The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

From Shtetl to Ellis Island: My Mother's Immigration Story

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Sheila Horvitz, history teacher and lawyer, shares a number of family stories, including her mother and grandmother's passage to America, the original documents from their immigration travels, how family names changed after immigrating, and how her mother got her official date of birth.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Sheila Horvitz.

This excerpt is in English.

Sheila Horvitz was born in New York, New York in 1944.

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Other video highlights from this oral history

They Met at Penn Station

1 min 1 sec

A Kosher Home, Plus Chinese Food On Sundays

59 sec

My Yiddish-Jewish Education

2 min 46 sec

Growing Up During the McCarthy Era

1 min 14 sec

A Third Seder

1 min 17 sec

Life like Fiction

59 sec

My Mother Was a Yiddishist

3 min 2 sec

Mostly White and Mostly Jewish: Not Interesting

2 min 29 sec

Before Air Conditioning and After Air Conditioning

1 min 27 sec

Mother's Last Words

1 min 30 sec

A Kiss and a Pet, But No Further

1 min 23 sec

Racism and Antisemitism in 1960s Boston

3 min 4 sec

So Many Names In One Family: How Surnames Changed When We Came To America

2 min 56 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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