During the war, Joseph Berkowitz—Yossel, in Yiddish—lived in a hole in the ground. A “grave,” the family sometimes called this trench—ziemianka, in Polish—covered with branches, designed to conceal his existence from the Nazis. At night, he snuck out for food, but otherwise his life was confined to this tiny carve-out in the dirt. Everything he needed to live—potatoes, matches, salt, flour—had to be begged or stolen from wary villagers. In the winter, these provision runs became nearly impossible because of the tracks he would leave in the snow. Ziemiankas were dark; typically the only light came from bits of burning wood stuck in the walls emitting a stinging smoke. The days passed slowly. Yossel lived in constant fear that he would be caught and killed or sent back to the Nazi labor camp from which he’d escaped.
By the time of his death, forty years later, Joseph Kushner, still doing calculations in his native Yiddish, had built thousands of homes for middle-class families in New Jersey, including four large homes for his children. All of them above ground.1
Yossel Berkowitz was the son of poor tailors from the small village of Korelitz, not far from Novogrudok. Novogrudok was an actual town, but Korelitz was a shtetl, like the one in Fiddler on the Roof, tight-knit, contentious, vulnerable. Unlike his future wife, Rae, who had attended one of the area’s most prestigious universities before the Nazis closed in, Yossel had little education. He could read and write, but only in Yiddish.
But—he could hustle. As a boy of twelve, as the story was passed down, he would buy run-down horses, then place hot potatoes in their rectums so they would jump around and look frisky. Then he would sell these young-looking horses for a lot more than they were worth. When he was fifteen, Yossel’s father died of pneumonia, and Yossel apprenticed himself as a carpenter. This lasted only four years.
In June 1941, the Nazis marched into eastern Poland. The next summer, young Yossel was forced to watch as the Nazis murdered his mother, three of his six sisters, their husbands and children. Then he was sent to a labor camp. Before the Nazis could march him to the Novogrudok ghetto for a massacre, Yossel escaped to the forest, where he dug his “grave,” hiding out with some siblings until he moved again, to join Tuvia Bielski’s partisans.2 “To save a Jew is much more important than to kill Germans,” Bielski would say, and the camp took all comers.3
Yossel found a compatriot in Bielski, a strapping young Jewish man who had grown up in a farmhouse. During the war, in the middle of the forest, the once-privileged intellectuals and the bourgeoisie had less to offer the band of Jews than working-class youths like Yossel. He found purpose in the camp, where his carpentry skills were much in demand. Sometime during the war, he and Rae found each other.
Nechama Tec compiled a number of accounts of relationships in her book Defiance—forest liaisons were both life-affirming and an act of survival. “A connection to an ‘appropriate’ man could ease the move from the ghetto to a safe place in the forest,” Tec wrote. “Men who could do that were usually the more resourceful, lower-class youths. . . . A simple, common youth had no trouble getting a socially superior girl, someone he could have only dreamt about before the war.”4
Whatever their social positions prior to the fighting, Joseph and Rae had nothing after the war. “I was rich man,” Joseph later joked. “I spent my honeymoon in Budapest.”5 After that, he and Rae embarked, without passports, on a perilous journey of over a thousand kilometers, much of it on foot through the mountains. At one point, Rae was stricken with grave appendicitis. They traveled from Budapest, two countries away from their native Poland, through Hungary and on into Italy, sneaking across international borders as they went, until they arrived at the refugee camp outside Rome. They were known as DPs—displaced persons.
“The misery of the DPs was indescribable,” Mark Wischnitzer wrote in the 1956 book Visas to Freedom: The History of HIAS, about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped resettle refugees before, during, and after the war. “Failing a miracle, only an act of Congress could resolve the problem. But for this, public opinion had to be roused. A nation-wide organization was required to bring home to the American people the plight of the victims of Nazism and Fascism and their need to find a home.”6
Joseph and Rae and their family were not wanted in America. “Nearly every surviving Jewish family in central and eastern Europe had been broken up by the war and Nazi atrocities,” Wishnitzer wrote. “Obtaining the documents required for emigration presented almost insurmountable difficulties.” Joe and Rae were stuck. In 1948, three years after the war ended, aid organizations were only able to settle 847 Jews in the United States.7 That June, President Harry Truman signed a flawed Displaced Persons Act, one that sharply limited Jewish immigration. Joe, Rae, Naum, Lisa, and Linda could not leave the refugee camp, ensnared between the horrors of the past and a future they could not reach.
