Herbert Rosenfeld

Herbert Rosenfeld was born April 7, 1900, in Tilsit in East Prussia in what was then Germany. The town is now known as Sovetsk and is part of western Russia.

The family moved to Berlin in 1907. While attending high school, Herbert became friends with Hans Loewenthal. Both became doctors. On Jan. 12, 1934, Hans would introduce his niece Ellie Loewenthal to Herbert. They married on May 16, 1936.

Herbert graduated as a medical doctor from Berlin University in 1922. Times were tough and Herbert took up smoking to deal with his hunger. He never gave up the habit. He loved the opera but could not afford tickets. So Herbert became an extra at the Berliner Staatsoper, carrying a spear or appearing in other crowd scenes.

His first medical job was in a mental hospital with violent patients. When one patient threatened to kill the next doctor who gave him an injection, Herbert was assigned the task, which he performed. He soon transferred to the Rudolf Virchow Hospital as a dermatologist and researcher and became the department head. But when Hitler came into power and discrimination against Jews intensified, Herbert's contract was canceled, effective Oct. 1, 1933.

He went to London, where he met Hans and was introduced to Ellie. He hoped to open a diagnostic laboratory, but his request for a permit was denied. With just three days left before a visa to travel expired, he was able to find space aboard the Bremen, a German ship headed for the United States.

He arrived in Boston but decided to go to New York. Through a friend he had a letter of recommendation from Chaim Weitzmann, later to become the first president of Israel, to Dr. Emanuel Libman. Libman was a legendary diagnostician who would appear on the cover of Time magazine on June 10, 1935. The two hit it off, and Dr. Libman took Herbert under his wing, getting him a research fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital and at the Skin and Cancer Hospital, at the time part of Columbia University. He opened a private office in New York in 1936 and then married.

As a researcher in the 1930s, he was part of the team that discovered the cause and cure of athlete's foot. The cure was to control the acidity of the sweat to prevent the fungus from growing. In 1937, he was tops in the specialist examination to be a Diplomate of Dermatology, but skipped a dinner in his honor to go home.

In 1939, Herbert and Ellie moved to the then-rural community of Briarwood in Queens from Manhattan. They were able to get Ellie's parents and Herbert's mother out of Germany and they also shared the new home, where Herbert also had a small office.

When World War II broke out, Herbert volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army Medical Corps even though he was in his 40s and a new father. (Peter Allan Rosenfeld was born Dec. 12, 1941.) He served at Letterman Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco, mostly treating tropical skin diseases suffered by soldiers who served in the Pacific. He left the Army as a major and returned to New York to re-establish his practice and welcome his second son. (Steven Paul Rosenfeld was born May 6, 1946.)

Herbert taught at the medical school at Columbia and worked at Mount Sinai Hospital as he built up his private practice. He was a private, quiet man who had few hobbies or close friends. Medicine was his life, although he enjoyed classical music and owned a small cabin cruiser that he sailed around New York during the spring and summer for two years in the 1950s. Because of his smoking, he developed emphysema and had a bad heart. He practiced medicine to the day he died of a heart attack after returning home on Dec. 21, 1971.

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• Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Jul 11 2018, 13:52:33 UTC
• Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Jul 12 2018, 10:00:34 UTC

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• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Dec 15 2019, 7:47:55 UTC
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• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jul 2 2021, 5:18:49 UTC