Regina Feldman Weisz

Regina Feldman — Hebrew name Rivke — was born on 31 August 1892 in Jákó, Szabolcs County, in northeastern Hungary. She was a daughter of Elias Feldman and Amália Miriam Grósz — the woman the next generation of the family would call Mali Néni. Her mother's sister, Roza Grósz, had married Samuel Weisz two years earlier — making Regina, from birth, a first cousin to all the Weisz children of Nyírbogát through her mother's side.

Regina was the first of the great cousin marriages. She married her first cousin Lipot Weisz — Samuel and Roza's eldest son — and the two of them established their household in Apagy, fifteen kilometers north of Jákó and ten kilometers from Lipot's parents in Nyírbogát. Lipot was a Kohen; Regina, as a Feldman, was not a Bas Kohen, but the couple's union was the first of three Weisz–Feldman cousin marriages that would bind the two branches of the family together across two generations.

Across the road from their Apagy household was the household of Regina's brother, Ignácz "Nossen" Feldman — and the cousin marriages would multiply. Ignácz would marry Lipot's sister Hanni Weisz around 1918 (she died in 1919). After Hanni's death he married Lipot's other sister Regina Weisz around 1920 (she died in 1929). Three first-cousin marriages in one generation — the doubled, layered intermarriage that gave this family its astonishingly tangled tree.

Regina and Lipot raised five children in Apagy across the 1920s and into the 1940s. The oldest was Imre (Yitzchak), born 1921. The youngest and only daughter was Irene "Bobby" Weisz, born 2 April 1924 — she would be the only daughter to survive what came. Three other sons were born between Imre and Bobby; their names are not yet documented in this archive — they were murdered in 1944 along with their mother. There is a surviving photograph of the Apagy household from around 1922 showing toddler Imre standing in front of Lipot and Regina; Regina, in the photograph, is in a beaded necklace.

In May 1944, Regina was deported with her family from Apagy. She was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944, age 52. Her three middle sons were murdered with her. Her husband Lipot was selected for labor at the Auschwitz ramp, transferred onward to the Mauthausen subcamp at Ebensee, where he died on 17 February 1945. Imre survived through the munkaszolgálat; Bobby survived through women's labor camps and Bergen-Belsen. Of the seven members of the Apagy household — Lipot, Regina, and their five children — only two came out of the war.

Regina's mother Mali Néni had died in 1930, fourteen years before the deportations. Her father Elias had died in the early 1900s. By the time of her own murder, Regina was the central figure of her generation in Apagy — Lipot's wife, Ignácz's sister, mother to two future survivors and three children whose names this archive does not yet hold.

31 AUG 1892 JÁKÓ – 1944 (52)