In Italy, Joseph made money selling scarce goods—sugar and tobacco—on the black market. But he was caught and arrested and sent to jail. Perhaps, his family whispered, a jealous relation had turned him in. His father-in-law was unable to prevail upon the authorities to let him go. So Rae, nine months pregnant with Linda, traveled to the neighboring town where her husband was being held. She too, begged for his release. Then, she bribed the guard. Her husband was freed.
Not long after that, her husband took on his wife’s last name. The Kushner family histories offer many reasons for assuming the matriarchal name. One version suggests it was to elide Yossel’s arrest record.8 Another, from Rae herself: “We were relatives.”9 A third: even when they were penniless, the name “Kushner”—furrier—connoted wealth. But almost certainly, the reason Yossel Berkowitz became Joseph Kushner was because US immigration laws were written so that, as Naum’s son, Joseph could get a visa. As his son-in-law, he could not. “Because sons and fathers were given priority to get visas,” the Kushners wrote in The Miracle of Life, “Yossel assumed his wife’s maiden name, being that he traveled with his father-in-law.”10
Shortly before he moved to America, Yossel Berkowitz became Joseph Kushner, son of Naum Kushner. No records remained in Europe to demonstrate otherwise.
In America, HIAS began a new set of records, which remained buried for seventy years. In those papers, Joseph Kushner was born. On March 16, 1949, “Josef Kushnier, 26,” as his name was recorded, boarded the SS Sobieski in Genoa, with aid workers in Rome cabling caseworkers in New York to let them know the Kushner family was on its way. The migration department worksheet prepared by aid workers listed “Naum, 51,” as the family patriarch, with “Josef, 26,” as his son. “Raja,” also twenty-six, was listed as the daughter-in-law. Raja’s—Rae’s—“maiden name” was given as “Sloninski,” a version of the last name of Joseph’s maternal grandfather. Lisa was listed as nineteen, Linda as two. For all of them country of birth was listed, not as Poland but as “Germany,”11 which, under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, raised fewer eyebrows.
There was also the name of a sponsor: a Dr. H. Bussel, of the Bronx. On the back of the migration worksheet there’s a notation by an aid worker that on March 25, while the Kushners were en route, a Miss J. Schwartz of the New York section had investigated. The notation said, “Dr. Bussel does not know family, assumes no responsibility.” When HIAS aid workers met the family at the port of entry, the Kushner family had a total of $2 in its pockets, and nowhere to go.
HIAS put the Kushners in a shelter. The family was allotted $1.80 per person a day, with $4 a week for baby Linda. Two weeks later, during Passover, the Jewish celebration of the Exodus from Egypt, the Kushners received an extra HIAS allowance for food for their holiday.
Joseph kept up the ruse that Naum was his father and Lisa his sister. “Josef came to inform me that his father was still ill and could not keep his appointment,” an aid worker noted in the file. “Josef, who assumed a great deal of responsibility for the family, indicated he would like to initiate discussions around planning although he recognized that final discussions would of necessity involve his father as well.” Nervous about the family’s resettlement, Joseph “expressed some anxiety about the ability of the agency to assist him because there were so many jobs to be obtained for the family.”
Under the Displaced Persons Act, all of the family had to be “suitably employed.” Joe was a skilled carpenter, he pointed out, “doing ‘white work’ of a finished nature.” The aid worker told him HIAS could help, but that the work could be anywhere in the United States. Josef asked to stay in New York, saying that a “landsman from Novogrudick in White Russia” had recently reunited him with his “father’s”—that is, Naum’s—sister. But now, Josef had a new challenge: convince the aid worker that he was Polish (which he needed to do in order to stay in New York) and not German, as the HIAS forms had listed (which could have helped when entering the country).
“I was ready to accept his statement concerning their origin, especially because of the marked Russian accent of his Yiddish.” the aid worker wrote. But more proof was needed for the family to stay in New York. Caseworkers asked for documents from the claimed American relatives, called references, and met with them all in person. “The documents fully supported the statements,” the caseworker noted. “There is also a marked facial resemblance.” The Kushner family was accepted for authorization in New York.
