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Israel Neustadter A"H
My dear tatelah was born in Jasina, Czechoslovakia in 1911. He attended the Pressburg yeshiva and later joined my grandfather in the family lumber business. He married his first wife Blanka Kahanova on March 24, 1939. She was 19. I am struck by her beauty and by how well my father dressed. Numerous pictures show him smartly attired, holding his attaché case against the backdrop of Prague and other cities. My father never talked about the concentration camps unless I pressed him. Even then he would tell me only about the cattle cars but not elaborate further. He lost his entire family at Auschwitz. I found a handwritten note in his mishnayos listing among others his parents Alexander Sender and Mansu, a sister Chaya Ethel and “my precious and dear daughter Chana, 3 years and 2 months old.” Records from Yad Vashem show my father was in Dachau and Buchenwald. My father related to me that a Rabbi in one of the camps told him that he was destined to survive because his prisoner number, 42183, adds up to the gematria of Chai. Every year without fail between Pasach and Shavuous my father had nightmares. He'd scream and wave his fists as if fighting someone off. I would go into his room and very gently hold him, careful not to wake him up too suddenly. When he realized it was me he'd hug me tightly and tell me he was alright and that I should go back to sleep. My father entered the United States on May 23, 1946 on the Oregon, sponsored by a cousin, Adolph Neustadter, a furrier. My father lived in New York, trying his hand at various endeavors including working in a cheese store, selling fluorescent lighting and starting an import-export business. By 1953 my father bought into a fledgling lumber company with an old friend. My father was the blue-collar minority partner. He ran the sawmill and dry kiln in Nanjemoy, Maryland, while his partner Frank Herman lived on Long Island and handled the sales. The Sepinka Rebbe frequently invited my father up to New York for Shidduchim and finally introduced him to one of his cousins, my mother. "How did the date go?" the rebbe asked my father. "If you had someone like this, why didn’t you introduce me to her right away?” my father replied. My mother who was 42, very choosy and not as yet able to find her bashert told me that “my father was quite simply everything she ever wanted in a man, minus a few inches.” They married in August, 1953, just a few months after their meeting. My mother gave up her career as a dress designer and moved to Washington to start a family. She invested what money she had in my father’s business so that he could upgrade to a 45% partnership. My father told me that from the moment he met my mother there was bracha and hatzlacha in everything he did. My father is remembered by the original Summit Hill'ers for loading his car trunk with schach every year from his forests. I remember some Succos holidays when his company’s giant Mack truck pulled into the parking lot near the shul. My father sold his business and retired shortly after moving to the Kemp Mill community in 1973. He is remembered here as the weekday Gabai. My father was a big bal tzdakah. I am truly awed by the glaring discrepancy between the value he placed on material goods and the value he placed on tzdakah. He routinely refused to let my mother or I buy him even a pair of pants or a shirt, complaining that they were a waste of money, yet he readily donated large sums to all the organizations and people that solicited him, particularly favoring tzdakah beseser. During the time I sat Shiva I was touched by the number of people who said my father was as nice and refined a man as you could ever meet. As one person put it, “your father was the only one in our shul who could say anything to anybody or ask anything of anyone and get away with it," without the risk of hurt or angry feelings. People knew he was genuine and beyond reproach. His face would light up when you looked at him. He was, in a word, Noseh Chain. My father enjoyed almost perfect health to the very end, walking around the two apartment buildings almost every day. He was niftar on the 23rd of Adar II, March 27, 2003 at Holy Cross Hospital after a sudden bout with pneumonia. He was 91. Throughout his life my father always made a point of being careful to answer Amen after every Bracha. He even pasted the reminder "Godol Haoneh Amen Yoser Min Hamivarech" into his siddurim. After experiencing the unspeakable and after building a new life, what was on his mind was the answering of Amen. The way my father conducted his life was the very essence of emunah; of an Amen. The gematria of Amen is 91. May his gentle neshama have an aliya.
December 25, 2002
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