Man Without an Heir?
A case of what comes of a $2 million estate

By :Bryan Schwartzman    Staff Writer

3/18/2004

Stretching across several continents, featuring a cast of a dozen claimants and the emergence of a potential long-lost heir, the battle over the multimillion dollar estate of an 87-year-old Cherry Hill, N.J., man has all the trappings of a made-for-TV movie.

And that was before anyone suggested exhuming his body.

The person at issue is Isaac Wolowicz, of County Club Drive, who died intestate three years ago.

“This is, in many respects, a once-in-a-lifetime case,” said Lee Herman, one of the lawyers involved in the proceedings. “All of this could have been avoided had he wanted to write a will; that is the shame of it all.”

According to court papers and conversations with Ya’akov “Koby” Zucker, 47, a second cousin of the deceased, Wolowicz was born in 1913 in Zyradov, Poland, a small Chasidic town southwest of Warsaw. The son of shopkeepers Moshe Ahron and Yetta Sheva Wolowicz, he had two brothers, Shlomo and Menacham (also called “Nachima”), and a sister, Pearl. The spellings of the above names fluctuated on several family-tree documents submitted to court.

According to various accounts, Wolowicz fled Poland alone in late 1939 when he was about 26, and spent the war years in hiding — first in Russia, then in France. He returned to Poland after the war, in 1945, to discover that his parents and siblings had perished in Eastern Europe. Several first cousins survived.

Official court documents showed that he left Europe and landed in New York City; in 1947, he married Mollie Rutenberg. Wolowicz was a tailor and a landlord in New York throughout the 1950s, and then moved with his wife to Cherry Hill. In the very early 1960s, Wolowicz opened a shop in nearby Berlin, N.J. — about 15 miles from Cherry Hill — called Wolow’s Western Ware, selling cowboy boots and hats; he ran the store for decades.

According to Zucker, who lives in Israel and is one of the claimants in the case, Wolowicz was a slight man who worked long hours and tended to save money. Zucker said that over the years, his father, Gershon Zucker, now dead, and his aunt, Halina Reitman, who also lives in Israel, exchanged letters and phone calls with Wolowicz, as did he.

“He wasn’t intending to die,” said Zucker in a telephone interview. “He was thinking he was going to live forever.”

Wolowicz and his wife had no children, and in 1993, Mollie Wolowicz passed away. In the years that followed, Wolowicz suffered a series of strokes, and eventually died in his sleep on Feb. 26, 2001. His store was liquidated by the end of that year.

Camden County Surrogate Patricia Egan Jones said that when someone in the county dies without leaving a will — a rather common occurrence — a spouse or a child usually presents the office with a death certificate, and is named administrator of the estate.

“Most of the time, it’s quite easy,” Jones said of the process.

But in this case, no direct heir exists, which makes matters more complicated. Add that to the fact that the estate itself is worth somewhere in the ballpark of $2 million, a much heftier sum than most, and the surrogate becomes faced with quite a dilemma.

So who gets the money? The State of New Jersey? Zucker and/or his aunt? Or a number of other interested parties who have suddenly come out of the woodwork?

Examining the claims
Just one month after Wolowicz’s death, 11 claimants filed court papers claiming entitlement to existing assets, including distant relatives, a former employee and Chabad Lubavitch of Camden County.

As the matter became mired in paperwork, it moved from the surrogate’s office to the Chancery Division of New Jersey’s Superior Court. Judge Theodore Z. Davis, now retired, appointed Glenn A. Henkel, an attorney based in Haddonfield, N.J., as the estate’s administrator in May 2001. It became his job to sort out the competing claims.

One issue he was able to resolve rather quickly was Chabad’s assertion that Wolowicz had pledged a $250,000 donation in 1994, of which he’d already given some $50,000 prior to his death. Finding clear evidence that the pledge was legitimate, Henkel paid Lubavitch the remaining allocation from the estate’s funds.

Then, by early 2002, Henkel had arranged for eight of Wolowicz’s relatives — including Zucker and Reitman, along with American distant cousins in New York and New Jersey — to split the estate five ways. The resolution did not address the claims of Geraldine Cairy of Sicklerville, N.J., who said that she worked at Wolowicz’s store for several years without payment, save for $1,000 bonuses she received annually. Relatives claimed she did get paid, albeit under the table.

