By Oliver B. Pollak
RICHMOND, California — Holocaust Survivors are our Greatest Generation. Their resilience and immigrant contribution to American life is formidable and compelling. The Bay Area is home to between 210,000, and 350,000 Jews. During 2018, the biweekly J of Northern California published 135 obituaries, 72 men and 63 women, ages 30 to 103. Twenty-seven, 20 per cent of the obituaries, were Survivors between 98 and 82. Their stories bear retelling.
The decedent’s family, friends, and Sinai Memorial Chapel submit obituaries to the J. These obituaries are a fraction of the Jews who died in 2018. The following stories draw from the published J obituaries.
Native-born Californians were joined by Jews from at least 18 states attracted to the Bay Area by UC Berkeley, military service, business opportunities, marriage, and a favorable LGBTQ climate. Jews also came from over 11 countries including Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Greece, Poland, and Russia, where they suffered from Nazi persecution, Kristallnacht, the Holocaust, and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. San Francisco became their new home.
Gerardo Joffe, was born in Berlin in 1920 as Gerhard. After Kristallnacht he escaped to Bolivia and changed his name. He came to America in 1946.
Moses “Misha” Grossman, born in Kiev in 1921, fled the Soviet Union with his parents to Harbin, China. In 1941 he immigrated to the United States and attended UC Berkeley and UCSF Medical School. He delighted in telling his children and grandchildren about his early days in China
Neal Mitchell was born in 1921 in the Polish town of Tomaszow Mazowiecki. In 1939, at the age of 18, he escaped to Russia with his younger brother. After the war he made his way to San Francisco.
An obit opens, “The amazing life of Herman Shine has come to an end.” Born 1922 in Berlin he was arrested in 1939 and confined in Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz where he survived through his roofer skills. He met his wife of 74 years in the camp in Gleiwitz. They settled in San Francisco where he opened Standard Roofing Company.
Diane Dorfman was born in Riga, Latvia in 1922. Her parents escaped pogroms in Russia. By 1928 they were chicken farmers in Petaluma. “Her regret of late is that she did not live long enough to see the outcome of the Mueller investigation.”
Heinz Kochman was born in Breslau in 1922. He fled Germany in 1939 and spent the war years in Beijing. He moved to San Francisco in 1947.
Anna H. Meyer was born in Vallendar, Germany in 1923. Following Kristallnacht she hid in Belgium and arrived in San Francisco in 1948 where she had a cousin and an uncle.
Edith Foyer was born in Vienna in 1923. She fled to Bolivia in 1939 where she married another Vienna refugee in 1945. They moved to Venezuela and in 1956 arrived in America. Her first husband died, her second husband also came from Vienna. She published A Time to Remember in 2012.
Gerhard (Jerry) Neuhaus was born in Spangenburg, Germany in 1923. In 1937 his family sailed to San Francisco. He married Renee Cohen who had emigrated from Germany in 1939.
Laura Duering, nee Rosenberg, was born in Geisen, Germany in 1923 to a family of winemakers. She moved to London and then to San Francisco where a distant cousin sponsored her.
Genia Kerbel was born in 1924 in Warsaw, Poland. She was a concentration camp survivor and married Jake Kerbel who she met in the Landsberg DP camp.
Miriam (Marion) Samuel was born in Czechoslovakia in 1924. She was the sole survivor of her family of 10.
Dr. Sigmund D. Sabin was born in 1924 in Berlin. His family and two sisters escaped to Brussels in 1939.They took a ship and arrived in New York on Christmas day 1939. They boarded a Greyhound Bus for Los Angeles where his aunt lived.
Norbert Joseph Kaplan was born in 1925 in Berlin. After Kristallnacht in 1938 his immediate family left for America. He attended Hamilton High School in Los Angeles.
Hanna Eichenwald Marcus, was born in 1925 in Rheine/Westfalen, Germany. After Kristallnacht Hanna’s family fled to Amsterdam. Hanna went to an orphanage. She never saw her family again. Hanna was rescued in 1940 by Gertrude Weismuller, one of Yad Vashem’s “Righteous Among the Nations,” who put Hanna on a ship for Liverpool. “Her parents and little brother perished in the concentration camps.” In 1946 she came to America sponsored by a cousin. “She was never without reading material, carrying her New Yorker or New York Times with her just in case she had a spare moment.”
