The Heschel School

Aryeh Leib (Leibel) Tomases (Romanian spelling Tomasis) was born in the Eastern Romanian city of Iași, near Moldova around 1910. He was the youngest child of Frieda (née Alexander) and Nechemiah Tomases, a furrier who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. His older brother Moishe Baer (Morris) was the grandfather of Faith Tomases and great-grandfather of Julia Tomases (Heschel High School class of 2020). 

Morris emigrated to the United States in 1912 to avoid the Romanian draft prior to World War I. He traveled to Wilmington, Delaware, where his aunt Sarah (his father’s sister) lived with her husband, Jacob Abramowitz, and her mother (Leibel’s paternal grandmother), Miriam Etel Tomases. 

Before the Holocaust, Iași was a major center for Jewish culture, home to the first Yiddish language newspaper and professional Yiddish theater. Systemic persecution of Iași’s Jewish population began when Ion Antonescu rose to power in 1940 and aligned his Iron Guard with Nazi Germany. On the evening of June 28, 1941, Romanian and German officers, supported by civilians, initiated a pogrom against the Jewish community, murdering thousands and forcing the roughly 4,300 survivors (of a total population of approximately 50,000) into sealed cattle cars destined for Cãlãraşi and Târgu Frumos. During the journey, some 2,600 people perished from  thirst, starvation and suffocation. The few who survived were set free after two months in a detention camp. 

Leibel Tomases was among those who died on the so-called Iași-Cãlãraşi death train. Morris’s daughter Helen recalls her father spending untold hours attempting, without success, to obtain the legal documents needed to bring his brother to the United States prior to 1941. 

There were five sisters between the two brothers: Rochel, Chaya, Dorbrish, Tsirel, and one whose name is not known (she died in childhood). Frieda Tomases and her remaining four daughters survived the Holocaust by hiding in a large pit formed by bombings, which was covered and camoflouged with a sheet and earth. 

Shortly after the war, Rochel and Dobrish emigrated to Israel; Chaya joined them in 1970, having stayed in Romania to care for their mother until she died in her 90s. (Tsirel died of illness at some point after the war.) The descendants of these three sisters reside in Israel, primarily in the city of Rishon LeZion.  

Some details of Leibel Tomases’s life and Holocaust experience have been pieced together from the memories of these and other relatives:

“Grandma had a few cows, and our uncle helped her with feeding them and making and selling cheese, butter and milk. On June 29, 1941, after Germany invaded Romania and started the war with the Soviet Union, the police announced that all men had to come to sign up for work permits. Some, including Uncle Leibel, a friend Joseph, and a cousin, Avraham, went to police headquarters. Police and soldiers took Jews from their homes, beat them, and took them to police headquarters where the beatings continued. Many were tortured and murdered.

The survivors were herded onto the livestock wagons of two trains, which started traveling back and forth. It was mid-summer and hot with no air and no water. The majority died. When the nightmare was over, only a few remained alive. When the trains arrived back at the station, they took out the dead, and the survivors were put into a camp. After a while they were sent home. Only Avraham returned. 

There is a story that Leibel and Avraham attempted to jump out of the train car and that someone held Leibel back but Avraham was successful. After the war, he married a fellow survivor named Gisela and they had two children together, a son, Leon (Ari), named after Uncle Leib and Gisela's brother, who also died on the train, and a daughter, Frima (Iris), named after Avraham’s mother. 

How and where Uncle Leibel and Joseph died is unknown. The dead were buried in a mass grave.”