But 98 years ago in New York, Jewish housewife Sadie Weiss made a then-significant investment in her family's future. In September 1923, she bought five shares of stock in a bank created to fund the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Twenty-five years later, Sadie's dream was achieved when the state of Israel was created in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But by then, Sadie was gone and the story of her shares died with her.
Weiss discovered this hidden piece of family history on Jan. 23, when he got an email from a stranger in Canada who had purchased Sadie's long-lost shares in a memorabilia auction and wanted to return them to the family. Toronto attorney David Matlow, an avid collector of Zionist artifacts, spent three weeks searching online articles, obituaries, Facebook and a Weiss family memoir for Sadie's descendants before finding Weiss on the LinkedIn website. The certificate arrived in the mail on Friday.
"It was a big surprise," Weiss said of learning about Sadie's shares. "I didn't know anything about her interest in this and I don't think any of my cousins did, either. It was totally out of the blue."
It's still possible to redeem Sadie's shares — together they're worth about $250 — but Weiss said he plans to keep the certificate as a family keepsake. Although Sadie and her descendants never made it to Israel, her great-granddaughter — Marty's daughter Andrea Weiss — became a rabbi, a vocation that wasn't possible for women in Sadie's lifetime.
Matlow purchased Sadie's shares as part of a bundle of 55 share certificates he bought at auction in December. They were meant for his Herzl Collection, a 5,000-piece collection of memorabilia on pioneering Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, billed as the world's largest private collection of its kind. Born in Hungary in 1860, Herzl was a journalist and opinion leader who advocated for the creation a Jewish homeland in the Palestine region.
Concerned about rising antisemitism in Europe in the late 19th century, Herzl believed statehood was the only way to safely preserve the Jewish people and their cultural traditions. Between 1896 and his death at age 44 in Vienna eight years later, Herzl wrote a book on creating a Jewish state, created a Zionist newspaper, launched a Zionist Congress of international Jewish leaders and established the Jewish Colonial Trust, which sold shares to fund the effort. Herzl became such an enduring popular figure among Jews worldwide, his likeness was re-created on canvases, busts, coins, street signs, glassware, cutlery, ashtrays, salt and pepper shakers and more.
"He is the visionary, the founding father of the state of Israel who had this idea for a Jewish homeland," Matlow said. "It's always been fascinating to me because it's unique in world history that a people have returned to their ancestral homeland to reclaim a sovereign state. On May 13, 1948, there wasn't a state of Israel and on May 14, 1948, there was."
Matlow, 60, said Herzl has always been a beloved figure in his family. His Canadian grandparents moved to Israel in 1955 and his now 93-year-old father flew there in 1948 to fight for the Israeli army in the Arab-Israel War. A private equity and securities lawyer, Matlow has produced a film documentary on Herzl, has visited Israel more than 50 times and is past chair of the Jewish Foundation of Greater Toronto. An admittedly obsessive collector of all things since childhood (coins, stamps, Toronto Maple Leaps hockey jerseys), he started his Herzl collection in 1991, when he inherited the Herzl portrait that had hung in his grandparents' home.
Over the years, Matlow has purchased many Jewish Colonial Trust shares for his collection. Most of them were issued in Europe between 1899 and 1901, and always to men. So Matlow was intrigued when he received Sadie's shares in December. It was extremely rare to see shares purchased by a woman, and Matlow recognized the city where she had bought them, Monticello, N.Y. Years ago, Matlow sent his daughter to summer camp in Monticello, a small town in Catskills Mountains which was famous in the mid-20th century for its Jewish vacation resorts.
Rather than keep Sadie's shares, Matlow decided to find her family and pass the shares along so he could learn more about Sadie and her dream.
"Something about that made me want to try to understand," Matlow said. "Anyone who bought a share, it's reflective of their commitment to the Zionist dream. This lady was trying to build her life and look after her children, and everything she did with her family there was partial to the idea of a Jewish homeland."
According to an autobiography written by Marty Weiss's father, Sam, Sadie Fleischer emigrated from what is now Poland in the early 1900s. She married Aaron Weiss, a Brooklyn tailor who made men's coats. There they had five children: four daughters and one son named Sam. When the flu pandemic struck New York City in 1918, the Weisses quickly left the city to avoid contagion and settled in rural Monticello. Five years later, Sadie purchased her shares in the Jewish Colonial Trust.
Matlow estimates that in 1923, one share in the Jewish Colonial Trust cost about $5, which would be the equivalent of about $76 today. Sadie's $25 investment in five shares would have been a major outlay for the time, when a loaf of bread was 7 cents and gasoline was 33 cents a gallon.
"Sadie and her husband were very poor," said Matlow. "They lived in back of an apartment until they could buy a house. So to purchase five shares in that circumstance in 1923 was significant."
In 1932, Sadie and Aaron's 18-year-old son, Sam Weiss, traveled to Brooklyn for a party and met his future wife, Blanche. They married two years later, and the first of their three children, Marty, was born in Brooklyn in 1936. That same year, Sam and Blanche Weiss moved their family west to California for a few years before permanently settling in San Diego in 1940, where Sam worked at the company that became General Dynamics. After 81 years of marriage, Blanche died in 2014 and 105-year-old Sam followed her in 2019.
Because Marty Weiss grew up in California, far away from his grandparents, he never met or spoke with Sadie, who died when he was in grade school. His grandfather Aaron, who came to stay with the family in San Diego after she died, never spoke about any shares she owned or her interest in creating or immigrating to a Jewish homeland. It wasn't until Matlow emailed him last month that he learned about the Jewish Colonial Trust.
Now that he has the certificate, Weiss said he and his wife, Ruth, plan to make copies of the document for family members, and he will have it framed. Sadie's story has become an exciting topic of conversation among the extended Weiss family.
"Now that I know about the Colonial Trust and Herzl, I'm going to pursue learning more about it," Weiss said. "It has put me in contact with some of my cousins who I haven't contacted in a long time. It's been great."