Dr. Leopold Weis

Isaac Mayer Wise: the founder of American Judaism: a biography By Max Benjamin May (Scroll to pages 22 - 23)

Family of Dr.Leopold Wise who studied medicine in Padua, Italy. Was renowned as a Chacham.

Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise’s great-grandfather was a physician named Leo, who had studied medicine in Padua, practiced at Marienbad, and lived n the neighborhood, in the village of Dermaul. This physician was known as Dr. Leo, and spoken of by his co-religionists as Leo “Chakam,” the Hebrew for Wise.

The son of this Dr. Leo, or Leo Weis, was Isaiah, who also studied medicine at Padua and likewise settled at Dermaul. This Doctor Isaiah lived to be over ninety years of age. Besides learned in his profession he was well versed in Talmudical and rabbinical literature, and became the teacher of his son, whom he named for his father, Leo.

This Leo, grandson of the Doctor Leo who had studied at Padua, was educated by his father and became a teacher. Leo Weis was never a vigorous man, and died shorty after the birth of his youngest child, a daughter. Nothing certain is known of his early life.

Shortly after receiving his education he removed from Dermal to Steingrub, a small village of a few hundred inhabitants near the town of Eger, in Bohemia, overlooking Saxony and Bavaria. In this village of Steingrub, in which there dwelt a large number of Catholics, Leo Weis was married twice. His second wife was Regina Weis.

The families were distantly related. As already stated, nothing is known of the ancestry of Regina Weis. She was, however, a handsome woman, bright, cheerful, lovable, and devoted. She emigrated to America in 1867 with her son Samuel and later lived in Peoria, Illinois, with her daughter, Caroline Korsosky, where she died in 1880 at a ripe old age.