July 28, 2003

 

Aronowitz Family

 

The Aronowitz family – the widow Keile (nee Goldman) and her children – arrived in Mazeikiai near the end of the 19th Cent;  before that they lived in Vekshne and in Trikshly.  The father of the family, Moshe Avigdor, had died in 1885 and was buried in Vekshne.  The father of Moshe Avigdor had been the Rabbi Is’hak Zeev (Wolf) Aronowitz, probably from Kovna, who served some twenty years to his death in 1876, as the Rabbi of the Hozenfut (today Aizpute) in Lithuania, where he was buried.

 

Moshe Avigdor and Keile Aronowitz had five offspring (that survived to adulthood):

1.         Ita-‘Haya (born 1867), married Tzvi Itelsohn.  She died  young, at the beginning of the 20th Cent.

2.         Ya’akov Zalman  (born March 23, 1868 ) in Hozenfut.  Married Blumeh Gordon and lived with her all his adult life in Mazeikiai.  Died probably of typhus in 1919.

3.         Ben Zion (born 1873).  Married Sara Lifschitz (from Anatopol in White Russia ) and moved with her to Vilna in 1900.  Immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1926 and died there in 1943.

4.         ‘Hana (born 1875).  Married a son of the Ra’hmel family, and lived in Mazeikiai to her death in 1928.  Was buried in Vekshne, and her headstone is still standing (see below).

5.         Itz’hak-Zeev (born 1881).  Married Fasiyah Retenovsky and left Mazeikiai, probably at the beginning of the 20th Cent.  Thereafter lived in Moscow , and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in December 1934.  Died in Jerusalem in 1954.

 

In the 1930s and ‘40s there were left in Mazeikiai only few of the Aronowitz’.  We are aware of Blumeh (the widow of Ya’akov Zalman) Aronowitz, and hers son Moshe.  Blumeh was a strong and well-to-do woman who raised eight children.  She had an imports wholesale business for such merchandise as flour, sugar, etc., as registered in the Lithuanian government’s census of 1931.   Her two story house was used both as a business and as living quarters, and waslocated at Laisves Gatve #36/38.  The business was on the ground floor, and a part of the building was leased to the soldiers of the 9th Regiment of the Lithuanian army;  also her building housed the Jewish Volunteer firefighting unit.  Blumeh also owned the house on the same street, #42, that was leased to the town and included the local jail and police station.

 

In summer 1941, after the invasion of Mazeikiai by the Nazi Germans, she was murdered.  Her son Moshe Aronowitz (born 1902) was sent to Dachau and died there in 1945.

 

In a letter sent by the town’s physician Dr. Borba, to Kalman Aharoni (the son of Blumeh Aronowitz that was living in the USA since 1928), Dr. Borba told of her death, of her son, and of the whole Ra’hmel family.  He also reported that Blumeh’s house was razed.

 

 

The Ra’hmel Family

 

The matriarch, ‘Hanah Ra’hmel (nee Aronowitz) was born, as said, in 1875 and died in 1928.  On her gravestone is engraved: 

Ho our mother!

Our hearts’ solace

Taken in her best days

A voice we shall be to her womb’s fruit

Ra’hmel

Daughter of R’ Moshe Avigdor

In the year 5688

RIP

19        3/5       28

 

One of her children, Kalman Ra’hmel, had a tobacconery that neighbored the home of Blumeh, on 40 Laisves Gatve.  According to the Lithuanian government’s census of 1931, Kalman had an additional business on that same street, at #5.  Kalman Ra’hmel was murdered together with the rest of the Mazeikiai martyrs, on the 3rd of August 1941 , upon the mass murder of all Jewish males in the grave ditches that had been dug near the Jewish cemetery.

 

In a witnessing written in the “Ledger of Lithuanian Congregations” page 308, is recorded that Kalman Ra’hmel suddenly lifted himself up from the mass of the murdered and wounded in the pit, and in a loud voice hurled at the murderers: “our blood will not stay silent!  Our vengeance will come!”  One shot silenced him forever.

 

According to a letter from his brother, Israel Ra’hmel (living in Mandatory Palestine), Kalman Ra’hmel married a woman from Tabrig a short time before his death, but no other details are known.