(See my Epstein bibliography for superscript page references. The superscript ‘B’ indicates a reference to the bibliography in general.)
[See the end for an August 2021 update, per my findings in Appendix B to Epstein Excursion: Part 1]
In my previous posts, I discussed R. Yehuda Yudel Epstein himself, his first wife Zelda, and his siblings; here, I consider their children. (There is nothing to suggest that Yudel had children from his second wife, my step-fifth-great-grandmother Roza née Rubin.)
R. Yudel himself expresses warm feelings towards his children – at least a subset of them (the ones who lived in Warsaw, I suspect) – in his work, which he published after the financial ruin of his old age. He does not, however, mention any of them by name.
“And I hereby bless my son and daughters and sisters, and all of my family […], their father and true friend – the author.”
To speak of them in anything more than generalities, we have to give them distinct identities. But for the most part, they have none. The best-known sources are exceedingly vague, at least from a genealogist’s perspective. So, let us dive into the obscurer end of things, and name the Epstein children.
For reasons which become apparent, it is easier to analyze Yudel’s sons and daughters separately first. As the latter’s genealogical issues are more complex, I begin with the sons. Then, having identified each of Yudel and Zelda’s children with some confidence, I will consider their age order overall. In the next instalment, Part 3B, I will expand on their later lives, their spouses’ backgrounds, and their families, where I have come upon material worth sharing.
The Epstein sons
Pauline speaks mostly of her brother Ephraim, sometimes specifying that he is her ‘older brother’.2:16 This suggests the existence of another brother, whom she mentions once: ‘my eight-year-old brother’, in a scene set in or shortly before August of 1850, her wedding date (and no earlier than 1849).2:63–4 Elsewhere, Pauline also refers to Ephraim as ‘the only son at home […] the kadish‘, which connotes the sole male heir.2:22 In contrast, as Professor Magnus notes, Ephraim523 speaks of two sons other than himself (of his parents eleven children), one of whom survived to adulthood.
Where is the missing brother who didn’t die in childhood, and what happened to the eight-year-old Pauline mentions?
Magnus’s tentatively proposes that there was another older brother, who converted to Christianity still in Europe and whom the family cut off entirely (as their father eventually would do to Ephraim). This would make Ephraim the de facto ‘only son’ and kadish until the birth of the younger brother (c. 1842), who eventually died, still in childhood, but after Pauline married and moved away from her parents’ home.
I find this solution unsatisfying. If we admit that Ephraim’s title as kadish was temporary, and lasted no later than 1842 (and would not again be suitable for that epithet before 1850, at the earliest), we are conceding that Pauline’s reference to Ephraim as such is dated, and was so even in the context in which it appears (the late 1840s, before his 1849 departure). If so, let the younger brother live! If the kadish is not much of a kadish anymore, there is no reason to kill the other child and invent a third converted one. Furthermore, a careful analysis of Ephraim’s words regarding his siblings (cited in full below) – clearly written with the intention of being precise – shows that the eight-year-old of 1850 cannot be the brother who died before adulthood: Ephraim says that two of his siblings died in childhood, a brother and sister, one in childhood, one in infancy; earlier in the same paragraph, he says that his eldest sister died at seven years of age – so the infant who died must have been the brother.
Furthermore, their father R. Yudel acknowledges, in his Minhat Yehuda (pp. 4, 6; reproduced above) the financial support and kindness of his family, particularly his son (בני, surely to be vocalized בְּנִי beni ‘my son’, not בָּנַי banai ‘my sons’), daughters, and sisters, and blesses them enthusiastically. Surely the ‘son’ is not a reference to Ephraim, dead to him for so many years. (Nor can this refer to an unattested son from his second wife – no more than fifteen years after his first wife’s death.)
