'Titanic': The story of the Jews on the 'unsinkable' ship

April 14, 1912, 11:40 p.m. The North Atlantic Ocean. The biggest and most luxurious ocean liner of its day, the R.M.S. Titanic, is heading for its final destination, New York. 

The world’s greatest and largest ship ever built has just struck an iceberg, shredding the ship’s side. Although most of its 2,200-strong crew and passengers are asleep, most of them have less than three hours to live but don’t know it. 

Dubbed the “unsinkable” amid great fanfare before embarking on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, the ocean liner was a paradigm of unheard luxury for all three classes. It was a marvel of its time, equipped with state-of-the-art amenities. It made brief stops in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, before it set off across the Atlantic. 

About 650 km. off the coast of Newfoundland, and only a couple of days away from its destination, the great ocean liner struck an iceberg on the starboard side of its bow. The iceberg flooded the watertight bulkheads below deck beyond their capacity, dooming the ship to sink on its maiden voyage. 

The 2,240 passengers and crew on board were made up of scores of nationalities. Among them were some of the wealthiest and most influential people of the time. Many of the second-and third-class passengers were emigrating from Eastern Europe. Due to new immigration laws introduced in England, they were on their way to the US to forge new lives or join families already residing in the blooming nation. 

Some 69 of the passengers on board the Titanic were known to be Jewish, and their stories and experiences are some of the most interesting and heart-wrenching of the whole saga. As Mary Kellogg-Joslyn, president of the Titanic Museum Attractions in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, told the Magazine, “It is about the stories, it is not about the ship. It is about the stories, and I think it’s important to keep this story alive, to tell the individual’s story, not about a ship which unfortunately had a terrible accident.”

The tale of the passengers 

Benjamin Guggenheim was a notable American businessman and scion of the wealthy Guggenheim family, whose name is known worldwide thanks to the family’s philanthropic endeavors. 

Upon boarding the Titanic, Guggenheim was accompanied by his mistress, French singer Léontine Aubart, along with his secretary, Victor Giglio; his chauffeur, René Pernot; and Madame Aubart’s maid, Emma Sagesser. Guggenheim held ticket number 17593, which reportedly cost £79 4s, though other sources suggest a slightly lower price. Guggenheim and Giglio occupied stateroom cabin B84 during the voyage, while Aubart and Sagesser stayed in cabin B35. 

Isidor Straus was a prominent Bavarian-born American businessman, politician, and co-owner of Macy’s department store in New York with his brother Nathan. He also served as a member of the US House of Representatives for just over a year.

Returning from a winter sojourn in Europe, mainly at Cape Martin in southern France, Isidor and his wife, Ida, boarded the Titanic and set sail for home. 

Jakob Birnbaum was 24 years old when he boarded the Titanic for home. He was the head of the diamond firm of Jacob Birnbaum & Co. of San Francisco, where he resided. According to White Star Line records, his European residence was in Belgium at 11 Rue Membling, Antwerp.

“He’s a first-class passenger, although not of the same wealth as people such as the Guggenheims or Straus,” Eli Moskowitz, author of The Jews of the Titanic, told the Magazine. “Although from Belgium, the [Birnbaum] family originated from Poland, and he [Jakob] came from a wealthy family of diamond merchants.”

In 1912, Birnbaum had been to Antwerp for business and should have returned to the US before April 1912, but his family persuaded him to stay for Passover.

Birnbaum had booked passage with another company, but due to the coal strike in England, his passage was transferred to the Titanic, which he boarded at Cherbourg (ticket number 13905, £26).

According to his descendants, Birnbaum’s family had begged him not to take a ship on its maiden voyage. Still, Birnbaum reassured his family that the ship was “unsinkable.”

Adolphe Saalfeld, a chemist and perfumer originally from Germany, relocated to Britain in the mid-1880s and was granted naturalized citizenship in July 1896, residing at Clarence Lodge, Victoria Park, Manchester.

A successful entrepreneur, Saalfeld served as chairman of Sparks-White & Co. Ltd., a company specializing in chemistry and distillation. In his senior role, he spearheaded marketing his line of concentrated perfume fragrances.

Saalfeld embarked on the Titanic from Southampton as a first-class passenger, holding ticket number 19988 for £30 10s. He occupied cabin C106 and had with him samples of his perfume products, intending to establish a new market for floral fragrances in America. Before boarding, he and his colleague, Paul Joseph Danby, a fellow chemist of Jewish descent, explored the ship together, envisioning the opportunities ahead for their business ventures.

Saalfeld wrote to his wife from the Titanic: “I just had an hour’s roaming about on this wonderful boat with Paul. I like my cabin very much. It’s like a bed-sitting room and rather large. I am the first man to write a letter on [this] boat. They are still busy finishing the last things on board.”

