I'm excited to share with you the story of the Oblatt family, the most random and one of the most interesting branches on my family tree, and the winding path that led to its unraveling from not knowing about its existence to discovering fascinating famous, and infamous, relatives.
1. My Great-Grandmother
At the starting point of my genealogical research, very little was known about my grandfather Yehuda's family. Regarding his mother, Teréz Frank née Neuhausz, and her family, he himself had very little knowledge. He just said that her parents died young, and he didn’t know where or what from.
According to her Hungarian birth certificate, which he gave me, she was born on the 4th or April 1894, in Érsekújvár, now Nové Zámky, Slovakia. Her parents were Lipót (the Hungarian version of Leopold) Neuhausz from Érsekújvár and Erna née Schwitzer, from Kovárcz (now Kovarce, near the Slovak city Topoľčany). When and where they died – It was up to me to discover.
First, I searched on JewishGen for the name Neuhaus in Nové Zámky. Only one family was documented with this name in the 1869 census, which seemed strange, given that Neuhaus was the German name of the city.
However, the only family that appears is that of Abraham Neuhaus and his wife, Teréz Oblatt, with four children. Abraham was born in 1810 and Teréz in 1817, both born in Ürmény (nowadays called Mojmírovce in Slovakia), about 30 km from Nové Zámky. Their four children listed in the census are Ignac (born in Ürmény, 1850), Antonia (Ürmény, 1853), Leopold (Nové Zámky, 1859), and Katalin (no year or place of birth).
In the relevant vital records, I traced the birth record of Leopold, son of Abraham Neuhaus and Rezi Oblatt, as well as those of his siblings Ignac and Antonia. I also discovered that the eldest daughter Katharina married Salamon Rothman in 1864, and was already a mother herself by 1869, so that’s the reason for her missing information in her parents’ household.
However, the parents were born long before the Jewish community started documenting its vital records. In Ürmény, the Neuhaus family was not documented at all, and only two marriage records showed the name Oblath or Oblat. I didn’t see a way to connect them, so I didn’t expect there would be a way to progress any further.
Then, with the help of a friend who has access to the wonderful database “Otzar HaHochma” (“The treasure of wisdom” in Hebrew, which is a huge digital library, containing more than 146,000 Judaic books, scanned in their original format), I tried to search for these names in rabbinic sources.
Shockingly, we found an article by rabbi Moshe Alexander “Zusha” Künstlicher from July 2011. It was the first article in the very first issue of “Alei Zikaron” (in Hebrew: “Pages of memory”), a publication by “Machon Zikaron” (in Hebrew: “Memorial Institute”, dedicated to the commemoration of Hungarian Jewry), Bnei-Brak, Israel. This article documents the inheritance dispute in a rabbinical court, following the passing of Rev Shlomo Zalman Császár-Oblath from the Hebrew year 5531, meaning 254 years ago.
The court was handling the appeal of the beneficiaries of Shlomo Zalman’s will. They had a problem with an endowment fund he created, which he ordered to go to the Jewish community of Eisenstadt, with the condition that his wife, sons and sons in-law, and their descendants, would be appointed heads of the community, FOREVER. The will clarified that IF the Eisenstadt community refuses this generous offer, his sons in law Isaac and Reuven will have the freedom to decide which other community will inherit this treasure for the same condition. So basically, by offering an endowment of 30,000 Zaggy (the currency mentioned in the will), Mr. Oblatt tried to effectively turn his descendants into some sort of Jewish barons in Eisenstadt, which belonged to the noble Esterházy family.
Künstlicher’s article lists the descendants of Shlomo Zalman Császár-Oblath, including “his daughter Ms. Shifra, wife of Rabbi Reuven Rakonitz, son of Rabbi Aryeh Yehuda Leib Rakonitz [who died on the 16th of Tevet 5513 and is buried in the old cemetery in Pressburg]. Rabbi Reuven served as the rabbi of Ürmény (I am doubtful in this), and Veszprém, (5537 - 5551) and Zsámbék. He died around 5579”. (p. 2-13)
Obviously, the mention of a rabbi named Oblath from Ürmény, even if doubtful, caught my attention, so I tried to find more sources regarding this.
