REMEMBERING UNCLE AVRAM, THE AMATEUR MATCHMAKER ON VALENTINE’S DAY 2017
© Peter Tarjan
My Uncle Avram Löbl (z”l) was born 110 years ago in Öcsény,
a tiny village in southwestern Hungary. He was the youngest child of Uncle Náci
(z”l), my paternal grandmother’s older brother. He was known as Anti, Antal,
Bandi, András and Abraham at various points in his life, but he was known as
Adon Avram Lobl in Meron, Israel, where he settled in 1957.
As a young man, Avram became a furniture maker. He made his
way to Strasbourg to perfect his skills. It is a mystery how he got by as
throughout his long life he only spoke Hungarian with any fluency.
Upon return, he opened his shop in Bonyhád, a small town in
the same area. He married a girl from an orthodox family and became the father
of my cousin, Erica, who at the age of ten, along with her mother perished in
Auschwitz in July 1944, while Avram survived in the forced labor service for
Jewish men. He returned to Bonyhád, resumed his trade and married for the second
time another survivor, Rózsika. István, their blond baby boy was born in 1948.
There were only three survivors in the large Löbl family,
Uncle Feri and Judith or “Jutka,” his 16-year old daughter, and Magdi, Avram’s other
niece, about 20 at the time of her liberation.
The Vidor family had a huge house kitty-corner from Avram’s
house. “Gyurka” (George) was the only survivor in that family. He was a year or
two older than Magdi, a nice, cultured young man, very lonely, hoping to become
a lawyer. Avram planned their match by inviting Magdi to visit him from another
village and the two lonely heart orphans were soon married. After Gyurka
completed his studies in law by correspondence, they settled in Pécs, the
largest town in the area, where they are still living today in 2017. Gyurka is
93 and Magdi is 91. They are very proud of their son, a retired judge and their
only granddaughter, an anesthesiologist.
During the 1956 Uprising a bunch of Jewish families hired a
bus in Bonyhád that took them to the border to escape to Austria and
subsequently settled in Tel Aviv. Avram stayed behind as he did not want to
lose his hard-earned machine tools. Shortly after the failed uprising, the
government gave permission to some Jewish families to leave legally. Avram and Rózsika
decided to follow their former neighbors and arrived in Israel along with most
of his shop equipment in 1957. The immigration officials asked him where he
would like to settle down.. His answer was very specific:
–
In a small town where the
weather is moderate, where the people are religious, but not too religious, and
of course, where they speak Hungarian.
–
Moshav Meron! – shouted the
official.
Meron, in the Galilee, a few miles from Lebanon, was founded
by Hungarian speaking immigrants after the Shoah. Avram’s family received a tiny
concrete house there with a solar water heater on the roof, a piece of land,
where after clearing the rocks they planted plum trees, a shed for his tools
and a chicken coop, called a lul,
where they raised about 1200 chickens every 11 weeks. István became Yisrael and
the family was getting used to their new life when Rózsika became ill and died
of cancer in 1960.
Avram waited until the prescribed mourning period was over and
then took a bus to Tel Aviv, where he looked up his former neighbors from
Bonyhád. He asked them whether they knew of any eligible ladies, whom he could
marry, as he needed someone to help with the orchard, the chickens and run his
tiny household. When asked what sort of woman he had in mind, again, he was
ready with the specifications:
–
Modest, comparable in age, able
to run a kosher household, willing to live in a tiny community, work hard and,
of course, speak Hungarian!
His friends introduced Avram to Klari, a recently widowed
lady from Oradea, also known as Nagyvárad, a Hungarian speaking city in
Romania. Avram invited Klari to dinner and as they parted, he told her:
– I’ll
be back it two weeks!
As promised, he returned on schedule, they went out to
dinner again where Avram asked Klari for an answer. She replied:
– What’s
the question?
When he explained his situation, Klari asked for three weeks
to consider the proposition. She had lived in cities all her life, wasn’t
religious, had no idea how to keep a kosher house and had a twelve year old
daughter, Esther, to care for.
To keep the story short, they married and lived their hard
life happily until Avram’s death in 2002.
But they faced an immediate problem: Esther and Yisrael
could not live under the same roof according to orthodox tradition as they were
not related by blood, only by their parents’ marriage. The solution was pragmatic:
both kids were sent to ultra-orthodox boarding schools, where they were
accepted without any cost to their parents, but heavily indoctrinated. – Klari
once told us that during the kids’ school holidays Yisrael was following
Klari’s every step to be sure that kashrut
was observed to the last detail.
Once Avram established himself to some degree, he sent a
formal invitation to Jutka who was already past thirty, living alone and
working in Budapest. The formal letter sufficed to get Jutka a passport and a
permit to leave the country for three months while keeping her job. As soon as
she arrived in Israel, Avram said to her:
– You are not going back!
Jutka’s answer was straightforward:
–
No way! I have a good job
and a nice apartment there, and I don’t speak Hebrew!
–
Nor do I – said Uncle Avram
– but there must be something that would keep you here?
–
Yeah, a husband…
Not
an easy problem… Jutka was born with hip dysplasia, grew up to be very short,
sweet, but far from being a beauty.
