Jakob Rosenfeld

Jakob Rosenfeld was born in 1903 in Lviv

Rosenfeld was born in 1903 to a Jewish family in Lemberg, then in Austria-Hungary and today Lviv. From 1910 his family lived in Wöllersdorf in Austria, where he grew up. His father was a military officer and later a hatmaker.

He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 1928, specializing in urology. From 1930 he worked at the Vienna General Hospital. A member of the banned Social Democratic Party, he was arrested in 1934 and later ran his own clinic.

After the Anschluss in 1938 he was sent to Dachau and then to Buchenwald. Released in 1939 on condition that he leave the country, he fled with his brother to Shanghai with visas from Chinese consul Ho Feng-shan. There he opened a medical practice.

In 1941 he joined the Chinese Communist forces as a field doctor and surgeon, and he joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1942. He founded a medical school to train army medical teams and rose to the rank of general. In 1945 he became chief doctor of an army in Manchuria.

In November 1949 he returned to Europe to search for relatives, many of whom had died in the Holocaust. He moved to Israel, lived in Tel Aviv and worked at Assuta hospital. He died of a heart attack in 1952 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul.