The Bernstein Family

Barauch (d.1938) and Fryma Maete (d.1938) Berenstein lived in Lviv, in Ukraine. Barauch taught writing, mathematics and religious subjects to local children. They had at least five children, Willie, Rosie, David, Tova and a son whose name is unknown.

Willie Berenstein immigrated to the United States about 1913 and soon sent for his younger siblings Rosie and David. Their surname became Bernstein after they arrived.

In 1918, David Bernstein (born c.1896) married Jennie Bernstein (c.1898-1964), who had also immigrated to Pittsburgh in 1913 from what was then Russia. They ran Bernstein’s Superette at 2630 Wylie Avenue in the Hill District and lived above the store before moving to Webster Street. They were the parents of Sylvia, Beatrice and Mildred.

“That store was Dave’s pride,” Mildred Schwartz later wrote in a University of Pittsburgh assignment, inspired by her memories of the store. “You could sense it by the way the baskets of fresh turnip greens, and string beans, and boxes of apples, oranges, and pears were displayed, with never a rotten apple or a spotted banana to mar their orderly, beautiful appearance.”

In the spring of 1938, David Bernstein received word that the Nazis had taken his remaining family from their home. They were never seen again. “I was fourteen years of age in 1938 when my father closed up our store and sat Chiva (sic) for his family who had perished at the hands of the nazis (sic),” Beatrice Bernstein wrote in April 2000.

Mildred “Millie” Bernstein (d.2002) met Leonard Schwartz through a mutual acquaintance when they were teenagers. They married in 1946 and had two daughters, Debbie and Jodi. Millie Schwartz was a typist for the U. S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Mines before leaving to raise a family. She and her daughter Jodi later owned an interior design studio and an art gallery.