Leopold "Lebli" Weisz

Leopold Abraham Weisz — known to his family as Lebli, sometimes recorded in Hungarian civil documents as Leib or Lipot — was born around 1833 in Petneháza, a village of a few hundred houses in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county in the sandy Nyírség plain of northeastern Hungary. He is the first member of the Weisz line whose name survives in stone, in marriage records, and in the memory of his descendants. Everything before him is reconstruction. Everything from him forward is documented.

His Hebrew name was Aryeh Refael HaKohen — confirmed in 2025 (v3.51) by the inscription on his son Samuel's gravestone in Nyírbogát: שאול בן אריה רפאל הכהן — "Shaul son of Aryeh Refael HaKohen." This single line of weathered Hungarian Hebrew script ties three generations of the Weisz line together in a way no civil record could: Lebli, his son Samuel, and Samuel's son Lipot — born in 1892, the year Lebli died, and named for him in the classic Ashkenazi tradition that the elder's name lives on through a grandchild.

Around 1859, Lebli married Pepi Pessil Schvarcz (1831–1915), daughter of Izsak and Gisela Schvarcz. She was about two years older than him. They settled as a household in Petneháza, where they would raise at least seven documented children over the next two decades. The family's exact occupation is not yet recovered in records — almost certainly small commerce, perhaps grain dealing, perhaps an inn, perhaps an arenda lease on a noble estate — the pattern that most Hungarian Jews of the Nyírség followed in the mid-to-late 1800s.

Of Lebli and Pepi's seven children, the line that flows down to this archive runs through their third son: Samuel "Shaul" Weisz (1860–1940), who would marry Roza Grósz of Jákó in 1890 and establish his own household seventeen miles south in Nyírbogát. The elder children — Roza, Lajos — and the younger ones — Izidor, Herman with his twenty children, Mendel, Morris — would scatter across Hungary. Lajos would be murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. Herman would quietly become one of the largest Weisz baal-habatim in the county, head of a household of twenty children across two marriages.

Lebli himself died in 1892, around the age of fifty-nine. The exact cause and date are not yet recovered. There is a separate civil record indicating Lebli also married a Katalin Svarcz, with a daughter Róza Veisz born in 1896 — but this conflicts with his death date of 1892, leaving an open question: either his death date is wrong by several years, or the second-marriage and 1896-daughter chronology is recorded incorrectly. This is one of the Weisz line's outstanding research targets.

Pepi outlived Lebli by twenty-three years, dying in Nyírbogát on 22 July 1915 — 11 Av 5675 — at the age of eighty-four. Her yahrzeit is carried on the family list. By the time she died, her son Samuel had been the patriarch of the Nyírbogát Weisz household for a full generation, and her grandson Lipot — bearing her husband's Hebrew name — was a young man of twenty-three.

The kehunah Lebli carried — the priestly line that his Hebrew name marks with the single word הכהן — passed forward without break: through Samuel, through Lipot, through Imre and his sons Laszlo and György, through Eli (Eliyahu Shaul, named for his great-great-grandfather Samuel) — and remains intact today. A registrar's pen in Vienna in 1787 had renamed Lebli's ancestors from Cohn to Weiss; it did not change a single thing about the kehunah.

1833 PETNEHÁZA – 1892 (~59)