Sonia Orbuch was born in Poland in 1925. Her J obituary is written by Maya Mirsky on the J Staff. She was a partisan involved in sabotage against the Nazis. She lost 60 family members including her two brothers. She met her husband in a displaced persons camp and moved to America. Orbuch published a memoir in 2009 with historian Fred Rosenbaum, Here, There Are No Sarahs. She made public presentations on her Holocaust experience.
Susy Raful was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1925. In 1944 she was sent by the Nazis to Ravensbrück. While in a Czech hospital she met an American soldier and came to New York in 1947 to marry him.
Norbert Nemon was born in Vienna in 1926. At the age of 11 he was sent to safety in the U.K. He came to the U.S. in 1945. He served in Korea.
Edith Wellisch, born in Czechoslovakia in 1926, died two days after her 92nd birthday. “She and her older sister were the only ones in their family to survive the Holocaust.”
Regina Dombek born in 1926 survived Auschwitz and married Henry who survived Bergen-Belsen and Birkenau.
Matilda (Tillie) Molho was born in 1926 in Thessaloniki, Greece. During the war she was hidden by a Greek Christian family. She emigrated with her husband to America in 1951.
Marianne Liepman was born in 1927 in Vienna. The family went to Shanghai. Marianne married her childhood beau who she met in Shanghai. They lived in the Bay Area in the early 1950s where her husband was stationed in the Army.
Harry Walter Gluckman was born with the first name of Heinz in Berlin in 1929. In late 1940 the family took a train across Eastern Europe, Russia and Manchuria to Korea, a boat to Japan, and then to San Francisco. Harry, age 11, passed through “The Golden Gate to Freedom.” “His grandparents and most other relatives perished in the Holocaust.”
“The Saga of Ester Libicki.” She was born in Poland in 1929. She survived Germany, and in the early postwar period married David and had a son Zygi who became Stuart on arrival in New York in 1951. She relocated to California in 1959.
Eva Langton was born in Berlin in 1930. The family immigrated to America in 1936. She settled in San Francisco with her husband in 1950.
Rita Goldman was born in Berlin in 1931. At age 7 the Kindertransport took her to London. She reunited in San Francisco with her parents who had been in Shanghai from 1940 to 1947.
Monio Pilpel, born in 1936 in Bielso, Poland, “went with his parents to Vienna, from where he escaped to England, and remained there until 1947, when he emigrated to America and settled in San Francisco with his parents.” His is the only obituary later followed with a notice of grave unveiling.
Obituaries suggest in lieu of flowers that mourners make donations to charity. These survivors suggested Moses and Verle Grossman Fund for Children’s Health at San Francisco General Hospital, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, an animal welfare charity, Yosemite Conservancy, Fromm Institute, Hebrew Free Loan, Alzheimer’s Foundation, Eleanor Meyer Scholarship Fund at Congregation Beth Sholom in SF, Amit, North Bay Hadassah, Jewish Federation, Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, HIAS, Steve Dorfman Memorial Scholarship Fund at California State University, Chico, Petaluma Animal Services, Temple Emanu-El, Congregation Sherith Israel, Temple Sinai, Oakland, B’nai Tikvah, Walnut Creek, Congregation B’nai Emunah, Congregation Beth Sholom, or the charity of your choice.
At its height San Francisco’s JCC Holocaust Center had 70 survivor-participants involved in public education, today about 15. Shanghailanders who numbered 100 in 2002 are down to perhaps a dozen. The Center is preparing children and grandchildren of survivors for the Next Generation Speakers Bureau.
We thank and honor our ancestors for giving us birth and protecting us that we might live. And we thank the rescuers, the righteous for providing sponsorship and sanctuary in times of greatest need. Their stories must continue to live.
The author is grateful to those who wrote obituaries and the J for publishing them.
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Pollak, an attorney and professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska Omaha, is a SDJW correspondent now based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted via oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com