The Cantor’s Kin

The streets were not paved with gold. Many of them were not even paved. Yet there he was, in Columbus, Georgia, speaking little English, trying to sell the locals something he knew little about—wine, which they didn’t seem to need, at least not from him.

What the six Jewish families in town did need, however, was a rabbi. Here Isaac Schwarz could help. In his native Bavaria, in a small town called Floss, Schwarz had received a solid Jewish education. Two of his older brothers were rabbis. Not only did he know his Torah, Jewish law, and daily practice, he actually owned a Torah scroll.

That’s how in 1852 Isaac Schwarz, the eleventh of twelve children, single and age 34—after caring for one of his sisters and her six children plus others on a harrowing sea voyage from Europe, complete with storms, sickness, and crowding—became the first rabbi of Columbus. Three years later, that experience helped Schwarz become the spiritual leader of the first Jewish congregation in New Jersey—B’nai Jeshurun of Newark.

Isaac Schwarz’s great-great-granddaughter, Susan Lowy Lubow, who lives in Morristown, pieced together this story and her entire family tree from old documents and newspaper clippings, family photos, phone inquiries, interviews with elders, Internet searches, and travels to the old country. “I dragged my husband through half the cemeteries of Europe,” she says.

She began with a roll of brown paper that soon stretched from one side of the Lubows’ Morristown house to the other. After nearly 35 years of research, her findings fill two spiral-bound books of about 250 pages each—one for her father’s side (where there were a lot of daughters; her line goes from Schwarz to Abeles to Lowy to Lubow) and one for her mother’s side. She has even traced Isaac Schwarz’s ancestors back as far as the year 1204 in the Bavarian town of Landshut.

Perhaps surprising to us but not unusual for his time, Isaak married his niece—his older sister Sophie’s younger daughter, Fannie. Even though they married in the New World (the ceremony had to be held in New York because Isaac was the only person authorized to conduct Jewish weddings in Newark at the time), their union was a product of the Old World, where Jewish families had to live clustered together, travel was difficult or restricted, and cousins often wed.

After clearing immigration in 1851, Isaac’s plan was to join his brothers Abraham and Pinkhas in the wine trade in New York. Abraham, for reasons unknown, dispatched Isaac to Columbus to sell wine. Isaac went South a peddler, but in 1853 came back a clergyman and settled in Newark with his sister Mina and her family, whom he had looked after on the arduous sea voyage. The next year Isaac wed Fannie and became cantor and religious leader of B’nai Jeshurun at a salary of $300 a year. (It was not much of a living, even though eggs were 8 cents a dozen.) One of the wedding ceremonies he performed was of Solomon Levine and Leah Reach, who would turn out to be Susan Lubow’s great-grandparents on her mother’s side.

When it came to the fine points of Jewish law, Isaac was a stickler. It cost him his job. After criticizing congregants from the pulpit for laxity of observance, his contract fell short of renewal in 1860 by one vote. His followers resigned in protest. Electing him rabbi, they formed Oheb Shalom, the third Jewish congregation in Newark. Dues were set at 36 cents a month (twice 18, the numerical value of the Hebrew word chai, meaning “life.”)

Isaac remained rabbi of Oheb Shalom until he retired in about 1870, after which he ran a kosher slaughterhouse in Newark. He died in 1894. When Oheb Shalom’s longtime home on High Street in Newark was dedicated in 1911, the principal address was given by Woodrow Wilson, then governor of New Jersey. That night the governor dined at the home of Meyer Kussy, who had been born the year Isaac became rabbi of Oheb Shalom. Kussy’s maternal grandmother was Isaac’s sister Sophie Schwarz Bloch, mother of Isaac’s wife, Fannie. Small world.

The Schwarz family’s world is no longer small. Isaac had 7 children, 20 grandchildren, 33 great-grandchildren (9 are still living), 83 great-great-grandchildren, 124 great-great-great-grandchildren, and, so far, 24 great-great-great-great-grandchildren. His descendants include pharmacists (Schwarz drugstores in Newark and Bradley Beach), teachers, engineers, doctors, and lawyers (including the late Allen Lowenstein, of the prominent law firm Lowenstein, Sandler in Roseland). In 1991, Susan Lowy Lubow helped organize a family reunion, held at Oheb Shalom in South Orange, where the congregation had moved in 1959. More than 300 people attended.

Lubow, 69, grew up in Newark in its halcyon days. “There was nowhere in Newark we couldn’t go,” she says. She spent summers with her parents, brother, sister, and cousins at her paternal grandparents’ house at 305 Ocean Avenue in Bradley Beach. “My cousin and I were allowed to go by ourselves from Bradley Beach to Asbury Park after dinner,” she recalls. “But we had to be back by 9 o’clock. We would run the whole way so we had time to go on all the rides and play Skee-ball, and then we would run all the way back, because when my mother said 9 o’clock, she meant 9 o’clock.

“My uncle had a Schwarz drugstore at the corner of, I think, Main Street and Ocean Avenue in Bradley Beach,” she continues. “We used to work at the store sometimes, do things like put pills in bottles, set up displays. There was a Planter’s Peanuts machine in the store. The peanuts were kept warm by a heat lamp. We were always pulling down the back of the machine and sticking our hands in to grab some peanuts.”

In 1955, Susan Lowy and her parents and siblings moved to South Orange after she had completed two years at Weequahic High School. In 1957, she graduated from South Orange’s Columbia High School and headed off to the University of Michigan, which her mother had briefly attended before marrying Meyer Lowy, a mechanical engineer from Newark. After graduating with a degree in history and becoming a teacher, Susan Lowy in 1962 married another Newarker, Lawrence Lubow, a cardiologist in training. During the 1960s many of the cousins moved to the suburbs. In 1967 the Lubows settled in Morristown, where they raised their two children: Jonathan, born three weeks after they moved in, and Elisabeth, born in 1968. The Lubows today have three grandchildren.

Living in Morristown, the seat of Morris County, placed Lubow outside the pull of the Essex County Jewish orbit she had grown up in. That was deliberate. “The ten miles between Morristown and South Orange in some respects could have been a million,” she says. “I didn’t realize how closed my world was until I got out of it, partly when I went to college, partly when I got married and we lived in Texas and New York before coming back to New Jersey.

“When I was a little girl,” she explains, “everyone knew everything about you. I had enough of that. It was nice to be able to reach out and touch the family, but I didn’t want them living in my backyard, or me in theirs. Also, the life I knew in the ’50s in Newark was gone. Both my husband and I wanted to get a little bit out from under. It would have been nice for my children to have had what I had, but you can’t go home again.”

Yet perhaps you can carry home forward, in a way. “In later life,” she says, “we have connected more with my cousins, particularly since my children have children and my cousin’s children have children. So we want to make sure the next generation knows one another.”