[Editor’s Note: The following story was relayed to us by our Glendale correspondent Hovsep Fidanian.]
[img]2362|right|Rabbi Nadoff||no_popup[/img]The picture captures the face of a new American, one of the more than 164,000 immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island in 1926.
It is of a man, in a suit and tie with a hat, looking straight ahead. The photographer was Lewis Hine, who devoted his life to documenting the human condition.
Mr. Hine titled his photo “Armenian Jew, Ellis Island Immigrant, 1926.”
Over the years, the haunting stare came to symbolize the loneliness that immigrants, many eastern Europeans, faced in their adopted homeland.
The man, though, wasn't an Armenian Jew. He was Shalom Nadoff, a Yemenite rabbi. And now officials at two museums, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the George Eastman House in upstate New York, are working to correct the record almost 90 years after Mr. Hine tripped the shutter.
Rabbi Nadoff's relatives say they learned about the mislabeling decades ago, and they have made attempts to properly identify their loved one. For Naomi Goldzweig of Brooklyn, the realization that the solemn-looking man was her grandfather came in 1991, on a family trip to the museum.
“When we saw the image, my dad said that it was his father,” said Ms. Goldzweig, 50 years old, an assistant principal who lives in the Fiske Terrace neighborhood. “Then we all laughed when we saw the caption. They wrote that he was an Armenian Jew, and he was nowhere near to being Armenian.”
Tracing His Path
Rabbi Nadoff, in fact, had spent all 25 of his years in the Middle East before migrating briefly to England, then to the U.S. Born in Saudi Arabia, he studied the Torah and silversmithing in Palestine. His tenuous connection to Europe had been a short stay in London for an exhibition of his filigree silverwork at the British Empire Exhibition in 1925, nothing more.
One of Ms. Goldzweig's uncles, Rabbi Nadoff's oldest child, who has since died, wrote to the museum a decade ago but never followed up. Others tried to find photos of Rabbi Nadoff for comparison. There only were a few from the same time period, and they didn't look enough like the man in the photo. Perhaps because of their new heightened awareness, the family seemed to see the picture everywhere.
“Whenever you see a book on Ellis Island, or show a movie about immigration, or have an exhibit about it, it's there, that same picture, and it was always wrong,” Ms. Goldzweig said. In late September, Ms. Goldzweig spotted the picture again, this time accompanying an essay in the Review section of the Wall Street Journal titled “A Nation Built For Immigrants.” She and her husband, Yitzchak, 55, contacted the newspaper, which in turn spoke with archivists at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the George Eastman House, the museum of photography in Rochester, N.Y., that owns thousands of Hine negatives, including the one of Rabbi Nadoff. Neither representative had heard of the caption dispute.
Ellis Island handles a half-dozen queries a year about photo misidentifications but has issued only a handful of corrections, archivist George Tselos said.
The Test
Curators judge each case on the quality of documentation available. For the identity of a person, the chances are better for a correction or a clarification if the individual is clearly recognizable in the picture, he said.
Eastman House averages three inquiries a year, according to senior archivist Joe Struble. Once, Mr. Struble said, a woman correctly identified a man in a Hine picture titled “Workers on the Empire State Building” using other photos that her relatives owned.
More common than corrections, though, is the addition of information, Mr. Struble said. Eastman officials often will add a note to the record if there is good, but not conclusive, evidence about a subject's identity.
Rabbi Nadoff's relatives discovered a piece of evidence in the last month that proved to the archivists that their loved one was the man in the Hine image. In mid-November, the Goldzweigs learned Ms. Goldzweig's sister, Hadassa Nadoff of Cedarhurst, N.Y., had a copy of their grandfather's “document of identity” from Ellis Island. The slip of paper listed his nationality as Palestinian and had a photo nearly identical to “Armenian Jew.”
Both the Ellis Island museum and Eastman House will enter Rabbi Nadoff's name and biography into their records and change the caption to “A Yemenite Jew from Palestine.” Mr. Struble also is working with several institutions that have prints of the picture, including he New York Public Library.
There is always much gained when a subject of a photograph is identified, but part of the power of the Hine photos is that “they stand in as universals and part of our collective identity,” Mr. Struble said.
For Rabbi Nadoff's relatives, though, the revised caption is bit of recognition for a man who was a Torah scholar and an art school graduate, a man who brought his wife and their growing family to America.
Ellis Island was just the first stop in a life that ended in 1987 in his homeland, Israel. From New York City, Rabbi Nadoff, with wife Mazal, 5-year-old son Isaac and baby Rachel, went to Philadelphia to exhibit his work at the 1926 Sesquicentennial International Exposition, a six-month celebration of the 150th anniversary of American independence.
The journey wasn't over. The Nadoffs moved to Chicago, where they had three more children. They stayed for 40 years before migrating to Israel in 1974. Rabbi Nadoff lived another 13 years.
To the best of Ms. Goldzweig's knowledge, her grandfather never saw the photo that made him famous.
Mr. Fidanian may be contacted at fidan1@charter.net
