Perfect Hands
| January 20, 2026Ervin Leitman’s shop feels like stepping inside a pocket watch: tiny drawers, jars of gears, and the soft tick of time all around
Ervin Leitman
Leitman’s Watch Repair
1682 53rd St. Brooklyn
Since 1956 (in this location since 1995)
W
hen I asked Ervin Leitman why he became a watchmaker, he answered in a thick Hungarian accent with a line that might as well have been the family’s business card: “I’m a watchmaker, my father was a watchmaker, and my grandfather was a watchmaker. We come from a family of watchmakers.”
Ervin was born in Mako, Hungary, near the Romanian border, close to Sighet. He was just nine years old when the war reached Hungary in 1944, and he was put on a cattle car headed for Auschwitz. But as the transport crossed into Czechoslovakia, 50 cars, including his, were shunted aside. Later he learned they’d been used as bargaining chips during the Kastner–Eichmann negotiations. Instead of Auschwitz, Ervin ended up in a labor camp in Austria, where he was eventually liberated by the Russians.
After the war, he returned to Hungary, then left for Eretz Yisrael in 1949, where he learned for a period in the yeshivah of Rav Yisroel Moshe Dushinsky. In Jerusalem, his grandfather, who had also survived the Holocaust, taught him the family craft of watchmaking. Ervin emigrated to America in 1956, when the rest of his family was able to leave Hungary during the revolution.
Automatic, or self-winding watches, together with digital watches, are the biggest changes in the industry, he says. “Back in the day it was all pocket watches, mechanical, lots of cogs. Good for business if you like tiny screws.”
Ervin arrived in New York, worked on 47th Street as a watchmaker and jeweler, and about 30 years ago opened the little shop in Boro Park that he still manages today. Along the way, he built up a reputation. Once, while working for a high-end watch company, a famous football player stormed in with his hundred-thousand-dollar watch, fuming over a broken link. The Swiss replacement would take months. The manager whispered desperately, “Ervin, can you make a screw for this watch?” Ervin calmly fashioned one from scratch while the athlete hovered, wide-eyed, then tipped him generously for the miracle.
Today, Ervin Leitman’s shop feels like stepping inside a pocket watch: tiny drawers, jars of gears, and the soft tick of time all around. Beneath the glow of his lamp, Ervin works, replacing batteries and repairing gears.
Ervin recalls that he once went out to Belle Harbor, where the Satmar Rebbe was recuperating after a stroke, to fix the Rebbe’s desk clock. Two hours of delicate work later, the clock ticked perfectly again. Rebbe Yoel turned to his gabbai: “Mir hut eim batzult? Did we pay him?” Ervin waved it off. “I don’t want money,” he told the Rebbe. “I want a brachah.”
The Rebbe asked what kind. Ervin thought ahead: “Now I’m young, my hands are steady, I can work. But what about when I’m old, when my hands might tremble?”
The Rebbe blessed him: “Yado al ha’elyonah — his hand should always be on the top.”
And now, decades later, Ervin leans forward, lifting a 90-year-old hand. “Look,” he says. Not a quiver, not the slightest shake — still as firm and precise as the day the Rebbe’s brachah was given.
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1096)
Oops! We could not locate your form.
RELATED CONTENT
Is there anyone who hasn’t been to Amnon’s Pizza on 13th Avenue in Boro Park?
