Of the 2,225 people aboard the Titanic on its maiden voyage, 1,512 perished in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic when the ship went down.
Charles Kennell was among the nearly 700 crew members to die that night. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, the 30-year-old listed his address as 6 Park View, Southampton, the port city in southeast England from which the Titanic would embark.
Kennell had already served on the Titanics sister ship, the Olympic, which took its maiden voyage in 1911. Kennell was the ships Hebrew cook. The Titanic had kosher food service.
Midway through the great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration to Americawhich brought two million Jews to the United States between 1881 and 1924major passenger lines crossing the Atlantic began instituting kosher food service for its Jewish passengers, mainly immigrants in third-class steerage.
But historians and authors who explore and preserve the body of knowledge about the Titanic know little else about kosher food and Jewish life aboard the ill-fated liner.
Its been a very tough subject to get much on, said Charles Haas, president of the Titanic International Society. My research has generated more questions than answers. Its been frustrating because I havent been able to find anybody who knows for sure almost anything.
Haas and John Eaton are authors of five books on the Titanic.
Over the years, theyve cultivated friendships with survivors and their descendants, conducted Titanic research in England and Northern Ireland, and have plunged to the ocean floor to see the Titanics wreckage.
The two will be among the guest lecturers on the Titanic Memorial Cruise from Southampton to New York, April 8-19 aboard the Balmoral Cruise ship.
The earliest reference Haas has found about kosher service on an ocean liner dates to 1904.
There was an article in the Trenton Times in June 1904 that said American Line officials arranged another innovation in the form of special kosher cooks for the Jews. The English will have their meals served separately and their cabins will also be separate from those of the Jews. And that was on the S.S. Philadelphia.
One of the big names in shipbuilding at that time, Haas said, was Albert Ballin, chairman of the Hamburg-American Line. In 1905, Ballin, who was Jewish, decided to place separate kosher facilities on all of his steamships between New York and Bremen.
According to a contemporary news article about the Hamburg-American line, the addition of kosher service was in accordance with a request from a number of representative Jewish organizations.
Valery Bazarov, director of family history and location services for HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, also confirmed the first decade of the 20th century as the beginning of kosher food service on liners crossing the Atlantic. He added that HIAS, which continues to help resettle Jewish refugees to America, established a kosher kitchen at Ellis Island in 1911.
The White Star Line, although we tend to think of them as the steamship line of luxury, they really catered to the third class, because they made more per head on the third class tickets than they did on a first-class, Haas said. And if they could get word-of-mouth advertising where immigrants reached America and wrote home and said how wonderfully they were treated on the White Star Lines ships, that was the best kind of advertising they could hope for.
On the Olympic and the Titanic, Haas said, the largest cabins in third class accommodated six. In some cases, there were cabins for four and even two.
The third class, in most cases, were accustomed to waiting on others, Haas said. And here for the first time they had stewards serving them. And theres even a notice on the bottom of the menu saying, any complaints regarding the lack of civility from a steward should be reported to the chief steward immediately.
As in all steerage arrangements of the time, Titanics third-class passengers were segregated by gender. The men were in the bow of the ship, unmarried ladies in the stern, and families were also in the stern.
Haas, who is not Jewish, has attempted to track down details of Titanics kosher facilities while conducting research in Belfast, where the Titanic was built, at Harland and Wolff shipyard. Hes never seen a kosher-only menu card specific to the Titanic.
To the best of my knowledge, theres not specific reference to kosher food on any of the menus that have survived, Haas said. I dont know whether that would have been done by word of mouth or it might possibly have been at the time passengers booked their tickets.
He and Eaton have seen a generic 1911 White Star third-class menu that indicates the availability of kosher meat. The menu was part of an advertisement for the Olympic.
In terms of artifacts that have been retrieved from the ocean floor, he said, weve not seen any kosher service dinnerware. Karen Kamuda, Vice President of Titanic Historical Society Inc. said that on the Titanic, all kosher china, stoneware and silver-plate or other serving utensils were marked in Hebrew and English either meat or milk. The same standards, she indicated, applied for all classes, and even first class silver-plate was marked milk or meat. Kamuda added that rabbis regularly inspected the liners catering departments in both Southampton and New York.
There are fundamental questions of when and who decided to hire a Hebrew cook for the Titanics kitchen. Who and when were (which) Jewish authorities called in for consultation? For the actual implementation of the facility.
But Eaton did remember that about 20-25 years ago, likely at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in Holywood, Northern Ireland, he caught a brief glimpse of a Titanic deck plan that included a space indicated by an arrow for kosher service.
It was a small space as I recall, he said, scarcely large enough for a single sink or workspace. It was not the size of a full installation of ranges and sinks, by any means.
Eaton made a return visit to the Ulster Museum last spring and asked if staff could find that deck plan again. They were unable to locate it.
Haas said that before the Olympic, was scrapped in 1935, all the contents of the ship were sold via auction. The auction included Olympics kosher kitchen and supplies, including a cooking range with rack and hood, stoking irons, dressers, cupboard, sink, tilings and light fittings.
The 1909 US Immigration Commission report on steerage conditions may give an indication of the role of Charles Kennell, Titanics Hebrew cook.
An immigration agent who reported on new steerage conditions wrote: The Hebrew steerage passengers were looked after by a Hebrew who is employed by the company as a cook, and is at the same time appointed by the rabbi as guardian of such passengers. This particular man told me that he is a pioneer in this work. He was the first to receive such an appointment. It is his duty to see that all the Jewish passengers are assigned to sleeping quarters that are as comfortable and as good as any; to see that kosher food is provided and to prepare it. He has done duty on most of the ships and on each he has instituted this system of caring for the Hebrews and then has left it to be looked after by some successor.
Yet all of these upgraded accommodations for steerage passengers in general and Jewish immigrants in particular couldnt substitute for the absence of common-sense safety measures at every level on the Titanic.
Speeding through a North Atlantic ice field, its crew ignoring warnings from nearby ships, lifeboats for only half of those on board, poor communications among crew members, and an off-duty wireless operator on the nearest ship, the Titanic struck an iceberg on April 14 and sank.
Of the 710 third-class passengers on board, only 174 escaped death.
The survivors arrived at New Yorks Pier 54 at 9:30 pm on April 18.
The following day, The New York Times reported that A score of the Titanics steerage were taken to the Hebrew Sheltering Home and Immigrant Aid Society for the night.
If the body of Charles Kennell, was ever retrieved, his remains were never identified.
