She began;
“Each one of us has genes from so many different families, so to know who we are we need to know where we came from. I will attempt in a small way to enlighten you, but unfortunately, each generation regrets that they did not speak to their parents and grandparents when they were alive to ask all the questions they now want answers to. At this date, there are few people left from the previous generations and much of what we know has probably been changed by stories over the decades. I will attach family trees, but names alone don’t tell the story of the people, so wherever possible I will write what I know, and what could be ‘myths’.”
In a lengthy document, she tells the story of four families, the antecedents of her two children. One of those families is the Lurie Family of Norway. With Ellen’s permission, I reproduce that section about the Lurie family here.
“In the 1880s Rocheleya Scheer married a man in Lithuania. After ten years of marriage, he divorced her, as there were no children. She then married Yacov Aron Lurie and had four children. When he died, she married for the third time. She was a strong, cheerful buxom woman and she was your great great grandmother.
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| Mottemende - Josef's uncle Marcus Scheer |
She had a brother Mottemende who married Golde and they had nine children. I am attaching the article THE LAST MOHICAN in Norwegian, together with the English translation, written by his granddaughter, Eva Scheer who was a well-known writer and member of the resistance in Norway, during the Second World War.
Martin always spoke of Mottemende who terrified him as a small child with his flaming red beard and booming voice. Martin’s name was really Yitchak Mordechai. Apparently, everyone changed their names around!
Rocheleya’s children were Abraham, who went to Manchester and changed his name to Lewis, before marrying Esther and going to Port Elizabeth. (Children were Harry Lewis, Rosie Klotz, Gertie Sonnenberg, Aaron and David Lewis), where they were a very respected couple in the community.
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| Golde Scheer |
Glicke died in infancy. Josef married Elke and when his uncle and aunt Mottemende and Golde, settled in Norway on their return from South America, he went to Norway. Elke returned to her home in Lithuania to have her first two children, Jacob and Selma but the five other children were all born in Norway.
The stories and myths of Elke and Josef’s meeting: Josef was serving his 25 years in the Russian Army. Lithuania was part of Russia at the time as after 1795 the major part of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania was handed over to Russia and the name Lithuania disappeared from the political map of Europe for 123 years until 1928. Josef came from Zedik in Lithuania and one Friday night he found himself in a strange town, probably Illocki, and the gabbai of the shul asked him to join his family for the Shabbat meal. The gabbai was Hillel Spitz. Apparently, a ‘suitable’ marriage had already been arranged for his daughter Elke but when Elke met Josef that night she decided that this poor soldier was the man she would marry. He was good looking and played either the trombone or trumpet in the Czar’s Army Orchestra. He was a qualified maker of orthopaedic boots for club-footed people.
Josef deserted the army after serving four of the 25 years and apparently on a trip back to Lithuania to visit the family a neighbour betrayed him and he was arrested. One story goes that he was sentenced to a prison term in Siberia and another version goes that he was sentenced to death. However, there are two stories about his escape from Lithuania:
a) Mother in law Chana hid Josef in a big cooking pot, which was placed on a wagon, and with Chana at the reins, he was smuggled out of the country. The Spitz family sold all sizes of pots!
b) Josef asked for a couple of hours to set his affairs in order and a coach driver by the name of Chaim was paid a huge amount to get Josef heavily disguised in woman’s clothing across the border. The Spitz family in this version were ceramic potters. When the police returned, Josef was gone. Elke and the children returned later to join him in Norway.
He was lured into a business deal by a ‘partner’ and invested in a whalebone business, which in those days was in use for women’s corsets, but it was the wrong type of whalebone so they lost everything. They lived in a very old wooden building in Oslo and were poor and unfortunately, very sick. Josef had diabetes and was used as a guinea pig for early insulin, which was so primitive it caused terrible burns and he died very young. Elke too, died young from heart problems and unfortunately, many of their seven children suffered from these problems as well. Their granddaughter Pauline (daughter of David Lurie) actually had a heart transplant in the 1990s but sadly, she died soon after receiving her new heart.
Elke, unusual for women at that time, was an educated woman and had studied German and dressmaking in Libau.
Norway is very cold in winter and one day the family searched all over for your grandfather, Jacob, and eventually found him fast asleep in the big oven where he had hidden for warmth.
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| The Lurie siblings (near Port Elizabeth - 1941) |
In about 1929, Jacob (actually, I think he was named Aaron Jacob) went to Port Elizabeth in South Africa where his Uncle Abraham and Aunt Yache were living. He learnt to speak English and found work, I think as a shop window dresser and in time he brought out his two brothers Robert and David and then in 1935 after their mother Elke had died the three sisters and Martin came out as well. Robert, unfortunately had a very bad heart and died while either running to catch a train, or on the train, and is buried in West Park Cemetery, Johannesburg having died in November 1944. Staying at the same residential hotel as Rosa and Mary was a young woman with whom they were friendly - Sarah Benjamin and they introduced her to their brother Jacob. They were married in 1941 in Muizenberg and had two children – Ellen and Jeffrey Robert (named after Elke, Josef, and Robert).”
