Ben Dahlman and Migdal

Beachfront Property

In the old days, scams didn’t come by email.  Someone, probably at a bar or maybe a church social, came up and offered “a deal you couldn’t refuse”.  It might involve land in Florida, supposedly beachfront property, which turned out to be in an alligator infested swamp.  Or, the classic scam of World War II days: “…let me sell you a bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge”.  And, just as folks today look for cash in the Nigerian bank email, or fake credit card scams, there was always someone who “bit”.  After all, as circus entrepreneur PT Barnum supposedly said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”. 

So when I received a message from an “Israeli lawyer” in February of 2014, I was on guard.  He vaguely referenced some land in Israel purchased by our Grandfather back in the 1920’s.  I ignored him, even when he attempted to directly call me.  But after several messages which included details about our family, I finally called him back.

The Lawyer

He was trying to reach my father, Don Dahlman, to discuss this land deal.  At the time Dad was still alive, but unfortunately dementia had taken most of his memory.  As Dad’s legal power of attorney, I took it on myself to talk to him.  His name was Gil Cirkin.

He explained that in the 1920’s there was a worldwide “subscription” for Jews to purchase land for farming and development in what was then British controlled Palestine.  Salesmen went throughout the United States trying to convince Jews to purchase plots, either for future settlement, investment, or just to aid in Zionist relocation into the Holy Land.  

One of those areas was near the village of Migdal, located on the Sea of Galilee.  And Gil Cirkin believed that Ben Dahlman bought a plot in that development in 1924. 

Migdal

Cirkin’s call set me off on a flurry of research:  about him, Migdal, and about his claim  “we” Dahlman’s owned property.  I discovered the Cirkin himself was a real lawyer with a record of dealing with aged property deeds that predated the founding of Israel.  I also discovered that Migdal itself existed, first as a Jewish farm community in the early 1900’s, then as a residential development in the 1920’s.  Today, Migdal really is “beachfront property”; high priced condos with a view of the Sea of Galilee. 

Cirkin sent us his “evidence” that Ben Dahlman owned this property.  In a 1930’s Migdal “deed book”, Ben Doll (or it could be Dall) of 711 Glenwood Avenue in Cincinnati, is listed as an owner.  And, who lived at 711 Glenwood Avenue in the early 1930’s?  Our Grandfather and Grandmother, Ben and Gertrude Dahlman, with their two children, Adele and Donald.

My sisters Terry and Pat and our first cousins Dick and Judy, the generation after Adele and Don, had some discussions.  I was the youngest, and didn’t know my grandparents very well.  And the others didn’t believe our grandparents would ever spend the money to “gamble” on land in the Holy Land.  The Ben and Gertrude Dahlman they knew, survivors of the Great Depression, were always incredibly tight with their cash.

But all that really didn’t matter.  Gil Cirkin disappeared, “ghosted us”; and the whole issue disappeared as well.

Gil Returns

On June 26^th of 2022, I received a “Facebook Messenger” from Gil Cirkin, describing the “situation” again, as if we had never communicated before.  I returned his lengthy missive with a terse: 

“Gil – we discussed all of this six years ago – and you never got back to me.  Unless you are serious about this, please do not contact me again.”

Four missed calls and two more messages including an offer to come to Columbus, and I finally talked to him. After our conversation, I decided to “call his bluff”.  We arranged a face-to-face meeting at a hotel near the Ohio State University campus on July 9^th.  

I was surprised.  Gil actually showed, and we met in the lobby of the Marriott for over an hour and a half.  My first question was why did he “ghost” us for six long years?  He explained that in 2014 he was acting as an attorney for another Cincinnati family that tried to claim the “Ben Doll” Migdal plot, but that the Israeli authorities denied the claim because that Ben Doll (a noted 1920’s Zionist in Cincinnati) never lived at 711 Glenwood Avenue.  That led Cirkin to search deeper, and find Ben Dahlman at the correct address.  But when we started communicating in 2014, Cirkin was still representing the Doll’s (the heirs to Zionist Ben) and was in conflict of interest.  

They dropped their claim in 2015, and Cirkin didn’t get back to this Migdal plot until after the Covid pandemic pause.  So here he was.

Finder of Lost Deeds

He then went through the claims process for “lost” deeds in Israel.  This is an important issue in Israeli law, as much of pre-Israel land was subscribed as this Migdal land was.  Many of the European owners and their families were lost in the Holocaust, and a lot of the records were gone as well.  And many of the American records ended up being family relics, proof to some of being “suckers”, and tossed away.  Israeli law requires a full search to try to clear the deeds, before declaring them void and taking the property for the state.

And this particular Migdal property was important, with a possible sale value approaching a million US dollars.  For over twenty years, Cirkin made his living sorting these historic deed issues out,  and taking thirty percent of the net profit of the sale of the land once the Israeli authorities accepted the legitimacy of the deeds.

