By Ben Harris and Shira Hanau

This article was last updated July 6.

(JTA) – The town of Surfside, Florida – site of the tragic Champlain Towers building collapse – is at least a third Jewish, with a large Orthodox population. And so, the tragedy has hit the Jewish community hard, with many of its members confirmed dead of missing. We’ve gathered information here on those we could confirm as Jewish. Unfortunately, this list may grow as the days pass and more bodies are found. We will update it accordingly.

Confirmed dead

Stacie Fang, 54, a New Jersey native who was the first victim of the Champlain Towers disaster to be identified, was the vice president of a Surfside-based company that produces an annual event in Chicago for retail and marketing executives. Her 15-year-old son, Jonah Hendler, was pulled alive from the wreckage of the building by a passerby shortly after it collapsed. “There are no words to describe the tragic loss of our beloved Stacie,” her family said in a statement.

Leon Oliwkowicz, 80, and Christina Beatriz Elvira, 74, were a Venezuelan Jewish couple who recently moved to Florida. They were among the first victims of the disaster to be identified. In 2019, the couple donated a Torah scroll to a Chabad yeshiva in Chicago where their daughter worked as a secretary, according to a report on the Chabad website Collive. At the dedication, Oliwkowicz, speaking in Yiddish, expressed his joy at having finally commissioned a Torah scroll in memory of his parents.

Frank Kleiman, 55, had much to look forward to. His most recent public Facebook post on Feb. 22, captioned “New venture, new beginnings,” referred to a postal company he had just started. He had recently married Ana Ortiz, and was looking forward to the birth of his first grandchild. Ortiz and her son Luis are among the missing. Kleiman, a child of Cuban Jewish emigres, was raised in Puerto Rico. He attended Drexel University in Philadelphia, earning a degree in finance, and was a big fan of the Philadelphia Eagles. His mother, Nancy Kress Levin, also lived in the building. And his brother, Jay, was visiting from Puerto Rico. They, too, are among the missing.

Michael David Altman, 50, had lived in his apartment, which had been in his family since the 1980s, for six years when the building collapsed. Altman, a Costa Rica native, came to the United States with his parents at the age of four. He is survived by his parents, both in their 70s, as well as his two sons, Nicholas and Jeffrey, both in college. Friends of Altman who posted to social media said he played racquetball regularly, according to the Palm Beach Post. His older son, Nicholas, told the Miami Herald that his father was “very loving,” “always smiling,” and “very fun and loved to tell jokes.” He was a great father, and a great son to my grandparents,” Nicholas said.

Tzvi and Itty Ainsworth, 68 and 66, had seven children and had lived in Australia for nearly 20 years where they were members of the Chabad of the North Shore in Sydney. They moved to South Florida several years ago to be closer to their children and grandchildren there. One daughter lives just a few blocks away from the Champlain Towers. The Ainsworths had recently celebrated the birth of two grandchildren.

“Every person she encountered, ever in her life, became her friend. Everyone was treated as equals,” Chana Wasserman, one of the Ainsworths’ daughters, wrote in a Mother’s Day blog post about her mother last year. “The guy at the laundromat, the guy working at the fruit market …” Rabbi Nochum Schapiro, head of their former Australian congregation, told the Australian Jewish News that “the community is urged to pray, to say tehillim [psalms], and to do mitzvot so that a miracle happens.”

Bonnie and David Epstein, 56 and 58, loved to go jet skiing and kite surfing. So when they retired early from their work as real estate investors and moved into an apartment on the 9th floor of the Champlain Towers South in Surfside, it was something of a dream come true. They were set to take their annual drive to Philadelphia and make a visit to their son Jonathan, 26, in New York before the building collapsed but delayed their trip while David recovered from an injury “My parents were really the best and it’s been so comforting to relive the joy of their lives through the testimony of friends and loved ones,” Jonathan Epstein wrote in a Facebook post, according to the Miami Herald. “Mom and Dad, I love you both so much and I’m so so proud to be your son.”

Missing

Jay Kleiman, 51, brother of Frank, was in South Florida, back in the condo where he grew up – only to attend the funeral of a good friend who had died of COVID-19, NBC Miami reported. “It is so tragic that he flew for a friend who died from COVID complications, and ended up there,” said Mark Baranek, who coached Kleiman and his friend, George Matz, on a flag football team at their synagogue. In Puerto Rico, Kleiman worked with his father in a garment industry company.

