The family members that attend our Satinsky Family seders are all descendants of Max and Mollie Satinsky. They met and married in 1899 while living in a small Jewish enclave in the Kensington area of Philadelphia which the residents called Y’rushalayim B’Philadelphia.

Max was one of the sons of Yitzhak Satinsky, a shohet (kosher slaughterer) who had been brought over from Lithuania in the early 1880s by the community members who had arrived around that time. Mollie was the daughter of another immigrant from Lithuania Harav Binyamin Bloch, a Rabbi who came to be held in such high esteem by the Philadelphia Jewish community that an estimated 10,000 people attended his funeral years later. There was a second shul in that community (across the street they say) headed by Rabbi Brenner, grandfather of the comedian David Brenner. (There had to be more than one shul in the neighborhood because ‘every Jew needs at least one synagogue that he or she wouldn’t set foot in.’)

Max and Mollie subsequently moved to the Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia where they reared their 5 children – Min, Rose, Rhea, Sylvia, and Yane (Jules). There they lived in a large 3 story row house next to one resided in by Max’s brother Dov B’er (Barnett), his wife Minnie, and their 6 children.

Max had a very close relationship with another brother Dave, who with his wife Annie, had 6 children. Unfortunately, Annie died while the children were still young, and Dave hired a woman to keep house for him and his 6 children. Shortly thereafter, Dave married the housekeeper, but then he died, leaving his 6 children orphaned with a step-mother. Mollie and Minnie recognized that the upbringing of these children should not be left to their stepmother, so they approached her with an arrangement to buy the children from her for $5,000 each. Mollie reared 3 of them –Irv, Helen, and Rose—and Minnie reared the other 3—Victor, Joe, and Morris (Reds). An interior doorway was constructed between the two houses so that the two families could easily intermix. Outsiders could never be sure which children belonged to which family.

Max had earned a good living as a highly regarded kosher butcher. He subsequently left the butcher shop and opened the Frankford Woolen Mills. He also owned some commercial real estate. His children remember how much he patronized his shop-keeper tenants – having family portraits taken when one tenant was a photographer, and having ‘so much candy’ in the house when another tenant was a confectioner.