- Biography
- Erwin (Reuven) Deutscher (the father of the donor) is the son of Beile Ida and Friedrich (Fischel, Efraim) Deutscher an Orthodox family from Vienna. He was born on January 28, 1923, the oldest of four children. His father owned a dairy on the outskirts of the town as well as a home in the city. He manufactured and sold kosher cheese. His maternal grandfather Joseph Bachrach immigrated to the United States before the rise of Nazism and became a rabbi in Pennsylvania and then Oklahoma. In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria and the Deutschers life changed radically. On one occasion, Erwin's father was pulled from their home and forced to parade through the streets in ridiculous costumes as an act of humiliation. The family found themselves in reduced economic circumstances, and his mother once went to a friend who owed them money to ask for repayment. The woman seemed sympathetic but then denounced his mother to the Gestapo who promptly arrested Beile. However the children were allowed to visit her in jail and Erwin's sister Rosi (b. 1924) smuggled in some food for her. While she was still in jail, Erwin was offered the opportunity to go on youth Aliya with a group of 25 boys from the Orthodox Zionist organization, Hashomer Hadati. He was unsure whether to take the opportunity knowing it would mean leaving the rest of the family and that he might never see his mother. However, his father, also a Zionist, encouraged him to go and luckily his mother returned home just before Erwin left Vienna. He left on October 18, 1938 shortly before Kristallnacht. He then attended the Mikve Israel agricultural school for two years and then a Bnai Akiva yeshiva for an additional two years. Erwin joined the Hagenah, later the Israeli Defense Force where he met and later married Hannah (Henia) Katz.
Friedrich Deutscher was arrested after Kristallnacht and sent to Dachau. Following his release, the two youngest children, Edmund (b. 1926) and Sigmund (b. 1928), were selected in the summer of 1939 to join a transport of children to the United States organized by Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus. His mother meanwhile had been writing to seek assistance from her father Joseph Bachrach in the States and the rest of the family hoped to immigrate soon. However in October 1939 the Gestapo rearrested Fischel and sent him to Buchenwald. When they released him the following February, he weighed only 90 pounds. As soon as he was well enough to travel, Erwin's parents and Rosi left Austria for Italy to embark on their voyage to the States. They had tickets to sail out on a luxury liner from Genoa. However before they could leave, the three of them were rounded up and interned in the Ferramonti camp in southern Italy. Though the conditions in no way resembled those of a German camp and though they enjoyed the assistance of the local Italian Jewish population, they were not allowed to travel. They remained there until June 1944 when they were selected to join a group of refugees the Americans evacuated to Fort Ontario, in Oswego New York. However Rosi chose to stay and marry Marcello Campagnano, an Italian Jew from Florence who had proposed right before they were to embark. While in the camp, Beila Ida and Efraim Deutscher worked in the camp kitchen and maintained its standard of kashrut. Through this work, they met Rabbi Eliezer Silver, President of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis. He helped them leave the camp and encouraged them to establish a kosher restaurant in Cincinnati. In 1951 Erwin and his wife left Israel with their nine month old daughter Naomi, to reunite with his family in the United States. They settled in Cincinnati to be near his parents; his two younger brothers both served in the Air Force (Sigmund for life and Edmund later became an engineer with GE). Erwin became an insurance agent and manager with Met Life and Hannah a Hebrew School teacher and principal. At the age of 50, Erwin obtained a PhD in Hebrew Letters from the Hebrew Union College.
