The Jeffrey Epstein That His Parents Were Unaware Of

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                     

How could such a thing happen to the Epsteins?  Having a son bringing tsuris to his family in such a manner is something we might all want to know about in order to avoid it happening to others. This would be one mother who certainly couldn't brag about her son, the Sex offender!  She must have planned saying, my son the doctor of math!  

 Jeff was only a few days older than my son born in Oregon. 

I checked my DNA with FTDNA and on the 1st page of 25, I matched 25 Epsteins; all 4th to remote cousins!!!  Well, Poland does border Lithuania, and my paternal grandmother was from Lithuania/Poland.   

From what I gather, this Brooklyn-born boy  was a very bright but overweight boy, doing best in math and music, which seem go go together.  He was even tutoring friends, probably in math.  He had even skipped two grades in school. His mother worked as a school aide, so was not home full time like my mother was.  I also wasn't home for my children when they came home from school being I was a teacher.  Luckily, I was home early enough.   Something happened that kept him from getting a math degree.  Though his parents were 1st generation Americans,  uneducated simple people, he had all the genes of being very bright in my estimation as a retired teacher.  

Here is the Wikipedia report on Epstein:  

Jeffrey Edward Epstein was born on January 20, 1953, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. His parents Pauline "Paula" Stolofsky (1918–2004) and Seymour George Epstein (1916–1991) were Jewish and had married in 1952 shortly before his birth. Pauline worked as a school aide and was a homemaker. "Paula was a wonderful mother and homemaker, despite the fact that she had a full-time job", according to a former childhood friend of Epstein's. Seymour worked for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation as a groundskeeper and gardener. 

Seymour George Epstein (1916-1991)

WikiTree

https://www.wikitree.com › wiki › Epstein-472

Aug 10, 2019 — He was born on 04 Dec 1916 in New York, USA and he was the son of Bessie (Tesher=Fisher, 1890-1960)

 and Julius Epstein (1882-1944) who were both born in Russia.

So Jeffrey was the grandson, or 2nd generation of Jewish immigrants from Russia, which could have meant either Russia

 or anywhere in the Pale of Settlement.  Ah, Julius was born in Poland; Bialystock, Miasto Bialystok, Podlaskie, Poland !!

Julius Epstein

Birth

15 Sep 1882

Białystok, Miasto Białystok, Podlaskie, Poland

Jeffrey was the older of two siblings; he and his brother Mark grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Sea Gate, a private gated community in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Epstein was referred to as "Bear" by his parents while Mark was known as "Puggie". Neighbors described the Epstein family as being, "so gentle, the most gentle people."                               

     Typical family group picture of Epstein family. Julius may have been the heavier fellow on the right.  

Epstein attended local public schools, first attending Public School 188, and then Mark Twain Junior High School nearby and usually earned money by tutoring classmates. Acquaintances considered Epstein "sweet and generous", although "quiet and nerdy", and nicknamed him "Eppy". "He was just an average boy, very smart in math, slightly overweight, freckles, always smiling", a female friend later said.

In 1967, Epstein attended the National Music Camp at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. He began playing the piano when he was five, and was regarded as a talented musician by friends. He graduated in 1969 from Lafayette High School at age 16, having skipped two grades. Later that year, he attended advanced math classes at Cooper Union until he changed colleges in 1971. From September 1971, he attended the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University studying mathematical physiology, but left without receiving a degree in June 1974.

Jeffrey Edward Epstein January 20, 1953 – August 10, 2019) was an American financier and child sex offender. 

Born and raised in New York City, Epstein began his professional career as a teacher at the Dalton School, despite lacking a college degree. (New York must have sure been hurting for teachers if this is the case--without a college degree?  How about the teaching certificate, too?

After his dismissal from the school in 1976, he entered the banking and finance sector, working at Bear Stearns in various roles before starting his own firm. (Why did he lose his school job-which caused him to do a 180 and go into banking?)

Epstein allegedly showed inappropriate behavior toward underage female students at the time, paying them constant attention, and even showing up at a party where young people were drinking, according to a former student. Other former students also often saw him flirting with female students. Eventually, Epstein became acquainted with Alan Greenberg, the chief executive officer of Bear Stearns, whose son and daughter were attending the school. Greenberg's daughter, Lynne Koeppel, pointed to a parent-teacher conference where Epstein influenced another Dalton parent into advocating for him to Greenberg.  In June 1976, after Epstein was dismissed from Dalton for "poor performance",Greenberg offered him a job at Bear Stearns.

Epstein cultivated an elite social circle and procured many women and children whom he and his associates sexually abused. (According to later accusations)

On June 30, 2008, after Epstein pleaded guilty to a state charge of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. While most convicted sex offenders in Florida are sent to state prison, Epstein was instead housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Stockade and, according to the sheriff's office, was, after 3+1⁄2 months, allowed to leave the jail on "work release" for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week.

