United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Peter (Pesach) Kosskowsky (1872-1939) was born July 4, 1872 in Pinsk, Russia (now Belarus). He and his first wife, Gitel (d. 1913), had two daughters. Schifra Kossowsky was born in 1903 in Yekaterinoslav, Russia (now Dnipro, Ukraine). We do not know the name of their second daughter. The Kossowsky family relocated to Vienna while Schifra was young. After Gitel’s death in Vienna in 1913, Peter married his second wife, Chaje Sura. Schifra Kossowsky married Moses (Max) Friedmann in Vienna in 1925. Moses was born in 1899 in Skalat, Poland (now Ukraine). Schifra and Moses had two daughters: Vera, born February 1928, and Gerta. Following the German annexation of Austria, the Gestapo briefly arrested and detained Moses. The Friedmann family then hid in Moses’ textile warehouse before fleeing to Aachen, Brussels, and eventually Palestine. Peter Kossowsky died in Vienna on September 12, 1939. Moses Friedman’s entire family was killed at Auschwitz except for one uncle. In 1961 Schifra married her second husband, Salomon Kowalek, who was born in Husiatyn (now Ukraine) in 1886.
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The Peter Kossowsky papers are arranged in four files.
Photographs, documents, German passport, letter, wedding ketubah, invitation, scrapbook, mourning book and report cards documenting the experience of Peter Kossowsky and his family.
Peter Kossowsky family papers