Riva (née Spitz) Frank passed away on February 20, 2019. She was born on August 6, 1942 in Regar, Tajikistan during World War II.
Her parents Solomon Spitz and Yocheved (née Joskowitz) Spitz, like many Polish Jews, fled their home after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. Solomon and Yocheved met and married on the train heading east into Russia. The couple continued to flee eastward, deep into the vast expanse of the Soviet Union. Solomon joined the Anders’ Army and left to fight in the war (later deserting due to antisemitism and signing up with a British-Jewish volunteer brigade unit in Palestine).
Yocheved remained in the Soviet Union, settling in Regar, Tajikistan, where she gave birth to Riva in August 1942. Riva’s birth certificate is in the Museum’s Collection and currently on view in The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do. In Regar, Yocheved worked in a communal bakery and placed Riva in an orphanage to keep her safe. Riva fondly remembered her mother visiting her weekly to bring her chocolate. She contracted malaria in the orphanage but recovered.
After the war, the family reunited in Haifa in 1946 – at which point Riva met her father for the first time. The Spitz family lived in Israel from 1946 to 1959. They had two more children: Joshua in 1947 and Gilad in 1950.
Riva attended religious schools in Israel and was a member of the youth movement B’nai Akiva. She also attended an ORT high school where in addition to academics she learned sewing, needlework, clay modeling, painting, and home economic skills. Later, when the Spitz family moved to the United States, Riva would be known as extremely skillful in knitting, sewing, jewelry-making, and painting, all attributed to her training in the ORT school. It was said by friends and relatives that she had “hands of gold.”
In 1959, the Spitz family immigrated to join their only surviving relatives in Buffalo, New York. Riva graduated Bennett High School in Buffalo, NY, and attended the “combined-program” of studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University. She went on to teach Hebrew and Bar and Bat Mitzvah instruction in Jewish Talmud Torah schools and day schools from 1964 until a few years before she passed away in 2019. In 2009, she was honored by Temple Beth El in Chappaqua, New York, for her teaching at the school for 37 years.
In 1965, Riva married Ben G. Frank, and the couple had two sons, Martin and Monte, and four grandchildren: Randall, Rebecca, Sarah, and Julia. She is survived by her husband Ben, children, grandchildren, and brother Josh. May her memory be a blessing.
