Romi Cohn

Avraham Hakohen Cohn — Romi was a nickname he adopted in America, and he was usually called Rabbi Cohn — was born in Pressburg, now known as Bratislava, the capital of what is now Slovakia, on March 10, 1929. He was one of seven children. When the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia and deported Jews to concentration camps, his family managed to spirit him across the border to Hungary. His mother, two brothers and two sisters perished in the camps. He studied at a Hasidic yeshiva until 1944, when the Germans occupied Hungary and deported tens of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz. He managed to slip back into Czechoslovakia and joined up with a partisan brigade battling the retreating Germans. With the German defeat, Mr. Cohn rejoined his father and two sisters in Pressburg. After the war, Mr. Cohn made his way to the United States and became wealthy developing thousands of single-family homes on Staten Island. He also turned himself into an expert mohel, performing thousands of circumcisions and writing scholarly articles. He even set up an operating theater in his Staten Island home to circumcise adult Russian Jews who had not been able to undergo the ritual as infants because of Soviet strictures. He described his wartime experiences in an autobiography, The Youngest Partisan published in 2001. (via his obituary in the New York Times)

http://www.jewishpartisans.org/partisans/romi-cohn