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Jen Richler: Hi, it's Jen Richler. Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women's Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet—and where even podcast hosts get sick during cold and flu season. Please excuse my voice in this episode, but the show must go on!

On August 4, 1869, a baby named Josephine was born in Sitka, Alaska, to German Jewish immigrants Martin and Fanny Rudolph. It was just a couple of years after Russia sold the territory to the United States. 

Seven decades later, Josie, as her family called her, was back in Germany, and the Nazis were in power. Josie’s American birth saved her life when she found herself desperate to leave Germany. Here’s Josie’s granddaughter, Hilde, in a 2009 interview, talking about her grandmother’s escape from the Third Reich.

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Hilde: When the time came to bring Omuch out, she appeared dressed from head to toe in black widow's clothing, with a big American flag on her shoulder, and underneath it all she had pinned a large amount of valuable jewelry to her underwear.

Jen: Josie Rudolph's story takes us from the muddy frontier town of Sitka, Alaska in the 1860s, to Hitler Youth parades in Nazi Germany, and finally to postwar New York, where her family tried to find their place. It's a remarkable tale of the survival of one Jewish woman and her family, but it's also part of a much bigger story—about antisemitism, refugees, settlement, and about who belongs, and where.

Later in the episode, we’ll talk with Josie’s great-granddaughters about her legacy and how a reporter changed their understanding of their own family history. First, we’ll speak with that reporter.

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Jen: Tom Kizzia is a journalist and historian who worked for the Anchorage Daily News for 25 years. He first heard about Josie over dinner with some high school friends in New Jersey, where he grew up. When Amy Weiss, the wife of one of his friends, heard Tom lived in Alaska, she told him her great-grandmother Josie was the first white American girl born in Sitka.

Tom Kizzia: It sounded like one of those stories that gets handed down in a family that, you know, sounds good, but couldn't possibly check out.

Jen: But it piqued his interest, so he decided to do some digging when he got back home. After a few dead ends, he found a report to Congress in 1870 of everyone who lived in Sitka at the time.

Tom: And, sure enough, in this census, there is the name Martin and Fanny Rudolph, and their newborn daughter, Josie—Josephine Rudolph. And that was Amy's great-grandmother. There she was, born in Sitka. And so, at that point, the whole project just took off.

Jen: It wasn't the first time Tom had reported on the history of Jews in Alaska. About 25 years ago, he wrote a series about the failed effort to change immigration quotas and resettle Jewish refugees in Alaska as Hitler tightened his grip on Germany in the 1930s. Through that reporting, he found a series of letters from Jews in a rural town in central Germany petitioning the US government.

Tom: The Jewish families were writing to America, saying, "We would make great colonists, we'd be wonderful Alaskans, we're ready for the rigors of the North, please allow us to come." And that whole effort died in Congress—nothing ever happened. So, for me, it was like, oh, there's kind of a happy twist to the story, or one light shining still is this woman who was able to get out of the Holocaust. And so that really was, um— made me want to figure out how to tell the story—the full story.

Jen: The story begins with two Jewish sisters, Fannie and Ida Heymann, who left Germany and came to the United States together around 1860.

Tom: There were a lot of, um, restrictions on Jewish families in Germany still in that period. Just as Germany was beginning to modernize, the idea of the United States was obviously a beacon of opportunity. And, you know, the majority of Jewish immigrants stayed in the eastern and midwestern cities, but there was a significant number who moved west for the reasons of, you know, economic opportunity that were drawing so many other Americans west.

Jen: They settled in the Pacific Northwest, where they both married German Jewish immigrants. The two couples—Fannie and Martin Rudolph and Ida and Isaac Bergman—moved to Sitka, Alaska, to seek their fortune.

Tom: I think partly there was a feeling—there were letters about, gee, you know, we're accepted here for what we can contribute to the community and not based on our background. And so there was a sort of exhilarating freedom that they'd find in some of these places. And I think there was certainly the need for, um, the sort of mercantile skills that some of the families brought. There was an idea, which is as old as, you know, continues to this day in Alaska, that there's going to be a big boom, and we want to get in on the ground floor.

Jen: Josie's parents didn't exactly find their fortune in Alaska, but they found steady work and became part of the Sitka community. Martin ran a dry goods store and a brewery, and his brother-in-law Isaac was the town butcher and served on the city council. They were part of a small but substantial Jewish community in Sitka in the late 1860s and early 1870s.

