Levison, Charlotte Engel, 1911-2001

William Levison (born Wilhelm Samuel Levison), physician, born April 12, 1909 in Cologne, died 1961 in Newark. After attending the Schiller-Gymnasium in Cologne until 1927, he studied medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau, Cologne, and Munich. He passed the state medical examination in Cologne on December 20, 1932, and received his M.D two days later with the dissertation Komplementbestimmungen bei Herz- und Kreislaufkranken (Complementary Diagnosis of Heart and Circulatory Patients), published in Zeitschrift fuer die Gesamte Experimentelle Medizin (vol. 78. 1931). He spent his practical year in Heidelberg (bei Siebeck) and at the medical institutes of the University of Cologne. Since as a result of the changed political circumstances he was forbidden to practice medicine in Germany, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1934, attaining citizenship in 1940.

William Levison worked first as an assistant at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, then at the Newark Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, and thus continued the vocation of family doctor into the third generation. He published several medical articles. In November 1942 he was drafted and became lieutenant in the medical corps of the U.S. Army. First stationed in various parts of the United States, he was later sent to the research station of a hospital in Hawaii, where he became a captain. On November 19, 1941 he married Charlotte Engel. They had a daughter: Judith Eve (born January 30, 1950). By December 1950 he became a Certified Diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine and Fellow of the American College of Physicians. In 1951 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the New Jersey Diabetes Association. With a group of physicians he founded a vacation camp for children with diabetes, Camp Nejeda. He died in 1961.

The Levison Family was rooted in the northern Rhine area for more than 250 years. The first known ancestor of the male line (Loew) is traceable in Siegburg, probably in 1673, definitely before 1681. Siegburg seems to be the "cradle" of the family, even to those members who were brought to Duesseldorf, Cologne, Bonn, etc. in the nineteenth century. William Levison's grandfather Isaac Levison was the first member of the family to become a physician, he graduated in 1857 in Greifswald. In 1939 the last bearer of the Levison name left Siegburg. William's uncle, the historian Wilhelm Levison (born Duesseldorf in 1876, died in Durham, U.K., in 1947), who was a professor in Bonn until his dismissal in 1935, wrote a comprehensive family history of the Levison family, which was published after his death under the title: Die Siegburger Familie Levison und verwandte Familien (1951).

William Levison's wife, Charlotte Engel Levison (maiden name: Charlotte Engel), was born in Frankfurt am Main on March 24, 1911. Her father Karl Ludwig (Fritz) Engel (1884-1929) worked for the Cologne branch of the Frankfurter Metallgesellschaft, and moved back to Frankfurt in 1920 to work for the construction company established by his great-grandfather Philipp Carl Kayser & Son. The family first lived in their own apartment at Rossertstrasse 3. During World War I she and her mother Helene Elise (Leni) Enders (1878-1927) moved to the residence of her maternal grandmother Anna Christiane Enders, née Orthenberger (1855-1930) at Liebigstrasse. Charlotte attended the Elisabethenschule in Frankfurt from 1917 to 1927, a school for girls founded in 1903. She entered a business school in 1927, and worked as a secretary for foreign languages. Engel's mother Helene Elise (Leni) Enders (1878-1927) died on March 19, 1927 of breast cancer. Her father remarried Lily Ebhardt on November 1, 1928. He committed suicide in a hotel in Frankfurt for financial reasons in May 1929.

Charlotte Engel came to the United States in 1934, and worked first as an au pair, and later as an infant nurse. On November 19, 1941 she married the surgeon William Levison (i.e. Wilhelm Samuel Levison) (1908-1961). Engel first met her future husband in Cologne when she visited one of her father’s friends in Cologne in 1920 (her father’s friend Felix Ganz married Resi Lobbenberg, who was William Levison's cousin. Their daughter Eva married Otto Willner). She was nine years old, he eleven; they became friends and she visited him occasionally in Cologne. In 1933 he proposed to her for the first time. She met William again in the United States, they married in 1941. They had a daughter: Judith Eve (born January 30, 1950). Engel Levison died in March 2001.

Engel Levison's parents and ancestors (Doctor-Dondorf-Hertz-Engel Family) were born and raised in the city of Frankfurt am Main. She had German-Jewish ancestors on her maternal side (great-great-grandparents: Moritz Hertz (1800-?) and Fanny Hertz (1800-?), great-grandmother: Helene Hertz née Orthenberger (1832-1886). The family owned a textile business. Engel's great-great-grandfather Moritz Hertz was the founder of the family business. He started out dealing in laces, which was turned into a successful dress making business under the name M. Hertz. His daughter Helene Orthenberger née (1832-1886), Engel's great-grandmother, continued running her father’s business under her name H. Orthenberger-Hertz. She was married to the non-Jew Carl Otto Orthenberger (1825-1883), a lawyer. She had five children. Her daughter Anna Enders née Orthenberger took over the business in 1886. She retired in 1906 and handed it over to her sister Fanny Diehl.

From the guide to the William and Charlotte Engel Levison Collection, 1717-2007, bulk 1935-1972, (Leo Baeck Institute)