Unlikely figures to play important roles in the American Civil War
Avraham Yitzchok Trager and his son Aryeh Leib (Louis), born into the yeshivah world of Eastern Europe, were perhaps unlikely figures to go on to play important roles in the American Civil War.
Avraham Yitzchok (known as A.I.) was born in 1809 in Minsk. After spending his early years studying in a Vilna yeshivah, and then marrying and starting a family, he began to shuttle across Europe and the Middle East as a meshulach, raising funds for the Vilna Gaon’s talmidim who had settled in the Old City of Yerushalayim. During the course of A.I.’s two-year sojourn in Ottoman Palestine, his wife and children perished, and he traveled back to Vilna to try to restart his life. It was there that he married Shaina Esther Kornblum of Brisk, a descendant of the Tosfos Yom Tov.
In the late 1850s, A.I. Trager immigrated to New York, where he was among the founders of Beth Medrash Hagadol on the Lower East Side (a name he jokingly coined when there were merely a dozen member families). Rabbi Avraham Yosef Ash, the shul’s first rav and also a successful businessman, suggested that Trager join him in the hoopskirt trade, then booming due to new manufacturing technology that enabled higher-quality and more efficient production. The new endeavor met rapid success, and in 1860, the rest of the Trager family joined him in New York.
A few months later, A.I. brought most of the family with him south to Charleston, South Carolina, where one of the Trager enterprise’s four branches was then located. They could not have picked a less auspicious time to settle there.
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