My Roots

This text (from 2006) is published with permission from the Estonian Jewish Museum

My great grandfather on my father’s side, Samuel Stupel, was enlisted to Tsar Nicolas I’s army straight from a bathhouse. His 25-year service gave him the right to settle in Tallinn (then Reval). It was here that he married a local girl, Feige Goldshtik (1854-1924).

They had seven children but my father could recall only three of his aunts: Bluma Pepersh (married in Kyiv, her son and husband left for America), Nehama Goldshtik (who lived in Riga with her three daughters), and Rasha Itskovich (?-1941) who lived in Tallinn.

My grandmother, Zelda Stupel (1883-1941), was the third daughter of a big and poor family. In 1906 she married Moisei Tserefman, a retired soldier from Borisov, Belarus, and gave birth to two sons: my father Samuel (1907-1997) and Yehuda (1909-1941). Moisei (Moses) worked at the match factory in Borisov. When my father was two, Moses drank icy water from a well on a hot day, caught pneumonia, and died. My grandma Zelda returned to her mother in Tallinn. Here she met a soldier from Warsaw, whose family name was Suffit. Soon she left for Warsaw with him and the children.