Avram was determined to find her a mate. He took the bus
this time to Sefad, about 8 miles from Meron and asked his Hungarian speaking
acquaintances whether they knew any eligible bachelors, who were suited for his
short but sweet little niece. He was directed to Yisrael Zwecher, who owned a
shoe store with his sister and her husband. Yisrael was about forty, also very
short, with the reputation for a ladies’ man. He was born in a village in the
Carpathian Mountains where the Jews spoke Yiddish and the locals spoke several
languages including Slovakian, Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Russian,
Ruthenian and other dialects. Zwecher completed six grades in elementary
school, two years in a Slovak school, two in Hungarian and two more in Russian,
as the area was annexed from Czechoslovakia by Hungary in 1938 and by the Soviet Union in 1945. As a little boy,
he attended a cheder, a Hebrew
school, but as an adult, he showed little interest in religion.
Yisrael was considered financially stable and successful as
he owned a Vespa scooter, a luxury in Israel at the time. He rode his Vespa to
Meron and began to date Jutka. They had a nice time together, but Jutka’s visa
was soon to expire and she was preparing to return to Budapest. Avram was not
going to let that happen. He took the bus to Sefad, went to the Zwechers’s
store and asked Yisrael:
–
Adon Zwecher, what do you
think of my niece, Jutka?
–
She is a sweet, young lady.
–
But what are your plans
regarding her?
–
I don’t have any plans…
–
But do you know that she is
going to return to Hungary soon?
–
Hm…
–
If you two were married,
she’d stay…
Score another match for Avram!
Jutka and Yisrael were soon married and settled in Sefad. For
many years, almost every Friday they rode their Vespa toward Meron, where they
left it in a ditch and walked into the gated moshav to have Shabbos
dinner with the Löbls. At the end of the evening they said goodbye, walked back
to the ditch and rode back to Sefad. Avram never asked them how they got there
and how they were going to get home. It was enough not to know to calm his
conscience.
Susanna and I visited Israel for the first time in 1968, a year
after the victorious 1967 war. Just a day or two before Pesach, we took an Egged bus from Haifa to Meron. The whole
country seemed to be on the road to get home for Pesach. Susanna and I were the
only foreigners on the bus and everyone was very nice and concerned about us. Susanna
was pregnant with our first child and they gave her a seat in the first row
near the driver. I stood for some time until I got a seat in the back. The
person opposite to me on the aisle kept two chickens – tied together by their
legs – on the floor of the aisle. Every time the bus stopped, the chickens slid
forward and usually stopped next to Susanna, where they tended to relieve
themselves. Quite an experience for a girl born in Los Angeles and raised in
Manhattan…
Some of the passengers were curious about our business and each time one of
them got off the bus, they reminded the driver to be sure to stop at Meron,
where there was a simple pole marking the Egged stop. It was a hot day in April
with all the windows open. As we approached the pole at Meron a bunch of
passengers leaned out the window, shouting in Hungarian:
–
Adon Lobl, vendégek jöttek! [Meaning, Mr. Lobl, guests are coming!]
I was stunned. Indeed, Uncle Avram was waiting for us with
his bicycle at the bus stop and we fell into his arms after about 14 years.
We spent the first part of Pesach with them. Avram and Klari
were happy to have us, Esther was very reserved, my cousin Yisrael seemed very
tense as he had become a heavy smoker and had to be without nicotine for the
Shabbat. When we asked their parents about the kids’ future, all they said:
–
We hope that we won’t have
to sit on the floor at their wedding.
We asked for an explanation. The folks in the next village were
from Yemen, whom they called “Tayman,”
who kept their tradition of sitting on the floors at festive events, such as
weddings. We were stunned again to discover the prejudices of my Holocaust
survivor uncle and his wife.
To close this shaggy-dog story, Avram and Klari’s dream came
true. Yisrael and Esther were married to each other and on my second visit to
Israel in 1983 they already had four young children.
We visited Israel once more in 2008. Again, we took a bus from
Jerusalem to Meron. As the bus was climbing the hills, a crazy driver in a silver
Citroën cut in front of the bus, slowed and forced the bus to stop. A tall,
blond guy got out of the car, came to the door of the bus that the driver
opened for him, stuck his head through the door and shouted:
–
Peter, get off the bus,
it’s me, Yisrael!
Like father, like son… We had a nice reunion with Yisrael, who
had already retired as a colonel from the IDF and became a tour director for
orthodox Jews who wished to tour Western Europe and China. Yisrael guaranteed
glatt-kosher meals for them even in China and led their religious services.
Sadly, by the time of my next visit to Israel, Yisrael had
passed away from cancer, like his mother. Klari was gone as well, but the four
Löbl grandchildren were raising Avram’s 14 great-grandchildren. Jutka proudly
told me, a non-practicing Jew, that someday there will be a minyan entirely
made up of Avram’s grandsons.
May Avram, the matchmaker, rest in peace near the tomb of Rabbi
Shimon bar Yochai in Meron.
P.S. For home work, figure out how many ways Yisrael and
Esther were related to each other!