Who then is R. Yudel’s second son, who no doubt eventually usurped his brother as the kadish? Yudel tells us himself: in Minhat Yehuda (p. 325, ad B.K. 17b) he cites a Talmudic insight from בני הבחור ילד שעשועים כבר חד סר כמ׳ אברהם מרדכי יחיה ‘my son […], [when] about eleven years old, Avraham Mordechai, may he live [an epithet for the living]’. While useless for determining his year of birth (as Minhat Yehuda was written over a span of 40 years), this reference suffices to establish that Yudel’s other son who lived past infancy was named Avraham Mordechai. A reference to this son is found in the Babruysk revision lists of 1850 and 1858, cited in the previous post, as Abram, age 14 in 1850. Obviously the age is not correct – Pauline has her younger brother as 8 (or possibly 9) by 1850. Her own entry there – as Pesya, a form of her Yiddish name, Pesel2:28 – gives her age as 19, also wrong. In general, revision lists are reliably imprecise with ages (contrast her father’s difference in age between that revision list, and the reference therein to the previous one, versus the difference between Avraham’s ages there).
If we accept Pauline’s estimate of his age, his father’s reference was written in about 1853 (in middle of his third cycle of writing Minhat Yehuda, see Abramson, cited in the first Epstein post). This would make him around 27 at the time his father thanked him for his financial support, which is plausible.
I have not found any later trace of Avraham Mordechai, but the above is sufficient to show that the absence of evidence in Pauline’s memoirs is hardly evidence of absence – a principal that we will keep returning to.
Thus we have the three sons from Ephraim’s tally accounted for: himself, a younger brother Avraham Mordechai, and another who died in infancy.
The Epstein daughters
Before factoring in evidence from as yet untapped sources, or addressing the number of R. Yudel’s daughters directly, I will follow Professor Magnus’s lead and infer what I can from the Memoirs themselves. Useful to this end were Magnus’s list of mentions of Pauline’s sistersM1:238n34, as well as the search function in the digitized version provided by the Digital Collections of the Goethe University Frankfurt.
(I am omitting references to the more obvious data points, those repeatedly mentioned in her book, or those explained at length in Magnus’s introduction. References are not meant to be exhaustive, only enough to illustrate the point being referenced.)
| Modern name | Hebrew/Yiddish name | Married surname | Husband’s name | Towns associated | Other information |
| Pauline | Pessele1:11 | Wengeroff | Afanasiy / Chonon | Konotop | author, b. ca. 1833 |
| Kathy2:21 | Sack2:19 | Abraham | St. Petersburg | older, implied2:37 | |
| Helene2:150 | Vilnius | ‘youngest’2:50 | |||
| Eva1:171 | ‘F.’ | Zaslav1:184 | b. ca. 1831, one daughter before | ||
| Marie2:119 | ‘our older’ (Pauline & Kathy) | ||||
| Cäcilie2:68 | (not ‘older’, paceM1:11) | ||||
| Chasche Feige1:102 | ‘oldest’ | ||||
| Chenje Malke1:157 | Günzburg / Ginsberg | David1:59 | Siemiatycze1:133 | 1 of 2 ‘older’1:131 | |
| Chaweleben1:67 | older | ||||
| Feigisch2:37 | Samuel | ‘older’ |
We can assume that Chaweleben (which is simply the Hebrew name חוה, Chavah, with what appears to be the affectionate suffix –leben; though see below) is identical with Eva; not only is Eva the standard translation for Chavah, both referring to the same Biblical personality, but the context of the reference to Chaweleben implies that she was her immediate elder, as we know Eva was.1:171 (This in itself is not enough to support Magnus’s hypothesis that Pauline refers to her sisters by their Yiddish names in reference to pre-modernization events, as Eva replacing Chawe in the text is about as straightforward a translation as David is for Dowid, which never occurs in reference to her brother-in-law, though surely that is what he was called then.)
