Samuel Aroni

1927 - 2022

May 26, 1927 - April 20, 2022 Samuel Aroni, an exemplar of the Greatest Generation, died on April 20, 2022, at the age of 94. Sam was born (as Samuel Cervinschi) in Kishinev, Romania, at a time when the geographic region repeatedly changed hands between Romanian and Russian control. In 1941, after Kishinev fell to the German and Romanian armies, Sam's family and other Jews were rounded up and ordered to move into the walled Ghetto. Very few of the over 11,000 Jews in the Ghetto survived the cruel conditions where food, water and electricity were a scarcity and "work details" were conscripted, with those conscripts ending up executed after digging their own graves. Sam and his nuclear family were among the few who escaped, even as his grandparents later perished during a death march from the Ghetto to extermination camps in Transnistria.
While living in hiding in Romania, the Cervinschi family learned of a ship preparing to sail for Palestine and arranged for the family to be on the passenger list. Those plans were upset when, in November of 1941, soldiers came to arrest the family. That ship was the Struma; it ended up sinking in the Black Sea – torpedoed after the British prevented its entry into Palestine. All but one of the nearly 800 passengers perished.
After years of hardships and loss, Sam's immediate family eventually made their way to Palestine in 1944 and changed the family surname to Aroni, in honor and memory of Sam's grandfather Aron who perished in the Holocaust.
Having had no formal education past the age of 14, Sam went halfway around the world to attend university in Melbourne, Australia (one of few countries that in the immediate post-war era accepted university students without a formal education). While in Melbourne, Sam met and married a ninth-generation Sabra, Malca Kornfeld, and they had two daughters -- Ruth (Aroni) and Miriam (Aroni Krinsky). The young family moved to Berkeley, California in 1963, where Sam earned his Ph.D. and began his career as a University professor. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1970, eventually serving as Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, and Director of Academic Cooperative Programs and International and Overseas Studies. Upon his retirement he was granted the title of Professor Emeritus.
Sam mentored generations of UCLA students, not just in the classroom but equally in life. He also contributed his wealth and breadth of knowledge to the Israeli government as well as other foreign governments and educational institutions. Sam's devotion to Judaism, the pursuit of justice, and the principles that undergirded the creation of the State of Israel were perhaps his most defining characteristics. Despite the unthinkable inhumanities he witnessed during the Holocaust, he had an abiding conviction in the "goodness" of all around him and always sought to nurture those qualities.
There is not a person from Sam's circle of life who didn't adore him and benefit from his larger than life presence. But his highest priority was always his family. Sam showered eternal love on Malca (who predeceased him), Ruth, Miriam and Glenn (Sam's son-in-law); his granddaughters Sarah and Hannah Krinsky (the ultimate apples of his eye); his beloved grandson-in-law Daniel Novick; and on countless aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, grand-nieces and grand nephews. A man of modest physical stature, Sam carried the world on his shoulders, and the world is a markedly better place because of him.
A celebration of Sam's life will take place this Sunday, April 24th at 2:00 pm at Eden Memorial Park, 11500 Sepulveda Blvd., Mission Hills, California. In lieu of flowers, his family requests that donations in his memory be made to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum or JDC for Ukrainian Jews.