The Boomer Chronicles

Last summer I went to a family reunion in New Jersey. It was a gathering of relatives on my father’s mother’s side. My background is Russian, Polish, White Russian, and Austrian. This particular part of my family was in the baking business in Poland. Read a bit of the history that a cousin of my compiled. I never knew anything about it before. Now I do. It’s pretty cool:

The Herschlag family of bakers in Dembitz, Poland, dates back to that area to the mid-1800s.  The family name, Herschlag, is common in the Alsace (also known as the Alsace-Lorraine), the strip of land between France and Germany.

The bakery that our immediate relatives left behind in Dembitz continued to be run by other family members.  In doing Internet research I came across a story about Dembitz that took place in 1941 during the Nazi occupation.  The story told of the Jews being forced to move into one section of the town, a kind of forced ghetto.  Later they were ordered to line up on a certain street, between two points identified by house locations.  One of the houses was that of “Abraham Herschlag, the baker.”

The first Herschlag-owned bakery in the U.S. that I know about was in Long Branch, New Jersey.

The second bakery was located on Rockaway Road in South Jamaica (New York), around the corner from Uncle Bennie’s house on Shore Road.

The name of the bakery was the Meyer and Herschlag Wholesome Sunlight Bakery. Meyer was a cousin we called Uncle Cohen. He put up some money for the bakery.  The name “Wholesome Sunlight” probably was the name of the bakery when they bought it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 11:29 am and is filed under New Jersey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.