This gives us the following grid (simplified to suit our current purposes):
| Modern name | Hebrew/Yiddish name | Married surname | Husband’s name |
| Pauline | Pessele | Wengeroff | Afanasiy / Chonon |
| Kathy | Sack | Abraham | |
| Helene | |||
| Eva | Chawe | ‘F.’ | |
| Marie | |||
| Cäcilie | |||
| Chasche Feige | |||
| Chenje Malke | Günzburg / Ginsberg | David | |
| Feigisch | Samuel |
We now proceed to the external sources, one by one.
(A previous attempt at identifying the daughters is that by Professor Bernard Cooperman in his 2000 translation of Pauline’s memoirs, Rememberings: The World of a Russian-Jewish Woman in the Nineteenth CenturyB, p. 294 – which seems identical to the one adopted by a user at JewAge.org, see their version of R. Yudel; my attempts are independent of theirs.)
The wife of Samuel Feigisch
In our discussion of R. Zimel’s family in Part 1, we found that Samuel Feigisch, Yudel’s son-in-law, was also the son of Yudel’s sister, but this does not help in identifying his wife among the daughters – for now.
Kathy
In sketching R. Zimel Epstein’s (ibid.), we found that Kathy Epstein married Abraham Zak (or Sack, in the German spelling used by Pauline), her first cousin, son of her aunt Sarah Roiza (by her first husband, Yitzchak Zak). Based on this, we can identify Abraham’s family in the 1858 revision list of Babruysk, part of the Belarus revision lists available via JewishGen.org (to be cited in full in part 3B): Abram son of Itska Zak, age 31, brother of Srol, son of Revza daughter of Zimel, age 47, and husband of Khasya daughter of Yudo, age 30. This fits the information we have on Abraham and his mother (Revza being a Russian spelling of Yiddish Roze or Royze), if we ignore the slight discrepancies regarding age typical in revision lists. Based on this, we have Kathy Sack‘s Yiddish name as Chasya, a regional variant of Chasha, so she must be identical with Chasche Feige, contra Cooperman who identifies Chasche as the wife of Samuel Feigisch. (My view leads to some difficulty with Pauline’s reference to Marie as ‘our older sister’, in contrast to herself and Kathy, as Chasche Feige is called ‘the oldest sister’. Kathy/Khasya‘s approximate date of birth, no earlier than 1825 (even assuming a three-year error in the revision list, as for her mother-in-law, born in 1808, according to her obituary), makes it unlikely that she was Yudel and Zelda’s oldest daughter. Perhaps, in the context of caring for the children, Chasha Feiga is the eldest single daughter and thus the one tasked with caring for her younger siblings. Be the difficulties what they may, I consider the revision list unambiguous with respect to Kathy’s identity.)
Eva
The post-marriage life of Eva, who was Pauline’s immediate elder sister and whose marriage she describes in some detail, is at first a mystery, as it seems Pauline intended: she names her husband ‘F.’ (the initial of his surname) and his hometown ‘S.’. The latter redaction lapses by the end of that chapter: The ‘F.’ parents go home to Saßlaw, i.e. Zaslav (Izyaslav, modern Ukraine), but ‘F.’ is left unresolved. It is tempting to think (as Cooperman and Magnus2:179n9 suggest) that Pauline eventually lapses here as well, and that Eva’s husband is the ‘older brother-in-law’ Samuel Feigisch (see above); but this is not likely, as Samuel’s (by then deceased!) father was from Vilnius and his mother was from Bobruysk and Warsaw, with no connection to Zaslav, among other problems.
I believe the evidence shows that Eva married Yitzchak Frenkiel (the Polish spelling; also Frenkel) of Zaslav and that the couple later lived, and died, in Warsaw. I arrived at this idea by a flight of speculation (which I detail in a genealogical process thread on Twitter), but here I will just present my conclusions rigorously.