The kosher kitchen

Down on the Titanic’s F deck, as the stokers continuously heaped coal into the great steam engines that powered the vessel, a small room used to prepare food stood apart from the rest of the third-class kitchens. It was the Titanic’s kosher kitchen. 

“Four years ago, someone asked me, ‘Did you know there was a kosher kitchen aboard the Titanic?’ and I said, ‘No, I didn’t know that,’” Kellogg-Joslyn told the Magazine.

The question piqued her interest and prompted Kellogg-Joslyn to do some investigating.

“We went into a major research study, and we identified 69 Jewish passengers; after two years of research, I wanted to do a whole exhibit on the Jewish passengers.”

The dive into the story of one of the lesser-known tales of the Titanic led to an exhibition from August 2021 to December 2022.

“We then extended the research project covering many different aspects, and we created Jewish boarding passes with the Star of David on them for all our visitors.” 

Although physical proof was never saved from the sinking ship or salvaged from the wreck since its discovery in 1986, third-class menus from the era, including from the R.M.S. Olympic – Titanic’s sister ship – provided by operating company White Star Line, state: “Kosher meat supplied and cooked for Jewish passengers as desired.” Other White Star liners from the time contained dishware and crockery labeled “Milk” and “Meat,” and it is known that there was a kosher chef aboard the Titanic. 

Charles Kennel, originally from South Africa, was born in 1882 and signed on as the Titanic’s “Hebrew cook,” according to the ship’s ledger. He listed his address as 6 Parkview, Southampton, the city from which the Titanic set sail. His seaman’s experience had already included a stint on the Olympic. Kennel reportedly earned four pounds a month for his services. 

Although there are references to Jews eating separately from passengers as early as 1904, “Kosher kitchens on ships such as the Titanic started in 1905,” author Moskowitz told the Magazine. “Albert Ballin of the Hamburg-America Line was the first person to do that. It is true that a kosher chef was in charge of preparing kosher meat, but unfortunately, we have no documented proof of it because most of the documents went down with the ship. It’s only for the third-class menu, so I can’t tell you what first and second class had, but knowing the Jewish passengers, I think first and second class didn’t care about keeping kosher food.

“We know that there was a kosher kitchen,” Moskowitz said. “There was a kosher chef, as there was also one on the Olympic. We also know the location of the kosher kitchen from the blueprints. It wasn’t a kosher kitchen as such but more like a cubicle – it was very, very small. It was meant only for cooking instead of a much larger kitchen with all the amenities, but it was still quite a big deal. And because the menu said kosher meat can be supplied, I assume they didn’t have a kosher dairy [kitchen].” 

Moskowitz considers Kennel to be one of the few Jewish members of staff on the Titanic, reasoning that no non-Jew could be a kosher chef, according to the Jewish dietary laws of bishul Yisrael. 

“You have to be a Jew to cook [kosher] meat,” he told the Magazine. “A gentile cannot cook meat. If it’s just serving food, like a waiter, that shouldn’t be a problem. But if it’s cooking, he has to be Jewish.”

Despite the salvaging efforts, nothing kosher from the Titanic was ever brought up. One reason could be the location of the kosher kitchen on the ship, which was in the stern. The stern suffered more severe damage than the instantly recognizable bow of the ship as it plummeted to the ocean bottom, breaking up as it sank and hitting the ocean floor at considerable speed.

The one person who could have shed the most light on kosher life aboard the ship, Charles Kennel, perished in the disaster, and his body, if recovered, was never identified. 

April 15, 1912, 2:20 a.m., North Atlantic Ocean 

The impact with the iceberg occurred while Guggenheim and Giglio were asleep, with Aubart and Sagesser being among the first to feel the collision just after midnight, ship’s time. Allegedly, Giglio responded dismissively, querying, “Never mind, icebergs! What is an iceberg?” Upon being roused, Guggenheim donned a life belt and heavy sweater under the guidance of Henry Samuel Etches, a first-class bedroom steward, before heading to the boat deck with Giglio and the two women.

As Aubart and Sagesser boarded Lifeboat No. 9, Guggenheim reassured the maid in German, conveying optimism about the ship’s repair and imminent resumption of the voyage. Etches bade farewell to Guggenheim and Giglio as the last lifeboats were lowered, never to see them again.

Upon realizing the gravity of the situation, with a typical Edwardian stiff upper lip that saw many men who were first-class passengers die, Guggenheim returned to his cabin with Giglio to change into evening attire. Witness accounts reveal that Guggenheim displayed calm resolve, affirming, “We’ve dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen. There is grave doubt that the men will get off. I am willing to remain and play the man’s game if there are not enough boats for more than the women and children. I won’t die here like a beast. Tell my wife I played the game out straight and to the end. No women shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward.”

