"Not least of America's arresting amenities for Rashe Gitte was the telephone. She had found this instrument highly useful in operating her grocery store. Salesmen's calls might be a month or more apart, but it was often necessary to obtain intermediate deliveries. She soon learned how much help it could be in fulfilling the mitzvah of assisting the poor and ailing. The rebbetzin also had a telephone, so that now it was a simple matter to phone Friday morning to learn what invalid was most deserving of a Sabbath afternoon visit. Rashe Gitte opened her grocery at five in the morning to accommodate the wives of factory workers and stayed open till late in the evening. But on the Sabbath, while Reb Yoshe took his afternoon nap before the afternoon Torah discussion at the synagogue, Rashe Gitte took her youngest boy ((Phillip Hochstein) and called on some invalid, preferring an old lady deaf and dumb from a stroke, who might therefore be avoided by other mitzvah-performing visitors. Rashe Gitte preferred to keep her mitzvahs very private, concentrating on avoidance of hurt feelings of others. Thus, if out on the street and seeing a customer who had stopped buying from her because of an excessive debt, Rashe Gitte would quickly run to the other side of the street or even turn backward in order to avoid embarrassing the poor delinquent. The most appreciated use of the phone was during the Days of Awe preceding Yom Kippur. It was so much easier calling on the phone in Bayonne to ask forgiveness for all the unconscious offenses of the year than slogging through mud or early snow in Radishkowitz to call on all the townspeople."

Vaderland

Built by John Brown & Company, Clydebank, Scotland, 1900. 11,899 gross tons; 580 (bp) feet long; 60 feet wide. Steam quadruple expansion engines, twin screw.  Service speed 15 knots.  1,162 passengers (342 first class, 194 second class, 626 third class).

Built for Red Star Line, British flag, in 1900 and named Vaderland. Antwerp-New York service. Chartered by International Navigation Company, British flag, in 1915 and renamed Southland. Troopship service. Torpedoed in the Aegean Sea on 9/2/1915, but salvaged and repaired. Torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine off the Irish coast on June 4, 1917.