If I Stay, There’ll Be A Jew: A Family Story Of Survival, Memory, And Building Jewish Life In America

SARASOTA, Florida — What I’m sharing is my generational memory, passed down and carried forward, and I’m grateful to share this with you.

This story did not come to me all at once.

I first heard pieces of it as a very young child, in the background of adult conversations. I remember telling my mother that I liked listening to grown-up talk. It was more interesting. That instinct goes back to when I was three, four, or five years old.

At home, my bedroom shared a wall with the living room. When my parents had friends over, I would lie in bed listening to the conversations through that wall. When we visited family, I listened while my parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation talked. I was quiet, but I was paying attention.

Through those conversations, I learned things long before I fully understood them. I learned that some members of the family got out of Russia, and some did not. I learned that there was correspondence with family members who remained behind, letters exchanged until World War II. And I learned later that those who did not get out did not survive the Holocaust.

The story itself was solidified when I was twenty-two, during the final year of my great-uncle Oscar’s life. He was relentless about telling me these stories. Fanatic, really. He wanted to make sure I had them. I am profoundly grateful that he did.

Rabbi Nathan (Nissan) Meyersohn was born in 1856, the same year I was born, exactly one hundred years later. That coincidence always struck me. I do not know what it means, but it made him feel close to me long before I understood why.

As I grew older, I also heard another phrase from my grandparents’ generation. They would look at me and say, “He has the spirit of our father in him.” At the time, I did not fully understand what they meant. I was a child. But I understood that they were connecting me to someone larger than memory, someone whose courage, stubbornness, Jewishness, and sense of responsibility still lived in the family.

I do not know whether that was destiny, family expectation, or self-fulfilling prophecy. What I do know is that it helped shape who I became. Over time, that phrase gave me a sense of personal responsibility, not as a burden placed on me by others, but as something I felt from within. If Rabbi Meyersohn had made such an impact on his generation and his Jewish community, then I felt a responsibility to try, in my own time and in my own way, to carry that spirit forward.

His given name was Rabbi Nissan Meyersohn, known in the family as Nissan. Like many immigrant families, his children and grandchildren later simplified the spelling of the name to Meyerson, and eventually Myerson.

He lived in a Jewish ghetto village outside Moscow, likely part of what is now greater Moscow. He was a rabbi and a leader in his community. That made him visible. In Russia at that time, visibility was dangerous.

When the pogrom came, it came deliberately.

According to my great-uncle Oscar, Nissan was asleep when it began. He was awakened by his wife screaming as she was being bayoneted to death. He woke into that moment.

He reacted immediately. He wrested the rifle and bayonet from the Cossack soldier of the Tsar who was killing her and killed that soldier with his own weapon. He reached down and knew his wife was gone.

He ran out of the bedroom. There were two more. One to the right held his two oldest sons. My uncle always emphasized that detail, to the right. In the common area, another Cossack soldier emerged, already bloodied. With surprise and momentum, Nissan bayoneted him as well.

He went to the bedroom on the right. His two oldest sons were dead.

In the other bedroom, four younger children were still asleep, untouched. He gathered them in his arms and ran out the back of the house into the woods.

By morning, survivors were finding one another. The details blur after that. What I know is that it took months to get out. On foot, across Europe. Somehow across the English Channel. They eventually reached England.

There, they were placed in a refugee camp funded in part by the Jewish community in London. That mattered to my uncle. Jews who had found safety were helping Jews who were fleeing death. England limited how many Jews it would take, but this camp existed to let them rest, feed them, restore their health, and prepare them for the journey across the Atlantic.

America was opening its doors.

The voyage was harsh. This was no pleasure ship. And yet, according to my uncle, there was humor. Jewish humor. Arguments about whether one wanted a first-floor walk-up or feared a fifth-floor one. Survival mixed with stubborn humanity.

About two-thirds of the way across the ocean, word arrived that Ellis Island was overflowing. An annex had been opened in Sag Harbor. Nissan’s ship was the second to arrive there, preceded by another just days earlier.

They were inspected and quarantined for 5 to 7 days. Everyone remained healthy.

After arriving in Sag Harbor and beginning to build a life in America, the family simplified their name over time. It had originally been a long Russian name that few could pronounce. Nissan’s father’s name was Meyer, and eventually the family became known as Meyersohn.

When the quarantine ended, a train arrived to take the refugees on to New York. Jews who had arrived earlier, largely from Germany, urged them to go. That was where Jewish life already existed. Sag Harbor was beautiful, yes, but they said there were no Jews there.

When Nissan said in Yiddish that he wanted to stay, they told him, “There are no Jews here.”

And Nissan replied, “If I stay, there’ll be a Jew.”

Then Rabbi Meyersohn did something more important.

He turned to the hundreds of refugees around him and gave a powerful speech. He asked them to stay and build a Jewish community together. About fifty stayed.

They did not know where they would sleep that night. They did not know what they would eat. But they stayed. And they thrived.

Rabbi Meyersohn became a driving force in forming the congregation, the synagogue, and the Jewish community in Sag Harbor. He personally donated $350 toward the purchase of the land, a significant sum at the time. He worked alongside a small group of congregants to build the original synagogue. They did not hire contractors. They bought the lumber, pooled their labor, and constructed it themselves.

That original structure still stands today as the core of Temple Adas Israel, with at least two major additions over the years, including a beautiful recent expansion.

Inside the sanctuary is one of its greatest treasures: the hand-carved wooden lattice surrounding the ark where the Torah is kept. Nissan carved it himself. It remains in place today and is one of the prides and joys of the congregation.