He tracked down the heirs to the owners of those lost deeds, then proved to the Israeli government that they were indeed the correct ones.  In doing so, he relieved the Israeli government of responsibility. In addition, by clearing the deeds it opened the property for further development.  Developers didn’t want to build on a piece of land when they couldn’t be certain who actually owned it.  Cirkin cleared up the issue.  And he got paid for it.

We talked through the process, and his guarantee that there would be no additional costs to the “heirs” (myself, my sisters and first cousins) outside of his share of the net profit.  He also explained the finances if the deal went through:  the Israeli government would probably get 50% of the sale in tax and fees, Cirkin would take 30% of what was left, leaving 70% of the net profit to be divided among the heirs.  If it was a million dollar sale, each “heir” might get $70,000.  That’s “money”, but certainly  not as much as selling the Brooklyn Bridge. No one would become a millionaire on this deal.

Ben and Gertie

After the meeting, I talked with Terry, Pat, Dick and Judy; and ran into a problem.  The Ben and Gertie Dahlman they knew would never have spent $200 ($3500 in 2022 dollars) on a shaky land deed in Israel, as least they thought.  So regardless of the “deed book” listing of Ben Dall (or Doll) at the right address, they didn’t buy it.

And that led me to try to find out more about what kind of couple Ben and Gertrude Dahlman were. Not in the 1950’s when I knew them in their apartment in Silverton with the plastic covered couches and TV dinners. But what were they like in the Roaring Twenties; before the Great Depression seared their lives with struggle.

Ben Dahlman was born in 1880, fifteen years after the Civil War and four years after Custer died at the Little Big Horn.   He was the sixth child of Isaac and Clara (Dreyfoos) Dahlman (mis-spelled as Dallman in the 1880 census), both immigrants from the French province of Alsace along the German border.  Isaac came to the United States in 1861 and Clara arrived around the same time.  They married in 1869.  Isaac made his career pioneering the dry-goods business in Cincinnati, and they had six children.  Ben, the youngest, had two older sisters, Carrie and Julia, and three older brothers, Lee, Sam, and David.

Ben’s first mention in local newspapers was in the Saturday, May 20^th, 1893 Cincinnati Tribune.  At thirteen, he was confirmed into the Jewish faith at the Plum Street Temple along with twenty-five other young teens (Cincinnati Tribune -1).  From then on, his name was in the papers for the next sixty-five years, either as the news, or in the byline.

I have no memory of my great-aunts or uncles.  I was eleven years old when Grandpa died, but I do remember the crooked little finger that stuck out horizontally from his hand.  He told me that he broke it boxing, and that it ended his career because he couldn’t fit the gloves on anymore.  For decades I thought that was a  “kid’s story”, much better than the arthritis that attacks most of us Dahlman’s.  But after researching, I found that Ben Dahlman began his sports career as a boxer.

Ben was definitely the “little brother” of the four boys.  Even when he was 17 years old, he was boxing in the “special class,” smaller than featherweight – under 100 pounds.  He barely was 5’0” tall.  But Ben Dahlman was competitive.  As a boxer he was one of the best in town, competing in the Cincinnati Gym Championships in 1898 and winning the City title in 1899 (Commercial Tribune 1898 -2),  Commercial Tribune 1899 – 3). 

And while there’s no more mentions of “special class boxer Dahlman” in the newspapers after the turn of the century, his athletic career wasn’t over.  He played baseball in the Commercial League, and (much to my delight) even ran the 50 and 100 yard dashes in a “Cincinnati Field Day”  track meet in 1904.  He also was part of the American Bowling Association, listed as a “prominent bowler” in a 1907 newspaper article (Commercial Tribune 1907 – 4).  He was still bowling on a team in 1927.

At the Post

Ben also went to work at 17, starting on February 16, 1898 the day after the battleship Maine exploded in Havana Harbor in Cuba, triggering the Spanish-American War.  He almost lost the job before he began. He showed up for his interview the day of the explosion, just as news was breaking from Havana.  The newspaper’s editor, Ed Keen, was understandably busy, and a waiting Dahlman became fascinated with the typesetting machines in the next room.  He peeked through the door to watch.  But, when the door closed, the glass window in it shattered.  Keen turned to him and yelled, “You’re fired”.   But Dahlman replied “But Mr. Keen, I haven’t yet been hired.”  Keen told him to report for duty the next day (Cincinnati Post – 5).

He started off as a copy-boy, someone who ran the written copy from the editors to the type-setters.  He made $2 a week.  That began his life-long career at the Cincinnati Post, from 1898 until he finally a retired sixty years later in 1958 (Cincinnati Post – 6).

