He rushed home to host his daughter and son-in-law. Now they’re all missing in Surfside
Harry Rosenberg, 52, purchased his second-floor condo just last month after a difficult year. He lost his wife, Anna Rosenberg, to cancer last summer and both his parents to COVID-19.
He rented smaller apartments in Florida before settling on the Champlain Towers South apartment in Surfside. The unit was large enough so his family could visit.
Hours before the building collapsed early Thursday morning, Rosenberg returned from a trip to New York. There, he attended his second grandchild’s baby-naming ceremony before rushing down to Miami to host his daughter Malky Weiss, 27, and son-in-law Benny Weiss, 32.
All three are still missing in the collapse.
Rabbi Sholom D. Lipskar of the Shul of Bal Harbour, the synagogue Rosenberg had recently joined, told the Associated Press that he “came to Florida to breathe a little bit.”
Rosenberg launched a mental healing center at a hospital in Bnei Brak, Israel, for young adults in memory of his late wife.
Only a week before the partial condo collapse, Steve Eisenberg, a fellow congregant at the Shul, said Rosenberg had told him, “It is the next chapter of my life,” according to AP.
Malky Weiss was planning to return to work Monday after her weekend trip in Surfside, said Shlomo Schorr, a co-worker at New Jersey-based accounting firm Roth & Co. Her name tag, desk notes, and coffee mug are still in the same place she left them, he said.
Schorr began working with Weiss about six months ago and said it’s hard to imagine working without her. She always has a smile and has love for every person in the office, he said.
“The room was just different when she was in there,” he told the Miami Herald.
Shushy Bernholtz, who was a childhood friend of Benny’s and his roommate at Hebron Yeshivat in Jerusalem, told Chabad.org that his friend has “many talents” and a “huge heart.”
“Benny knows everything,” Bernholtz said to Chabad. “He can quote the works of the great German playwrights and poets like Goethe and Schiller and explained the most complex debates in the Talmud with relevant commentaries.”
Originally from Vienna, Austria, Benny Weiss studied computer science at Kings College in London, according to Chabad, and worked in finance after he married Malky and moved to Lakewood.