Benjamin Guggenheim, Victor Giglio, and René Pernot perished in the sinking of the Titanic; their bodies were never recovered nor identified.

AS THE dire situation unfolded and it became evident that the ship was sinking, Straus attempted to save his wife, who adamantly refused to be separated from her husband. She steadfastly declined to enter a lifeboat without him. Col. Archibald Gracie IV, a friend and survivor, recounted that when he offered to inquire whether Isidor could join Ida in a lifeboat, Isidor refused to accept special treatment while women and children remained aboard. According to witnesses, Ida declared, “I will not be separated from my husband. As we have lived, so we will die together.”

Showing remarkable courage and selflessness, Ida then handed her fur coat to her maid and urged her to board a lifeboat. The last sighting of Isidor and Ida together was arm in arm on the deck, exemplifying a poignant display of love and devotion amid the chaos of that night.

Following the disaster, Isidor’s body was recovered by the ship CS Mackay-Bennett and taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, before being transported to New York. Initially interred in the Straus-Kohns Mausoleum at Beth-El Cemetery in Brooklyn, Isidor was later reinterred in the Straus Mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx in 1928. However, Ida’s remains were never recovered. 

In commemoration of Ida, the family collected water from the Titanic wreckage site and placed it in an urn within the mausoleum. Isidor and Ida are memorialized on a cenotaph outside the mausoleum, featuring a poignant quote from the Song of Solomon (8:7): “Many waters cannot quench love – neither can the floods drown it.”

In a bizarre twist of history, the Straus’s great-great-granddaughter Wendy Rush was married to Stockton Rush, the American chief executive officer of OceanGate, who tragically died when his submersible Titan, which dove over 3 km. underwater with paying tourists to view the wreck of the Titanic, imploded, killing all five on board. 

ALTHOUGH NOTHING is known about how Birnbaum met his end, “I consider Jakob Birnbaum to be my ‘favorite’ passenger,” Moskowitz related. “What I find fascinating about Jakob Birnbaum is his tombstone. He was one of the few Jewish passengers whose body was found, and he’s actually buried in a small Dutch village called Putte, right near the Dutch-Belgian border. His tombstone is very interesting because he’s the only Titanic victim to have a gravestone entirely in Hebrew.”

Saalfeld later claimed that he had been in the smoking room at the time of the Titanic’s collision at 11:40 p.m. and had seen the iceberg, after which he returned to his cabin. In his haste, he left his perfume samples in his cabin.

He recounted: “I saw a few men and women go into a boat, and I followed and when lowered, pushed off and rowed some distance, fearing... Titanic sinking.... As we drifted away gradually, I saw Titanic sink lower and lower, and finally, her lights went out, and others in my boat said they saw her disappear. Our boat was nearly two miles away, but pitiful cries could be plainly heard. No one in our boat knew how many lifeboats were on Titanic but... there was ample time for saving every soul on board had there been sufficient boats... The captain and officers of the [rescue ship] Carpathia did all that was possible to make us comfortable, and to those that were sick or injured, they gave their tenderest care. The icebergs were huge, and the weather was extremely rough on the voyage to New York.”

Saalfeld returned to his wife in England but found himself ostracized as a male survivor, as many survivors experienced. His family reported that he never slept properly again, often calling upon his chauffeur “Patch” to drive him around the empty streets before he could fall asleep.

Saalfeld died on June 5, 1926, aged 61, and his assets (in today’s money) were valued at £2m. He is buried in Golders Green Jewish Cemetery in London.

A small leather pouch containing Saalfeld’s perfumes, still intact, was recovered from the wreck of the Titanic over 70 years after the sinking. Even after many years at the bottom of the ocean, the scents allegedly still retained their fragrance. They were on display at the Titanic Exhibition in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2014. 

A burial debacle

Following the disaster, the White Star Line chartered three ships from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to recover any bodies. Ten Jewish victims were identified and were laid to rest in a particular Titanic plot in the city’s Baron de Hirsch Cemetery.

“As it turns out, none of the 10 victims were Jewish,” Moskowitz related. “Two of them were identified years later – one was a second-class passenger who sailed under an assumed name. Another one was identified as a steward who was buried there accidentally. The other eight were never identified, but we know that they were not Jewish. When the bodies arrived in Halifax, there was a commotion with all the bodies, and Rabbi Jacob Walter identified 10 male Jewish victims.

