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'Irish-American' Kerry's Jewish roots revealed

February 9, 2003

BY LYNN SWEET SUN-TIMES WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

WASHINGTON--Presidential candidates find their lives--and their lineage--are put under a microscope.

In the case of Sen. John Forbes Kerry, new scrutiny led to the discovery that the grandfather of the Massachusetts Democrat was Jewish, born Fritz Kohn in a small town that was once part of the Austrian empire and now is in the Czech Republic.

The revelation is interesting because Kerry is most often taken as a Boston Brahmin, mainly because his mother comes from the upper-crust Forbes and Winthrop families, who are well-known in New England. Kerry is also a practicing Catholic. His name and his home state, which contains the nation's biggest Irish-American population, have led people to conclude that he is something he is not.

"People assume," said Kerry spokesman David Wade. "Your name is Kerry, you are from Massachusetts, the land of the Kennedys."

It remains to be seen whether any issue will develop over whether Kerry tried hard enough to wave people away from the assumption that he was Irish-American. Several friends of Kerry who were interviewed said they assumed him to be Irish-American.

Kerry learned about his grandfather's heritage last month from Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish, whose research led to Kerry discovering the details of his grandfather's 1921 suicide in a Boston hotel washroom.

The son of a diplomat, "John has talked a lot about how he grew up in different places, how he did not have a sense of connectiveness," said Wade. Since the story was published last Sunday, Kerry found it "great to have a sense of family history he did not have before."

Kerry told the Globe he had found out about 15 years ago that his paternal grandmother, Ida Lowe, was born Jewish. But he said he knew nothing about his grandfather's roots. Wade said Kerry said he remembers his grandmother as a "zealous Catholic."

The Globe pieced together Kerry's genealogy through Ellis Island immigration records, other documents in Chicago and records from the former Austrian Empire. The paper hired Felix Gundacker, director of the Institute for Historical Family Research in Vienna, to examine and translate the German-language records.

Kerry's grandfather, who emigrated to the United States in 1905, was born in an Austrian town once known as Bennisch, which today is called Horni Benesov in the Czech Republic. Gundacker found birth records noting the 1873 birth of a Fritz Kohn and another record noting Kohn changed his name to Frederick Kerry on March 17, 1902. The Globe quoted Gundacker as "1,000 percent certain" that Kerry/Kohn was born to a Jewish family because the church records were on a page listing Jewish families.

Ironically, Kerry's younger brother, Cameron, a Boston lawyer, converted to Judaism in 1983, when he married a Jewish woman.

Kerry grew up in the dark over the circumstances of his grandfather's suicide. "He knew his grandfather died when he was very young,'' Wade said.

Kranish, the Globe reporter, showed Kerry copies of Boston newspapers from Nov. 23, 1921, headlined with the news that a merchant killed himself with a single shot from his revolver.

"God, that's awful," Kerry told the Globe after reading the article. "Oh God, that's awful. That is kind of heavy."

Wade said Kerry's father, who died in 2000, never talked much about his father's suicide and that the senator only was told about the suicide during his father's "last years, when his father was very ill," Wade said.

The revelation, said Wade, "turned on a light bulb for John Kerry on why his father was so understandably reticent to talk about it," and it "helps John Kerry understand his father much more and what his father went through."

Jennifer Anne Perez also writes in A Jewish Czech in John Kerry's Court in Reform Judaism Magazine about this story from her base in Prague. Her story is much richer and more detailed than the one from the Globe. In addition, her piece follows the amazing sleuthing performed by European Jewish genealogists which uncovered the Kerry-Kohn secret past. Every genealogist or person interested in genealogy should read this account of a 'Hail Mary' search for a family's roots which succeeded despite great odds.

Perez summarizes the Kerry family saga in this way:

The story begins in the Czech hamlet of Horni Benesov on May 10, 1873--the day Benedikt and Mathilde Kohn had a son they named Fritz.

Like his father, Fritz became a brewer. Yet it was difficult for him to succeed in an area dominated by German-speaking Catholics. Many Jews hid their religious identity, posing as Gentiles. "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, before his 30th birthday, Fritz took his wife Ida and infant son, Erich to a government office in Vienna and changed their family name. Fritz Kohn would henceforth be known as Frederick Kerry.

The Kerry family settled for three years in Austria before embarking on May 4, 1905 for America.

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.

Kerry became what we'd call a business consultant and helped conduct a major reorganization of Chicago's Sears & Roebuck. Eventually, his family moved to Boston where he became a shoe manufacturer.

Perez describes Kerry's tragic death in this way:

Frederick Kerry's 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 Boston's posh Copley Plaza Hotel, put a loaded revolver to his head, and pulled the trigger. He left behind $25 in cash, $200 in stocks, and a Cadillac.

The suicide cast a shroud of silence over the family history for more than fifty years.

John Kerry's father, Richard, would have been five years old at the time of his father's death. One can only imagine the terrible effect that it would have on such a boy's emotional development. In the article, Kerry describes his strained relationship with his father in the context of this new revelation:
That explains a lot. My dad was sort of painfully remote and shut off, and angry about the loss of his sister [she had died of cancer] and lack of a father.
Richard Kerry had great difficulty confronting the issue (for understandable reasons) and never told his son about the grandfather's suicide until Richard himself was confronting his own mortality:
Not until the late 1990s, when John's father Richard was suffering from cancer, did he finally disclose 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] help[ed] him understand his father much more and what his father went through."

Richard Kerry died in 2000. He never revealed that his father had been a Jew. Born in the United States and only 5 years old when Frederick died, it is likely that Richard did not know of his grandfather's hidden past.

For Kerry, this story has come as a revelation:
"This was an incredible illumination," Kerry says. "It really connected the things I'd talked about for years but now understand more personally. I never really knew why my grandfather left Austria or why he underwent such personal transformation, but we do know many of the things that were happening under the old Hapsburg Empire. We know what life was like for too many of them, and the ultimate turn for even greater tragedy it would take not much later."
As for the deeper psychological motivation for a man like Fritz Kohn to turn his back on his religious heritage, adopt Catholicism and start life over again in a strange land, Perez' genealogist expert puts this in context:
As for why Fritz Kohn chose the path he did, Prague-based genealogist Julius Miller believes he was a man who, like many other European Jews, looked to start over and build a better life for himself and his family. "Thousands of European Jews abandoned their past," Miller says. "The story of Frederick Kerry, alias Fritz Kohn, mirrors the histories of many Jewish families who came to America in the early 1900s."