This is my father's brother, Leon Mizrachi, a lawyer, the only one in the family whose name is spelled differently, due to a registration error in the official documents. The photograph was taken in 1927 and bears the stamp of the Julietta photo studio in Bucharest.
Leon Mizrachi was born in 1899 in Bucharest. Until he left the country, in 1941, he was a lawyer and the president of the Zionist associations in Romania. I was very close to him. I was still in my early childhood, but I remember he often came to our place; he loved me and brought me presents. He was the one who gave me my first fountain pen with a golden nib and my first alarm clock. It so happened that I immigrated to Palestine at the same time with him and his family. Between 1941 and 1945 I visited him on a regular basis, first in Haifa, where he had built a house, then in Tel Aviv, where he tried to get in business with a diamond polishing workshop. He couldn't practice law, because he didn't manage to learn to express himself in Ivrit in such a manner that he could plead in front of an Israeli court. This hurt him. He had a very well shaped personality, his intelligence was doubled by a solid culture, and he was a sentimental nature.
He and his wife, Paulina Mizrachi [nee Hurtig] had four children, who were born at relatively big distances one from another: Emanuel, the Theodor and Angelo twins, and then Daniela. Emanuel Mizrachi [known as Bar Kadmah in Israel] was born in 1932 in Bucharest. He worked as a theater reviewer for many years; he also painted, becoming a well-known modern painter in Israel. He never got married. The Theodor and Angelo Mizrachi twins [known as Zvi and Schmuel, respectively in Israel] were born in 1939 in Bucharest. They were one year and a half when they left the country.
