Her son has been so active in the Jewish world that it's a shame to think she might not have been allowed Israeli citizenship under the law of return.
Barbara
From: "Johnson, Naomi" <[email protected]>
To: Lisa Silverman <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 1:10 PM
Subject: Re: [ha-Safran] Estee Lauder question
The exert below is taken from Wikipeadia. Although Wikipedia is never thought of as a true reference, it does explain both the Catholic and Jewish references you mentioned.
I'd be curious though to see what others write in response to your question, since her mother was a Schotz Rosenthal, had two Jewish husbands and named their daughter Esther. Esty must have had a strong Jewish background in spite of her mother with the
Catholic moniker. How the mother's family became Catholic would be very interesting.
Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Corona,
Queens in 1908,[Note
1][2] the
second child born to Rose Schotz Rosenthal and Max Mentzer.[3][4] Her
mother was French Catholic on
her maternal side and Hungarian
Jewish on her father's side.[5][6][7] Rose
emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1898 with her five children to join her then husband, Abraham Rosenthal.[3] But,
in 1905, she married Max Mentzer,[3] a
shopkeeper of Hungarian Jewish descent who had also immigrated to the United States in the 1890s.[3] When
their daughter was born, they wanted to name her Esty, after her mother's favorite Hungarian aunt. Then the time came for the clerk to write out the birth certificate, and her mother chose Esther instead because Esty seemed so unusual that no one would know
how to spell it. So, Esty became her parents' nickname for her, which sounded like Estée when her father pronounced it in his Hungarian accent.[8] Eventually
she attended Newtown High School in Elmhurst, New York. But much of her childhood was spent trying to make ends meet. Like most of her eight siblings, she helped out at the family's hardware store, where she got her first taste of business, of entrepreneurship
and what it takes to be a successful retailer. Her girlhood dream was to become an actress with her “name in lights, flowers and handsome men."[4]
From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Lisa Silverman [[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 10:34 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ha-Safran] Estee Lauder question
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 10:34 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ha-Safran] Estee Lauder question
Students here are researching famous Jews and they have come across two versions of Estee Lauder’s birth: One is that she was born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants, and the other states that her mother was French Catholic.
Does anyone have a reliable source (we do not own her autobiography) that could shed light on the question of who her parents were?
Lisa Silverman
 |
Lisa Silverman
Library Director, Sinai Temple Blumenthal Library
10400 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD, LOS ANGELES, CA 90024
|
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