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Obituaries
THELMA FAY LAZERNICK
VIRGINIA BEACH—Thelma Fay Goldman Lazernick passed away April 20, 2022, in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Thelma was born in Norfolk, Va., January 27, 1928, to Solomon and Fannie Swersky Goldman. She grew up in the Ghent section of Norfolk and graduated from Maury High School. She attended the Norfolk Division of William and Mary College (precursor to Old Dominion University) and received her RN from the Sinai Hospital School of Nursing in Baltimore, Maryland, where she met and married Albert Lazernick. After residing in Maryland for several years, she and Albert returned to Norfolk where they raised their six children. Thelma worked as a private duty nurse for almost 40 years, often helping patients and their families spend their last days at home rather than in a hospital or nursing facility.
In addition to her parents, Thelma was predeceased by her husband Albert, sister Irene, brothers Eugene, Harold, Mickey, Paul, and Jack, as well as her sons Eugene, Steven, and Lee.
Left to cherish her memory is daughter Marlie (David) and sons Brad (Judy) and Ernie (Joe). She is also survived by grandchildren Ryan, Samara, Josh, Jenny, Mandy, Isaac, Shayna, and Jacob, as well as a host of great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins.
A graveside service was conducted at Forest Lawn Cemetery. The service was live streamed.
Donations in Thelma’s memory may be made to the Beth Sholom Home of Eastern Virginia, 6401 Auburn Drive, Virginia Beach, VA, 23464; Congregation Beth El, 422 Shirley Avenue, Norfolk, VA 23517; or the Alzheimer’s Association of Southeastern Virginia. The family wishes to extend their heartfelt appreciation to all the staff at Beth Sholom for the wonderful care they extended to Thelma over the years.
BARBARA HORNSTEIN LEVINSON BREIT
WASHINGTON, DC—On Friday, April 22, 2022, Barbara Horstein Levinson Breit, age 91, of Silver Spring, Md., formerly of Portsmouth, Va., passed peacefully surrounded by her family.
Barbara, a lifetime member of Gomley Chesed Synagogue, spent most of her life in Portsmouth, moving in her later years to be closer to her family in Maryland.
Preceded in death by her husband, Morton Levinson, and their daughter, Merle, and her second husband, Harvey Breit, she leaves to cherish her memory, her children, Leon (Beverly) Levinson, Carol Levinson, Roslyn (Robert) Black, her grandchildren, Sara (Craig) Eidelman, Andi (Jason) Kristall, Jamie (Jared) Maier, Stacey (Andrew) Watson, Mitchell (Diana) Black, and her most beloved great-grandchildren, Tanner, Jenna, Ross, Reese, Frankie, Levi, Jack, Sophie, Abigail, Eliana and Logan. Her family was her greatest legacy.
Graveside funeral services were held at Gomley Chesed Cemetery in Portsmouth. Memorial contributions may be made to the Bender JCC of Greater Washington Inclusion Camp, www.benderjccgw.org or to Main Street Connect, www.mainstreetconnect.org. May her memory be for a blessing. Arrangements entrusted to Torchinsky Hebrew Funeral Home, Washington, DC.
SURA GOLDNER
Sura Goldner passed away on April 21, 2022.
Predeceased by her spouse Dr. Martin Goldner. She is survived by her children, Kim Cohen (Daniel), Lance Goldner, Mark Goldner (Sharon).
A funeral was held in Suffolk at Holly Lawn Cemetery with Rabbi Roz Mandleberg officiating.
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www.hdoliver.com MIMI REINHARD, JEWISH SECRETARY WHO TYPED UP SCHINDLER’S LIST SAVING HERSELF AND OTHER JEWS
(JTA)—Mimi Reinhard had studied literature and languages as an undergraduate before World War II. But it was a course in shorthand that saved her life.
Reinhard was imprisoned at the Plaszow concentration camp outside of Krakow when she was chosen, due to her excellent German and shorthand skills, to work as a secretary instead of being sent to perform hard labor. That assignment would save her life when she went on to type up the list of Jews to be saved by Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist later named a “righteous among the gentiles” for his efforts to save the approximately 1,200 Jews who worked for him.
When Reinhard typed up that list, her own name would be on it.
Reinhard died Tuesday, April 6 at 107 in Israel, where she moved in 2007 to be near her son, Sacha Weitman, then a professor at Tel Aviv University.
Reinhard was born Carmen Weitman in 1915 in Vienna, where she studied literature at the University of Vienna. After meeting her husband, a man from Krakow, the couple moved in 1936 to Poland, where their son was born three years later, just three months before the war broke out.
Her husband was killed in Krakow, but Reinhard survived the war with the rest of “Schindler’s Jews” despite their harrowing journey from Plaszow through Auschwitz and finally to Czechoslovakia. The group was liberated in 1945 and Reinhard and her son, who had survived the war in Hungary, moved to New York.
