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A museum in New York
looks back at our immigrant roots.

JOHN MARX SMOCK
Special to The Jewish News

t the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, it's
always time for a shivah call at the apartment of the
Rogarshevsky family, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from
Telz, Lithuania, circa 1918.
Opened recently as a permanent exhibit, the tiny, three-room tene-
ment apartment of Abraham and Frannie Rogarshevsky appears today
almost exactly as it did on July 12, 1918, when Abraham, a garment
presser, died of tuberculosis at age 47.
In the small front parlor, a table is set for seudat havra-ah, the tradi-
tional mourning meal of eggs, lentils, bagels and other rounded foods
representing the circle of life.

A

3/5
1999
100 Detroit Jewish News

Clockwise from left:
The tenement building at 97 Orchard St.

The table is set for the shivah meal.

The bed, where the two Rogarshevsky daughters slept, and the sink with
running water were fairly new in 1918.

The rest of the apartment is equally a time capsule filled with real
objects owned by real people and animated by their stories of hardship
and triumph. In the kitchen, calendars and magazine pages hang as
wall art above the coal stove, and shelves with lace edgings hold cook-
ery.
In the bedroom, on a high chest of drawers beside the feather bed,