Early Years
Samuel Simon Leibowitz was born in Iasi (or "Jassy") Romania in 1893 and arrived in New York City on March 14, 1900 at the age of 6. He and his family traveled to New York on a ship called the Kensington, and is listed on the ship's manifest as "Simon Leibovici" along with his parents, listed as Avram and Bina Leibovici, Jewish immigrants from Romania.
A biography of Judge Leibowitz by Quentin Reynolds published in 1950 and a biography by Fred Pasley published in 1933 erroneously list the arrival date as March 17, 1897, and list the Judge's original last name as "Lebeau," but these are both incorrect. The mistaken arrival date may be the result of the poetic license that the authors used in an attempt to create more intriguing stories(since March 17 is St. Patrick's day, Reynolds provides a colorful description of the St. Patrick day parade on the day that Judge Leibowitz supposedly arrived), or erroneous family history provided to Reynolds by Judge Leibowitz. Since census records for 1910, 1920 and 1930 all list the date of arrival for the family as 1900 (see Ancestry.com for electronic access to these records), and since the ship manifest also shows the arrival date as 1900, there can be little doubt that the arrival date was in fact 1900. The ship manifest for the Kensington shows the arrival of the family with the name "Leibovici," not "Lebeau." The name "Lebeau" may have been adopted after arrival at Ellis Island for a few years, but the original name was "Leibovici." It was common for immigrants named "Leibovici" to change their name shortly after they arrived in the United States to "Leibowitz" (as, at the time, this was regarded as an "Americanized" version of "Leibovici".)
Quentin Reynolds wrote a colorful biography of Judge Leibowitz in 1950. Other biographies are available
The family lived in a tenement on Essex Street on the Lower East Side. His father had a small shop in East New York. He attended Jamaica High School and Cornell University.
He eventually married a woman named Belle.
Read more about this topic: Samuel Leibowitz
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