Sylvia Rosman died on Thursday July 9, 2020, at the age of 99 from pneumonia. Although dementia had silenced her for almost a decade, in her last few hours she exhibited the kind of benevolent, self-sacrificing flourish that epitomized her unstinting love for her family. Sylvia, stricken with severe hypertension and struggling to breathe, waited for her son to visit one final time before succumbing moments later. An endurance, as with so many immigrant Jews, that was inextricable from the macabre European fate they narrowly avoided.
Sylvia Rosman (nee Kapner) fled Cigelka, Czechoslovakia in 1938 at the age of seventeen (17) with her mother, Anna, and her younger sister, Helen, and entered the U.S. in August of that year-- one month before Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland, a year prior to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and just as the U.S. barred its door to Jewish immigration.
But if this narrow escape from the Shoah that annihilated her extended family haunted Sylvia, she never betrayed it. To the contrary, Sylvia’s vivacity, playfulness, and inexhaustible energy bound her to lifelong friends, distant family, and complete strangers. Whether slaving all day in an overheated kitchen to cook a holiday meal or awakening at 5am to bake a veritable menu of cookies and cakes for her beloved grandchildren, or charming customers at the family hardware store, or bouncing up and down on the dance floor at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs despite severe arthritis and painful bunions, Sylvia laughed off obstacles and inconveniences that would have stymied women half her age.
Food occupied a central place in her life and in her connection to loved ones. Indeed her recipes—a syncretic blend of American, Eastern European, and Jewish cuisine— became family legend. Soups- Chicken, Vegetable, Potato, and Split Pea. Chicken- breaded, roasted, southern fried, barbecued. Kreplach, Gefilte Fish, Chrane, Pot Pies, Pot Roast, Chicken Hamburgers, Lukson Kugel, Potato Kugel, Potato Latkes, Chopped Liver baked in filo dough. Mandel Bread, Marmalade cookies, Chocolate Babka, Raisin Babka, Black and White Cake, Honey Cake, Chocolate Roll, Rugleach, Apple Pie and Strudel.
Along with her physical beauty and infectious magnetism, this culinary prowess could overcome the mightiest language barrier. It attracted men by the dozens and eventually, a husband. Although Sylvia and her future spouse didn’t speak a common tongue, Leonard, through his command of German, and his fiancé, through her fluency in Yiddish, comprehended enough to know they shared a common dream: to earn a living, to observe their religion, and to raise two children free from the Jew-hatred that harried them from Eastern Europe and that had exterminated their extended families.
Sylvia and Leonard married in 1940 and moved into a Bronx apartment on Kelly Street down the block, as it happens, from where Colin Powell’s family resided. Sylvia gave birth to her daughter Renee in 1943 while Leonard, serving in the U.S. military, prepared to land at Normandy. Their son, Jerome, was born in 1949, after the Rosmans relocated to Manhattan. In 1956, the family moved across the Hudson to College Towers in Jersey City where Sylvia lived for the next forty years. She spent her middle years as a traditional homemaker, uxorious wife, and versatile assistant at the family store, Boulevard Hardware, greeting customers, feeding the dog, and running assorted errands. In retirement, she split her time between Jersey City, New Jersey and Coconut Creek, Florida, and in her final years, she resided at the Stein Assisted Living Facility for Seniors.
Sylvia is survived by her sister Helen Kleiner; her daughter, Renee Schweber; her son, Jerry Rosman; her grandchildren, Matthew Schweber, Adam Schweber, and Brooke Bokor; and her great-grandchildren, Eli Bokor and Abigail Bokor.
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