Samuel Hersh and Leah Devorah Glass of Kovel, Volhynia, Ukraine, were the revered ancestors of more than 150 relatives who gathered in Toronto in 1985 for a family reunion, reported the Canadian Jewish News on August 22, 1985.
Samuel and Leah and their nine daughters settled in Toronto in 1905, and some scant details about them were preserved in a memoir written by one of their daughters, Gertie Borman.
Borman wrote that Samuel arrived first with perhaps one of their daughters and Leah followed with the others. Their first home was in the Bay and Dundas area of Toronto, later occupied by the city bus station.
Samuel was a presser and attended synagogue regularly. Both he and Leah died in the 1920s. Today they have many descendants in Toronto and across the United States.
“They came to Canada basically for the reason that most Jews came, to escape from the pogroms, to have a better life,” said their great-granddaughter, Beverly Appel.
Appel organized the reunion with help from her mother Edith, her aunts Lil, Bertha and Ida, and cousins Clair Simon and Linda Fine. What spurred her interest in her family tree was a letter received from a California cousin, Julie Shuer, inviting her to her twin sons’ bar mitzvahs.
Some cousins offered to perform at the reunion, including the Fox sisters who were being billed as the Fox Family Flappers; Wendy Cladman, a professional opera singer from Germany; Lee Landrum, a poet; and Hugh Fink, a violinist. ♦
Below, death record for Samuel Glass, Toronto, 1923, indicating that his father was named David Glass.
