The Heschel School

Martin Rosenfeld was born on September 3, 1912 in Iklod, a small village in the town of Gherla in the Northern Transylvania region of Romania. We do not know many details about his experiences during the war since he rarely spoke about it prior to his death in 1987. However, a prisoner card bearing his name (spelled Marton), with his birthdate and place of birth, in Yad Vashem's Central Database, indicates that he arrived at Auschwitz on May 5, 1944, and was transferred to Mauthausen, in Austria, on February 17, 1945, as the Nazis evacuated prisoners Westward in the waning days of the war. The "Häftlings-Personal-Karte" in Yad Vashem's collection identifies him as prisoner number 131859 and "Ungarn Jude," a Hungarian Jew.

Martin had three brothers and one sister who survived the war but his wife, Szerene (née Abraham), also known as Serena, and their son, Lupu, were murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz. Records from the village of Iclod indicate that Serena was born in 1911 and Lupu on July 5, 1937, so they would have been 34 and just shy of eight years old, respectively, at the time that they were killed. 

When Martin returned home after liberation, he remarried, to Sylvia Friedman, a fellow survivor from the region. They had one son, Ervin, on January 1, 1951. In December 1964, the Rosenfelds emigrated from Romania, first traveling by train to Italy, where they stayed for almost two years.

A letter issued by the German embassy in Rome on May 26, 1965, when the Rosenfelds were living at Via Agostino Depretis 77, declares that Martin was prisoner number A14019 at Auschwitz. The letter includes a photo of Martin displaying that number tattooed on his left arm.

In December 1966, the Rosenfelds emigrated to America. There they lived in the Boro Park neighborhood of Brooklyn among many other Holocaust survivors and established a richer and more secure Jewish life for their family.

Ervin Rosenfeld, the only child of Sylvia and Martin, married Clara Fischer, also the child of Holocaust survivors from Romania whose family had emigrated to America in 1963 and settled in Brooklyn. They had three daughters, the oldest being Heschel parent and Holocaust Commemoration Committee member Jeannie Rosenfeld Fisher, and have seven grandchildren, including Heschel students Sophie, Elizabeth and Henry Fisher.

Martin died of a heart condition in 1987. At the bottom of his tombstone, there is a memorial to his family members murdered in the Shoah, including his son, Lupu, who was named after his own father, Naftali Zev.