Ucko, Henry Zvi

Henry Zvi Ucko (1910-1995) was a writer, teacher, and rabbi in Germany until political conditions and growing anti-semitism led him to emigrate. In 1939, he fled to Amsterdam and then immigrated to the Dominican Republic, where he organized a congregation in Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo) and began researching the history of Jews in that country. He moved to the United States in 1946.

Henry Zvi Ucko was born 13 May 1910 in Koenigsberg, Germany. He studied at Universities Koenigsberg in Freiburg from 1928 to 1933. He prepared a doctoral thesis, but no degree was conferred due to political conditions and growing anti-semitism in Germany. In 1938, he served as a rabbi, cantor, and teacher at a high school for the study of Judaism and at a Jewish teacher's education institute. In 1939, Ucko fled Nazi Germany to Amsterdam and then immigrated to the Dominican Republic. En route to Santo Domingo, he lost all his belongings when the boat he traveled on, the Simon Bolivar, either was torpedoed by the Germans or hit a land mine in the North Sea, killing 80. Ucko organized a congregation in Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo), where he and his first wife, Ellie, lived until moving to the United States in 1946. Rabbi Ucko led congregations in Massachusetts (1946-1956) then Mason City, Iowa, and Fayetteville, N.C. (ca. 1959-1983). In 1985, he married Lenora Greenbaum, and in 1988 they moved to Chapel Hill, N.C.

Ucko's research interests during the 1940s and 1950s focused on the history of Jews in the Dominican Republic. In 1945, he gave a public presentation of his dissertation La Fusion de los Sefardies con los Dominicanos. Ucko returned to the Dominican Republic in 1957 to conduct more research. It is not clear that the research from this trip was ever published. Ucko's book of short stories, The Triumph and Other Stories, was published in 1993.

Henry Zvi Ucko died in 1995.