In 1904 Ben became a working writer, hired by the Sports Editor to follow horse racing.  He also joined the Cincinnati “Pen and Pencil” Club of aspiring writers, even getting on the Board of Directors.  Ben became a horse racing expert, not just stories about horse racing, but understanding the betting odds. By 1911 Ben already was becoming “the” horse racing handicapper for the paper.  He even travelled to New York to watch the horses run, taking his father Isaac with him on the excursion (Times Star – 7).

 He didn’t just spend sixty years with “the ponies”, though he was the acknowledged expert handicapper in the Midwest.  He served as the President of the “Commercial” baseball  league, and spent several years on their governing board.  He also served as the Sports Editor for the Post, wrote a horse racing column, and covered the rest of the sports world.  He was one of the first newspaper reporters to write about two new professional sports, golf and tennis (Cincinnati Post – 8).  He even had a successful racing greyhound named after him, as well as a bowling tournament.

And when there was a crisis, Ben Dahlman chipped in to do his part at the paper.  During World War I, the “advice columnist” went to war as a nurse.  At thirty-eight, Ben was too old for military service.  So for two years, it was Ben Dahlman giving advice to the lovelorn in the Cincinnati Post. And in the Great Flood of 1937, when all of the reporters were out covering the damage, he stayed at the office, editing copy and putting the paper together.  Since he couldn’t get home for days, his wife Gertie brought him dinner and clean shirts.

The Millers

In 1913, Ben, thirty-two married twenty-two year old Gertrude Miller.  Gertrude was the second child of Louis and Sophie (Manneheimer) Miller.  While her father Louis was born in the US, mother Sophie was also originally from Alsace, and became part of the close knit Jewish-Alsatian community in Cincinnati.  Louis and Sophie had five children:  Esther (Essie), Louis (Lou), Gertrude (Gertie), Stella (Stel) and Leonard (Len).  (I didn’t  know my Grandmother Gertie very well, but I did know Aunt Essie and Aunt Stel.  I called them the “blue haired ladies” of my childhood.  Their “up-to-date” style was to tint their gray hair blue. It was the older Jewish ladies trend).

Judaism went through a “reformation” throughout the 19^th century.  Before that time, there was only  Orthodox Judaism.  By the end of the 19^th century, there were two “reformed” groups; “conservatives” and “reformed”, and a Jewish “fundamentalist” sect called the Hassidic.  Reformation started for Jews, like Lutherans, in Germany, but it took deep root in the United States as Reformed Judaism. 

Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise helped bring Reformed Judaism to Cincinnati, and made the town one of the main centers. By the turn of the century the Hebrew Union College was founded, a school to teach rabbis of the Reformed movement, along with several Reformed temples.  One of the oldest was Temple Bene-Israel located on Rockdale Avenue. To Cincinnatians, it was known as Rockdale, so much so, that in the late 1960’s when the temple moved out to Ridge Road in Amberly, it still retained the name,  the Rockdale Temple.  

Much of Ben and Gertrude’s social life revolved around the temple.  Gertrude was a member of the True Order of the Sisters, a temple-based service group.  They raised their two children in the temple and in the faith, Adele born in 1916, and Donald (my Dad) born in 1918.  Don even appeared in a Temple Hanukah pageant in 1926.  

The Roaring Twenties

But they also found time to travel – to New York (to visit Uncle Lou) and to Mackinac Island.  They went with Aunt Stel and her husband Leon Joseph up to Lake Michigan.  They often played cards with friends and bowled.   And then there was always time at the race tracks – in Kentucky and Ohio, where Ben worked and sometimes played the ponies he knew so well.  

Ben’s job with the Post paid well enough that they bought their own house on Herschel Avenue in 1924.  While the sale price was unlisted in the newspaper, they did sign for a $5000 mortgage (Cincinnati Commercial – 9).  In the 1930 census they declared it worth $8000 (more than $142,000 in 2022 terms).  Life was pretty good.  So good, that perhaps they might have been able to, in 1924, buy land in Palestine for $200. 

In 1924, a spokesman for the Migdal property sales, and one of the founders of the farm there, was touring the United States.  Moshe Glikin, a pioneer Zionist, crossed the US trying to raise money for the Migdal project.  He hit Jewish communities in New York, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis and Los Angeles. 

 And, while the formal Reformed Movement wasn’t particularly interested in Zionism, some of their well-known leaders were.  Rabbi Silverman, Rabbi emeritus of the Reformed New York Temple Emanu-El, spoke in favor of Zionism to the Cincinnati Men’s Club.  Other Jews, including Albert Einstein, were “investing” in Migdal.  And in Cincinnati, the local Zionists ran a campaign to raise $5000 to purchase farmland in Palestine in 1924 (Cincinnati Commercial – 10, 11).