We have evidence of another son-in-law whose name matches ‘F.’: R. Yudel, in Minhat Yehuda162, mentions his son-in-law הרה״ג המופלג ושנון מו״ה יצחק פריינקיל נ״י (‘the brilliant rabbi […] Yitzchak Freinkel‘). We find in JewishGen’s vital records for Zaslav (part of their Ukraine collection) an Itsko (Yitzchak) Freinkel, son of Haskel (Yechezkel), who had a son Shevel Mordka (Shaul Mordechai) with Khava-Lyuba on 12 December 1850 (male births, no. 82). Lyuba is the Russian form of the Yiddish name Liba, so we have Chavah Liba – is this Chawe-Leben? By searching the Zaslav records (with spellings Frenkel, Frinkel, Freinkel, and Freynkel), we find the family to be descended from a Shaul Mordechai Freinkel, who had sons Yechezkel, Fayvish, Chaim, and Meir (perhaps more), and at least one daughter, Frima, married to David Yaakov Halperin (Galperin). Yechezkel died in 1853, aged 45. His son, Yitzchak, appears to have been married twice: first to Marya-Ruhlya née Galperson (Halperson), daughter of Ios (Yosef) – with whom he had a daughter in 1845 – and then to Chavah Liba. Indeed, Pauline writes that Eva Epstein’s husband was previously divorced. (In 1864, a Maryam Ruhlya Alperson, daughter of Ios, died in Zaslav aged 29; if the age can be ignored as a slight error, this can easily be Yitzchak’s first wife.) This is also consistent with Eva’s date of marriage in September 18481:173.
In the cemetery databases, we find, at Okopowa in Warsaw, the grave of Chavah Liba (inscribed in Polish as Ewa Liba) Frenkiel, wife of Yitzchak and daughter of Yehudah haLevi Epstein (sector 40, row 7, no. 9), died 1902, aged 73. Immediately next to it, in the same enclosure, lies Shaul Mordechai (Maksymilian) Frenkiel, son of Yitzchak, died on 24 February 1913 at age 62 (sector 40, row 7, no. 10), who must be her son. This corresponds well with the previous birth record.
Taken together, this clearly is Eva/Chavah Liba, the daughter of our R. Yudel, and we find that she ended her days in Warsaw. This is supported further by the birth records of what appear to be their children, to be cited in Part 3B.
Cäcilie
Returning to our research around R. Zimel in Part 1, we find that Zimel’s son David had a son Jakób Michał (Yaakov Michel). As discussed, Yaakov Michel married (in his second marriage) an Epstein: Cywia/Cecylia Epsztejn, daughter of Judek and Zelda née Kremin. Based on what we’ve learned about R. Yudel and Zelda, this is clearly a reference to them, and Kremin is a transcription error for Kreinin, Zelda’s maiden name. Thus we have Cäcilie/Cecylia‘s Hebrew name, Tzivyah (צִבְיָה Tsivya; usually vowelized צְבִיָּה Tseviya in modern sources), and her married name, still Epstein. The image of her gravestone in the Okopowa Street Cemetery in Warsaw (sector 23, row 9, no. 16) is illegible, as far as genealogical facts go, but the transcription has her father as Jodel Helevi [sic], consistent with the above, and her date of death as 20 October 1898.
(I later found that the identification of Cäcilie as Tzivyah in Hebrew (or Tzvia, as she renders it) has already been made by a Geni user, a great-great-granddaughter of Ephraim’s, though not based on the above, as it has Tzivyah’s death in 1856: see the profile, description valid as of 24 January 2021.)
Helene
Pauline’s sister Helene (also anglicized to ‘Helena’), allege several web-based sources, was the mother of the Russian chess player Semyon Zinoveyevich Alapin (see his English and Russian pages on Wikipedia, and his profile on Geni.com) – known throughout his career in Western Europe as ‘Simon’. Though I concur, I find the references provided inadequate (the best being a 8 June 2011 article by the Russian chess columnist Alexander Kentler “Сын Старого Зака” (“The Son of the Old Zak”), describing Alapin’s family ties to Abram Zak, in a discussion of Zak’s illegitimate progeny), so I will attempt to reconstruct the evidence.
