csua.org/u/6oa -> www.uahc.org/rjmag/03fall/kerry.shtml
A similar revelation occurred on February 2, 2003, when the Boston Globe reported that Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, thought by many to be a Boston Brahmin of Irish-Catholic ancestry, was the grandson of Czech immigrants who also had concealed their Jewish heritage. The story begins in the hamlet of Horni Benesov on the tenth of May 1873-the day Benedikt and Mathilde Kohn had a son they named Fritz. Yet it was difficult for him to succeed in an area dominated by German-speaking Catholics. It was easier to do business as a Christian, says Prague-based genealogist Julius Miller, who specializes in tracing Jewish lineage. Many Jews just stopped practicing Judaism during this period and had no belief at all. On March 17, 1902, shortly before his 30th birthday, Fritz took his wife Ida and infant son Erich to a government office in Vienna and changed their family name. The Kerry family settled for three years in Austria before embarking on the steamship Konigen Luise in Genoa, Italy on May 4, 1905, bound for America. The two-masted, twin-screw Barbarosa-class ship was configured to carry nearly 2,000 passengers in steerage, about 150 in first class, and 140 in second. According to the ships manifest, the Kerrys traveled in first class with only twenty-nine other passengers-French, American, and Swiss families with decidedly Anglican names like Hale, Walker, and Bridgeman. Ellis Island records note that upon boarding the ship, Kerry identified his family as Germans from Austria, their former place of residence as Vienna. By the time the ship arrived in New York City on May 18, 1905, Frederick Kerry had left his Jewish heritage behind. A New Life The Kerrys settled in Chicago, where Frederick quickly set out to stake his claim in the American dream. On June 21, 1907, he filed his initial citizenship papers with Illinois Cook County Circuit Court. By 1908, he was listed in a business directory with an office on Dearborn Street in Chicagos famous Loop. In 1910, the year his daughter Mildred was born, he had made it into the Chicago Blue Book, a catalogue of notable city residents. By February 6, 1911, he had filed his naturalization petition, which was witnessed by the highly respected State Street merchant Henry Lytton and by Frank Case, a business manager at Sears Roebuck. Kerry had assisted in the reorganization of Sears, and by the following year he was promoting himself as a business counselor under the title Frederick A. But for reasons that remain unclear, Kerry soon left Chicago and settled in Brookline, Massachusetts. There, in 1915, Ida gave birth to their third child, Richard, the future father of Senator John Kerry. Frederick would continue the merchant life, now working in the shoe business and achieving enough success to hire a live-in German domestic worker, who appears on the 1920 census records of the Kerry household. The census information also offers a glimpse into the lengths to which Frederick Kerry had gone to obscure his Jewish lineage. Both he and his wife listed their native tongues as German-although the first language of Czech Jews of that era who were born near the Polish border would almost certainly have been Yiddish. By this point, however, both Frederick and Ida had been practicing Catholics for nearly twenty years, and by all accounts were regarded as devout in their faith. Frederick Kerrys American dream ended mysteriously on November 21, 1921 at the age of 48. According to front-page news reports, the now virtually bankrupt husband and father of three walked into the lobby washroom of Bostons posh Copley Plaza Hotel, put a loaded revolver to his head, and pulled the trigger. The suicide cast a shroud of silence over the family history for more than fifty years. It would come to light again with the first stirrings of a United States senators bid for a possible presidential run in 2004. A Rising Star The Kerrys youngest child, Richard, would also achieve success, but unlike his father, would sustain it.
Richard and Rosemarys first son, John Forbes Kerry, was born on December 11, 1943. Though he attended exclusive boarding schools in Europe as well as an elite private school in New Hampshire, John later would tell interviewers that somehow he always felt disconnected from his peers, like an outsider. Bush-both belonged to the elite secret Skull & Bones society-but while Bush lived the fraternity life, Kerry, an admirer of John F. Kennedy, found his niche in politics and became president of the Yale Political Union, a nonpartisan group providing a forum for a wide range of political debate. Returning to the United States in 1969 with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts, Kerry soon became a vocal critic of the war. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, he asked a question that would make him famous: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? Five years later, Kerry graduated from Boston College law school and kicked his political career into high gear. He quickly rose through the ranks of state government, becoming lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982 under then Governor Michael Dukakis, and eventually winning a United States Senate seat in 1984. In the late 1980s Kerry learned from a relative that his grandmother Ida had been born Jewish-a surprising revelation, as he had remembered her as a zealous Catholic. But he knew virtually nothing about his paternal grandfather, Frederick. John Kerrys constituency assumed that, with his fathers name and his mothers lineage, the senator was a full-blooded Irish Catholic. Even his hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe, regularly made the mistake, despite Kerrys repeated attempts to set the record straight. During a 1993 interview with TV host John McLaughlin, Kerry addressed the incorrect presumption that his father was Irish by stating that his grandfather was Austrian and that his grandmother had been born Jewish. Once, while on a visit to Europe, he stopped off in Vienna and called every Kerry in the phone book. And in 2002, his office contacted the regional Czech archives, which, he would later discover, actually possessed information on Fritz Kohns birth, but the senator never received a reply-two years earlier the bureau had stopped conducting searches for foreigners. It was not until the late 1990s, when Johns father Richard was suffering from cancer, that he finally disclosed to John that his grandfather had shot himself to death. That turned on a light bulb for John Kerry on why his father was so understandably reticent to talk about it, Kerry spokesman David Wade told the Boston Globe. It helped him understand his father much more and what his father went through. Born in the United States and only 5 years old when Frederick died, it is likely that Richard did not know of his grandfathers hidden past. The Mystery Revealed In late 2002, as rumors began to circulate that Kerry would seek the Democratic nomination for president, editors at the Boston Globe began soliciting reporters for in-depth articles on Kerrys life. Journalist Michael Kranish, a veteran Washington correspondent who had spent four years piecing together his own Jewish family history, volunteered for the assignment. Gundacker had developed a specialty in tracing the genealogies of Jews in Austria and in parts of what is now the Czech Republic. Within two weeks, Gundacker discovered the original document in Vienna that recorded Fritz Kohns name change to Frederick Kerry. Ironically, had Kohns name been changed at Ellis Island, it might have been impossible to uncover the original name. But because Kohn made the change while still in Austria, probably to conceal his background before coming to America, his origins could now be traced. That search took him to the state archives in the Czech city of Opava, halfway between Krakow, Poland and Prague. There he met archivist Jiri Stibor, a traditionalist who refused to use a computer, preferring to search by hand through the millions of musty files collected in the cavernous rooms of a former palace. Stibor told Gundacker that on June 20...
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