On the Trail of the Topaz Family

Making Connections at the History Festival

When Jeremy Topaz emailed in from Israel last year to respond to our call for Sunderland memories, it was the start of a fascinating heritage trail across three of our locations that lit up the History Festival. Jeremy himself kindly recorded the story of his own journey from Sunderland to Cumbria, where his father set up a photographic postcard business.

Then Alan Fell, senior consultant for British Jews in the First World War, We Were There Too, presented this fascinating project and its highlights, including the digital archive and interactive website which will become a permanent record of the lives of Jewish men, women and families, 1914-1919, with details of their military and Home Front activities (https://www.jewsfww.uk/).

Part of Alan’s talk featured the ‘Personal Records’ that are recorded on the site and he told the audience about Herman Bergson (Brown), born in 1885 and member of the Bradford Jewish Social Club​. Herman served with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces​ and in 1915 was given a week’s leave to marry Margaret Topaz at Spring Garden Synagogue, Bradford while suffering from gas poisoning and a wound to the right leg. Herman was sent straight back to the Front the day after (https://www.jewsfww.uk/herman-bergson-3496.php).​

Although Herman was the focus of this story, who was Margaret? Was she a relation? We contacted Jeremy and he replied, ‘Margaret (or Auntie Maggie as I knew her) was one of my father’s siblings - 7 sisters and one brother. She had 3 children of whom the last one, Esther, died earlier this month aged 96. Two of Esther’s children are Reform rabbis.’

But the connections did not stop there: Jeremy went on to say that one of Esther’s children is Rabbi Walter Rothschild, who was also an active participant in the History Festival audience! And to top it all, when Toni presented Bella Westlake's research on the Bradford history Facebook group, who else but Walter and his siblings appear as children in a photograph of the Bowland Street synagogue? Their grandmother Margaret died in Bradford in 1959, and Herman, who worked as a tailor, survived her by nearly two decades.

Hers is a great example of how women can disappear when they change their names on marriage, and we hope we'll be able to tell more of her story as wife of a war veteran.

by Trish Skinner and Toni Griffiths

(Photos courtesy of British Jews in the First World War, We Were There Too)