Meet Max and Hugo Fink, brothers who ran a junk store (oddly enough called the Los Angeles Junk Co.) in Santa Ana in the late 1910s. Hugo, who was older, arrived first, in 1904, and Max followed six years later. They were from the town of Sepekov in what is now the Czech Republic; at the time it was part of Austria and had a tiny Jewish population. They settled in Los Angeles, where they drove cabs and met their wives; Hugo marrying Lena Berg in 1909 and Max marrying Rosa Hirshfield in 1915. The two growing families moved to Santa Ana in 1916 to try their luck in Orange County, where the taxi business was less competitive. When a LA friend of theirs, Harry Cohen, offered them the opportunity to run his junk store, they accepted, with Max assuming most of the responsibility while Hugo still drove cabs. Unfortunately the business didn’t even last a year; started in May of 1918, it was gone by October, and the two families had moved back to LA by 1920. But what I find most interesting is that Lena and Rosa quickly became enmeshed in the Jewish social scene in Santa Ana, hosting a number of events and being mentioned on a regular basis in the Santa Ana Register. Rosa was a founding member of the local Daughters of Israel chapter (an early version of Jewish Family Service), and both she and Lena hosted and/or attended farewell parties, weddings, card games, and many other social activities during their short stay in Orange County.
Dalia Taft, Director of the Orange County Jewish Historical Society, highlights images from the archives every month. For more information, please visit https://www.jccoc.org/Pages/Oc-Jewish-Historical-Society. You can also contact Dalia at Daliat@jccoc.org or at (949) 435-3400, Ext. 360. The Orange County Jewish Historical Society is a program of the Merage Jewish Community Center and is funded by the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.