Story Summary:
Hyman Ashkin, born in 1903 to Russian Jewish immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side, overcame childhood rheumatic fever and resulting heart damage to become a skilled surgeon. A Columbia graduate, he married Ruth Ryskind in 1935 but had to give up surgery after a heart attack in 1937. Moving to California in 1938, he worked as a prison doctor and later at Lockheed during WWII, treating injured workers and volunteering at a Jewish orphanage. He also helped rescue a Jewish woman from Austria under restrictive U.S. immigration laws. After the war, he provided low-cost pediatric care until his early death from heart failure in 1947.
~Written by his Daughter, Linda Stewart
"From Tea Leaves to Lifelines: Remembering Dr. Hyman Ashkin"
Hyman Ashkin was born in 1903 , the son of Russian immigrant parents who settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where they opened a store that sold coffees and teas. That, because they were vaguely related to the Zechnowitz family which had launched the Swee-Touch-Nee brand of tea—said to be the first Jewish company in America. As a child he contracted rheumatic fever which requires a lot of bed rest to avoid complications, but his mother made him get up and work in the store, which resulted in permanent damage to his heart. Not that he ever let it stand in his way.
He attended Columbia College and its medical school (under the Jewish quota of the time) and graduated in 1928 as a skilled surgeon—a skill he first practiced at Sydenham Hospital in Harlem. In 1935 he married Ruth Ryskind, and in 1937, while she was pregnant with their daughter, Linda, Hy had a heart attack which altered his plans and the direction of their lives. Told he should no longer practice surgery because of the strain, nor live in New York because of the weather, the family picked up and moved to California in 1938. Getting a California medical license, he first took a job as the prison doctor at a low-security facility in Chino, but then, in 1941, came the war. Knowing his actual skills as a surgeon and how they’d be needed for soldiers at the front, he gave himself pills to disguise his bad heart and tried to join the army. The army wasn’t fooled.
One of his new early friends in California, was man named Abe Golden, a Public Defender for Los Angeles County. Abe was linked to an underground railroad, getting Jews out of Europe— a railroad established by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Through Abe, he got in touch with the railroad’s engineers and sponsored the escape of a Jewish woman then trapped in Austria—a sponsorship that required a promise to support her for up to five years. One has to remember that in the 30’s and 40’s, even as Hitler was eating up the map, the Immigration Law of 1924 was still in effect—effectively barring Jewish immigration, so helping a Jew to escape to America was no easy job. At any rate, the woman, Felicity Dasch, is listed in the 1940 census as living in the Ashkin household in California.
In 1943, still trying to do something for what was then known as “the war effort,” Hyman took a job at the resident doctor at the Lockheed airplane manufacturing plant in Long Beach, California where Rosie the Riveters were cutting off their fingers in assembly line accidents and Hy was assembly-line sewing them back on. All the while, on the side, he also volunteered as the on-call doctor for a Jewish orphanage.
After the war, he joined a medical co-op in Los Angeles that provided low-cost care for families, and worked as a well-loved pediatrician. On May 15, 1947, he suffered a soon to be fatal heart attack and died, too young, on May 25.
May his memory be an eternal blessing.
~Written by his Daughter, Linda Stewart