They were a large group. Housing was tight. They couldn’t find anyone to take them in. They stayed on at the shelter. They met with aid workers a few times a week. “Work with the K. family was complicated by the size of the family and above all by their attitude towards the agency,” one caseworker wrote. “They seemed to believe that they could get what they need or want by exercising pressure on us. They have a tremendous drive to establish themselves and start off again and were extremely active in trying to locate an apartment or to utilize the community resources. They also tried to obtain everything at once as if they would not get everything they were entitled to.”
After two months, the Kushner family was given a time limit. They located two furnished rooms at 102 West Eighty-Seventh Street, a narrow five-story brownstone. The family eventually found its way to a one-bedroom walk-up on St. John’s Place, Brooklyn, near Eastern Parkway, in Crown Heights. On February 27, 1950, Rae’s twenty-seventh birthday, the United Service for New Americans, which had worked with HIAS, sent the Kushner family a bill, as was standard practice, for their passage from Italy, their shelter, and other costs, for a total of $1,435.32, worth about $15,000 today. The bill was sent to the address of Dr. H. Bussel, the American “sponsor” who had disavowed responsibility for the family. It’s not known if the letter was ever properly routed, or if the sum was paid back. The HIAS paper trail stops there.
As GIs returned home after the war, they faced an acute housing shortage for their growing families. The federal government began fueling home construction, especially in New Jersey. Sandwiched between New York and Philadelphia, the first and third largest cities in America at the end of the war, New Jersey was an epicenter of middle-class growth on the East Coast. It was also a magnet for immigrants: as far back as 1910, a quarter of the state was foreign born. “The forces of suburbanization were as great as anywhere in the country,” James Hughes, the former dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, said in an interview. “New York City and Philadelphia were manufacturing dynamos.”12 Tube radios were manufactured in Camden, black-and-white televisions in Jersey City, apparel in New York City. From the 1950s to the 1970s a thousand homes were built each week in New Jersey, for a thousand straight weeks.
There was plenty of work for a carpenter. “My grandfather came here on a Tuesday, got a job on a Thursday and he just worked very very hard and he was able to create the American dream,” is how Jared Kushner later described it.13 Nicknamed “Hatchet Joe,” Joseph Kushner made ninety dollars a week, sometimes sleeping at job sites to save the one-dollar bus fare home and back. He worked this way for four years, through the birth of his second child, Murray. During that time, Rae and Joe saved half his salary. But Joseph was finding it increasingly hard to reconcile his long days in New Jersey, and sometimes evening shifts in Brooklyn, with being an observant Jew.
In 1953, after a supervisor questioned his taking days off on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holy days, Joe decided to work for himself. He entered into a real estate deal with the sons of a fellow Holocaust survivor he met on the commuter bus to New Jersey, Harry and Joseph Wilf. With five thousand dollars he had saved in weekly increments, Joe Kushner became a minority owner of three lots in Clark County, New Jersey. “We made a couple dollars from the three houses,” Rae later said.
Their second son, Charles Kushner, was soon born, as well. Since all of their cash was tied up in real estate, Joe and Rae had to borrow money to pay for his bris, the religious circumcision ceremony that takes place when a Jewish boy is eight days old.
Not long after, on his way home from work, Joseph saw Murray, then three years old, sitting on the stoop of their building in Brooklyn “with a little black boy,” as described in The Miracle of Life. “As he approached the children, he heard Murray teaching his ‘friend’ ”—the quotes exist in the original—“the ‘Shema Yisrael,’ ”14 the same prayer Jews had shouted in the courtyard in Novogrudok as the Nazis were hauling them away on trucks.
Climbing the stairs to their walk-up apartment, the words of the prayer in his ears—“Hear, O Israel, God is One!” Joe decided to leave Brooklyn, to move his family “to a Jewish neighborhood.” Through her Jewish immigrant network, Rae had heard about a small Orthodox Jewish community in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Because Orthodox Jews don’t travel on the sabbath, there had to be a shul—a synagogue—in walking distance. There had to be yeshivas—Jewish schools—for the children. There had to be a life, like the one in Novogrudok in the early 1930s, where Jews could observe their religion, and study, and pray, and eat, and do business together, and be safe.
