Sam "Laci" Feig (Klein)

László "Laci" Klein — Mordechai Elazar in Hebrew, Sam Feig in his American civil name, Mordechai in shul — was born on 25 December 1922 in Tiszadob, Szabolcs County, Hungary. His Hebrew name preserved both his father's name and the Kohen designation: Mordechai Elazar ben Menachem HaKohen, son of Menachem Klein the Kohen, son of the kehunah that ran through three generations of the Klein male line.

He was the youngest of four children. His older sister Ilona (1912, Hebrew name Devorah) never married. His older brother Jenő (1913, Hebrew Eliyahu) would survive Theresienstadt and live to age 92. His other brother Avrohom Chaim (1914, Hungarian name Lajos) would be killed at the Don River with the Hungarian forced-labor service in 1942 or 1943. Laci grew up in Tiszadob in the world that the Klein, Goldstein, Kohn, and Weisz households of the Tiszadob kehillah shared — bound by friendships that would survive the war, in particular Laci's lifelong best friend Iku Kohn, whose name appears beside his on the Tiszadob memorial plaque he and Jenő would later sponsor in Brooklyn.

In May 1944, the family was deported. His parents Emanuel and Lina were both murdered at Auschwitz. Ilona was murdered there in April 1944, before the rest of the family was even rounded up. Avrohom Chaim was already dead at the Don. Of the four siblings, only Jenő and Laci would come out of the war. Laci survived Auschwitz. The exact details of his camp survival are not yet recorded on this archive; this is a research target for a future version.

After liberation, Laci spent the postwar years in displaced-persons camps in Europe before reaching America. He arrived in New York on 20 January 1951 aboard the USNS General Ballou, a U.S. Navy transport ship requisitioned for the Displaced Persons Act. He registered on his American paperwork as "Sam Feig" — he changed his name on arrival. The family knew him by all three: Laci to his Hungarian-speaking relatives, Sam in American settings, Mordechai in shul. None of the three was wrong.

On 21 August 1952 in Brooklyn, Laci married Irene "Bobby" Weisz — a fellow Hungarian survivor whose path had run through Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Sweden, and Chicago to land her in New York earlier that year. The marriage was the third generation of Kohen × Bas Kohen marriage in Laci's direct line: his great-grandparents Yitzchok Yosef and Devorah Klein in Tiszadob; his parents Emanuel and Lina in Tiszadob; now Laci and Bobby in Brooklyn. The Hebrew name on Bobby's ancestor list — Aryeh Rephael HaKohen, her father Lipot — meant their wedding was the fusing of two Kohen lines, two generations after the camps had emptied both ancestral villages.

Their first home was above the Kerestir shteibel on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights — a small apartment over a shul named for the Kerestirer Rebbe, the Hungarian Hasidic line that had shaped Tiszadob and the Nyírség before the war. They later moved to 1180 President Street in Brooklyn, the address Bobby would keep for the rest of her life. Laci worked as a tailor in the Brooklyn garment trade. Bobby worked as a Finisher in the same trade. They had two children together — Menachem (Tatty) and Rivka, and were part of the Hungarian-Jewish Brooklyn community that the postwar generation built — the Boro Park and Crown Heights neighborhoods where Hungarian was still spoken, where Tiszadob, Apagy, and Nyírbogát were still everyday names.

Laci filed his Petition for Naturalization (No. 551234) under Section 316 in 1961, with Alien Registration Number 7 946 213. His full Hebrew name Mordechai Elazar ben Menachem HaKohen is confirmed on his Brooklyn memorial plaque.

He died on 17 September 1990 — 27 Elul 5750 — in Brooklyn, age 67. Bobby outlived him by twenty-three years. Their daughter Rivka — Rochel bas Mordechai Elazar HaKohen — would carry his Hebrew name forward as a Bas Kohen of the kehunah. She died on 28 Cheshvan 5785 (29 November 2024).

B. 25 DEC 1922 TISZADOB · D. 17 SEP 1990 · 27 ELUL 5750 · BROOKLYN (67)