Reinhard remembered Schindler as a “mensch” in an interview with Haaretz shortly after her move to Israel.
“I wanted to go with Schindler, because of his reputation, but there were a lot of people who didn’t want to be on that list,” she said. “It was a gamble as far as we were concerned. To go with Schindler was no guarantee of anything. We didn’t believe that Schindler would really succeed in saving us. He was just taking us to a different camp. Who knew? We took a chance only because we believed in Schindler.”
OBITUARIES
REMEMBERING NEAL ADAMS, A COMIC BOOK LEGEND WHO CHAMPIONED HOLOCAUST AWARENESS
Rafael Medoff (JTA)—Comic artist Neal Adams, who passed away at age 80 in New York City on April 28, is best known for having revolutionized Batman and other iconic comic book characters for both the DC and Marvel brands. But Adams himself was also a fearless crusader: He battled comics publishers for the rights of artists and writers, rescued Superman’s Jewish creators from abject poverty and campaigned for a Holocaust survivor to regain portraits she painted in Auschwitz.
Adams, who was born in New York City in 1941 and spent much of his childhood on a U.S. military base in postwar Germany where his father was stationed, was not Jewish. But he had a strong interest in the Holocaust, both because of his childhood memories from Germany and because his mother-in-law was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland who helped the Polish Embassy in Morocco design counterfeit documents for other Jews fleeing from the Nazis.
In 1967, Adams began drawing for DC Comics, the publisher of Batman and Superman and, a few years later, for Marvel Comics, home of Spider-Man and the X-Men. Under Adams’ pen, superheroes who previously were drawn in exaggerated, cartoonish ways, took on a new, powerfully realistic appearance. Sales of Adams-drawn comics skyrocketed.
Adams’s first dive into public controversy came about by accident. During a visit to the DC production room in 1969, he chanced upon a staff member cutting up pages of original comic book art.
“I could not believe they were destroying this beautiful artwork,” Adams said later. He launched a campaign to convince DC to recognize the art as the property of the artists and return it to them after publication. After seven years of protesting, lobbying and cajoling, both DC and Marvel gave in to Adams’s demand. The sale of original art has since become an important supplementary revenue stream for traditionally low-paid comic book artists.
Jewish artists, writers, and editors have played major roles in the comic book industry from its earliest days, starting with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Jewish teenagers from Cleveland who created Superman in 1938. They sold the rights to the Man of Steel to DC (then National Periodicals) for $130 and a 10-year work contract.
When Adams met them in 1971, Siegel was working as a clerk and Shuster, nearly blind, was sleeping on a cot in a relative’s apartment. Shocked to hear that Superman’s creators could not even afford tickets to see the Broadway play based on their character, Adams led a campaign to pressure DC “to just do the right thing already,” as he put it. The publicity he generated eventually convinced the publisher to give Siegel and Shuster a modest pension and health care coverage.
In 2006, Adams took up the cause of Dina Babbitt, a Czech Jewish artist seeking the return of portraits that she had been forced to paint in Auschwitz by the infamous “Angel of Death,” Dr. Josef Mengele. The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, which acquired eight of the portraits after the war, claimed ownership.
“The fundamental principle that art belongs to the artist who created it is recognized everywhere except in totalitarian countries,” Adams and other comic book figures wrote in a petition, which echoed Adams’ earlier fight for the return of comic book art. “Mrs. Babbitt has suffered enough. We implore you to do the right thing and give her back her paintings.”
Adams helped mobilize more than 450 comic book artists and writers to sign the petition.
“Sadly, despite Neal’s best efforts, the museum never returned the paintings,” said comics creators advocate J. David Spurlock, who worked with Adams and former Marvel Comics chief Stan Lee on the campaign.
Adams drew a comic strip about Babbitt’s plight, which was published by Marvel Comics, and then later adapted into an animated short for a DVD of Holocaust-related stories created by Disney Educational Productions. Subsequently Adams, together with comics historian Craig Yoe and myself, coauthored a book, We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust, which showed how comic book stories about the Nazi genocide played a pioneering role in Holocaust education in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the course of my collaboration with Adams on these projects, we had the opportunity for many conversations about comic books as a vehicle for Holocaust education, something that Adams strongly advocated. He said his Holocaust-related efforts were “some of the most meaningful work [he] ever did.” Considering the breadth and impact of Adams’s career, that was saying a lot.
Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust.
Chris Sisler, Vice President, Member of Ohef Sholom Temple, Board member of the Berger-Goldrich Home at Beth Sholom Village, James E. Altmeyer, Jr., President, James E. Altmeyer, Sr., Owner
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