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.