Ervin Leitman’s shop feels like stepping inside a pocket watch: tiny drawers, jars of gears, and the soft tick of time all around
When I asked Ervin Leitman why he became a watchmaker, he answered in a thick Hungarian accent with a line that might as well have been the family’s business card: “I’m a watchmaker, my father was a watchmaker, and my grandfather was a watchmaker. We come from a family of watchmakers.”
Ervin was born in Mako, Hungary, near the Romanian border, close to Sighet. He was just nine years old when the war reached Hungary in 1944, and he was put on a cattle car headed for Auschwitz. But as the transport crossed into Czechoslovakia, 50 cars, including his, were shunted aside. Later he learned they’d been used as bargaining chips during the Kastner–Eichmann negotiations. Instead of Auschwitz, Ervin ended up in a labor camp in Austria, where he was eventually liberated by the Russians.
After the war, he returned to Hungary, then left for Eretz Yisrael in 1949, where he learned for a period in the yeshivah of Rav Yisroel Moshe Dushinsky. In Jerusalem, his grandfather, who had also survived the Holocaust, taught him the family craft of watchmaking. Ervin emigrated to America in 1956, when the rest of his family was able to leave Hungary during the revolution.
Automatic, or self-winding watches, together with digital watches, are the biggest changes in the industry, he says. “Back in the day it was all pocket watches, mechanical, lots of cogs. Good for business if you like tiny screws.”
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