Feige Chaje “Clara” Zahler

1890s

Born 6 March 1891 in Galicia, in the Austrian Empire, the daughter of Feivel Zahler and Chana Potchter of Rohatyn.

1900s–1910s

Married Harry Weber and had three sons in Rohatyn. Harry left for America in 1912, six weeks after the youngest was born, and she raised the boys alone through the First World War.

1920s

Sailed from Rotterdam with her sons on 15 September 1920 and reached New York on the 25th with four dollars. She joined Harry at 132 Columbia Street, Manhattan, and had two more sons there. Died of heart failure on 6 February 1925, aged 33.

A Rohatyn Family

Feige Chaje "Clara" Zahler was born on March 6, 1891, in the Austrian province of Galicia, one of the children of Feivel Zahler and Chana Potchter of Rohatyn, a market town in what is now western Ukraine. It was a large family touched by loss: her oldest brother, Chaim Juda, died of tuberculosis in Rohatyn in 1902 at twenty-two. Several of her brothers and sisters also ended up in New York. Her brother Harry married there in 1923, and her sister Yetta was married at Republic Hall on Lenox Avenue in 1924, while her sister Rosa married in Rohatyn in 1923.

Clara married Harry Weber, a tailor, and they started their family in Rohatyn: Julius was born in 1906, Samuel in 1909, and Lewis in September 1912. Six weeks after Lewis's birth, Harry sailed alone for New York.

Eight Years on Her Own

Clara stayed behind in Rohatyn with three small boys, and within two years the First World War had turned Galicia into a battlefield. Armies fought back and forth across the region during the war, and fighting over its future continued after 1918. She and the children lived through all of it without Harry for eight years.

On September 15, 1920, Clara finally sailed from Rotterdam with her sons aboard the S.S. Rotterdam. She reached New York on September 25 with four dollars to her name, had to pass a literacy test before she could land, and planned to meet Harry on arrival. The family settled at 132 Columbia Street on the Lower East Side. The ship's list describes her as five foot four, with brown hair and grey eyes.

A Short Time in America

In New York the family grew. Benjamin, called Barney, was born in 1921, and Nathan around 1923. But Clara had chronic rheumatic heart disease, and on February 3, 1925, she was admitted to the hospital with heart failure. She died on February 6, 1925, at thirty-three, less than five years after arriving and with her youngest son barely more than a baby. She was buried at Montefiore Cemetery by the First Consolidated Kinheniczer Rev. Jehuda Arje Sick and Benevolent Association, a mutual aid society of immigrants from the Galician town of Knyaginichi, one of the many hometown societies that looked after the Lower East Side's newcomers in sickness and death.