Always a Pressburger

JUST KEEP GIVING Rabbi Cohn 88 still radiates the strength of a forest warrior although over the years he’s channeled his kochos into other areas of community service (Photos: Shulim Goldring)

I t was a chilly day exactly 75 years ago when Rabbi Romi (Avraham) Cohn was a 13-year-old setting out on an escape route from his hometown of Pressburg across the Slovakian border into Hungary — a trek that set a pattern for the bravery smarts and cunning that would accompany him throughout the war years and beyond. Many readers are no doubt familiar with his captivating story of survival as told in The Youngest Partisan (ArtScroll/Mesorah) — the account of a daring teenager who sneaked across borders financed Jews in hiding under the noses of the Germans and fought Nazi troops with a partisan brigade in the snow-covered forests of the Tatra Mountains.

Rabbi Cohn 88 still radiates the strength of a forest warrior although over the years he’s channeled his kochos into other areas of community service: He’s one of New York’s foremost mohelim (he’s conducted 35 000 brissim and represented the American Board of Ritual Circumcision at recent governmental bris-milah hearings); he’s the author of Bris Avrohom HaKohein — a definitive sefer on the halachos and minhagim of bris milah; he’s a wealthy contractor who has taken upon himself the support of up-and-coming gedolei Torah; he became the driver confidant and diary documenter of the holy Ribnitzer Rebbe; and he was the man responsible for salvaging and renovating the burial grounds of the Chasam Sofer in Bratislava (known as Pressburg in German).

Yet in speaking of any of his accomplishments the conversation will always return to those transformational early years of survival that molded his life. “In order to know where I am going ” he tells Mishpacha today “I need to remember where I come from. No matter where I am today or what I’ve done, ich bin a Pressburger.”