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Judah Samet
Judah Samet (Hebrew: יהודה סמט; February 5, 1938 – September 27, 2022) was a Hungarian-American businessman, speaker, and Holocaust survivor. At the age of six, he and his family were taken from Debrecen, Hungary, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they spent eleven months. After the Second World War the family immigrated to Israel, where he subsequently served in the Israel Defense Forces and worked as a teacher. He later moved to Canada and then to the United States. In 2018, he was a witness to and survivor of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. He was a jeweler and speaker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Early lifeJudah Samet was born in Debrecen, Hungary on February 5, 1938, to an Orthodox Jewish family.[1] His parents owned and managed two knitting factories and had four children: two sons, Moshe and Yakove, both older than Judah, and the youngest, a daughter, Henyah.[1][2] The family lived across the street from the synagogue.[3] HolocaustIn March 1944, Nazis entered Debrecen and forced thousands of Jews into railcars with limited space, food and water.[2] Samet remembers them being ignored by other citizens.[2] He was with his family in a train going to the Auschwitz concentration camp, but it was rerouted to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after Czechoslovak partisans reportedly destroyed train tracks.[3][2] Samet's father had received tickets and passports to emigrate to the United States but the family was not able to leave in time.[1] Before they were sent to Bergen-Belsen, Samet and his family were held at a lumberyard in Austria.[4] They got to the camp around July 1944,[3] where Samet could only eat flavored water ("soup") and "moldy, rock-hard bread" every day, and sometimes bit bones to try to ease the starvation.[2] Samet and his siblings would receive some bread from their mother,[2] which he described as the reason they stayed alive.[5] Samet's mother told him to eat lice, which had infected the camp.[5] A German soldier contemplated killing Samet's mother because she asked for more supplies, but his superior officer decided to keep her as an interpreter for the Gestapo.[5][1] A fellow inmate of Samet's performed a surgery on Samet's abscess on the back of his head.[1] After eleven months in the camp Samet and his family were sent by train to an unknown location.[3] It was speculated that they were going to the Theresienstadt Ghetto,[1][2][4] or off a bridge.[1] The train stopped in a forest close to Berlin, and an armored tank[2] or infantry[6] division showed up.[2] Samet's father then pointed out that the tank's commander was American,[1] and he was later revealed to be a Jew.[7] Samet's father Yekutil died a week later from typhoid fever.[2] Through Paris and Marseille, Samet and his family moved to Israel in 1946, where they lived in an Orthodox orphanage.[1][3][4] Samet graduated from a seminary high school.[1][3] Career and activitiesAfter graduation Samet served in the Israel Defense Forces' Paratroopers Brigade.[3][8] His brother Jacob died in the Suez Crisis as a machine gunner for the IDF.[3] He also worked as a teacher and managed two towns for the government of Israel.[1][3] Joining family members, Samet moved to Toronto in 1961 and subsequently to New York City.[2][3][4] In New York City, he worked at his uncle's coat factory.[3] He met a teacher from Pittsburgh, Barbara, whom he later married and with whom he had a daughter, Elizabeth.[1][2][3][9] Samet moved to Pittsburgh in 1962.[2] He attended Duquesne University but did not graduate.[3] In the Downtown Pittsburgh Clark Building, Samet managed and ultimately owned Irving Schiffman Jewelers, founded in 1941 by his father-in-law.[2][10][11] Samet also worked as a teacher.[9] He served for 40 years as a Torah reader and cantor at the Conservative Tree of Life – Or L'Simcha Congregation, where he had been a member since 1964.[3][4] From 2011, Samet gave public speeches about his life at high schools, universities, and churches.[2][3][6][12] He said that he was "energized" by the positive reception of his speeches.[3] Pittsburgh synagogue shootingOn October 27, 2018, eleven Jews were killed and seven injured in a mass shooting during Shabbat services at the Tree of Life building, marking the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.[4] Samet was four or five minutes late to the service because he had been delayed by his housekeeper.[4] When he pulled into a handicapped spot on the parking lot, he was approached by a man who told him to leave due to the active shooter.[4] Before pulling out of the parking lot unharmed, Samet had a clear vision of the shooting exchange between the gunman and a police officer.[4]
.jpg) U.S. President Donald Trump invited Samet to be one of his personal guests at the 2019 State of the Union Address, which Trump gave on February 5, 2019.[14] Samet visited the White House and met President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, First Daughter Ivanka Trump, and Senior Advisor to the President Jared Kushner.[12] After Trump introduced Samet in the Address and noted that it was Samet's 81st birthday, the crowd applauded, gave him a standing ovation, and sang "Happy Birthday" to him.[15][16] Samet smiled, blew a kiss, waved down to Trump, stood up, bowed his head, and shouted "thank you". Trump jokingly conducted with his hands and said, "They wouldn't do that for me".[15][16][17] He was not wearing his kippah at the Address because a government employee had told him "nobody wears a hat here" upon entering the House Chamber.[18] Samet later said that he admired Trump and called him a "working man".[12] A Republican, Samet supported Trump, saying about him: "I like him very much. He is strongly pro-Israel. That a man would go outright for Israel and declare for Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel ... that was something new."[4][19] He was, however, not politically active, as opposed to his Democratic family members.[20] Personal life and deathSamet died from complications of stomach cancer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 27, 2022, at the age of 84.[21] References
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