(Editor’s note: First of two parts)
Whenever groups gather to talk about local history, the family stories are always the best. When talking Chattanooga history, few family stories can rival one that involves religious persecution, conscription into the tsar’s army, being smuggled across borders and eventually finding a home in the Tennessee Valley — and that’s just the beginning of the Siskin story, a journey that epitomizes the American Dream.
The story begins in Kavarskas, a tiny town in Lithuania where Issac Asher Ziskind and his family worshipped, along with other Jewish families, in the local synagogue. He learned the Jewish admonition of “tzedakah,” or righteousness involving charitable love, as a young man, and in turn taught his family that same concept of faith in action.
While Lithuania had been a haven of relative religious freedom and learning, all of that would change in the late 18th century when the small Baltic province was annexed by a Russian empire seeking an outlet to warm water for trade. Within weeks, Jewish communities ceased to flourish. Formerly successful merchants found their businesses shuttered, while their children were denied access to advanced education. Basic human rights became only a dream of the past.
It was into this repressive environment that Isaac’s oldest son, Chaim Raphael Ziskind, was born in 1868. A charismatic young man who worked as a teaching assistant, his life changed drastically when he was ordered into the tsar’s army, often serving alongside men whose anti-Semitism made the three-year conscription even more difficult.