Obituary

Anna Glatt, 92

Survived the Holocaust; was a neighbor of Elie Wisel

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Born in Sighet, a town in northern Romania, in the early 1920s, Anna Lieberman Glatt, lived down the street from Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel, who died on July 2, and their neighborhood was not the only thing they shared. Similar to his experience during the Holocaust, her entire family was deported and she, too, spent time at Auschwitz as did Wiesel.

Glatt, a Flatbush, Brooklyn native died on July 12. She was 92.

Her entire family, except her sister, Ettel Lieberman, was killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anna Glatt was the oldest of six children; she had three sisters and two brothers. After being at Auschwitz for a little less than a year, Glatt and Lieberman were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, according to Glatt’s son,

Rabbi Dr. Aaron Glatt, who is chairman of the department of medicine at South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, an assistant rabbi at Young Israel of Woodmere and a Woodmere resident.

In 1944, Glatt lost more than 90 relatives in one day to the brutality of the Nazis at Auschwitz. During her time in concentration camp, the Nazis were unhappy with the speed at which she removed her earring upon their request, so a guard hit her ear with a rifle and she was deaf in that ear ever since.

A week after Bergen-Belsen was liberated by Allied troops, Glatt buried Ettel who died of “malnutrition, typhus and the tortures she was subjected to from the Nazis,” Aaron Glatt said, “My mother was always very proud that she buried her sister by herself, with her own hands.”

After being liberated from Bergen-Belsen, Glatt went to a hospital in Sweden for a short time and then came to the U.S. in 1945, where, as her son said: “She built a beautiful life for herself.”

She learned English, graduated from Brooklyn College and got a job as a bookkeeper. A decade after coming to the U.S., she married Joseph Glatt, who also survived the Holocaust. He died in 2007 at 84. He worked as an accountant.

Both Anna and Joseph Glatt were active in their community, Aaron Glatt said. Anna was the president of the PTA at various schools in Brooklyn, and was most active at Prospect Park Yeshiva, where she spearheaded the construction of a library in the 1960s. “She was the most amazing person I know,” Aaron Glatt said.

The funeral was held on July 13 at Shomrei Hadas Chapels in Brooklyn. Glatt was interred at Beth Moses Cemetery in Farmingdale. Shiva was observed at the Fenster home in Brooklyn and the Glatt home in Woodmere July 16-19.

In addition to her son, Aaron Glatt and his wife, Margie, Glatt is survived by another son, Avi Glatt and his wife, Lorraine, her daughter, Leora Fenster and her husband, Jay and more than 40 direct biological descendants in addition to the many in-law children and grandchildren who she treated as her own.