I was born in Nagymegyer (now Vel'ký Meder, Slovakia) in 1922 as the fourth child and third boy of eight children.

My Great-grandfather, Yoseph Dov Lock, and my Grandfather, Yehoshua Heshl (Hermann Weiss), whose name I bear), were successive Rabbis in Nagymegyer. I was the first in the family to be born there, because my parents, upon their 1914 marriage, had settled first in Sopron (Ödenburg) near the Austrian border, where my mother, Elsa née Rosenberger, had been born and raised.

True to our rabbinical heritage and in the spirit of Noblesse oblige, our family conducted a strictly orthodox way of life, including the most trivial of everyday details.

My father, Aharon Weiss, was still a young man when ordained as a Rabbi, but did not whish to serve as one. In addition to his thorough Talmudic knowledge, he had also acquired a significant familiarity with secular matters, probably during his years of stay in Vienna. Among other things, he was interested in global politics and modern technology. Many people, gentiles as well as Jews, valued his opinions and explanations regarding these matters and sought his advice even in their personal problems. He also had a thorough knowledge of German and, since my mother was born in Mödling, Austria (in the outskirts of Wiener Wald) with German as her mother tongue, they conversed in this language quite often (mostly, when they did not want us to understand....).

The family moved to Nagymegyer, as mentioned, with three children, sometime in 1921. This happened partly because of the unstable postwar political situation in Hungary, the so-called "White Terror, which started after the collapse of Communist Béla Kún's régime. The main victims of this terror were of course the Jews, who were accused of the crimes committed by the defeated Communism. The economic situation was also reaching the boiling point with raging inflation. Many in the middle-class population lost their livelihood, as did our young family. Understandably, when my Uncle Samuel Weiss (my father's younger brother), who owned a factory manufacturing kosher soap and toothpaste in Nagymegyer, invited my father to join him in his enterprise, he agreed and, upon moving to Nagymegyer, devoted his eloquence and experience to broadening the clientele base and distributing "SCALWO" products in all the nearby villages.

I have no knowledge about the details of the agreement between the brothers, if there ever was one, but it didn't last long anyway. The result was that our family lost its livelihood again, at that time already with 4 or 5 children. The brothers severed their relationship completely, to the extent that my younger sisters and I were not even aware that we had an uncle. We only knew that hateful people were living in that big house we always used to skirt when passing by, never knowing why.

My father became Melamed, teacher of the local Talmud Torah school. The curriculum in this learning institute for boys between 5 and 14 years old included reading Hebrew, getting acquainted with the prayer book, and beginner's study of the Torah or Khumash, i.e., the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch). The boys achieved the latter by translating the text into Yiddish or German and later adding the commentary of Rashi, the great Medieval Bible and Talmud commentator. The school building was adjacent to that of the Jewish elementary school. After their classes were over, the boys of the elementary school went to Talmud Torah to continue studying there until after the evening prayer. The girls stayed in the elementary school, where they also received religious and household instruction in the afternoon. I don't remember this period when father acted as Melamed (I must have been too young) and only heard about it from him. He liked his teaching job and was convinced that he was performing one of the basic commands of the Torah, a holy mission ("teach them to thy sons.").

Regretfully, this job also came to an unjust end. The supervision of the Talmud Torah was the prerogative of a Gabbai, who tested the pupils weekly to check their progress and, indirectly of course, the work of the Melamed. During one of these checkups, he faulted a pupil for allegedly mispronouncing the text. My father came to his pupil's rescue, claiming that he had heard no mistake. Hebrew represents its vowels as a series of small characters called Nikud (Punctuation) positioned above or below the consonants. The debate between the Gabbai and my father was about the pronunciation of one of these signs, a sh'va (which looks like a subscripted colon). My father, who was a great Hebrew scholar in general and in the Holy Writs in particular, tried to convince his "Superior", who was unwilling to admit his ignorance. The debate deteriorated into personal affront and ended of course with my father's dismissal from his post. There is a Talmudic saying that could be translated, as "He who is in control of the pay, will always have the decisive say." The vainglorious Gabbai denied livelihood to a whole family because of his false interpretation of a dubious sh'va that may change the pronunciation, but mainly because of his stubbornness and conceit.

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