Mayer and Joan Sayovits
Mayer Sayovits was born on October 10, 1914 in Oradia, Romania, to Yitzchak Isaac and Ita Sayovits. He had 12 siblings, only five of whom survived the Holocaust: brothers Elya, Yehuda, and Mordechai, and sisters Suri Lowinger and Esther Abraham. Along with his parents and 7 other siblings, an unknown number of Mayer’s nieces and nephews perished, including two of Esther’s children who were victims of the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
As members of the Vizhnitzer Chasidim, the Sayovits family was strictly religious, and Mayer received a yeshivah education through high school. His parents owned a transportation company that operated trucks and buses, as well as a fur business. Although Jews in Oradia had experienced antisemitism before World War II, the situation became more precarious after Nazi Germany awarded Northern Transylvania to their Hungarian allies. From that point, the Jews in the region were subjected to anti-Jewish laws but they continued to live in relative safety until the Nazi occupation of Hungary in March 1944. Persecution of the area’s Jews escalated: They were forced to wear a Jewish star beginning on April 5th, fenced into two ghettos from May 3rd, and were deported to Auschwitz in a series of liquidations from May through June 27th.
Before these events unfolded, Mayer had been drafted by the Romanian army but was discharged after he managed to bribe his commanding officer. He then joined a group of Jewish partisans hiding in the woods in Romania. He learned to forge identity papers and helped many Jews acquire false documents to elude capture. He would also sometimes sneak into town and use his family’s vehicles to rescue Jews in hiding.
Joan Sayovits, also known by her Hebrew name Devorah Henya, was born on September 10, 1917, in Sighet, Romania, to Shlomo Tzvi and Rachel Indig. She had 11 siblings, only five of whom survived the Holocaust: brothers Fred, Mordechai Shmuel, Victor and Moshe Indig, and sister Tzili Tesler. Of 44 children, only two of Joan’s nieces and nephews survived: Yaakov Tesler and Eliezer Tal (changed from Tesler), both of whom live in Israel.
Joan’s family, which was affiliated with the Sigheter Chasidim, was also strictly religious. Since girls generally didn’t pursue education in the community at that time, she only attended school through third grade. Mayer and Joan met and got engaged before the war, but they were separated when he was drafted. In April 1944, the Jews of Sighet, which was also part of Transylvania, were forced into a ghetto, and. Joan was among those deported to Auschwitz by cattle car that May. In a stroke of good fortune, Joan reconnected with a non-Jewish family physician there, who helped her survive by hiding her in the camp. At Auschwitz, Joan also met Mayer’s sisters Esther and Suri, who credited her with saving their lives by providing them with scraps of food.
Joan was transferred to Bergen Belsen in January 1945, and liberated by the British Armed Forces in April 1945. When asked if there was somewhere she wished to go – and not knowing whether any of her family was alive – she replied, “Bronx, America” where her older brother, Frank, had emigrated before the war. Joan was placed on a ship in Oslo, Norway, and arrived safely in New York City. She lived with her brother until March 1948.
After the war, Mayer searched for Joan while living in a Displaced Persons (DP) camp. At the same time, Joan was looking for Mayer. She wrote many letters, one of which eventually reached him. Now able to communicate, they made plans for him to emigrate to New York. Unfortunately, United States Immigration quotas prevented him from joining her. Mayer befriended a man who was affiliated with a shipping company and managed to board one of its vessels sailing across the Atlantic. He made his way to Trinidad and Tobago, where he registered as a college student, and finally arrived in New York in March 1948.
Mayer and Joan married days later, on March 10th. They had a son, Sidney, on March 11, 1949, and a daughter, Judy, on July 23, 1951. Mayer opened a butcher shop on Featherbed Lane in the Bronx, and Joan worked as a saleswoman at Sheff’s, a bakery on Jerome Avenue. Sidney married Jayne Shields in 1971 and they had three children, Alison, the mother of Heschel students Noah (HS Class of 2023) and Ethan (HS ‘28) Wishengrad; Jared, and Brandon. Mayer and Joan also had three grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren from their daughter Judy and her husband Dr. Allen Lebovits.
Joan passed away on January 24, 1983, when she was just 65 years old, and Mayer passed away on August 14, 1991, at the age of 76.