Tom: In the 1870 census, there certainly were ten last names, and some of them had kids. Abe Cohen and his family, the Scherpser brothers, Aaron and Benjamin Levy, Leizer Kaplan, Sam Storer, Sam Goldstein…

Jen: We're able to get a tiny glimpse of Sitka's Jewish community thanks to the diary of Emil Teichmann. Teichmann was a 21-year-old secret agent sent by an English company in the summer of 1868 to find out what had happened to a missing shipment of furs. He posed as a tourist and wrote a book about his adventures that was published many years later. One Friday night before going to bed, he overheard voices on the other side of the wall in his boarding house:

Tom [reading]: "Looking through a crevice, I saw quite an assembly of some twenty men, all of the Jewish persuasion, who were holding their Sabbath service and reading their prayers under the leadership of the oldest man present, who took the place of the rabbi. It was a memorable thing to see this religious gathering in so strange a setting. And it said a great deal for the persistence with which the Jews everywhere, even in the most remote countries, practice their devotional exercises. I myself should scarcely have expected it in Sitka, among a community which was engaged in such very disreputable occupations."

Tom: …referring there, I think, to the liquor trade that was going on between some of those merchants—not just the Jewish ones, but a lot of the merchants and the Native community—which was supposed to not be happening, but was happening kind of openly in Sitka during those first years.

Jen: The Native community was comprised of the Tlingit people, who had been there before the Russians and had some jurisdiction over the area's natural resources before the American settlers arrived.

Tom: The United States didn't recognize that. They acted like they had bought everything—the rights to everything. And so, there was quite a bit of conflict in that first decade as the army imposed itself.

Jen: That first decade ended with most settlers leaving, as they realized the boom they'd dreamed of wasn’t to be. Fanny and Martin, along with Ida and Isaac, headed back to the Pacific Northwest in 1871. But just a few years later, Martin and Fanny returned to Germany so Fanny could take care of her ailing parents. They thought they’d just be there temporarily and then return to the US. But that’s not how things turned out.

Tom: It seems that there was just a sort of unanticipated series of problems once they got back. The death of her father, followed by the death of her mother, followed by the death of her husband, Martin. And at that point, Fanny and her daughter, Josie, decided to stay in Germany.

Jen: Josie was six years old when they returned to Germany. When she was nineteen, she married an older, wealthy industrialist named Bernhard Thurnauer, who owned a large ceramics factory outside Nuremberg. They had two children, Martin and Lily. As an adult, Martin took over the factory and became quite successful in his own right. He lived with his wife and two daughters in a mansion outside Nuremberg. The girls would visit their grandmother, Josie, in Nuremberg.

Starting in 1933, when Hitler rose to power in Germany, Nuremberg was the site of annual Nazi propaganda rallies, complete with marching soldiers, torchlight processions, and speeches by Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Here’s Josie’s granddaughter, Lilo, in a 2009 StoryCorps interview with her daughter, Susie. She’s recalling one of her childhood visits to her grandmother’s apartment in Nuremberg.

Lilo: I saw some of his followers in their uniforms walking around the streets, and I remember sitting with my grandmother at the window in her apartment listening to the "Heil Hitlers" that were going on at a rally that Hitler had in Nuremberg at that time. I have a clear picture of her and myself sitting at her window listening to what was going on. 

Jen: Lilo’s father, Martin, a successful Jewish businessman, became a target for the Nazis. In 1933, he was thrown in jail on made-up charges. He and his wife, Leni, didn’t want their girls to worry, so they told them their father was on a business trip. But Lilo didn’t believe it. Martin wrote Leni a letter from jail in his characteristically upbeat tone.

[male voice reading letter] 

Dear Putsel,

 

On account of the censorship, I am not permitted to write to you in shorthand.

Personally, I am asking for the following items, if it will be permitted: a picture of you and the children, toilet articles, mouthwash, the alcohol which Dr. Voelker prescribed with cotton, a small pillow, underwear for the week.

As an occupation, I have a book from the prison library: German Humor of the Past. It reaches from the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century. There it stops.

I hope that you are as much at ease as I am. This also will pass.

Between 9 and 10, I walk around the courtyard. I do not get to do things like that usually. Everything has also its good points.