A book published in 1907 by Rabbi Meir Stein from Trnava, Slovakia, supplied my next lead. In the book, titled “Even HaMeir”, describing the rabbis of Hungary, I found a short entry about Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Rakonitz-Oblatt:
“Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Rakonitz-Oblatt, Rabbi of the holy community of Ürmény, son of Rabbi Reuven Rakonitz who was head of the rabbinical court of the holy community of Veszprém and Bomben. He was a student of the fountain of Torah – late Rabbi Moshe, author of the book ‘Chatam Soffer’, as mentioned in his responsa, Even Ha’Ezer, Part I, Section 99, and was accepted as head of the rabbinical court of Bátorkeszi. Later, he held the rabbi's position in Ürmény, and died on the 26th of Nisan in the year 5596. On his mother’s side, this rabbi was a descendant of the Newall family, who were appointed to be leaders of the Jewish community by the monarchy; and his grandson was the renowned physician Dr. Schenk from Vienna”.
So… it turns out there WAS a rabbi in Ürmény from the Oblatt family, who might be connected to Terezia Neuhaus; and that she may have had a relative in Vienna, who was prominent enough for a rabbi to consider it respectable to boast about him though he was a medical doctor.
This intrigued me even more, and I went to search for a couple with the names Schenk and Oblatt, and/or someone named Schenk from Vienna who might have been born in Ürmény. The mysteries were piling up, but I still couldn't find the connection.
2. The Doctor (and the Princes)
In Vienna, I found several candidates, and through a short elimination process, I zoomed in on Dr. Samuel Leopold Alfred Schenk, an intriguing and important historical figure that I’m excited to introduce to those who haven’t heard of him, as so many living nowadays owe their lives to his pioneering research.
Samuel Leopold Schenk was born in Ürmény on 23 August 1840, son of Israel and Sali Schenk. In 1865, he completed his doctorate in medicine at the University of Vienna, and on 10 October 1869, he married Rosalia Wollner in the city of Nitra, (then in Hungary but nowadays Slovakia).
Samuel advanced to the rank of professor at the University of Vienna by the age of 28, and at 33, he became a professor of embryology. He developed In Vitro fertilization through experiments with eggs of rabbits and guinea pigs.
Dr. Schenk and his wife had four sons, all born in Vienna:
Arthur (Avraham), born on 23 February 1873.
Friedrich (Shlomo), born on 17 July 1874.
Eugen Alois (Zalman), born on 28 September 1878.
Johannes, born on 22 December 1879.
On 24 April 1881, Schenk and his wife were baptized into Christianity at St. Stephen's Church in the heart of Vienna. The baptism record notes that Mr. Schenk's godfather was Prince Alfred of Liechtenstein, and his wife Rosalia’s godmother was Princess Henrietta of Liechtenstein. Not coincidentally, the names Alfred and Henrietta were added to their names, officially.
However, Despite his groundbreaking work, he faced repeated rejections when trying to achieve the rank of associate professor, partly due to anti-Semitic reasons prevalent at the time. He and his family were even subjected to antisemitic caricatures in Austrian newspapers, mocking their large family (This relates to the fact that part of the switch to modernity in Europe was that families had less and less children, while religious Jewish families remained larger, and still significantly smaller than the previous generation).
In 2020, Tatjana Buklijas, a researcher from New Zealand, published a study on Dr. Schenk, which was featured in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. Buklijas cites Mary Douglas in claiming that Dr. Schenk came from a poor rural Jewish family. It seems that both were unaware that he was a grandson of a rabbi and came from a wealthy and important family.
Around the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Schenk faced disciplinary proceedings at the University of Vienna because he published a theory he developed regarding ways to control the sex of the embryo that would be conceived, through nutrition. By now this theory was already scientifically refuted, but the self-publication itself was not in accordance with the academic behavioral standards of the time. As an excessive punishment, he was forced into early retirement.
About two years later, on 17 August 1902, he passed away in the spa town of Bad Schwanberg in western Styria, Austria, and was buried there. He was survived by his wife and their four sons.
All sons grew up and became doctors in various fields. The eldest son, Arthur, passed away on 15 June 1917.
Subsequently, with the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi regime regarded the converted widow Sali Schenk and her sons, who were baptized in childhood or infancy and raised as Christians, as Jews, according to the Nuremberg Laws that defined who was a Jew. Sali and her second son Friedrich were deported to the concentration camp Theresienstadt, and were murdered there – she on 14 August 1942, and her son two days later.
