Steuer Cousins Meet

Several Steuer cousins living in Israel met. We also all met our Judkowitz cousin, visiting his son from New York. We got together in Neve Sha’anan, Haifa since the majority of the cousins lived in Haifa or just outside of Haifa. I went early from Tsfat and met them earlier since I felt I already knew him via all of our Skype chats.

There were two cousins who are descendants of Moritz Steuer & Minna Gruenberg-they are second cousins and have known each other before list gathering. Then there was a cousin and her aunt (she’s 90 years old) who are descendants of Friederike Steuer & Moses Wachsner. Friederike and Moritz were brother and sister and two of Samuel and Eva (Fraenkel) Steuer’s children.

It was a great evening. Found out that Shmuel Meir Jurovics was ultra-orthodox. It was 1937 when the Gestapo came to his house looking for him, B”H he was at shul (it was Friday evening). After the Gestapo left, his wife, Edith Dvora

 Wachsner (our Steuer connection) packed a suitcase for her husband and send the suitcase and his passport with their youngest son to the shul. His son told him not to return home because the Gestapo is looking for him. Shmuel Meir went by train to Belgium to his brother’s. From Belgium he went to his sister’s house in New York.

Our other 90 year old cousin there was in the Jewish Brigade. His father, Fritz Michaelis, was a lawyer in the glass industry in Silesia. This meeting uncovered that two of our cousins’ fathers both had a hand in the Phoenicia Glass Factory in Haifa. Benjamin Jurovics was a Civil Engineer.

I was asked how I initially knew about the Samuel Steuer branch of the family by one of our 90 year old cousins. I had moved back in with my parents for a while and decided to look in the phone book to see if there were any Steuer’s in the area. It so happened there was a Steuer family that lived up the hill from us (about 2 minutes away). I called him and he invited me up to meet him. While I was there, he gave me a copy of a hand-written genealogy in German that had been written by his father, Rabbi Urlich Steuer. This cousin then told me that he remembers Urlich from when he was a child. Urlich was 13 years younger than his father.

Waiting to her more stories and memories.