They were immigrants building a new life and a new identity as Americans in New York City in the early 20th century. Their building is now part of the Tenement Museum, which highlights the stories and contributions of immigrants like those who once filled the austere tenement buildings on the Lower East Side.
On Sept. 22, the staff gave a virtual tour organized by Fordhamâs Office of Alumni Relations, focusing on the Rogarshevsky family, Lithuanian Jews who came to America in 1901 and lived in one of two tenement buildings now maintained by the museum.
âWe work to tell very specific stories, because we find that that is easier to identify with,â said Danielle Wetmore, a lead educator at the museum. âNone of us live our lives in statistics.â
The sold-out event drew approximately 50 people from 14 states as well as Brazil.
Envisioning the Past
The Rogarshevskys came to America seeking economic opportunity, said Wetmore, noting that anti-Semitic laws may have made it harder for them to find that in their home country.

An image from the virtual walk-through of the Tenement Museum
To help with imagining what the Rogarshevskysâ immigrant experience may have been like, the tour included period images such a crowded city street that would be a striking change from the familyâs more rural home. âItâs going to be loud. ⌠Theyâve never seen so many people,â Wetmore said.
Other pictures showed their restored apartment in the museumâs building at 97 Orchard Street, with its window separating two rooms to promote ventilation and ward off a scary virus of that era, the one causing tuberculosis. (The familyâs father, Abraham, would die of the disease.)
There was no ice box, so the mother, Fanny, would have gone grocery shopping every day. The building had no showers, so a deep clean would have required a trip to a neighborhood bathhouseâ2 cents for five minutes. âThat is done maybe once a week, maybe a little less than once a week,â Wetmore said. Families typically spent about half their income on rent, she said.
Were their living conditions a step up? Hard to sayââItâs always going to be a mixâ of better and worse, compared with the home country, Wetmore said. âThe way your space feels is different. The kind of compromises youâre making here regarding space are different than you made in Lithuania.â
Within the diversity of the city, there could be clusters of immigrants from the same part of the world, as earlier immigrants helped family members and former neighbors make the trip, said one of the presenters, Fordham history professor Daniel Soyer, Ph.D. âSometimes you can look at the census and youâll find that [even in]a building, there will be a bunch of different families from the same place,â said Soyer, author and coauthor of several books including Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (NYU Press, 2017).
A New Language
Wetmore noted the tension between speaking oneâs native languageâin this case, Yiddishâversus stepping into a new, American identity by speaking English. Soyer said Yiddish had lower social status and younger people wanted to speak English; they learned it in the public schools, although with varying retention, while at least remembering their linguistic heritage.

A room in the Rogarshevsky family’s restored apartment at the Tenement Museum
â[For] the rest of their lives, they may understand every word when someone speaks Yiddish but not be able to speak it themselves,â he said.
A popular form of entertainment was dime novels, some of them formulaic romances featuring a downtrodden heroine who winds up in love and married at the end, Wetmore said. At the time, arranged marriages were on the decline, and the Rogarshevskys’ two daughters, Ida and Bessie, may have dreamed about falling in love, she said.
âAbraham did not like his daughters to read romance novels,â Wetmore said. But Ida and Besse liked them. And they were written in English, which Abraham couldnât read, so he wouldnât have known if they were obeying him, she noted.
Social Unrest
Labor issues of the day may have come up at home, Wetmore said. There were calls for strikes to address poor working conditions in factories, where workers had to put in 70 hours a week and risked losing an entire weekâs pay for making one mistake or being fired if they made three, she said.
This activism grew more urgent in 1911 after a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factoryâthe top three floors of a nearby Greenwich Village buildingâclaimed the lives of 146 workers who couldnât escape via doors, the elevator, or the fire escapes, which werenât made to be weight bearing. The majority of the dead were young immigrant women like Ida and Bessie, who worked in factories themselves.
The deaths fueled conversations about bringing change. âThis conversation makes me curious how the [Rogarshevsky] parentsâ views of union membership or striking or solidarity maybe change because of this tragedy,â Wetmore said.
A Journey in Name
The family changed its name from Heller, in Lithuania, to Rogarshevsky in New York and later to Rosenthal. Soyer noted that last names were âvery slippery thingsâ in Eastern Europe, especially among Jews, who âmay not have had much attachment to themâ because they had been made to take them in the 19th century.

The Rogarshevsky family’s former building at 97 Orchard Street, now maintained by the Tenement Museum
And, he added, âitâs a complete myth that people changed their names at Ellis Island.â
âMost Jewish name changes in New York took place much later than people think,â he said. âIt was really in the second generation, as people were upwardly mobile.â
The Zoom sessionâs chat screen was a churn of comments throughout the 90-minute event as people asked about the familyâs story and related their own experiences to it. And that was the point of the eventââWhat does [the Rogarshevskysâ story]tell us about the story of immigrants today,â Wetmore said, âand how does this story then impact our views or our relationships with immigration and immigrants in our modern world?â
The virtual tour of the Tenement Museum was one of many cultural events held regularly by the Office of Alumni Relations.