The family moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, to a rental home on South Jersey Avenue. Four years later, they moved to a house Joe built, on Summit Road, a tidy brick two-story on a small lot, with Murray and Charlie in one bedroom and Linda and the new baby, Esther, in another.
Joe founded his homebuilding business at an opportune time. It benefited not only from a suburban housing boom, but from two decades of federal legislation and largesse. In June of 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had signed into law the National Housing Act. For the first time, mortgages were to be insured by the federal government. Before the NHA, banks would typically only loan half a home’s value; worse, loans were structured so buyers were typically left owing a lump sum which they were often unable to pay back, leading to foreclosures, evictions, and countless family tragedies.
The NHA created the structure of home mortgages as we know them now: long-term loans, requiring a standard 20 percent down payment. The act stabilized the housing market, stanched the flow of foreclosures, and pumped money into the economy two ways: by fueling housing construction and by giving middle-class renters a toehold onto home ownership. As described by Richard Rothstein in his book, The Color of Law, it also codified racial segregation; early FHA rules explicitly said that issuing loans for homes in racially mixed neighborhoods was a financial risk the federal government was unwilling to take.15
The GI Bill, passed in 1944, stimulated housing construction even further, providing even lower down payments and longer loan terms for millions of returning World War II veterans. But redlining by banks and explicitly racist covenants—private agreements enforced by public courts—meant that the housing construction boom in the suburbs overwhelmingly supported and attracted white buyers.16
Suburbanization got another boost, in 1956, from the Federal-Aid Highway Act, the largest public works project in American history, which came with an initial authorization of $25 billion. As with the federally backed railways of a century earlier, interstate highways modernized American transportation, allowing people and things to move rapidly, and for money to be made more efficiently. If the National Housing Act encoded racially segregated housing, the Highway Act made it easier for white families to leave cities, because it was relatively cheap to commute to urban centers, where most jobs in factories and offices were still located. This was the tailwind that helped Joe and Rae’s real estate business get off the ground: federal funds and laws undergirding housing construction, suburbanization, and segregation.
Joseph Kushner’s history as a builder in New Jersey is largely written in the land records of Union, Middlesex, and Essex Counties, a stack of mimeographed deeds, mortgages, and land transfers. To each was affixed a revenue stamp with the image of William H. Crawford, a former secretary of the treasury, assigned a corresponding dollar value. One of the earliest such records, from September 12, 1956, is a deed of sale for the lot on Summit Street. Rae Kushner’s name is spelled “Rej.” Six months later, Joe and Rej “also known as Rae Kushner,” took out a $10,000 mortgage on the lot, just eight years after they had arrived in New York, penniless.17
A year after that, the Kushner real estate business began in earnest. By early January 1958, Joseph Kushner and Harry Wilf formed Vineyard Homes Inc., to develop lots in Edison, New Jersey. The small two-story houses they built looked much like Joe and Rae’s own home: bungalow-style with a second story jutting up in the middle. That top floor, under the eaves, housed the children of growing American families.
The Wilfs had spent the Holocaust years in Siberia, traveling to American-occupied Germany after the war. Their family arrived in America virtually intact: all but one sister had survived. The Wilfs had a little bit of a running start on the Kushners.18 In this early venture, Joe Kushner was the secretary, but Harry Wilf was the vice president. More crucially, Harry guaranteed the loan, for $458,300, an amount worth over four million dollars in 2019.19
Joe worked constantly: out of his car, using pay phones for his calls. To the extent he had an “office,” it was in the small house on Summit Road, underneath the bedrooms of the two boys and the two girls. In 1957, they were all under ten. Rae did the paperwork, Rae selected the partners, Rae figured out how to set up corporations under the laws of the State of New Jersey in a way that would redound to the family’s financial advantage. In the summers, she took the four children to the beach or the mountains: to Far Rockaway, or to the Catskills, where the five of them would live in a single room. Joe would visit on weekends. Sometimes, he would even work on Shabbat.
