Actress Shelley Winters was born in 1920 to Rose Winter and Jonas Schrift, who immigrated to America from Austria in 1907 on the ship Pennsylvania. His entry paperwork gave his occupation as âSchlacter,â which is an Ashkenazi Jewish occupation name for slaughtering animals, but he learned to be a fabric cutter in St. Louis, Mo. Their older daughter, Blanche, was born in 1916.
In the late 1920s they moved to 90-38 170 St. in Jamaica and Schrift opened a haberdasher clothing store at 171-03 Jamaica Ave. A month after the stock market crash on Oct. 29, 1929, he took out $10,000 insurance on his business, which contained a value of $1,500 in merchandise, before burning the store down. He was sent to Sing-Sing in Ossining, NY, on March 20, 1931.