Many regards to everybody, kisses for you and the children.
 

Yours,
M.

Jen: Martin was able to get out of jail after about a week with the help of his lawyer, on the condition that he give up his factory and most of his money and possessions to the Nazis and leave Germany. Luckily, Martin had some business contacts in the US who were able to sponsor him and his family to come to New York. Lilo was nine at the time and recalled the overseas journey as exhilarating:

Lilo: Here I was, a little girl who had never been out of her immediate territory, going on a boat for a week's trip to New York. My father was seasick from the moment he stepped on the boat until we got off, and I had a ball. I mean, I had the run of the boat, I became sort of… special to everyone else who was there on the boat. I loved the dining room and the huge menu that was presented to me at every meal. And I'm sort of fascinated that I knew what to do, because as I said, I had had nil experience—I don’t think I had ever eaten in a restaurant. So I remember it as having been a fun time. And I remember arriving in New York and seeing the Statue of Liberty—that was very very exciting for me. And even now when I see the Statue of Liberty, I get sort of a little flutter.

Jen: Meanwhile, Josie stayed in Nuremberg with Bernhard, whose health was failing. After he died in 1936, Josie decided it was time to leave and join her son’s family in the US. By then, the US had imposed strict quotas on the number of people who could immigrate. But Josie's Alaskan birth was her ticket out.

Tom: The timing is so amazing in her life because not only was she born in Alaska just after it became U.S. territory—so she was born on US soil—but she was born a year after the 14th Amendment in that post–Civil War period, which was intended to give freed slaves citizenship, to ensure they were treated as American citizens. And that 14th Amendment included the right to birthright citizenship, where if you were born on U.S. soil, you were automatically an American citizen.

There was also a bizarre twist in all of this. There was a law that passed the United States Congress in 1907 denying citizenship to US women who married foreign nationals. And it's bizarre because a man marrying a foreign national had no such problem.

Jen: This would have been an issue for Josie, whose husband was German in 1888. But luckily for Josie, the law was repealed, and around the time she decided to leave Germany, her US citizenship was reinstated. It took months for her U.S. passport to come through, but she finally got it on October 7, 1938. And not a moment too soon—over the next few years, the Gestapo, who controlled Jewish emigration, would make it harder and harder for Jews to leave Germany, until they outlawed it entirely.

Tom: That image of Josie when she finally left Germany… The Gestapo were in charge of the border crossings by the end of 1938. It's like two weeks after Kristallnacht, and, you know, things are falling apart everywhere. And Josie shows up at the border wearing a black widow's full-length dress, and underneath it, she's got all of her jewelry pinned to her underthings. And she just strides through with her American passport and heads to New York.

She would live a decade in New York before she died and would see her granddaughter married to an American GI. It's just kind of a happy ending that shows how brave she was—and how much she deserved that "pioneer daughter" moniker.

Jen: Most German Jews weren’t as lucky as Josie. Many didn’t have the resources or weren’t able to leave. Immigration quotas also meant many Jewish refugees had no place to go. And as Tom mentioned earlier, a plan to resettle German Jewish refugees in Alaska had failed.

Tom: It failed for a variety of reasons, but one of them, sadly, was antisemitism within the Alaska Territory. The idea that, you know, “this type of person,” quote-unquote, would not fit… that they would be an enclave within Alaska, that they were somehow not adept, not ready to split wood and snowshoe to the store. The anti-immigration movement forces in DC were pretty powerful, as has been documented in other cases through that period. So, it kind of just floundered in Congress, in the hearings, and just disappeared after six months of conversation.

Jen: Zooming out from the details of Josie's story, what do you think we can learn from it today?

Tom: In some ways, this is a, you know, paint-by-numbers illustration of how settler colonialism works.

But, you know, at the same time, that phrase becomes a kind of mental shortcut that doesn't allow you to look at the details of what's actually happening on the ground. The pioneer community, as I said, was made up of a lot of different types of people with different motivations, sort of coming together.

It really raises the question of who belongs in that story and who is part of Alaska's origins. I think when people look back on history, they tend to populate it with their own sort of fantasy of what a frontier town was like. And I think it's important, as a storyteller, to complicate and make that story much more realistic.

Jen: And Josie’s story is poignant when you consider the antisemitism that scuttled the Alaska resettlement plan.

