Romi Cohn –a Czechoslovakian-born American rabbi, mohel, and real estate developer – died after contracting coronavirus on March 24, 2020.
Avraham Hakohen Cohn was born on March 10, 1929 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. He was one of seven children.
World War II and the Holocaust See also: The Holocaust in Slovakia
During World War II, most Slovak Jews were deported to concentration camps. While Cohn's family managed to sneak him into Hungary, his mother, as well as two of his brothers and two of his sisters died in camps. In Hungary, Cohn studied in a Hasidic yeshiva until 1944 when the Nazis occupied the country. At that point, at the age of 15, he escaped back into Slovakia and joined a partisan brigade fighting the Nazis. As a partisan, he provided Jewish refugees with housing and false Christian identifications. Through his efforts, he was able to save 56 families.[dubious – discuss]
After the war, Cohn emigrated to the U.S. He "became wealthy developing thousands of single-family homes on Staten Island" and "turned himself into an expert mohel, performing thousands of circumcisions and writing scholarly articles."
On January 29, 2020, at the invitation of his congressman Max Rose, Cohen delivered the opening prayer for the U.S. House of Representatives to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
As a mohel, Cohn "set up an operating theater in his Staten Island home to circumcise adult Russian Jews who had not been able to undergo the ritual as infants because of Soviet strictures."
In almost all of the circumcisions Cohn performed, he practiced the ancient controversial practice of metzitzah b'peh in which the mohel places his mouth directly on the circumcision wound to draw blood away from the cut.
In the U.S., Cohn married Malvine Geldzahler. They had no children. Cohn died on March 24, 2020, at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York of respiratory distress caused by pneumonia and COVID-19.