The third son, Eugen, who held a doctorate in law, was protected because his wife was considered “Aryan”. However, he couldn't continue to work. Their son, Otto, born in 1930, was forced to join the Hitler Youth and was later got expelled due to his half-breed status.
Otto Schenk grew up to become a famous Actor, and Theater- and Opera-director in Austria and passed away on 9 January 2025.
Sadly, I never had the opportunity to reach out to him, to introduce myself as his blood relative, and to complete the story of our shared family history, which he never had the chance to know. That's why I decided to share this story here, in his honor.
3. The Rabbi
Returning to Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Leib Oblatt from Ürmény, three significant developments helped me complete the picture:
In the meantime, DNA matches that came up for me on the FamilyTreeDNA site helped me identify several people from around the world, all living descendants of Oblatt / Oblat / Oblath / Obláth / Obblat families. Genetic matches between the members of this research group revealed that despite being descendants of Oblatt families from various different places across the Hungarian kingdom, we all cross match one way or another. Cross-referencing these DNA matches and combining them with archival research proved that a branch of the Oblath family goes back to a man named Israel Oblath who lived in the village Salgó, today Svätoplukovo, Slovakia, and was buried in the nearby Ürmény. DNA showed that we are indeed cousins, meaning that Israel must have been another son of the rabbi. Alongside him, several other children of Rabbi Oblatt were discovered in vital records books and through funeral notices that were published back in the day – Salamon, the eldest son, who married Johanna (Cheila) Massel/Meiselisch, granddaughter of Rabbi Rafael Meiselisch from Ukraine (known by the title of his book “Tosafot Shabbat”). Another son, Lazar Oblath, was born in Zsámbék around 1803, married Eržebet Steiner from Ürmény, and passed away in Budapest. A daughter named Ernestina (Esther) was born in Ürmény around 1816, and married Zakariás Neubrunn, and they also had at least six children and many grandchildren.
A living descendant of the Oblath family from Budapest managed to locate interesting archival documents, scanned and made accessible by HUNGARICANA, a common website of Hungarian archives, that add to the life story of Shlomo Zalman, or Salamon Oblatt (the rabbi's grandfather, from the inheritance dispute mentioned above). Around 1750, Shlomo Zalman Oblath purchased a house on St. Laszlo Street in the city of Pápa in Hungary (the same street where his brother Isaac also lived). In 1752, Count Esterházy wrote a letter to the bishop of the city of Nitra concerning Salamon Oblath, who was supplying firewood to the various cities owned by the Esterházy family.
In 1765, Salmon Oblath wanted to buy another house in Pápa for his sons, but on 23 January 1770, he was documented as living in the city of Veszprém, when his name appeared in a contract he signed with Count Battyány that permitted the Oblath family to collect firewood from the forest owned by Battyány.
It is worth mentioning that the Esterházy family owned the northern part of the Burgenland region, including the city of Eisenstadt, as well as the cities of Tata, Pápa, and Baja in Hungary, and parts of Slovakia, while the Battyány family owned the southern part of Burgenland. From this, one can understand Salamon Oblath's interest in ensuring the growing influence of his descendants in the Jewish community of Eisenstadt.
After Salmon's death, his widow Feigla Oblatt sold the house in Pápa in 1773. It is unknown when and where she passed away.
The wildest thing about all these truly amazing revelations, is that the Jewish Oblatt family even had a surname as far back as 1750, considering that the Jews in the Hungarian kingdom were only forced to take on latin names and surnames around 1781, when emperor Jozef II issued his ‘Bill of Tolerance’.
I visited the Jewish Cemeteries in Nové Zámky and the nearby Šurany, which resulted with limited success. However, my dear friend Ludmila, who has devoted invaluable time and effort in recent years to documenting Jewish cemeteries in Slovakia, documented the two, as well as the Jewish cemetery of Mojmírovce, formerly Ürmény.
Among the tombstones she photographed, several wonderful surprises were found:
The wife of Rabbi Oblatt: “You passed away on the holy Shabbat, 9 Tammuz 5609 in the counting of days / Here lays the modest woman, the Rebbezin / You chose the path of faith and never strayed from it / the fear of god was your aim and desire / Your pure soul will rest in the shade of the guardian of the doors of Israel / anyone who knew you would say that you exceeded all women / the wife of the great luminary Rabbi ASHL (Acronyms of Avraham Shmuel Leib) / may your rightous memory be of blessing”.
