Abe & Sarah Lehat

In 1924, following the death of his wife, the former Goldie Gershowitz, Sam Lehat, a clothing store manager in Oklahoma City, placed the two youngest of his three children into the Home: eleven-year-old Abe and 9-year-old Sarah. At age fourteen, older brother Archie, who was already working as a newsboy, was not eligible for admission.

In the Home, Abe demonstrated his musical abilities as a violinist, performing solos at events including the Home’s  anniversary celebrations and several B’nai B’rith events. At Isidore Newman School, Abe served on the staff of The Pioneer, which in 1929 won second prize in a national contest for senior high school magazines conducted by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. 

In 1926, while Abe and his sister resided in the Home, their father, Sam, married Belle Turansky, the widowed mother of the Turansky children who were then also living in the Home. Following his 1929 Newman School graduation, Abe returned to his father and step-mother who soon relocated to New York, where Abe worked as a clerk in a paint store.

By 1940, Abe was working as a machine operator for International Business Machines in New York City.

During World War II, Abe was stationed in England and Germany where he achieved the rank of sergeant as a top turret gunner in the Army Air Force 401st Bomb Group, 612th Bomb Squad. According to the 401st Bomb Group Association, Abe flew a total of ten missions, and escaped from imprisonment in the last.

Abe died in 1963 at age 43 and was buried in San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Cemetery.

Sergeant Abe Lehat, 1945. From 401st Bomb Group Association. 

Sarah returned to her father and his new wife in 1927, and moved with them New York. 

In December 1937, shortly after her marriage to Gus Stein, Sarah penned a letter to Home Superintendent “Uncle Harry” Ginsburg, who had served as Assistant Superintendent during Sarah’s time a decade earlier. Suggesting a close and lasting relationship, Sarah wrote that regrettably she had neglected to invite him to the wedding (which she called an “unpardonable sin”) but wanted to share some of the details about the event and her husband with him.

Sarah died in 1989 and was buried in New Montefiore Cemetery in New York.