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Mr. Shmuel (Sami) Rohr

Mr. Shmuel (Sami) Rohr
Mr. Sami Rohr was born in Berlin on April 4, 1926, the only child of Oskar and Perla Gelbard Rohr. Thirteen days after Kristallnacht, in 1938, when organized Nazi gangs terrorized Jews across Germany, the Rohrs made their way to Belgium, and from there to France and then Switzerland.
 
In 1950, fearing that the Korean War signaled the start of another world war, Oskar Rohr sent his son to Bogota, Colombia, where an aunt had found refuge. There, Sami Rohr began building his fortune in real estate. In Chile, in 1952, he met Charlotte Kastner, a native of Czechoslovakia, whose parents were killed at Auschwitz. They married a year later. The Rohrs moved to Miami in the late 1970s.
 
Sami Rohr, whose warm heart, vision and financial success enabled him to fund Jewish community centers around the globe and lay the groundwork for a rebirth of Judaism across the former Soviet Union, transformed the face of the Jewish world.
 
He passed away on August 5 2012. Besides his son George, Mr. Rohr is survived by two daughters, Evelyn Katz and Lillian Tabacinic; 12 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.