(My research into Semyon duplicates, albeit with more precise references, some of that presented in an article by the Russian chess player Mikhail Zaitsev, on his personal website and as Alapin’s entry on ChessPro.ru; I do not remember which parts I discovered independently, and which I rediscovered – let this notice suffice.)
As I will show in Part 3B, it can be shown that Simon had a sister Eugenie Mayer-Alapin in Frankfurt, and that their mother was Pauline Wengeroff’s sister; from this, their father Sinovi‘s death record and death notice can be identified, which give us their mother’s name as Helene (née Epstein). On the other hand, St. Petersburg directories give us Simon’s birth name, ‘Shimel’ Zimel, which lead us to conscriptions lists, revision lists, and his birth record, from his home town, Vilnius, which give us his parents’ birth names: Zundel (son of Nachum Yaakov) Alapin and Hinda Sarah (daughter of Yudel) Epstein.
The finishing touch to the identification of Helene with Hinda Sarah is her marriage record, as indexed at JRI-Poland, registered on 13 February 1856 in Góra Kalwaria (marriages, no. 3): Zundel Alapin, 19, son of Nachman [sic] Yankel and Dwoyra, married Zlinda [!] Sura Ziemielowicz, 20, daughter of Judko and of Zelda Epszteyn, daughter of Chaym. Word initially, Zl- can resemble H in some 19th-century hands; and Nachman and Nachum are often confused in records. Devorah as Zundel’s mother will be discussed in Part 3B; Zelda Epstein’s father was shown to be Chaim Kreinin in Part 2. That leaves the parsing error for the bride’s maiden name and mother’s maiden name, easy to make after the formula of Polish vital records of the time (as I’ve discussed regarding the surname Michlow in Part 2 of my Rubin series, see there for an example).
How many daughters were there?
We can now assemble our findings into a fuller, tighter grid (highlighting ‘new’ information):
| Modern name | Hebrew/Yiddish name | Married surname | Husband’s name |
| Pauline | Pessele | Wengeroff | Afanasiy / Chonon |
| Kathy | Chasche Feige | Sack | Abraham |
| Helene | Hinda Sarah | Alapin | Zundel / Zinoviy |
| Eva | Chava Liba | Frenkel | Yitzchak |
| Marie | |||
| Cäcilie | Tzivyah | Epstein | Yaakov Michel |
| Chenje Malke | Günzburg / Ginsberg | David | |
| Feigisch | Samuel |
With this in hand, we can finally approach the second half of Professor Magnus’s question: how many sisters did Pauline have, and does her reckoning contradict Ephraim’s?
MagnusM1:9–10,2:179n9 seems to give up on reconciling Pauline and Ephraim’s counts entirely; from Pauline, she derives a list of five sisters, who overlap in whole or in part with three traditionally-named sisters. Cooperman, on the other hand, takes Ephraim at his word – partially – and gives Yudel and Zelda eleven children, nine of whom survived to adulthood, eight of them daughters (here in disagreement with Ephraim, apparently unintentionally), with the details of each about as vague as Pauline and Ephraim leave them.
Magnus and Cooperman seem not to have noticed that Wengeroff does address the number of her sisters, if indirectly. In the Passover Seder scene, set in her year-long snapshot of traditional life, Pauline speaks1:51 of ‘four unmarried sisters’. Throughout the same year-cycle in Volume One, and her references back to it in Volume 2 (e.g.2:16), Pauline refers to two older brothers-in-law (with an ambiguous sentence in the same Seder scene suggesting, perhaps, a third brother-in-law then1:54, but not necessarily so). This gives us two married sisters and four unmarried, for a total of seven. This is consistent with the number of sisters we would expect from Ephraim’s tally: eight total, the eldest, born a year after her parents’ marriage, died at age seven – well before the Seder scene, in which Ephraim is twelve years old. (In fact, the unnamed daughter died well before Ephraim was born, as will be seen below.)
