Notes for Reminiscences of Jacob Greenebaum
Compiled by John H. Rubel
The Rubels came from Hochspeyer, close to Kaiserslautern. They had moved to the latter town in the early 1830s, and emigrated in 1848, arriving in Chicago in 1848, the same year that Elias and Henry Greenebaum arrived, and two years after their elder brothers, Michael and Jacob, had come (Meites, 47). Both Elias and Henry Greenebaum attended school in Kaiserslautern (Elias in 1837 [p. 11]) when the Rubel family was living there, and since there were only 32 Jewish families and 175 Jews (of which at least a dozen or so were the Rubel family) in town in 1837 (Gerlach, p. 275), the Rubels and Greenebaums, so often associated in Chicago in later years, probably knew each other several years before leaving for America.
About two inches on the map – fifteen miles or so – nearly due north of Nahbollenbach are the towns of Gemunden and Laufersweiler. My maternal great grandfather, Alexander Billstein, emigrated from the former around 1850 and my maternal grandfather, Herman Baum, from the latter a generation later in about 1875. Near the end of the century they, my grandparents, one born in Neenah, Wisconsin, the other the Laufersweiler immigrant established in Chicago, met and married.
http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/rheinphalz/rhe007.html
