December 6, 1977

Mollie Novin

Mollie Novin was born in Chicago to parents who had emigrated from Warsaw. She was one of eleven children, among the youngest along with a brother who was fourteen months apart from her. Her father, a businessman who had once traded in imports and exports such as furs between Europe and the United States, established a jewelry business in Chicago and represented four generations of jewelers in the family. Suffering from asthma and seeking a better climate, he sought a new home and, finding Dallas already a sizable and modern town compared to smaller Texas cities, moved the family there in 1899 when Mollie was about eight or nine years old.

In Dallas the family lived in what was called East Dallas, in a cottage on Olive Street near the father's jewelry store on Elm and Pearl, so he could come home for meals. Mollie attended a public school on Jackson Street and graduated from Bryan High School. As the family prospered they moved to South Dallas on Bellevue Street, where their neighbors included the Rothschilds and Rabbi Frum. Mollie married in 1912 in a ceremony performed by Mr. Frum, who served the community as rabbi, shochet, and mohel. Her husband, from Chicago, had come to Dallas as a young man, worked for her father, and then entered the jewelry and loan business himself. The couple lived on Harwood, Hickory, and Park Row before later homes on Purdue and finally an apartment.

A lifelong member of Sherith Israel, Mollie recalled its early Orthodox services where men and women sat separately, first on Commerce Street, then Jackson Street, and later at synagogues on Park and Eakin and on Grand Avenue. She kept a kosher, observant home for many years and remembered the sharp divide between Orthodox and Reform Jews in her youth, recalling being treated coldly at the Reform Sunday school and later resigning from the Council of Jewish Women. She belonged to Hadassah, B'nai B'rith, and the Sherith Israel Sisterhood, and enjoyed the Jonathan Club. She raised children who pursued college and careers, and she recounted an encounter in which her husband intervened with the Ku Klux Klan to protect Jewish merchants in East Dallas.

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