, where weekends saw the entire Frank family clan lounging by the lakeside, swimming in its truly crystal clear waters, picking huckleberries, cooking and eating and playing cards.

It was from this close association that the idea of the “Frank Family Social Club” was born and the first family reunion held at Kubel’s barn, Crystal Lake on Sunday September 4, 1960.

As the invitation noted, the menu was "Chopped Liver, Pickles, Olives, Celery, Roast Turkey, Potato Salad, Cole Slaw, Potato and Noodle Kugel, Assorted Fresh Fruit and Pastry, and Drinks. (Dietary laws will be observed.)"

Now, 40 years later, we have a book that tries to bring this history and family relationships together in one place.

As Jonathan Weiss states in his note, I encourage you to see this history as a work in progress. Thanks to the wonders of computers, I can add any information about previous generations that individual family members may recall but have yet to share.