BDE: Mrs. Gitza (Gisella) Slomowics, A”H

We are saddened to inform you of the passing of Mrs. Slomowics, a native of Chust, a Holocaust survivor. She was 95 years of age.

She was born in the Czekeslovakian town of Chust in the year 1927, to her parents, Reb Chaim and Aidel Berkowitz, who were upstanding Torah Yidden.

She spent the war years in the Concentration Camps, and lost her family in the Great Churban. Following the war she returned to Chust, where she met her future husband, Reb Kalman Slomowics, also a native of Chust. They were married there, and they remained living there for the next fifteen years.

They exhibited extraordinary mesirus nefesh for keeping Torah and Mitzvos during those years, and she lived with that spirit, her deep dedication to Yiddishkeit, for the rest of her life.

Arriving in Boro Park in the 1970’s, they joined the Shul of the Kirlhazer Rov on 49^th Street, with whom Mr. Slomowics shared a bunk in the camps. As they established themselves here, they became known as an exceptional couple. “They were tsaddikim,” relates Mrs. Mindy Weinberg was a neighbor to the Slomowics’s for many years. 

“The Holocaust loomed large in her memory, and she always wanted her grandchildren—and the people she knew—never to forget what happened to her, her family, and that entire world,” recalls a granddaughter. “But she was always joyful, always loving, and an extremely proud bubby and grand-bubby to her descendants who loved being with her.”

“People would come to her for brachos,” recalls Mrs. Weinberg, “and she was so effusive in her good wishes for everyone, and in many instances, people attributed their yeshu’os to her brachos. But they did not know is how she had in mind everyone. She would sit on a Shabbos afternoon, going through the needs of every person on the block and davening for them.”

Back in Russia, following the war, the Slomowic’s became close to a great tzaddik known as the Ribnitzer Rebbe. And when Reb Kalman would come to see the Rebbe, he would be let in immediately—because the Rebbe knew of their mesirus nefesh. She always kept a picture of “dem Rebb’n” near her.

Today, she is laid to rest precisely on the yohrtzeit of the Ribnitzer Rebbe, following a lifetime of joyfulness despite incredible suffering, and emulating the Rebbe’s path of fiercely clinging to Yiddishkeit in the face of great challenge.

Yehi Zichra Baruch.