Gertrude & Sidney Kreisman
In February 1928, native Austrian Fannie Klein Kreisman died in Houston, Texas. A few months later, her husband, Henry, a retail merchant, admitted their children, Gertrude (11) and Sidney (8), to the Home.
Sidney and Gertrude lived in the Home until 1934, when they returned to their father in Cameron, Texas. While in the Home, Sidney joined his Isidore Newman fifth grade classmates on a tour of the Item-Tribune plant and performed a solo in a school musical program. The siblings attended religious school at Temple Sinai, from which Gertrude graduated in 1933. After attending Newman School throughout the lower grades, Gertrude transferred to Joseph Kohn High School. There she was chosen as the school’s “most nearly perfect student” and competed in the Item-Tribune contest to find the “most [physically] perfect boy and girl students in New Orleans.” The press noted that “brown-haired, brown-eyed Gertrude Kreisman, 17, who lives at the Jewish Children’s Home … is especially proficient at tap and acrobatic dancing [but] likes all kinds of sports.” As for her diet, Gertrude said, “I eat whatever I want whenever I feel like it.” Among Gertrude’s competitors was fellow Home resident Adele Karp, who represented Isidore Newman School. Attempts to find the outcome of the contest have been unsuccessful.
On the back of this 1930 photo, which appears to have been taken at the Home’s summer camp in Bay St. Louis, Gertrude Kreisman wrote, “To the sweetest little friends I have ever had.” Scrapbook of Bessie Mashinka Rothstein, courtesy of her daughter, Debbie Wizig.
In the 1940s and 1950s, while living with their father in Texas, Gertrude worked as a secretary for what the census described as “a Zionist organization” and Sidney sold men’s clothing. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps.
In 1953, Gertrude married Reginald P. Kottwitz in a ceremony performed in the rabbi’s study of Houston’s Temple Beth Israel, where she was a member of the sisterhood.
This undated photo of Gertrude Kreisman was kept in the scrapbook of fellow Home resident Bessie Mashinka Rothstein.