On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on sex trafficking charges. He was jailed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.

In February 2025, Trump Administration Attorney General Pam Bondi stated that Jeffrey Epstein's client list was "sitting on my desk" for review, and in June, Elon Musk alleged that President Trump himself was in the Epstein files. In July, however, the DOJ and the FBI announced that there was no client list, no evidence that Epstein had blackmailed anyone, that Epstein had killed himself, and released footage showing the outside of Epstein's cell undisturbed—though that footage was not able to be independently verified. A minute was found missing from the footage soon after, where the clock jumps from 11:58:58 to 12:00:00. A Wired investigation found that the video had been modified despite the FBI's claim that it was raw, and that nearly three minutes have been cut out of the video.

Jeff had a huge problem.  I wonder if counselors in schools today could have brought this to the attention of a poor family with a very bright son who was going to be having problems as an adult.  

Wikipedia has amassed tons of information of Epstein.  I read just a few parts, more involved in other aspects of his life.

Update: 10/26/25: from Book: Legal Gladiator, the life of Alan Dershowitz by 

Solomon Schmidt,

p.208 and on about Epstein befriending Dershowitz and his wife;  telling how they 

had

 similarities ; that Epstein showed an aptitude for math and skipped two grades; that

in the 70's had become a math and physics teacher at a prestigious private school,

Dalton Academy...how Epstein had invited the Dershowitz couple to his home, but 

Alan never learned about his personal goings on.  

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/201027801/julius-epstein

.  

Suicide: A Biblical Problem Invoking A Law About It

Nadene Goldfoot                                               

Kamal Ravikant is the author of the bestselling books, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It and Live Your Truth

   Jewish law centers around the important value on all of life.  Therefore, it stands to reason that the act of suicide is looked upon  as a crime.  Moses was born in 1391 BCE and died in 1271 BCE, over 3,000 years ago, and suicide must have been in existence then.  The deliberate self-destruction is equal to murder, since it is murdering oneself.  So when it came to burial of a suicidal victim, the person was treated as a convicted murderer and denied normal burial and customs involved in mourning.

With the era of psychology, we have Jews leading in becoming psychologists and studying suicide and its causes.  It had been realized that most suicides have a mental unbalance and that some could not be condemned at all for their action.
                                                                           

 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a Jew born in Pribor, a town in Moravia in the Austrian Empire, later to be called the Czech Republic but lived and worked in Austria  who was the founder of psychoanalysis.  He spent most of his life in Vienna, Austria which he left and emigrated to London after the Nazi invasion in 1938.  He had a successful scientific career as a neuropathologist and clinical neurologist.  He went into hypnosis which he used in treating neuroses of people.  He invented the method of "free-association" where a patient speaks out about what is on his mind.  He was experiencing anti-Semitism as a child and later as an adult.  Perhaps this experience caused him to dislike all religion including his own, as he saw it as an irrational manifestation of the human mind which was traceable, by the aid of psychoanalysis, to early personal internal conflicts like other neuroses.  In the year he died, 1939, he was working on of the controversial study, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM, when Freud presented data based on psychoanalytical concepts, to prove that Moses was an Egyptian man-and not believing that he was in fact the brother of Aaron, a Jewish Egyptian slave.  Freud went on to discuss the nature of religion.  

Too bad they hadn't discovered DNA Freud's his day.   "Three of the ancient Egyptian mummified individuals were analysed for Y-DNA, and were observed to bear paternal lineages that are common in both the Middle East and North Africa. The researchers cautioned that the affinities of the examined ancient Egyptian specimens may not be representative of those of all ancient Egyptians since they were from a single archaeological site.  I know that King Tut's line resembled the alleles found in R Haplogroup.  The male line of Y is much harder to retrieve than the female (mt) line.  

                                                    

Josef Breuer (1842-1925 Vienna, Austria),  was a distinguished physician who made key discoveries in neurophysiology, and whose work in the 1880s with his patient Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O., developed the talking cure and (cathartic method) and laid the foundation to psychoanalysis as developed by his protégé Sigmund Freud.

Max Wertheimer was an Austro-Hungarian-born psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler.                                                     

Max Wertheimer was born in 1880 in Prague, Austria-Hungary and died in 1943 in New York, USA.         

  Biblical suicides include Samson written about in Judges 16:30 who gave his life in order to also take the Philistines with him.  He had been deceived by Delilah who betrayed the secret of his strength by telling the Philistines to cut his hair.  They also put his eyes out and forced him to walk in chains to move the prison mill.  When he became the object of mockery, that was it.  He lost it and used his strength to move the pillars that caused the building to fall, killing all there, including himself.                         