If so, synthesizing the two accounts is not futile, and with Ephraim’s reckoning and Pauline’s clues, augmented by the research above, we can match their siblings’ many names to a mostly coherent whole – and make some educated guesses for the remaining ambiguities.
Assembly
To begin with, we know per Ephraim that all the sisters married. Assuming no cases of divorce or widowhood (which we can be sure of in all cases except Ginzberg and Feigisch, in whose cases we can still be nearly certain), this means one married surname per sister, each accounted for. Each surnamed sister has a known traditional Jewish given name except Feigisch; each has a known Westernized given name except Feigisch and Ginzberg. On the other hand, we have one sister’s Westernized name without a known surname: Marie.
Thus we have one ambiguity only, with two possible resolutions: either Marie is Chenya Malkah Ginzberg, and the names of the sister who was Samuel Feigisch’s wife have been lost entirely; or, Chenya Malkah’s Westernized name is missing (perhaps she never used one), and Marie is Samuel Feigisch’s wife, whose traditional name is unknown.
I favour the latter. Marie is so frequently the equivalent of the Hebrew name Miriam in that era that I find it unlikely that it would have been used as the equivalent of Malkah, despite the alliterative principle that governed the chosing of the other sisters’ names. (Miriam is, after all, a very plausible name for a daughter of Yudel Epstein’s, his mother Miriam having died in 1822.)
Thus we have our table of identification of the Epstein sisters, their various names and surnames, and their husbands’ names, in no particular order, for we have none so far (highlighting my innovations in bold again):
| Modern name | Hebrew/Yiddish name | Married surname | Husband’s name |
| Pauline | Pessele | Wengeroff | Afanasiy / Chonon |
| Kathy | Chasche Feige | Sack / Zak | Abraham |
| Helena | Hinda Sarah | Alapin | Zundel / Zinoviy |
| Eva | Chavah Liba | Frenkel | Yitzchak |
| Marie [?] | [Miriam] | Feigisch | Shmuel Toviyah |
| Cäcilie | Tzivyah | Epstein | Yaakov Michel |
| [Marie?] | Chenje Malke | Günzburg / Ginsberg | David |
Order
What can we say about their age order? Beginning with Pauline’s clues mentioned above, we have Chenya Malkah Ginzberg, Marie [?] Feigisch, Eva Frenkel, and Ephraim as unambiguously older than herself; Helene Alapin and Avraham Mordechai as unambiguously younger than herself. Kathy Sack is implied to be older than Pauline; she is mentioned2:37 as one of her chaperones on the way to meet her potential husband, between Eva, her husband, and Samuel Feigisch – all older than Pauline and married, giving them the status of adults for the time. Cäcilie, on the other hand, appears to be younger: her one mention is at Pauline’s wedding, who lists2:63 her family members joining her on the way to her marriage in Konotop as her parents, her immediate younger sister, and her eight-year-old brother.
We can further say that, of the older sisters, Chenya Malkah Ginzberg and Marie [?] Feigisch were the oldest, as their husbands are the two ‘older brothers-in-law’ of the first part of Pauline’s memoirs. (David is explicitly so, and Samuel by elimination, as the second brother-in-law of the elder two can be the husband of neither Kathy (whose husband is contrasted with the two eldest throughout the beginning of the second volume), nor of Eva (close in age to Pauline, married only in the middle of the first volume), nor of Cäcilie or Helene (whom we have established to be younger than Pauline).)
For some of these, we can now assign dates of birth:
- (For Chenya Malka Ginzberg, we have no sources to estimate her age.)
- For Marie [?] Feigisch, I will assume she was close in age to her husband, as was usual for a first marriage at a young age. Her husband’s year of birth, per the revision lists cited in Part 1 of this series, was either c. 1816 or c. 1823 – accepting the latter as more plausible, as the former has implausible dates for their son, perhaps to evade conscription. If we accept her Hebrew name as Miriam, this gives us another reason to assume her birth postdates her grandmother Miriam Epstein’s death in 1822.