Tom: Who is the first pioneer daughter of Alaska? She’s, you know, the child of German Jewish immigrants. I think that is just a wonderful way to rebut that headline that infamously rejected the resettlement plan, saying, “German Jews are unsuited for Alaska settlers Is The Prevailing View Here."

History is really complicated and has all these unexpected twists and turns. And Josie's story really kind of brings that home, I think, in a powerful way.

Jen: After learning Josie's story from Tom, I wanted to hear what her descendants had to say.

Susie: I am Susie Hoffman. I'm 78 years old. I live in Brooklyn, New York. I am the great-granddaughter of Josephine Thurnauer.

Amy: I'm Amy Weiss. I'm 71 years old. I live in Summit, New Jersey. Josie is my great-grandmother as well.

Jen: What were some of the important things that you both learned from Tom's research, whether about your own family's story or about the broader context?

Susie: The biggest thing, I think, from a broader context is that I didn’t think about the story from the perspective of the Indigenous people in Alaska who were being displaced at the time that the Americans took over.

I was thinking all the time about our family and the injustices that we experienced, and through Tom's work and the questions that he asked and the research that he brought to it—and just from a more modern perspective—I began to understand that these pioneers were settlers, the European settlers who went to Alaska after it became part of, under American control, and dispossessed the Native peoples who had not given permission for the United States to take that land that the Russians gave them.

Amy: We think of Josie and family as sort of pioneering, and yet they were—you know, now we talk about settler colonialism. So on one hand, they were, but they were Jews. So they were discriminated against as Jews. And yet, there was this other population—the Native population as well.

So do you look at them as survivors, do you look at them as refugees, or colonialists? And that's sort of a very contemporary conversation, right? You know, in what context you play, what role, and who you are and what you did.

Susie: Right, and when we first met Tom and started talking about this, I was kind of shocked and embarrassed that our family was valorizing the fact that she was the first white woman born in Alaska, American. It was like, growing up, we never questioned that. That was just a given. And then today, you know, it just—it was embarrassing. As my son said to me—and to Amy, I think, as well—“What, did you think, that there were no other kids born of any background? So what’s so special about being white? There were plenty of Native people, kids, born at that time.”

Jen: Why do you think this story—your family's story—is worth telling? And what do you hope people take away from it?

Amy: I guess it's just another story of survival in a way. A woman’s survival and a family’s survival, which matters to me. And that whole greater awareness of a big world out there—you know, it's incumbent upon you to be aware and responsible and informed, and, you know, care, I guess.

Susie: I was very proud of my mother. I was proud that I had a mother who was a refugee, even though I suffered personally from the antisemitism growing up and as a young child.

It was kind of a protective thing for me knowing that, yeah, this was something special about my family. Both Amy and I have tried to pass this to the next generation as well.

That, yeah, we were immigrants, we were refugees, we—we almost, you know, weren’t here. Remember that there are other people now—migrants coming to this country—who are being told they can’t be here. And we were once in that place.

Jen: Birthright citizenship, which was key to Josie Rudolph's survival, is now in the president-elect's crosshairs. Donald Trump has said one of his top priorities as president is abolishing birthright citizenship by executive order. If he does, the order will likely be challenged and end up before the Supreme Court.

You can see pictures of Josie and her family at jwa.org/canwetalk. We'll also include a link to Tom's series about Josie for the Anchorage Daily News in our show notes.

Special thanks to Rebecca Graham for bringing us this story and connecting us with Tom, and to Noah Stoffman for reading the letter from Martin Thurnauer.

Thank you for listening to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble.

If you love listening to Can We Talk? and want to make sure we continue telling stories at the intersection of gender, history, and Jewish culture, please remember the Jewish Women’s Archive when you make your year-end donations. To contribute, go to jwa.org/donate—and thanks.

That’s a wrap on our fall season. We'll be back with more in the spring. In the meantime, you can catch up on episodes you’ve missed at jwa.org/canwetalk, or on your favorite podcast app. And you can sign up for our monthly newsletter at jwa.org/signup.

I'm Jen Richler. At this time of year, when the nights are long, we wish a light-filled Happy Hanukkah to all who celebrate. It's traditional to light your Hanukkah candles just after sunset. In Sitka, Alaska, on the first night of Hanukkah, that will be around 3:27 pm.

I'm Jen Richler. Until next time.