Remembering Romi Cohn

Age 91, New York City
Passed away on March 24, 2020

He was just 15 when he joined the underground resisting the Nazis in what was then Czechoslovakia.

But Romi Cohn was resourceful enough to supply Jewish refugees with housing and furnish them with false Christian identifications, stamping them with German seals provided by a cooperative Gestapo source. In all, he saved 56 families, according to the Twitter account of Rep. Max Rose, his congressman on Staten Island, N.Y

After the war, Mr. Cohn made his way to the United States and became wealthy developing thousands of single-family homes on Staten Island. He also turned himself into an expert mohel, performing thousands of circumcisions and writing scholarly articles. He even set up an operating theater in his Staten Island home to circumcise adult Russian Jews who had not been able to undergo the ritual as infants because of Soviet strictures.

Avraham Hakohen Cohn — Romi was a nickname he adopted in America, and he was usually called Rabbi Cohn — was born in Pressburg, now known as Bratislava, the capital of what is now Slovakia, on March 10, 1929. He was one of seven children. When the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia and deported Jews to concentration camps, his family managed to spirit him across the border to Hungary. His mother, two brothers and two sisters perished in the camps.

He studied at a Hasidic yeshiva until 1944, when the Germans occupied Hungary and deported tens of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz. He managed to slip back into Czechoslovakia and joined up with a partisan brigade battling the retreating Germans.

With the German defeat, Mr. Cohn rejoined his father and two sisters in Pressburg. He described his wartime experiences in an autobiography, “The Youngest Partisan,” published in 2001.

In the United States, he met Malvine Geldzahler, the woman who would become his wife and who survives him. They had no children. Rabbi Cohn set up a foundation that financed the education of 70 rabbinical students in Israel. He considered them his offspring.

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