By 1963, Joe was the president of his own company, able to guarantee his own loan, for three hundred thousand dollars. Savings and loans were the typical banks of the era, small and stable, making a profit by taking in savings accounts on which they paid a few percentage points in interest, and issuing mortgage loans for a little more: a rate of 5 or 6 percent interest. The next year, Joe Kushner bought two new lots, which were owned by two new companies, and took out another $400,000 mortgage, and another for $310,000. On these lots, Joe Kushner began building garden apartments: long, motel-style two-story apartments that offered inexpensive housing for young postwar couples, who moved to these homes in a voracious, seemingly endless stream. The companies, and complexes, had names like Scotch Plains, Cherry Pines, Martha Bell.
In this era, the mid-1960s, the Kushner family real estate business became more complex, and Joe Kushner, under Rae’s tutelage, began placing his companies into a series of complicated, interlinked trusts, the vehicle that in those days insulated people from corporate liability. It was the trusts that acquired, held, improved, leased, and mortgaged the properties to homeowners, that sold the properties, and that made the money for their beneficiaries.
By 1966, the Kushners were doing very, very well. They flew to Israel for a vacation.20 Some of Joe’s relatives had moved there after the war. Nineteen-sixties Israel had an ineffable pull for Jews. “If Israel would have existed, maybe we could have rescued some Jews, and not killed so much,” Rae said. “A million and a half children—”
The year they traveled to Israel, Rae and Joe bought a new lot at the corner of Wilder Street and Westminster Avenue in Hillside. There were unwritten codes that kept Jews confined to certain areas, but Hillside was by then a town of Jewish enclaves, a place where Jews who were coming up in the world, like the Kushners, could live. Joe finished building the house on Wilder Street in 1967, a 9,000-square-foot white brick home on a 17,000-square-foot corner grassy lot, with a large center staircase, the master bedroom downstairs, the kids’ bedrooms upstairs. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year Charles turned thirteen; his bar mitzvah year, the year, in Jewish tradition, that boys become men. Murray was in high school; Linda was already married. On Shabbat there were candles and challah, and people would gather in the living room in Hillside: family, business associates, guests.
After the move to Hillside, there were more real estate developments, more corporate configurations, more partners. Joe built generous, expansive homes for his children, in West Orange and Livingston, affluent New Jersey towns newly opening up to Jews. As the sixties turned to the seventies and then the eighties, and white flight from New York and Newark accelerated, the Kushners moved, too. Hillside was slowly becoming less white. Livingston was whiter, and conspicuously affluent.
In 1970, Joe and Rae began to act like truly wealthy people. They set up trusts for each of their children: “The Linda K. Laulicht Trust Number I,” “The Murray Kushner Trust Number I,” “The Charles Kushner Trust Number I,” and “The Esther Kushner Trust Number I.” These, unlike the previous trusts, were not a way to ward off liability. These trusts were a way to transfer wealth, untaxed, to their children and grandchildren, in a family that had risen from the ashes.
By the 1970s, the Kushner family had celebrated many simchas, or joyful occasions: two brises, two bar mitzvahs, a wedding. There were many more in their larger community, occasions to drink and eat and wear brightly colored dresses and, for the men, suits or black tie. They would celebrate among ice sculptures and large cuts of meat at the kosher banquet facility in Short Hills, New Jersey, noshing and hugging and telling one another, “Mazel Tov!”
Yet the past never left them. “There could be a party of a thousand people, all American. There comes a European, we stay on one side. And what are you going to talk? Where were you? Where you lived, how you got out,” Rae said. The conversations always led back to the concentration camps and the ghetto.
The Kushner children, Esther and Charles and Murray and Linda, absorbed these conversations. Rae’s children lived her life, as well as their own. “I don’t know if it is so healthy for our kids to have the same mind. They are more serious kids, our kids,” Rae said. “To live a little bit of our lives, with our past. . . . Our youth went away, our junior years went away, and the middle years went away. When you live a new life in a country without language, to start from the beginning, it’s not easy.” In America, the Jews from Europe put their all into every party, to make up for lost time. At the simchas, the younger generation was warned: never forget where you came from. “People should know what happened to us,” Rae said. “If we not gonna tell now, in twenty years I don’t know who’s gonna be to tell. And now we have still the strength and the power to do this, and to warn the rest of the world to be careful: who is coming up on top of your government?”21