- For Kathy Sack, we have a revision list that mentions her directly, cited above, giving us a date of birth c. 1828; her gravestone, per one of the transcriptions available to me, cited in Part 3B, has her date of birth as 1826.
- For Ephraim, we have his own (somewhat uncertain, as he admits, and see part 3B) estimate of his year of birth as 1829. From the revision list for his father’s household, cited in Part 2, we can estimate c. 1827, close enough to accept Ephraim’s estimate without hesitation.
- For Eva Frenkel, we have her tombstone cited above, which gives us an estimated year of birth of c. 1829. The birth records of her children, cited in Part 3B, indicate c. 1832.
- Magnus’s best estimate for Pauline’s year of birth is 1833M1:4 (the revision list of Yudel’s household does not agree entirely, but no matter). For subtleties around determining her year of birth, see her further discussion of Pauline’s reliabilityM1:72–75.
- For Cäcilie, from her marriage record (cited briefly in Part 1, as the daughter-in-law of Zimel Epstein’s son David) and her children’s birth records (to be cited in Part 3B), we have a range of estimates: c. 1834, 1835, 1837.
- For Helene, we have her marriage record, cited above, and her death record, to be cited in Part 3B, both giving us an estimated year of birth of 1836.
- Lastly, for Avraham Mordechai, we have the unreliable revision list cited in Part 2, giving us c. 1836; Pauline’s mention of him works out to c. 1842, which I will accept.
Lastly, we factor in Ephraim’s convoluted clues. I will reproduce the relevant parts of his account, as they require close attention (emphasis mine):
She [Zelda] married my father when she was thirteen years of age, he being one year older. At fourteen she had her first child, a daughter who died at seven years of age of an unstaunchable hemorrhage from leech bites which were applied to the lower part of her abdomen for some acute internal disease. My mother died in her sixties, and gave birth to eleven healthy children, three sons and eight daughters. I am her fifth child, and with me survive my three sisters, these being her fourth[,] seventh and ninth daughters. All of us, with the exception of two—a sister and a brother who died, one in childhood and the other in infancy—were married. and some of them lived to see their grandchildren, and I myself have great-grandchildren.
The numbering of his surviving sisters is misleading: there cannot be a ‘ninth daughter’ if there were only eight to begin with. Clearly, the ordinal numbers refer to the eleven live births he refers to before them – of whom he is the fifth, and the three sisters are fourth, seventh, and ninth.
The general identification of the three sisters is fortunately straightforward: Pauline’s introduction to the second volume of her memoirs, published approximately two years after both the first volume of the same, and Ephraim’s autobiographical article, mentions Kathy and Helene as living. (As will also be seen from their dates of death, established in Part 3B: 1917 and 1931, respectively.)
Helene, then, is surely the ninth, as she is the youngest of the daughters; this, incidentally, shows us that the two youngest of the eleven must have been Avraham Mordechai and the infant boy. Kathy and Pauline, based on the relative age order suggested above and confirmed by their estimated birth dates, are the fourth and seventh. This makes Ephraim close in age to Kathy, explaining his closeness to Abraham Sack in his teens (cf.2:16).
Having placed all those referenced by Ephraim, we attend to the others. Sixth place is Eva’s (who died in 1902), immediately prior in order to Pauline. Of the three that precede Kathy, the first must be the daughter who died aged seven (born a year after her parents’ marriage, i.e. c. 1816 – 1823), see Part 2), leaving second and third to Ginzberg and Feigisch in whatever order, with Marie [?] Feigisch’s presumed birth in 1823 favouring Chenya Malkah Ginzberg birth preceding Marie’s, somewhere in the gap between the firstborn girl and Marie.
As the younger boys must be tenth and eleventh, Cäcilie (who indeed died in 1898, a decade before Ephraim’s article), already shown to be the sister immediately junior to Pauline, must be her immediate successor in total birth order as well: eighth.