King Saul

                                                                        

Samson

                               
The first king of Israel, Saul, of the tribe of Benjamin, found in Samuel 31:4, had committed suicide.  The Philistines and Ammonites were united in a major attack on the Israelites, who had judges ruling over them, so with the threat, the people demanded a king, and Samuel, a prophet, chose Saul for the position.  With his leadership, they defeated their enemy.  Yet he was at odds with Samuel anyway for other reasons, and Samuel replaced him with David.  Saul was so jealous of David that he drove him out of the country.  This time the Philistines attacked again and Saul fell with his 3 sons in battle.  He fell on his sword (committing suicide) to avoid capture in the battle against the Philistines at Mount Gilboa, during which three of his sons were also killed.   
                                                                             

 According to Josephus, the siege of Masada by troops of the Roman Empire at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War ended in the mass suicide of 960 people, the Sicarii rebels and their families hiding there.

 In 73 CE, the garrison of Masada killed themselves rather than be taken by the Romans who were sure to be cruel and angry with the holdouts who had caused the Roman reputation to be tarnished and they killed themselves with a system without pain as much as they could.  They had certain men be the slayers until none were left.  One woman left without others seeing her with a few children, the only ones alive after the Romans entered and found all dead. 
                                                       

Soldiers singing Hatikva, Israel's national anthem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsg5QswBQ1Q

 Today, Masada is the scene of the swearing in ceremony for IDF, Israel Defense Force. Among the ruins are King Herod's Palace, which sprawls over 3 rock terraces, and a Roman-style bathhouse with mosaic floors. Masada is one of Israel's most popular tourist attractions. 
                                                                           

Clifford's Tower where suicide took place in York, England

Later, in the year 1190, the 150 Jews of York, England killed themselves to avoid falling into Christian hands.  It happened on the Sabbath before Passover on March 16, 1190 when the York Jews, headed by Rabbi Yom-Tov of Joigny, France, were besieged in the Castle Keep by a bloodthirsty mob and it ended with them killing one another rather than surrender to the mob. "Seeing no way out to safety most of the Jews chose to commit suicide in the keep. The alternatives were to renounce their faith and surrender to forced baptism or death at the hands of the mob.. "  They really were left with no choice.  
                                                                    

Keeps were large towers in castles that were fortified residences, used as a refuge of last resort should the rest of the castle fall to an adversary. The first keeps were made of timber and formed a key part of the Motte-and-Bailey castles that emerged in Normandy and Anjou during the 10th century; the design spread to England as a result of the Norman invasion of 1066,

After killing their wives and children they set fire to the wooden keep and killed themselves.."   Jews continued to live in York who had come in from other places till 1290 when all were expulsed.  A few Jews do live there today.                                 

                                                                               
There were Jews who committed suicide in order to avoid the horrible killing fields and gassing of masses of Jews held in concentration camps by the Nazis.  

When suicide is the action from mental disturbances, the person is buried in a normal way, but when it's not mentally caused, the person was buried in a plot at the side of the cemetery.  It's hard to imagine what kind of cause that would be.  Any of the above would have caused great mental anguish to cause the taking of one's own life. 
                                                       

 Thank goodness we have police trained in talking down people about to do something drastic like jumping off a high bridge or building.  They do their very best in preventing the taking of a life from any cause, even from oneself.  

Suicide rates by WHO region in 2015 (per 100 000 people)^[14][15]

WHO region	Crude rateu	Age-standardized rate	Crude male rateu	Crude female rateu	Male–Female ratiou
Southeast Asia	13.3	13.3	14.9	11.7	1.27
Africa	7.4	12.8	9.9	4.9	2.01
Europe[note 3]	15.7	11.9	25.2	6.8	3.73
Western Pacific	10.2	9.1	10.9	9.5	1.15
Americas	9.9	9.1	15.2	4.6	3.27
Eastern Mediterranean	3.9	4.3	5.0	2.7	1.84
Global	10.7	10.7	13.6	7.8	1.74

Reference:The Voices of Masada by David Kossoff
The Antagonists by Ernest K. Gann-Jew vs Roman in "one of the most heroic stories ever created...surely Gann's best best book quote from Irving Stone.
  The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2015/08/why-jewish-interest-in-psychology.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_psychologists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_history_of_Egypt
Jewishgen.org--Pribor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Breuer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Wertheimer
http://www.historyofyork.org.uk/themes/norman/the-1190-massacre
http://medievalcastles.stormthecastle.com/inside-a-medieval-castle-keep.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/22/health/ancient-egypt-mummy-dna-genome-heritage/index.html