Sam Levitan
In 1927, following the death of his wife, Tillie, New Orleans salesman Herman Levitan admitted his two-year-old son, Sam, to the Home.
Sam’s earliest memories of the Home were walking around in his crib while being surrounded by admiring young girls. “I must have been a precocious, beautiful baby, I guess,” mused Sam years later.
He also remembered walking to Newman School, listening to “Little Orphan Annie” on the radio, yelling “Hey, Lindbergh” each time a plane flew overhead, and celebrating his birthday a day late because another Home kid was born on the same date.
He called the Home “a good environment” where he felt “stability, care, and contentment.”
Sam Levitan on horseback, c. 1930. Courtesy of Sam and Gert Levitan.
Sam was discharged from the Home in 1936 when his father remarried. After leaving the Home, he became a Bar Mitzvah, a traditional coming-of-age ritual not then observed in Reform congregations or in the Home. He graduated from Samuel J. Peters Commercial High School and served during WWII in the Army’s 98th Division in Hawaii and then the Philippines, retiring as a staff sergeant. Moving from basic solder to company clerk, Sam later joked that he “carried a rifle and a typewriter.”
About his decades of service at the Whitney Bank, where he rose from errand boy to vice president, Sam described his favorite part of the job as “making people happy” by sometimes making loans “rather liberally.”
But Sam’s greatest joy was his family: his wife, the former Gertrude Koniarsky, and their children, and grandchildren. He met “Gert” in the Home, but not until after it had closed as an orphanage. The JCC, which bought the building, held square dances there. Sam offered to drive a group of girls home from the dance. Once in the car, Sam decided to ask out each girl, one by one. “I was the first girl he asked,” said Gert, after 70 years of marriage, “and I don’t think he took the rest of the girls out.”
Sam who died at age 94 in 2018, relished the nicknames he earned long before; “Sammy baby” and “Hugging Sam” captured characteristics he attributed to the care and affection he received during his earliest years in the Home.
Sam Levitan in the Army. Courtesy of Sam & Gert Levitan.
Sam & Gert Levitan, September 2017. Author’s photo.
In Sam's Own Words
In 1983, Sam Levitan was interviewed by Karen B. Sher about his childhood in the Home as part of the Jewish Children’s Home Alumni Project. Read the transcript of Sam’s interview here.
In 2003, Sam Levitan was interviewed about his childhood in the Home. Watch the video interview here.