UWS Family Reunited With Heirloom Hidden During Holocaust: Report

Upper West Side NY

15 October, 2021

2:13 PM

Description

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — A courier sent by a German museum arrived at 94-year-old Susi Kasper Leiter's Upper West Side apartment in June with an heirloom that her grandparents had hidden before they were deported in 1942 to the Treblinka concentration camp and eventually killed during the holocaust, reports the New York Jewish Week. Leiter, surrounded by her immediate family and rabbi, took out the 22-pound 1874 family Bible featuring illustrations by the famed French artist Gustave Dore, according to Jewish Week. "Twenty-eight members of my own family tragically did not survive the Holocaust," Leiter told Jewish Week. "So when we were notified about the finding and survival of this Bible, I realized that miracles can happen. It is a new connection for my children and grandchildren, to the Leiter family whose name they bear." The Bible had quite the journey traveling from Germany to New York City over the past 70 years. It was originally hidden by the Leiter family along with other valuables behind a double wall in a home within the German town of Bopfingen-Oberdorf, according to Jewish Week. The valuables remained hidden in the house until 1990, when one of the owner's sons found the hidden double wall. The son eventually sold the Bible on eBay in 2017 to an artist who collected works by Dore, according to Jewish Week. The buyer quickly realized the Bible was a piece of family history after finding a postcard written to Eduard Leiter, and donated it to the Ehemalige Synagogue and Museum in Oberdorf, who then reached out to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for help finding any surviving family. The American museum was able to get in touch with Susi Leiter's grandson Jacob. You can read the full story and see pictures of the Bible on the New York Jewish Week's website.