“He took 10 male bodies without genuine identification and said, ‘These are Jewish.’ It was Friday afternoon. When the hevra kadisha [burial society] came to bury them, they actually took the wrong group. After Shabbat, when the rabbi realized it, he returned to identify more victims and noticed that the group was still there.”

Moskowitz explained that during the commotion of identifying and burying bodies, the 10 mistakenly identified as Jewish were left in the Baron de Hirsch Cemetery while the original passengers, whom Rabbi Walter had claimed were Jewish, were buried along with other Titanic survivors in two of Halifax’s other cemeteries that held Titanic plots.

All roads lead to ‘Titanic’

Some moments or events in history are written down and fade into facts, figures, or statistics. Most Titanic aficionados can cite that 1,517 people died that tragic night in April and that the Titanic had lifeboats to accommodate only about a third of the ship’s total capacity. Even if all lifeboats were fully occupied, they could have evacuated approximately 53% of the total on board. Incidentally, despite the subsequent criticism of the lack of lifeboats on board, the Titanic’s ratio of lifeboats to passengers was far ahead of its competitors. 

It is the majesty of the ship, the scale of the tragedy, and the epic proportions of hubris involved that have led to the Titanic story enduring over a century in the public’s imagination. No other ship is so instantly recognizable. No other name conjures up images of the Gilded Age so brightly. When one delves deeper into the lives of those on board and the stories of how some survived and some met their end, and their last moments as they knew that a watery grave in the Atlantic was their journey’s end, one cannot help but feel the weight of the tragedy unfolding that fateful night. 

During research for this article, my attention was drawn to the now-closed Titanics, Manchester’s oldest kosher delicatessen, established in 1913, where I used to shop. The deli was founded by Joseph Abraham Hyman, a Jewish survivor of the “unsinkable” ship. As Mary Kellogg-Jocelyn accurately stated during her conversation with the Magazine: “All roads lead to Titanic.” 

‘Titanic’ – and Anne Frank

In 1909, Natan Straus Jr., son of Macy’s co-founder and nephew of Titanic passengers Isidor and Ida Straus, invited a former college roommate of his from Europe to come and spend time working at Macy’s, where the young man could practice his English and learn about foreign commerce.

The young man’s name was Otto Frank. In 1911, Frank returned to Europe and stayed in touch with Straus Jr. – the two families vacationed together in 1928 – and the Germans invaded the Netherlands, where the Frank family lived. Mary Kellogg-Joslyn said that Frank wrote to Straus Jr., saying: “During the war, everybody was worried.” Straus wrote to Frank, “Get out of there and come back home to the States.” Frank replied, “No, I’m a German first and Jew second, and they won’t touch us.”

The Frank family went into hiding in Amsterdam. During that time, Otto Frank’s daughter Anne kept a diary that chronicled the two years spent hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

“As we know, the family did not survive when they were picked up by the Nazis. After the war, Otto surfaces all of a sudden in Amsterdam and writes to Straus that he is alive, thanking Straus for his attempts to get the family out of Europe,” Kellogg-Joslyn related. “He writes, ‘I’ve got this manuscript from my daughter. I have her story.’”

With Natan Straus Jr.’s help, Anne Frank’s diary was published in the US in 1952, with a forward written by Straus family friend Eleanor Roosevelt. The Diary of Anne Frank has since been translated into more than 70 languages and has sold millions of copies. 

The truth about Bruce Ismay

Joseph Bruce Ismay was a prominent (non-Jewish) English businessman who served as chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, a company founded by his father, Thomas.

Ismay boarded the Titanic in Southampton. After it became evident the ship would sink before rescue could arrive, Ismay entered the Collapsible C lifeboat shortly before it went down, later admitting he could not bear to watch the vessel’s final moments. Collapsible C was eventually rescued by the Carpathia hours later.

Upon arrival in New York, Ismay was received by White Star vice president Philip Franklin, and shortly after, testified before a Senate committee. Ismay faced harsh criticism from the press – for urging Capt. Edward Smith to press ahead at full speed despite iceberg warnings, and for departing while women and children remained on board – earning the unfortunate moniker “coward of the Titanic.”

Following the tragedy, Ismay’s wife, Florence, prohibited any discussion of the Titanic within the family. Ismay’s granddaughter, historian Pauline Matarasso, described her grandfather as haunted by the disaster in his later years, tormented by thoughts of how the tragedy might have been averted.

At a Christmas family gathering in 1936, close to Ismay’s death, one of his grandsons, who had learned of Ismay’s involvement in maritime shipping, asked his grandfather if he had ever been shipwrecked. Ismay finally broke a silence of nearly 25 years, replying: “Yes, I was once in a ship which was believed to be unsinkable.”