[Video below.] A few hundred people gathered in the frigid cold this morning for the levaya of a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor said to have left behind more than 2,500 descendants. Yitta Schwartz, who was niftar at about 6 a.m. at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, is thought to have had the largest extended family of anyone in the generation of frum Jews from Eastern Europe who escaped annihilation by the Nazis during World War II.Unlike most survivors, Yitta and her late husband, Yosef, left their native Hungary with their family intact. They came to the United States with eight children and added nine more in the years to come, one of whom passed away as a child.
Yitta left Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1978 after her husband died and settled in what was then the fledgling Satmar satellite community of Kiryas Yoel. At the time, she already had more than 170 grandchildren.
By the time of her petirah, her grandchildren had grandchildren.
Click below for a video of the levaya:
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{Times Herlad Record/Matzav.com Newscenter}
May we all be zoicha to such nachas and have at least half as many decedents as this wonderful Yiddishe Bubbe!
*descendants (correction to my typo above.)
bobby, not bubby
nice story
Should read Yitta Schwartz was Niftera, or nifteres…niftar is leshon zachar
that means only five percent of her granchildren came to her levaya..that is terrible!
For the record, they came to the US with 10 children (2 more had been niftar in the camps) of whom 6 were born post war. They were featured in the papers when they arrived as an anomaly… 6 more children were born to them here. One boy was niftar as a teen in an accident.
Mrs. Schwartz was an exceptional woman, very wise in the old fashioned wisdom. She was sharp as a whistle to the end – kept track of each desendant-who gave birth and when, etc. Baruch Dayan Emmes.
The grandchildren live all over the world, and the levaya was made on short notice.
Can anyone tell me if this woman once lived on Penn Street in Williamsburg? She may have been my grandmother’s next door neighbor.