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Rob Forstenzer, Jewish Montanan Rob Forstenzer grew up in Scarsdale, NY but now lives in Livingston, MT. He was interviewed by Clay Scott for our Living Stories of Jewish Montana. He shared stories about his family's personal connection to the Holocaust as well as the photos you see below. Below are three clips from Rob's extensive interview. Click on the button to hear parts of that interview. The B&W photo is of the store owned by Forstenzer's paternal grandfather in Brauns

1842-1904 Henry Klein, Herman Gans, Louis Gans, and Herman Richter of Helena, Montana. Photo Credit: Montana History Portal. Louis Gans, co-founder of the Montana firm, Gans & Klein, manufacturers and purveyors of men’s clothing and furnishing goods, was born in 1840 in Neustadtl, Bohemia (today, Straz, Czech Republic). According to the Encyclopedia of Bohemian and Czech-American Biography , Louis was “educated in Prague, where he was [a] student of theology.” In 1857, he arr

b. unknown-d. 1911 Butte, MT Image: Stereograph, 1906-1911 by N.A. Forsyth, looking east on East Park in Uptown Butte showing some of the Brinig storefronts at the right behind the wagon with the umbrella. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society & Archives An earlier MJP post described the literary career of one-time Butte resident, Myron Brinig, “the first American Jewish novelist to write in any significant way about the gay experience.” Highly regarded for their incisiv

1857-1943 Butte, MT Brinig's tombstone, picture from obituary When the prolific Butte author and suffragist Helen Fitzgerald Sanders profiled the deceased retailer Moses Brinig in her “History of Montana,” she also devoted several sentences extolling his widow Rebecca’s business acumen, “wifely ministrations... [and being] a patient and noble mother...” to her seven sons and one daughter. But Rebecca Labovitz Brinig’s life, as detailed in an unpublished memoir and interviews