The Rohrlichs from Romania

This post is about relatives of my great-grandmother (mother's father's mother) Clara Marcovis, nee Schevach (1869-1944). In particular, it is about the descendants of Clara's first cousin, another Clara, who married Karl Rohrlich.

Clara's father was Leb Schevach. My great-uncle Leo Marcovis (1900-1983) must have been named after Leb, his maternal grandfather.

Leb Schevach was one of three known children of Avram and Leah Schevach. One must assume that my grandfather Abe Marcovis (1902-1997) and his cousin Abe Leon (1892-1918) were named after their great-grandfather. This Schevach family, as far as we know, lived in Roman, located in what now is the northeast, or Moldavian Region, of Romania.

To our knowledge, Leb Schevach had only two siblings. Of Isadore Schevach, we only know his name. Leb's sister Blima (d. 1928) married Avram Mark or Marcu, and they had two daughters, Liza and Clara.

Liza, whose husband Moritz Reiss was a maternal cousin of my Clara, died in Israel in the early 1950s. Their children, Beatriz, Theodor and Josefine, then moved from Israel to Sao Paolo, Brazil. Theodor's son Gerald earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from U.C. Berkeley and returned to Sao Paolo.

Clara Marcu married Karl Rohrlich. Schevach relative and family historian Harvey Leon (1914-2002) said Karl owned an olive oil factory. Their son Leon (1899-1979) carried on the olive oil business until the Communists seized his assets in 1948. Leon moved to Israel in 1964.

Little is known about their daughter Sylvia Rohrlich Samitca, who died in 1941, in her early 40s, from an failed operation.

Their other son, Berthold (1897-1943), died from a stroke while returning home by train from Bucharest. The family believed the presence of Nazi soldiers on the time may have contributed to the stroke. Berthold was survived by son Alexander (1922-2005?), whose mother Clementine died in childbirth. Both father and son filed claims of slave labor after the war.

Dr. Alexander Rohrlich

Alexander, whose Romanian nickname was Sandu, became a pediatrician. He met his wife, Bronja, when she worked in a hospital in Roman.

Sandu and Bronja applied for emigration in 1950, but were denied. They tried again in 1958. This time, a Communist official approved their application so he could take over their house.

After stops in Vienna and Amsterdam, they arrived in Israel in 1959. They first lived in a "settlement town" where Sandu cared for the children of poor immigrants from Arab countries. These children would be for them a substitute for the children they never had.

I was fortunate to meet them in their Tel Aviv apartment in 2001.

Prominent Shirttail Relatives

Karl Rohrlich's brother Egon practiced law in Vienna. Egon could not get out of Austria, and was killed at Sobibor concentration camp. Two sons, however, fled after the German annexation in 1938.

George F. Rohrlich (1914-1995) would receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, serve on General Douglas MacArthur's staff in Tokyo, and teach economics at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Fritz Rohrlich (1921 - ) would become a world leader in the field of Quantum Electrodynamics. Before joining Syracuse University, he taught from 1953 to 1963 at the University of Iowa, just 100 miles east of where Clara Marcovis had lived.

My Journey to Israel: 1972

One year ago, my niece and nephew took their first overseas trip on the 10-day Birthright tour to Israel. 36 years earlier, their mother went on the Des Moines Jewish Federation-subsidized 7-week high school summer tour in Israel. Over 40 years ago, I used a Federation scholarship to join the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization (BBYO) summer tour.

Our first tourist site that summer of 1972 was the entry hall of Lod Airport, whose walls bore the pock marks from a bloody terror attack about a month earlier. Luckily, that was my closest encounter with violence.

We stayed much of the time in Arab hotels in East Jerusalem. When there was free time, we walked through the Arab neighborhoods to go either to West Jerusalem or to the Old City.  If children were playing in the street, I stopped to kick a soccer ball with them.

On the left, my friend Samir,
working the family stall in the
Old City of Jerusalem

This was just five years after Israel reunited East and West Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War.

One of the hotel owners had a son, about 14, who mixed with our group whenever we returned from a tour. He called himself Moshe, but we called him Freddy Felafel. When he and I became close over the summer, he confessed his real name was Nasser. He hid his name so the American Jewish kids would accept him.

This hotel was a 15-minute walk to the Damascus Gate of the Old City. Inspired by a recent sermon by my congregational rabbi, I snuck off to visit the Western Wall at midnight on Shabbat. Hopelessly lost in the maze of dark, deserted alleys, a friendly Arab, arm wrapped tightly around my shoulder, showed me the way back to the gate.

Our trip included an extensive tour of Jewish sites in the West Bank. Our bus wandered freely through the occupied West Bank. There were no separate roads for Jews, and almost no Jewish settlements for them to lead to.

There also were no superhighways linking Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. Buses going uphill to Jerusalem

Tel Aviv as seen from Jaffa in 1972

were very, very slow.

We visited some kibbutzim, but our main agricultural experience was on a moshav up north called Nahalal. It was the home of Moshe Dayan, the eye-patch wearing iconic Defense Minister of the 1967 war.

It was also the home of Israeli pop star Shula Chen (pronounced khen). It was to the Chen family that Maureen Gurner and I were assigned to clean the chicken coop. That week was also an opportunity to observe closely as a teenage boy worked the community milking machine.

Yoav Yosilevich with his par-
ents and little brother outside
their house in Yehud

One Shabbat I was assigned to an Israeli family with a son my age named Yoav. The Yosilevitch family lived in a small ranch house on a quiet street in Yehud, a town north of the airport. On Friday night, the mother lit candles inside the front door and served us peanut butter sandwiches. In those days,  Israelis had their main meal at midday.

Later we drove with his friends to a roadside snack bar.  It was Arab-owned, so it did not have to close for Shabbat. In the afternoon I played frisbee with the kids in the street.

Yoav practiced English speaking to me, and I practiced Hebrew speaking to him.  14 months later I would study the casualty list from the Yom Kippur War hoping to not see his name.