Our Dad remembered going to Hyde Park School from their Herschel Avenue home.  He wasn’t quite the sub-feather weight his father was, but, even so, on the day he enlisted in the Army at twenty-three years old, he was 5’3” and 116 pounds. Some of the kids at Hyde Park bore grudges against “German” kids after World War I.  The fact that both of Dad’s grandparents left Alsace while it was still part of France really didn’t matter. So, as Dad described it, his father needed to teach him some boxing skills. 

The Depression

But the Great Depression soon caught up to the Dahlman’s.  By 1931 they no longer owned their Herschel Avenue home, and were renting at 711 Glenwood Avenue.  They also were taking on borders to try to help cover the rent.  As family lore tells it, Ben Dahlman’s salary was cut in half, then half again.  Gertrude was forced to go to work, one of the early pioneering women in the real estate industry.  She soon was making more than Ben – which must have been a “thing” for them, because that was always a BIG part of the story that I heard as a child.

They later moved from Glenwood to an apartment on Mitchell Avenue, the place that my Dad remembered as home.  Financial concerns didn’t prevent them from celebrating Adele’s wedding to Mayo Hersher in Atlantic City, NJ in August of 1937.  The family went, with Don accompanying his mother and aunts Essie and Stel.  There was no mention of Ben going; he may not have been able to leave work.  And they were still living on Mitchell Avenue while Dad went to Walnut Hills High School and worked his way through the University of Cincinnati – what Dad called a “street car” college because most students lived at home and came by public transportation.  

World War II came, and while Ben Dahlman at sixty-one was far too old for service, he wasn’t too old to register for the draft.  Don Dahlman wasn’t as lucky, and in  the fall of 1941 he enlisted in the Army.

After the War

Ben and Gertrude continued to work after the War.  Ben was seventy-eight years old  in 1958 when he finally left the Post.  There was a grand “Ben Dahlman Day” at River Downs, the thoroughbred horse race track near Cincinnati.  Oddly, the only newspaper in the area not represented at the celebration was the Post, but sportswriters from other papers who spent decades sitting beside him at the races were there to celebrate (and write about) his retirement.

I suspect that Ben and Gertie lost all their retirement income during the Depression and World War II, and that it took another decade to make up enough for them to live in their final apartment, the one that I remember with plastic on the couch on Greenland Place off Summit Road in Cincinnati.

Gertrude died in January of 1963.  Ben soon moved to the Jewish Nursing Home at Glen Manor, not too far away.  He lived there until 1967, a whiskey bottle beside his bed for his evening “night cap”, and a story or two always available for his youngest grandson when we came from Dayton to visit.  When Ben Dahlman died, he left an estate of almost $50,000, the equivalent of over $450,000 in 2022.

He never mentioned land in Israel, nor did anyone else in the family, including my Dad.  Perhaps they forgot about it, or saw it as a waste of money they’d prefer not to remember.  Or maybe they didn’t buy property there at all, and there is some other explanation, logical or not, for Ben Doll (Dall) of 711 Glenwood Avenue in Cincinnati on a 1934 list of deed owners of Migdal.  

Ben Dahlman thought the best horse he ever saw was the 1948 Triple Crown Winner Citation.  And you can be sure, Ben and Gertie were there to see him take the Roses at Churchill Downs.  They didn’t miss a Derby for fifty years.  I know for sure I saw Citation,  much later when our family toured his home at Calumet Farms, just down the road near Lexington, Kentucky when I was a kid.  There are some very old and crackling eight millimeter movies of that time.

Gil Cirkin is still on the case.  Most of the family “heirs” are taking the attitude that it will be adventure to see what happens.  Maybe there’s a pot at the end of this rainbow, or maybe we’re being taken for a ride.  But a big part of this is learning more about that short,  prematurely white-haired man who worked the Post sports desk from baseball’s 1898 best Honus Wagner to 1958’s  Ernie Banks.  Or more appropriately for Ben Dahlman:  from Plaudit, the Derby winner of ‘98, to Tim Tam in ‘58.

It was a great ride.

To the family – Merry Christmas!!!!  

Marty –  December 25^th, 2022

Footnotes

Note – the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune,  and the Cincinnati Times Star, are available directly from the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library.  The Cincinnati Post is also available there in a separate collection.

• Primary Documents Included
• Migdal Deed Location
• Ben Dahlman – Temple Confirmation (1)
• Ben Dahlman  – 1934 Address 
• Migdal 25^th Anniversary 
• Ben Dahlman – WW I Draft Registration
• Ben Dahlman – WW II Draft Registration
• Ben Dahlman Winner – Greyhound 
• United Jewish Cemetery Receipt
• Cincinnati Post – 1958 Ben Dahlman Retires (two pages)