Chava & Menachem Markowitz
Chava (née Bakman) Markowitz was born in Radom, Poland in 1913 to Zalman and Brucha (née Rozenbaum) Bakman. She was the oldest of seven siblings, followed by Esther, Henoch, Mania, Rubin, Rivka, and Moshe.
Menachem Markowitz was born in 1909, also in Radom, to Fraydele (née Markiewicz) and Uszer Markowitz. He had two older brothers, Israel Chaim and Herszek, and two younger brothers, Josef and Sidney. Herszek was killed in a 1925 bicycle accident and Josef died in infancy.
Menachem, a tailor by trade and a dedicated Zionist, illegally immigrated to Paris in 1929 to develop his bespoke tailoring skills. He applied for a passport to move to Palestine in 1930, and was officially released from his Polish citizenship in 1936. Menachem returned to Radom in 1937 to be with Chava, and they married in March 1938. A few months later, the newlyweds left Poland for good, but the rest of their families stayed behind in Radom.
The German army occupied Radom on September 8, 1939, just a week after its invasion of Poland. Between March and April 1941, the city’s roughly 30,000 Jews were concentrated into two ghettos, among them all the remaining members of the Bakman and Markowitz families. (The accompanying slideshow includes images of the registration papers that the Germans forced them to sign to attest that they were "voluntarily" relocating.) Between 1942 and 1944, the Germans conducted several massacres in the ghettos and gradually deported the Jews to concentration and labor camps.
Chava’s younger sister Mania survived Auschwitz and was liberated from Bergen Belsen by the British Army on April 15, 1945. Before her deportation from Radom, she witnessed German soldiers pulling her parents, two sisters and three brothers out of line in the Ghetto. The seven of them were shot to death on the spot. Mania met Nathan Jacobson in Germany after the war. They married and had two daughters, Doris and Rita, who each had two sons. Nathan died in 1963 and Mania died in 2005.
Menachem’s brother Sidney was the only other surviving member of the Markowitz family, but his wife and young daughter were killed in the concentration camps by the Germans. The circumstances of their parents’ deaths remains unknown but, according to documents in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, their brother Israel Chaim, his wife, and daughter were killed in the Radom Ghetto. After the war, Sidney married Maryla, another survivor whom he met in the DP camps, and emigrated to the United States in 1948. Sidney died in 1984 and Maryla died in 1990. They were never able to have children because of medical experiments that the Germans conducted on Maryla.
After settling in Rishon Le’Zion in 1938, Chava and Menachem had a son, Ameeram, the father of Heschel parent Murray Markowitz. Ameeram’s sister Ilana was born in 1944, and their brother Asher, was born in 1950. In 1955, Menachem moved to the United States, followed by Ameeram in 1956, and Chava, Ilana, and Asher in 1957. The family was reunited in Brooklyn, where Sidney, Maryla, Mania, and Nathan also lived.
Menachem continued to work as a tailor until he retired in 1980. He and Chava were married until his death in 1982. Chava, who passed away in 2007, lived to be 93 years old. Each of their children had two children of their own, giving them six grandchildren and, to date, six great-grandchildren, including Heschel students Sarah and Rachel Markowitz.
