Henry Jacobowitz, a lawyer, volunteer, military veteran and Holocaust survivor, passed away on June 7 at 97 years old, survived by his daughter, Susan, and three granddaughters.<\/p>\n
Henry was born in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, a border area that was part of Czechoslovakia before World War II, given by Hitler to Hungary in 1939, and now it\u2019s part of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Since Hungarian Jews were among the last to be transported to concentration camps during the Holocaust, Henry\u2019s family first dealt with the Hungarian occupation, with men being taken for forced labor, then in 1944, they were among approximately 100,000 Carpathian Jews to be deported directly to Auschwitz, where 90% of them perished.<\/p>\n
Henry lost his mother and four younger brothers and sisters at Auschwitz.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad was extraordinary,\u201d said Susan Jacobowitz. \u201cHe was a very modest man. He never talked about the war or about his past or felt that he was special in any way. He had a real sense of justice and compassion, and he didn\u2019t want people to suffer.\u201d<\/p>\n
After liberation, Henry spent two years in Displaced Person (DP) camps in Austria. One month before his 18th birthday, he was brought to the United States on a corporate affidavit sponsored by the United States Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM), made possible by the 1945 Truman Directive.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had a lot of belief in the United States,\u201d Susan said. \u201cHe felt like he was so lucky to come here.\u201d<\/p>\n
When he got to the United States, he didn\u2019t speak English, and his education had been paused since he was 11 years old, so he enrolled in a high school in the Bronx. Two years later, he earned his Regents diploma.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he was really remarkable, but he would certainly never have said that about himself,\u201d Susan said. \u201cHe always told me that there was nothing special about him and that many people strive to make it, but it\u2019s more about luck than anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n
After failing an exam to study at City College of New York (CCNY) for free, he studied part-time in the evenings while working during the day as a shipping and receiving clerk.<\/p>\n
Henry was drafted to the U.S. Military in 1950, serving mostly in the Finance Corps in New Jersey during the Korean War. When he got out of the military, he finished degrees at CCNY in business administration and accounting.<\/p>\n
Henry then attended the University of Arizona Law School from 1954 to 1957. During law school, he was featured in a local newspaper for winning a mock trial competition on April 29, 1955, exactly 10 years after the day he was liberated.<\/p>\n
After graduating, he started his law practice, co-founding Duecy, Moore & Jacobowitz with two partners. Henry was the subject of an article, \u201cNew Yank Is New Lawyer,\u201d in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, published in October 1957.<\/p>\n
His future wife recognized him from the Jewish News article at a party, and they were married for 25 years.<\/p>\n
Henry practiced business law, civil litigation and bankruptcy law for over 50 years, then worked for free at a legal aid clinic for seniors. He also taught business law at Phoenix College.<\/p>\n
Henry loved Arizona so much that he refused to leave.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe really loved Arizona \u2014 the sunshine and the fresh air, and it was where he was able to create himself as an American,\u201d Susan said.<\/p>\n
He rarely spoke of his life before arriving in the United States. When people asked, he would simply tell them he was from New Jersey rather than explaining his birthplace.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a poor area. They don\u2019t really have any natural resources. It\u2019s kind of undeveloped,\u201d Susan said. \u201cHe was from this place that was just hard to describe to American kids who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, so my dad thought it was better for us to be American.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t have much of an accent,\u201d Susan said. \u201cA lot of people didn\u2019t know he was a survivor or even that he was from Europe. He didn\u2019t have a tattoo, and he really didn\u2019t talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite removing himself from much of his past, Henry was involved with the Phoenix Holocaust Survivors Association.<\/p>\n
Susan remembered the first time she met other survivors, when Henry brought her, her husband and her sister to a dinner when she was an undergraduate student studying history at Arizona State University (ASU).<\/p>\n
\u201cHe just felt like that had been one part of his life that he had lost, so then after that, whatever would come after would be up to him to make it what it was going to be,\u201d Susan said.<\/p>\n
Henry even refused compensation from the Claims Conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said he didn\u2019t want to be reminded of the past, and he didn\u2019t think there was a price that you could put on that kind of suffering, on losing your mother or your brothers and sisters,\u201d Susan said.<\/p>\n
Susan went on to complete a graduate degree in history at ASU and wrote her Master\u2019s thesis on Etty Hillesum, a Dutch woman who died in the Holocaust whose diaries had recently been recovered.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t learn about her own father\u2019s story until he took her with him to the 40th wedding anniversary of his first cousin who had been married while in a DP camp in Bad Gastein, Austria.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn that trip, he ended up telling me his story, and he said, \u2018I don\u2019t want to talk about it again. I don\u2019t want to ever read anything that you write,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Throughout her studies, Susan researched works written by other children of Holocaust survivors. She is currently working on a book about her father\u2019s life, titled \u201cFar From Childhood: A Holocaust Memoir.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of what motivated me in my academic work, my scholarship and my creative writing is a feeling that people should know what ordinary people go through in war and what it means to be a survivor of genocide,\u201d Susan said.<\/p>\n
Born into a Spinka community, an ultra-Orthodox sect of Hasidism, Henry had a complicated relationship with his Judaism.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had a very religious upbringing, but he just never really believed,\u201d Susan said. \u201cAnd then because of the war, he felt like it didn\u2019t offer anything positive.\u201d<\/p>\n
His wife was Jewish, and he raised his children as Jews, but the family did not actively practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very interested in the experience of having a parent who was a survivor, who had been so traumatized, and the connection to Judaism, which was sometimes fractured or complicated by the fact that the parents associated so much trauma with being Jewish,\u201d Susan said.<\/p>\n
Both of Susan\u2019s sisters predeceased their father, but \u201cthere was nothing he wanted more than to be a good father and a good grandfather,\u201d Susan said. \u201cHe took the best care of us that he could.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before he passed, Henry requested that donations be made to CCNY, University of Arizona\u2019s James E. Rogers College of Law and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which he believed to have helped him immigrate to the U.S.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne time my dad said to me, \u2018I used to wonder if I would live to see 16.\u2019 The fact that he got to be 97 is pretty remarkable,\u201d Susan said. \u201cI said to him, \u2018Maybe you\u2019re immortal.\u2019 And he said, \u2018I\u2019m pretty sure it\u2019s just death deferred.\u2019 The fact that death got deferred for him meant he got to raise a family, have a law practice and do so many things that you can only dream of doing when you\u2019re worried that you\u2019re never going to get a chance to have a future.\u201d JN<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Henry Jacobowitz, a lawyer, volunteer, military veteran and Holocaust survivor, passed away on June 7 at 97 years…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":941490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5131],"tags":[5229,5643,1587,718,14446,1589,96338,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-941489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-phoenix","tag-america","tag-arizona","tag-az","tag-community","tag-holocaust","tag-phoenix","tag-profile","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116936410994439993","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/941490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}