This tombstone revealed that the rabbi's wife was named Dina. This makes sense, as each of her children (those I already had proof for as well as those I was still only suspecting) named one of their daughters Dina or in German – Antonia, all born after the death of their mother Dina.
Daughter Rosalia / Sarah Kayla Schenk neé Oblatt:
“Died on the holi Sabbath 4th day of the month Adar I / and was buried on Sunday / in the year 5627 / The dear, humble, pious and righteous womanMrs. Keila Sarah (may her soul rest in Eden) / Wife of the late honorable Mr. Ahron Avraham / daughter of the late great rabbinnical luminary, our teacher the rabbi / Avraham Shmuel Yehuda (may the memory ofthe righteous be a blessing) / and her mother the Rebbetzin Mrs. Dina (may her sould rest in Eden) / The voice of your descendants is lamenting you / All your life you were a woman of valor to your husband Abraham / You have left your home and elevated to the highness of the spirit / Your sons are yelling 'Where is our mother Sarah?' / You have reached out to do right by the poorest of your people / You have produced a gang for the good god from the fruit of your loins / Oy Aah, you have made the journey to death.Hier ruhet / die ehrwürdige frau / Sara Schenk / Geboren OBLATT / Gestorben am 9. Februar 1867 / Friede seiner Asche!"
This gravestone provided the final seal of approval for the connection between Dr. Schenk from Vienna and his grandfather, Rabbi Oblatt, and to my side of the family.
Daughter Katalin / Gitel Fonfeder neé Oblatt:
“Buried Here / The righteous woman of valor, Mrs. Gittel / wife of our teacher the rabbi Moshe Fonfeder / May his memory be of blessing / A majestic fruit of a majestic tree / daughter of the rabbi of great light / our teacher the rabbi Avraham Shmuel Yehuda Rakonitz / died on Monday 8 Tishrei 5644”.
This tombstone provided the final validation for the connection between Dr. Schenk from Vienna and my family’s rabbi.
And the golden proof:
In Nové Zámky, a tombstone was found with this inscription:
“Here lays / The important woman Mrs. Reizel / daughter of the great luminary Rabbi Shmuel Leib / wife of R' Avraham Wolf Neuhaus / There are many women of valor and you exceeded them all / You were fearful of heaven and also wise of heart / The memory of your actions is engraved on your sons' hearts / You will never be forgotten by your descendants / died 16 Adar 5643 / May her soul be bound up in the bond of everlasting life.Hier ruhet / Theresia Neuhaus / gestorben im 66sten lebensjahre / Friede ihren Aschen”.
Thus, despite starting my journey with no information on this branch of the family whatsoever, I suddenly discovered its history extending deep into the 18th century. It turns out that we descend of yet another rabbi, this time one who had faded away from public memory.
Now, thanks to vital records, Jewish genealogy resources, rabbinical sources and the Hebrew poetry found on Jewish gravestones around Central Europe, I was able to create a huge tree, containing this rabbi’s ancestors, his wife and mother, who both died long before vital records began for the Jews in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, his seven children, 30 grandchildren and numerous scattered living descendants around the globe - from Alaska to Hungary, Austria, Israel, Serbia, and even Australia.
Three other HUGE Oblatt trees were built and await the day we will eventually trace the exact link between all branches of these family, who are certainly related, as proven genetically, but branched out before most families even got a last name.
I managed to document my own branch, as the graves of Theresia (Reizel) Neuhaus née Oblatt and her husband Abraham Wolf Neuhaus, as well as the graves of their son Leopold (Reuven Yehuda) Neuhaus and his wife Ernestina (Esther) née Schwitzer, still stand in Nové Zámky.
Alongside them, another dramatic surprise was uncovered: Ernestina's father, Moritz (Moshe) Schwitzer, remarried in his old age, as a widower, to none other than Antonia (Dina) Neuhaus, older sister of his son-in-law Leopold.
On a very personal note, I am sad that I made all these discoveries only after my grandfather passed away, as I would have loved to sit with him and tell him that I found out that he, Yehuda, was actually named after his grandfather, Leopold Neuhaus, and is a namesake of Leopold’s grandfather, a rabbi. Knowing him, my grandfather would burst out laughing to learn that he was a descendant of a rabbinical dynasty, and secretly would also be touched and feel pride.
Dear reader -
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