Ultimately, none of that mattered, as the biggest bombshellwas yet to come.

A long-lost nephew?
In June 2002, a new set of court papers were filed, claiming a Russian immigrant to Israel was Wolowicz’s actual nephew, and thereby was entitled to the estate.

Alexander Altschuler, 55, of Jerusalem said that he is the son of Wolowicz’s brother Shlomo, who also went by his middle name, Zalman. Court documents allege that Shlomo Zalman Wolowicz fought with the Polish army against the Nazis, was wounded in the 1939 Blitzkrieg invasion and died several months later in a Warsaw hospital.

Family members substantiate that story, but as far as anyone knew, he died a single man.

Lawyers for Altschuler, however, provided copies of a marriage certificate issued to a Zalman Wolowicz and Zelda Isaakovna (maiden name unknown) in 1938, along with a birth certificate issued later that year for their son, Alexander.

According to papers filed by the attorneys, Zelda took her baby, and in late 1939 fled German-occupied Poland for Russia. She was apparently accompanied by her sister, Sara. The documents show that Zelda died in 1942, and Sara took custody of her young nephew. Eventually, Sara and her husband, Boris Altschuler, adopted Alexander and raised him in Leningrad.

Henkel, the estate’s administrator, hired Harvey Morse P.A., a Florida genealogical research firm, to independently investigate Alexander Altschuler’s claims. Researchers spent months looking into the case, according to Morse, the firm’s founder, even traveling to Russia to scour through national archives.

Morse said that based on his company’s discovery, which included death certificates and adoption papers, Altschuler can be positively identified as the son of Shlomo Zalman Wolowicz.

But lawyers for Isaac Wolowicz’s other relatives said there’s no way to substantiate the veracity of such documents, especially during the World War II years, when forged paperwork ran rampant. Moreover, they add, there may very well have been more than one Shlomo Zalman Wolowicz among Poland’s 3 million Jews before most of them were killed in the Holocaust.

Halina Reitman, Wolowicz’s first cousin and one of the other claimants in the case, submitted in a court paper that she visited Shlomo in the hospital after he was wounded in battle, and that he never mentioned a wife or child.

Her allegations were backed by a childhood friend, Henri Sulewicz, who was born in the same town of Zyradov, Poland, as Isaac Wolowicz, but who now lives in Nice, France. Sulewicz was deposed here in the United States, and he said that he, too, visited Shlomo in a Warsaw army hospital, and learned nothing of a marriage or child.

But there is a way to determine whether or not the two men — Wolowicz and Altschuler — are, in fact, related. Thanks to the miracle of modern science, a DNA test could prove a verifiable familial connection.

To that end, Henkel filed a motion in October requesting New Jersey Superior Court Judge Allan Vogelson to order a DNA test, which would require the exhumation of Wolowicz’s body from Beth David cemetery in Elmont, N.Y., on Long Island, where he was buried alongside his wife and other members of her family.

Altschuler, who is said to be observant, objected to the proposed exhumation on religious grounds.

“The exhumation of the deceased from the sacred site is an act repugnant to Jewish ethics and Jewish religion,” wrote Altschuler’s lawyers in a countermotion.

Five of the attorneys — and one by telephone — involved in the case appeared before Vogelson Feb. 23 at the state courthouse in downtown Camden, where Henkel once again made a case for exhumation.

But Vogelson said he first wants to explore all other options. To start with, he wants Altschuler deposed, either by videophone from Israel or in person, so he could speak at length about his family history and possible relationship with Wolowicz.

“The last thing I want to do is exhume a body,” said Vogelson at last month’s hearing. “That doesn’t mean I won’t do it.”

Henkel said the date for the Altschuler deposition has not yet been set.

Meanwhile, the estate itself is sitting in a money-market account. Some of it has been used to pay the various attorneys for work on the case; according to Henkel, about $1.7 million is left.

Where it will all go remains to be seen.

Bryan Scwartzman will continue to follow the case through court.

You may contact Bryan Schwartzman via Email:bSchwartzman@jewishexponent.com

This article appeared in the March 18, 2004 issue of the Jewish Exponent.  To visit their website, please use the following link:  www.jewishexponent.com