Taking this all together, we have:
| ORDER | YEAR OF BIRTH | GIVEn name | Married surname | YEAR OF DEATH |
| 1 | c. 1816 | [girl] | [n/a] | c. 1823 |
| 2 | [Marie ?]/Chenje Malke | Günzburg | [before 1908] | |
| 3 | c. 1823 | Marie [?]/[Miriam] | Feigisch | [before 1908] |
| 4 | c. 1826–1828 | Kathy/Chasche Feige | Sack | 1917 |
| 5 | 1829 | Ephraim Menachem | [n/a] | 1913 |
| 6 | c. 1830 | Eva/Chavah Liba | Frenkel | 1902 |
| 7 | 1833 | Pauline/Pessele | Wengeroff | 1916 |
| 8 | c. 1835 | Cäcilie/Tzivyah | Epstein | 1898 |
| 9 | c. 1836 | Helena/Hinda Sarah | Alapin | 1931 |
| 10/11 | c. 1842 | Avraham Mordechai | [n/a] | [before 1908] |
| 10/11 | [male infant] | [n/a] | [died in infancy] |
(This approach is essentially the one Cooperman uses in building the Epstein family tree, but with partially different results (numbers 3–4 and 8–11); some attributable to ignoring Ephraim’s separate sums of sons and daughters, others to not realizing that Kathy and Chasche are identical.)
For the further lives of Yudel and Zelda Epstein’s children, please see Part 3B of this series, hopefully the last subdivision in this Zenonian series.
Updated table, and another promise of things to come
In August of 2021, I found that JewishGen’s Belarus Revision List database had been updated to included the Babruysk merchant-class revision list of 1834, which includes (as its first entry) Zimel Epstein and much of his family, including Yudel Epstein and all his children born at the time. I reproduce the substance of the revision list in Appendix B to Epstein Excursion: Part 1, and I hope to discuss the implications of my findings for Yudel’s children in Part 3B.
For now, I will only emphasize a few relevant points, and revise my chart based on the new information – not all of which I will explain just yet.
- The birth order I hypothesized for children 2–7 (i.e. those born and still alive by 1834) is exactly correct.
- Their birth years are very close to what I guessed – almost exact, when we adjust for a roughly one-year over-estimate (due, perhaps, to late registration) in the ages of the revision list, which we find for all three children for whom we have exact birth dates.
- We are rid of that pesky name Chenya – Chenje in the original – which, unsurprisingly in retrospect, turns out to by a miseading of Chaje, Chaya. This gives us her true full name, Chaya Malka, which led me to her gravestone and date of death – all to be expanded on in Part 3B.
- My hypothetical daughter Miriam – i.e. Marie – is no longer hypothetical.
And now, for the revised table:
| ORDER | YEAR OF BIRTH | GIVEn name | Married surname | YEAR OF DEATH |
| 1 | c. 1816 | [girl] | [n/a] | c. 1823 |
| 2 | 1818 | Chaje Malke | Günzburg | 1887 |
| 3 | c. 1823 | Marie/Miriam | Feigisch | [before 1908] |
| 4 | c. 1826 | Kathy/Chasche Feige | Sack | 1917 |
| 5 | 1829 | Ephraim Menachem | [n/a] | 1913 |
| 6 | c. 1830 | Eva/Chavah Liba | Frenkel | 1902 |
| 7 | 1833 | Pauline/Pessele | Wengeroff | 1916 |
| 8 | c. 1835 | Cäcilie/Tzivyah | Epstein | 1898 |
| 9 | c. 1836 | Helena/Hinda Sarah | Alapin | 1931 |
| 10/11 | c. 1842 | Avraham Mordechai | [n/a] | [before 1908] |
| 10/11 | [male infant] | [n/a] | [died in infancy] |
P. Y. Mund's Genealogy Blog 
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