My cousin Ken just sent me this interesting picture of Papa’s cousin, Hymie Eisenkraft, whose untimely death Papa wrote about on June 16, 1924. (Ken first wrote to me in October of 2007 after he read about this site in the New York Times, checked it out, and spotted in one of Papa’s diary entries the name of his grandfather, Harry Eisenkraft, who was Hymie’s brother. Ken and I had never met or known about each other until then.)
As you’ll note, Hymie’s photo appears in the center of a custom Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) card festooned with Zionist images, Hebrew and Yiddish mottoes, and traditional wishes for a Happy New Year:
The pictures flanking Hymie are of Max Nordau (left) and Theodor Herzl, co-founders of the World Zionist Organization, and along the top of the card are illustrations of the American flag and what would later become the Israeli flag. Hymie, who survived World War I service but died in a car accident in Brooklyn on June 26, 1919, must have had this card made at some point in the 1910’s.