Collection

STEIN, Mania Brodsky

Description Level

Fonds

Material Type

textual record

graphic material

object

Physical Description

1 metres of textual records. - 12 photographs. - 86 artefacts.

Scope and Content

The collection is comprised of 3 boxes (1 m) containing approximately 2,500 letters, 86 postcards, and 12 photographs. The correspondence dates from the 1920s up to the 1980s (letters and envelopes with stamps, postcards, and cards). There are also a small number of receipts, invitations, and business cards. The majority of the correspondence comes from family members and friends in the former USSR, including letters postmarked from Moscow, Kiev, and Riga. Some correspondence was sent within Canada (Toronto, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts), or from the USA (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio), Israel (receipts and acknowledgment letters from charitable organizations) and a DP camp in US-occupied Germany. One small file contains some of Julius Stein's papers and correspondence including letters from the Canadian government regarding his citizenship. While there is a small amount of English-language correspondence, the majority of the letters are handwritten in Russian and Yiddish. An initial assessment completed when the collection was donated notes that the content deals largely with the domestic life of Brodsky-Stein's family and friends in the USSR. Further research by scholars of Yiddish and Russian is needed to obtain more detailed information on the content of most of the correspondence, however it can be assumed that the letters, including envelopes and stamps, would be of interest to researchers interested in the lived experience of Jewish families in the USSR during the 20th century.

Date

1922-1986.

Fonds No.

P0145

History / Biographical

Mania Brodsky Stein (Mania Brodsky/ M. Stein/Mary Stone) was born March 15, 1900 in Uman, Kiev, then part of Russia. Brodsky-Stein emigrated from the former USSR to Canada in the 1920s, along with her brother J. (Jacob/Yaacov) Brodsky, settling in Montreal, Québec. She was married to Julius Stein (born May 3, 1901 in Cologne, Germany, died in 1948, Montreal, Québec). She maintained correspondence with family in the USSR until her death in Montreal in 1986. The collection was donated to the Archives by her son, Henry Stone. A summary from a Yiddish-language profile in the New York paper Der Algemeiner Journal by Jacob Rabinovitch, June 22, 1984, page 12 states: Miriam Stein was a religious woman, well known in the Jewish community for her charitable works/philanthropy, though she was not one to seek recognition. As a young woman in the 1920s, she worked as a housekeeper in other observant religious households. During the post-war period she had a large house on Park Avenue in Montreal, which was open to all. She focused her efforts on new immigrants to North America, particularly young religious men who had trouble finding work due to religious practices such as being unable to work on the sabbath, a number of whom, including individuals who went on to become rabbis, would later remember her support.

Custodial History

The correspondence was kept by Mania Brodsky Stein, as she received them from the 1920s until the 1980s. The collection was donated to the Archives in 1986 by her son, Henry Stone, after her death.

Notes

Alpha-numeric designations: P86/14.

Archival / Genealogical

Archival Descriptions

Repository

Canadian Jewish Archives

Less detail