Harvey, son of Gussie (Harry and Sarah Nesses's oldest daughter) and Jerry Smolinsky, had his Bar Mitzvah and affair at the Jewish Community Centre of Bensonhurst in 1954.

Seated at this table are, from l. to r., Isidor (Izzy) Oshinsky and his wife Monia, Saul Fenster and his wife Pearl Stubin (nee Szczupakiewicz), and Frieda (nee Sobel) and Harry Oshinsky.

Standing in back, from l. to r., Morton Stubin (ne Motel Szczupakiewicz) and his wife Edith (nee Rytolc), and Sam Ocean (ne Osinski) and his wife Eva (nee Lakin).

Izzy, Harry and Sam were three of the children of Eliezer Litman Osinski, who came from one of the shtetls surrounding Sniadowo, in the Lomza area of Russian Poland.  Litman had immigrated to the United States leaving behind his children (who later emigrated), but went back to Poland cir 1915 to bring back his second wife who had also remained in Poland.  However, they both passed away there. She passed away in 1919; he in 1921, one or both as a consequence of the flu pandemic. His second wife, Eta Chana nee Gniazdowicz, was a sibling to the mother of Motel and Perel Szczupakiewicz, Srulke Gniazdowicz (my ggfather), and was the mother of four children. His first wife Dwejra Klausewitch (Klossewicz) had passed away in Poland at an early age, and he subsequently remarried Eta Chana cir 1889. Together, Litman and his first wife had two children who also immigrated to the United States.

When my grandfather, nee Avraham Chona (Harry) Gniazdowicz emigrated from Russian Poland in 1906, he did so with Sam Ocean (then Schleime Osinski). They were both teenagers at the time. According to the ship manifest, both immigrated with the surname "Oschensky."

All of them at one time lived in Brooklyn, New York, though when they arrived at Ellis Island, they were to meet their "father" Licman Oschensky, who, like many other Jews at the time, was living in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

THE GNIAZDOWICZ COUSINS

at a Bar Mitzvah affair
August 1965

Seated, l. to r., Saul Fenster, the wife of Sam Ocean, who is seated to her left, and Rose Morgenstern, oldest daughter of Jake and Zlate Cohen. Standing, l. to r., Pearl Fenster (she and Morton Stubin are siblings, and children of Juszk Szczupakiewicz and Itka Gniazdowicz), Harry Ness (Chona Jankiel, son of Avram Ick Gniazdowicz and Szjena Loba (Lava?) of the Gniazdowo shtetl, near Sniadowo), Lou Morgenstern (Rose's husband), and Morton Stubin (nee Motel Szczupakiewicz, from Ostrow Mazowiecka, and later Czyzew).