Nancy Kress Levin, 76, the Kleimans’ mother, had fled the Cuban Revolution in 1959. She and her husband first settled in Puerto Rico. In the 1980s, Levin moved as a single mom with her two sons to Surfside and lived in Champlain Towers, then a new building popular with Hispanic Jews who had arrived mostly from Cuba.

Moises Rodan, 20s, graduated this year from the University of Florida, where he studied computer engineering. Rodan attended a Jewish high school in Caracas, Venezuela, called Colegio Moral y Luces Herzl-Bialik and was involved in the Venezuelan Jewish community in the Miami area, according to the Miami Herald. In college he was involved in a student group called Hispanics and Latinos in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Andres Levine, 26, was supposed to be married in August. The 26-year-old, who worked in finance, had moved to Florida from Venezuela about seven years ago in search of better work opportunities. He had attended high school with Rodan. Esther Beniflah Melul, a friend who attended the same school and also was a close friend of Levine, told the Miami Herald that she had spoken with him the night before the collapse. “We had so many plans, so many things to do … I was going to have dinner with him that Thursday night,” she said. “We spoke the night before. I just can’t believe he’s gone.”

Luis Sadovnic and Nicky Langesfeld, were engaged on the beach in front of the Champlain Towers in December, though they had only moved into the building a few months before its collapse. Langesfeld, a lawyer whose family lives in Argentina, and Sadovnic, who had an MBA and also attended the Colegio Moral y Luces Herzl-Bialik Jewish school in Venezuela, were married in a private civil ceremony in January, according to The Associated Press.

Organizers of a GoFundMe page for the couple’s families wrote that the couple loved to spend time together on the beach. A colleague of Langesfeld said the couple liked to listen to reggaeton music. “Her presence is larger than life, and her sense of humor knows no bounds. She has the biggest heart and she loves to spoil her guinea pig Kali, and her dogs Capo and Zoey,” organizers of the fundraiser wrote of Langesfeld. Luis is down to earth, caring, and loving. He would do anything to protect Nicky,” they wrote about Sadovnic.

Harry Rosenberg, 52, had experienced a rough year. His wife, Anna, died of cancer last summer and both his parents died of COVID-19. Seeking a respite he moved to South Florida, where he rented a series of places before settling on the Champlain Towers. He purchased his unit there only last month, according to a report by Chabad.org. Rosenberg returned to the apartment from a trip to New York just hours before the towers collapsed. “Chaim is a man of intense faith,” said Sendy Liebhard, a friend. “Life threw him a lot of curveballs, especially recently. His faith in God and positive outlook is what’s nourished him.”

Malky Weisz, 27, and Benny Weisz, 32, lived in Lakewood, New Jersey and were in town to visit Malky’s father, Harry Rosenberg. Malky worked as an auditor at an accounting firm and Benny, originally from Austria, worked in finance. Shushy Bernholtz, a friend of Benny’s since childhood, told Chabad.org that Benny had wide-ranging interests. He reportedly studied in a yeshiva in Israel and a kollel in Lakewood. “Benny knows everything,” Bernholtz said. “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.”

Ilan Naibryf, 21, and Deborah Berezdivin, 21, were a couple who had travelled to Surfside for the funeral of a family friend. Berezdivin’s family owned two units on the building’s eighth floor, according to The New York Times.

In March, the University of Chicago awarded Naibryf and two classmates $15,000 for their startup, a financial technology company that enabled the purchase of goods and services with stock. Naibryf, an Argentina native raised in Hawaii, was a physics major and the past president of the university’s Chabad student center. He had just completed his third year. Berezdivin was a marketing major at George Washington University who was raised in Puerto Rico. She dreamed of working in luxury fashion, according to a report in El Nuevo Dia. 

Linda March, 58, left New York, her lifelong home, March, a lawyer, moved to Champlain Towers this past year, in search of a less cramped place to live near the beach.

Paula Silverman, a close friend who had texted with March just a few hours before the collapse, said March was looking to start over after becoming ill with COVID last year. March had lost a sister to cancer more than 10 years ago, then her parents not long afterward. “She was young and ready for the next stage of her life. I can’t wrap my head around it,” Silverman told the The Jerusalem Post. Silverman said her friend was a social person who cared about everyone and had a sense of humor that reminded her of Joan Rivers. “She knew everyone. You’d walk down the street and you’d see her talking to the mailman, talking to everybody, giving out masks to everybody,” Silverman said. “A heart of gold.”

