He was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz on October 11, 1918, exactly one month before the end of World War I. He came into the world at the Jewish Maternity Hospital (later incorporated into Beth Israel Hospital) at 270 East Broadway, in the heart of Manhattan's Lower East Side immigrant neighborhood. At the time, the Rabinowitz family lived in a large apartment house at 51 East Ninety-seventh Street, at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue. The birth could have taken place at nearby Mt. Sinai Hospital, but Jerome's mother and father, Lena and Harry Rabinowitz, favored a Jewish hospital that provided kosher food and Yiddish-speaking doctors.
From his earliest days, Jerome was called "Jerry" by family and friends, and according to his sister, Sonia, his middle name, Wilson, reflected their parents' patriotic enthusiasm for the current President. The family name meant literally "son of a rabbi" and was never one that Jerry liked; it marked him as the son of Jewish immigrants, a stigma that he resented in his youth and which he identified with his parents, especially with his father, who retained a thick Yiddish accent and the habits of the Old World.
Harry (originally Chane) Rabinowitz was born September 11, 1888, and emigrated from his native Russia in 1904 while still a teenager, traveling first to England and then to America. His departure had required subterfuge in order to avoid serving as cannon fodder in the Russian army. Robbins' sister recalled that their father "managed to escape the draft in Russia by being declared dead...which he would have been if he had been drafted." Harry's father, Nathan Mayer Rabinowitz, made his living as a baker, a trade that he passed on to his children. His wife, Sara Luniansky Rabinowitz, had apparently died relatively young. As an elderly widower, Harry's father remained behind in the village of Rozanka, a tiny rural community in the province of Vilna near the shifting Russian-Polish border. As was common for such impoverished Jewish families, the Rabinowitz clan emigrated one at a time. The first to leave was Harry's oldest brother, Julius, who established himself in Manhattan and later arranged passage for the others-first Harry, and eventually two more brothers, Samuel and Theodore, and their sister, Ruth.
The Rabinowitz siblings were part of the great wave of Jewish immigrants who came to this country to escape the pogroms and outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence that were occurring throughout Eastern Europe. The world of the shtetl was one of privation and miseries endured. A familiar adage of the shtetl was the heartfelt lament, "If God lived here, His windows would be broken." For a poverty-stricken community increasingly under siege, religious faith served as both a solace and essential bond. But in the New World, faith was coupled with a practical ambition for material success, a dream now at least within reach for the uprooted Rabinowitz family.
From this information we can clearly see that the Robbins were brought up in a Jewish Comunity whose family stuck to the traditionals of their culture and lifestyle. Robbins was born just after the world war, meaning he was conceived in one of the most dealiest conflicts in western history. This made living circumstances almost impossible for the Rabinowitz family, because of the violence that was occuring around them, and the ultimatum of serving the Russian army or declaring yourself dead to protect the family. Robbins didn't like the fact that his family secluded themselves from other communties, as growing up he saw it as a threat, and later paid for it, as a youth. He saw how 'poverty-stricken' his family was, and maybe even thought that they were worse off than before. The Rabinowitz family were compact with each other through their faith, but in this 'New World' faith was overpowered by the need to have material success, something that still continues to happen today.
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