Judith Esther Kurz, born in Yugoslavia and among the generation of the founders of the state of Israel, died of lung and kidney complications in Woodland Hills, California on Thanksgiving evening, November 25, after living more than 50 years in her adopted home of Los Angeles. She was 81.
Well-read, erudite, outspoken and elegant, she spoke fluent English, Hungarian, Hebrew, Serbian, German and Yiddish. With her husband, Eli Michael Kurz, and their many friends, she loved attending concerts and the theater, and drew special pleasure from the achievements of her family.
Yudit (Judith) Esther Hubert was born in Ada,Yugoslavia, in the Vojvodina region near the Hungarian border, on January 29, 1929. Her parents, Nandor and Tova Hubert, along with Nandor’s brother Feri and his wife Sari, owned and operated the local flour mill. They were the first family to own a car in Ada, and enjoyed driving to the Dalmatian coast for summer vacations.
Not long after World War II began and life in Ada became untenable, the extended family first fled south to Belgrade. After the German Luftwaffe bombed the Serbian capital, the family once again was on the run, this time heading north to Budapest, Hungary.
As the Nazis finally turned their wrath on the Jews of Hungary in 1944, Judith’s mother placed her on a Kindertransport train intended, eventually, to lead to escape in Palestine. Her younger brother, Israel Hubert, had already been smuggled successfully out of Hungary on a similar Kindertransport, but Judith was not as fortunate. Her train was intercepted and redirected to Auschwitz. Earlier, her father had been captured and sent to a Soviet labor camp where he died after being denied insulin to treat his diabetes, a disease she also battled most of her life.
As the Russian army closed in on Auschwitz in January 1945, with Judith Hubert turning 16, she and her fellow concentration camp inmates began the infamous “death march” from southern Poland to Bergen-Belsen, deep into the heart of Germany. Many of the prisoners were murdered along the way, dying from beatings, executions, exhaustion, malnutrition, frosty winter conditions and disease. She and the other survivors arrived emaciated, but were liberated soon thereafter by British forces.
Weighing perhaps 70 pounds, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent much of the next year in surgery and receiving treatment in a sanatorium in Sweden. When she was well enough to travel, she boarded a freighter in Bergen, Norway for an arduous weeks-long trip to Palestine, stopping at several ports along the way, including Alexandria, Egypt, where she was the only traveler not allowed to disembark. Days later she was reunited with her mother and brother.
In 1949, she married Elimelech (Eli Michael) Kurz, who had arrived in Palestine in 1939 from Kosice (Kassa), Slovakia. Kurz and his younger brother, Josef (Joe)—also a long-time resident of Los Angeles—were the only holocaust survivors in their family, as both parents and a brother and sister were murdered at Auschwitz. Eli Kurz, known as “Mickey” to everyone, fought in the pre-state underground and served in the Israeli army during the 1948 War of Independence and, later, the 1956 Suez war.
With their 5 year old son Nahum (Norman), Judith and Eli Kurz immigrated to the United States in 1957. They lived for 7 years in the Hollywood area, had another child, Carol, in 1959, and in 1964 moved to Van Nuys.
Having been denied the opportunity to fulfill her dream of becoming a doctor, she started taking college classes when she was 46 years old. She worked for many years as a bookkeeper and accountant in local San Fernando Valley businesses. Later, she volunteered her time to work with at risk children, and continued to take classes at the University of Judaism.
In addition to her love of the arts, she read widely and was interested in American politics and progressive causes, and remained deeply connected to Israel and Jewish life in Los Angeles, the United States and around the world.
She provided recorded testimony of her WWII experiences to the Shoah Foundation and to the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum.
She and Mickey enjoyed traveling widely abroad, especially to see extended family and friends in Israel. In Los Angeles, they were part of a tight-knit community of Hungarian-speaking, holocaust-surviving Israeli emigres who socialized regularly and vigorously propelled their children and grandchildren to fulfill the American dream.
Mickey died in 1995 at age 78 of a heart attack. Judith Kurz suffered enormously when her granddaughter, Adina Tamar Senensieb, died at the the age of 12 after a difficult life as a brilliant and vibrant girl afflicted at birth with multiple genetic disorders. Notwithstanding the extraordinary challenges she faced throughout her life, Judith Kurz remained positive. Always ready with a smile and a laugh, she loved to share a good story.
Before she died, she requested those so inclined to continue to support her two favorite charities, Magen David Adom (the Israeli Red Cross) and Shane’s Inspiration, an organization devoted to serving the needs of disabled children.
Kurz is survived by her son Norman Jacob Kurz, a political and communications consultant, and his wife, Mimi Guernica and their sons, Julian and Aaron, of Bethesda, Maryland, and her daughter Carol Rachel Kurz, an OB/GYN and her husband, David Senensieb, and their son, Nadav, of Calabasas. She is also survived by her brother Israel Hubert and his family, of Toronto, Canada, and a large extended family in Israel, not to mention countless friends she made easily and often everywhere she went.