Judy Spiegel, 65, was enjoying spending more time with her grandchildren since she and her husband, Kevin, moved to Surfside in 2017. The move brought them closer to their daughter, Rachel, and her family in Miami. Spiegel, a Merrill Lynch stockbroker, taught Rachel’s four-year-old daughter Scarlett how to read, write, and count during the pandemic. Kevin Spiegel was traveling for his job when the building collapsed. “The other day [Scarlett’s] asking where is grandma, and I tried to explain that there’s been an accident,” he told the Miami Herald. “Scarlett responded, oh, she does this all the time, but I know all her hiding spots, just take me there and I’ll find her.” The Spiegels were longtime members of the Chabad of Southampton on New York’s Long Island. Her daughter Rachel described her to the Associated Press as a “passionate advocate for Holocaust awareness.” 

Estelle Hedaya, 54, a 30-year veteran of the jewelry industry, had moved to Surfside from New York in 2015 to work at Continental Buying Group and Preferred Jewelers International, where she was director of operations. She celebrated the end of each work week at a Friday afternoon Zoom happy hour that she organized, called Hedaya Happy Hour. It always ended before Shabbat, which she observed. On her blog, “Follow the Toes,” Hedaya chronicled her life in Surfside and her visits to local spas and restaurants, as well as her foreign travels. A friend of Hedaya, Mindy Beth Silverman, told the Miami Herald her friend had thrived in South Florida. “If there was something fun to do, she was first in line,” Silverman said.

Brad Cohen, 51, an orthopedic surgeon and father of two, regularly attended synagogue and kept a “fully observant”Jewish home, according to Chabad.org, with his wife and two children. They were not in the building at the time of its collapse. Born in Dix Hills, New York, Cohen moved to Florida and lived near his parents, who reside in Boynton Beach. 

When Cohen’s 12-year-old daughter, Elisheva, was brought with other families of the missing to visit the site of the collapsed building on the weekend after the collapse, she sat down on the ground to recite Psalms. “She wasn’t crying. She was just lost. She didn’t know what to do, what to say, who to talk to,” Surfside’s mayor Charles Burkett said of the encounter.

Gary Cohen, 59, also a doctor, was in town to visit his parents and was staying at his brother Brad’s apartment when the building collapsed. Cohen, a psychiatrist at the Tuscaloosa Veterans Affairs Medical Center, lived in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife, Mindy. The couple has two children. The pair had become more observant in recent years, thanks to his brother, according to Chabad.org. 

Myriam and Arnie Notkin, 81 and 87, were married for about two decades. Arnie, a former physical education teacher in Miami Beach, was the kind of teacher former students spoke of lovingly decades after graduating from school. Brian Gadinsky, a former student of Notkin, remembered his former teacher in an interview with the Miami Herald. “He was the teacher that if you saw in the hallway, you’d be happy, you’d be smiling. You wouldn’t be looking the other way or try to duck in the bathroom,” he said.

Myriam worked as a real estate agent and later served on the co-op board of the Champlain Towers South. She immigrated to the United States from Cuba. “You could tell that they loved each other,” Fortuna Smukler, a childhood friend of Myriam’s daughter, told the Herald.

Ruslan Manashirov and Nicole Doran, were planning a honeymoon trip to Greece and France for September. They had just gotten married in May after rescheduling their wedding multiple times during the pandemic. And they were starting their married life together in a new apartment – they moved into Champlain Towers South after their wedding.

Both worked in the medical field and moved to Florida as adults. Manashirov, an Azerbaijani Jew originally from Baku, was a neurologist and Nicole, from Pittsburgh, was a physician’s assistant. “They were very, very much in love,” Wendy Kays, a nurse who worked with Nicole 11 years ago, told The Washington Post.

Main Photo: Images of Andres Levine, Ilan Naibryf and Deborah Berezdivin, three of the Jewish victims of the Surfside building collapse, in center among other photographs of those missing posted at a makeshift memorial on the building site in Surfside, Fla., June 26, 2021. (Credit: Andrea Sarcos/AFP via Getty Images)