Witness to His Time: The Adventures of West Hempstead's Eddie Rosenblum

Although Eddie Rosenblum has been a resident of West Hempstead for 55 years, his story begins on another continent when the world was a different place.

Rosenblum’s parents were from Galicia, Poland, a small town on the Polish-Russian boarder. His father was a tailor, as was his father before him. Around 1910, his parents immigrated to Vienna, Austria where they had two boys and two girls. Eddie, “the baby” of the family, was born in 1920.

Rosenblum attended school for eight years, as was required by law, but higher education was denied to Jews. “So my father naturally said, ‘You’ll learn to be a tailor.’

"I already knew a lot of tailoring because there was no TV, there [were] no iPods, so after school at four o’clock I went into the shop and was learning how to sew and how to make button holes and how to put on buttons and so on," Rosenblum, now 90, recalls.

In 1938, Adolph Hitler came to power in Austria. “All hell broke loose,” recalls Rosenblum. SS soldiers ransacked his father’s tailor shop. Each member of his immediate family was in a different location at the time and were separately hidden by friends who put their lives on the line to do so. While their possessions were gone, they were grateful to be alive, he says.

Relatives already living in the United States and working in the garment industry, helped Rosenblum and one of his sisters immigrate to New York. At age 18, he arrived in New York City by boat on Friday, Feb. 3 1939.

“Traveling the north Atlantic in February, I do not recommend," Rosenblum says. "My sister never made it to the dining room.”

By the following Monday he had a job at $10 a week. One job led to another and he began working steadily as a union tailor. Eventually, his entire immediate family made their way to New York.

In 1942, the US Army came calling. Even though America was fighting Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, sometimes Jews and minorities weren’t always treated nicely in the US military, he explained. This was not the case for Rosenblum.

“Quite honestly, I did not find any anti-Semitism while I was in the service. I was in an outfit where people came from Louisiana, Mississippi – all over the south – they’d never seen a Jew before. But my conduct, and my affiliation with the rest of them, they loved me. I loved them. They protected me.”

Rosenblum’s skills as a tailor came in handy in the army. With each promotion a soldier receives, he gets new stripes to be sewn on his uniform. “Who does it? The tailor!” exclaimed Rosenblum. 

After learning of his tailoring skills, the Army reassigned him to the 531st Quartermaster Salvage Company. “Our company could repair anything [in] the field. Shoemakers, we had. Carpenters, we had. Electricians, we had. We had them all. The top of your truck was torn? We could repair it [in] the field.”

In August of 1944, Rosenblum was in the third wave of the invasion of Omaha Beach. After an injury during advanced infantry training, Rosenblum’s knowledge of the German language enabled him to be reassigned as an interpreter at a German prison of war camp in France.

After his return to civilian life, the GI Bill enabled Rosenblum to attend school at the Mitchell Designing School in Manhattan for garment design. Soon after he married his wife, Shirley, in 1947 and had four children. He purchased a house for $10,000 in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn while working as a fitter for the Simon-Ackerman clothing store.

But after eight years the desire to have his own business was too much to ignore. He answered an ad in a trade paper that read, “Tailor with Capitol Seeks Partnership.” This lead to Rosenblum buying a one-third partnership of a clothing company in Garden City. Eventually, Rosenblum bought out the other two thirds and was the sole proprietor of Edward Mitchell, Custom Tailors. “It sounded better than Rosenblum.”

“We made clothes for the rich and famous,” he recalls. His clientele included Nassau County Executive A. Holly Patterson; WCBS News’ Ralph Penza; Joe Namath and several of the other members of the New York Jets. Al Toon, a wide receiver for the Jets, required 40-inch sleeves on his shirts, which Rosenblum made to order.

In 1990, at age 70, Rosenmblum retired, although he remains active. He rides his bicycle regularly, goes horseback riding out of in West Hempstead and up until last year, continued to ski. Twelve grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren occupy much of his time.

Although Rosenblum’s past is long and eventful, he lives in the present. He has a cell phone and knows how to search the Internet using Google. “I receive e-mail. I’m not as good at sending yet,” confessed Rosenblum. He’s heard of Facebook and Twitter ,but doesn’t know what they are.

Recently Rosenblum reflected on his journey. “I came to this country… with a suitcase in my hand and a shirt on my back… and I had a lot of dreams. I wanted a family and a home and a business. I did the best I could. I wanted to be not the richest, but the smartest. I wanted to be a somebody. I think I have attained that goal. I became a somebody.”

Indeed he has.