Nissan was also an artisan and stonecutter. He carved every headstone in the cemetery that predates his death. If you walk through the older sections of Sag Harbor, you will also see granite street signs at historic intersections. Nissan carved those as well. It was one of the ways he earned a living. His work still marks the town.

His own headstone reads:

In cherished memory of our beloved father, Nathan Meyersohn. Died April 22, 1928. Age 72. A devoted Jew and a staunch American.

Those words matter.

Nissan loved America and embraced his Judaism fully. He was an outspoken advocate for the separation of church and state and wrote editorials arguing that religious freedom and democracy strengthened one another.

His wife Julia’s headstone, which Nissan engraved himself, reads:

In memory of our beloved mother, Julia Meyersohn. Died September 20, 1914.

They married after meeting in Sag Harbor. Julia had lost her husband and children in a different pogrom. They did not know one another before that moment. But when they looked at each other, there was something unmistakable.

There was magic.

Together, they had seven children, including my grandmother Esther, my great-aunt Annie, and my great-uncle Oscar.

Uncle Oscar later served in the trenches of the U.S. Army in World War I. He never spoke about it heroically. He said he did not know how he survived. “Thank God I had a good gas mask,” he told me, because they were exposed to mustard gas attacks more than once.

At Christmas, he said, the German troops and the American troops met in no man’s land. They shared food. They sang songs. Hours earlier, they had been shooting at each other. The next day, they resumed shooting at each other.

He said it was surreal. Everyone was asking the same question: why are we here, and why are we trying to kill each other?

After the war, Oscar earned a law degree and became a lawyer. He later served in the Roosevelt administration. At the end of that administration, those who had served were given pieces of White House china.

I do not have one piece.

I have the entire set for eight.

It came to me through my mother, who inherited it from Oscar. It matters not because it came from the White House, but because it passed through hands that believed public service mattered.

That same sense of care runs through what I inherited from my great-grandmother Julia. She was devoted to needlepoint. I have two of her pieces.

One is a Tree of Life.

The other is Home is where the heart is, with the numbers one through zero stitched beneath it. My mother told me Julia used that piece to teach her children how to count.

It was not a decoration.

It was teaching.

It was patience.

It was love made practical.

Years later, in 2014, after decades away, I returned to Sag Harbor. I was fifty-eight years old. The last time I had been there was for my grandmother’s funeral in 1968, and then again less than a year later for my uncle’s funeral.

Before that visit, I called the temple to ask if there would be Friday night services. What began as a simple question turned into a conversation that lasted more than half an hour.

I mentioned that every time we visited Sag Harbor, we also visited the cemetery.

There was a pause.

Then she asked, carefully, “Do you remember if there was a child’s grave there?”

I told her yes. Not just one. A small group, buried close together.

She explained that from the late 1970s through the 1990s, the Jewish population declined sharply. The congregation nearly ceased to exist. The cemetery fell into neglect and vandalism. When it was restored with love and care, the children’s graves could not be found. Some people were no longer sure they had ever existed at all.

When I arrived that afternoon, she made phone calls. Three people called a few more. Within half an hour, more than twenty congregants arrived. We consolidated into several cars and caravaned to the cemetery.

When we walked through the gate, memories returned in waves. I asked everyone to be patient and quiet. I needed to walk slowly. I needed to remember.

I had not been back since I was thirteen. Forty-five years later, I hoped I could still find the grave of my great-uncle’s baby.

The questions came softly.

“Where is the child?”

“Where is the child?”

I noticed a subtle mound near the fence line. I walked toward it. I knelt in the grass and dug with my bare hands.

Beneath the surface were the headstones of children who had died of dysentery. They had not disappeared. They had simply sunk, slowly and quietly, into the earth.

At that moment, there was rejoicing. The mystery was no longer a legend. It was history.

What had been buried was not history, but remembrance.

That night, at services, the rabbi unexpectedly called me up to speak. I had no notes. I spoke from memory. I spoke for twenty-five minutes.

Later he told me, “If you are anything like your great-grandfather, I understand why this temple exists.”

In 1988, at the age of thirty-two and as the new President of the Newport Lodge, I attended a B’nai B’rith convention in Washington, D.C. I heard Vice President George Bush and Governor Michael Dukakis deliver their presidential campaign speeches live. I also heard Leon Uris speak.

I stood in line holding a copy of Exodus.

When I reached him, he asked my name. I told him to sign the book to my daughter, Rebecca. Then I said my grandmother would have loved to hug him. Her name was Esther Einstein.

He froze. Then he stood up and hugged me.

“You’re Esther’s grandson,” he kept repeating. “She would be so proud of you.”

He told me she had spoken of me and my younger brother, Donald, when we were very small children, and that he had met us at her office in New York City, where she ran her book editing business. I do not remember the meeting. I was very young. But hearing him say it stopped me cold.

In that moment, everything my mother had ever told me about her mother crystallized. Esther became fully real to me, not just as my grandmother, but as a woman who mattered.

That book is not a souvenir.

It is evidence.

Tikkun Olam
תיקון עולם

Literally, repairing the world. Idiomatically, making the world a better place. It is one of the core moral ideas in Jewish ethics.

From Rabbi Meyersohn, to Esther and Annie, to Oscar, to my mother, Nathalie Einstein Mallett, to me.

It is not a story about coincidence.

It is not a fantasy story.

It is a story about presence.

“If I stay, there’ll be a Jew.”

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