Max Silbernik had a family and a shoe factory in Poland before World War II.
After the Nazi invasion, the factory was seized, the family was put into concentration camps and only Mr. Silbernik survived. He remarried after the war, had a son and came to Chicago, where he and two partners ran the Alandale chain of women’s clothing stores for 30 years.
Mr. Silbernik, 98, died of a cerebral hemorrhage Sunday, May 27, at Aventura Hospital and Medical Center in Florida, said his son, Marty. Mr. Silbernik had moved to Aventura in 1995 from Skokie.
At the chain’s peak, there were Alandale stores in Austin, Albany Park, Rogers Park and Jefferson Park, with a suburban location in Berwyn. The focus was on affordable, quality clothing, most of which Mr. Silbernik and his partners bought during periodic trips to New York.
Mr. Silbernik also dressed windows and worked the floor, always impeccably attired in a suit and tie.
“It was three guys; they were storefront retailers,” Marty Silbernik said.
Business waned through the 1970s as customers moved to the suburbs and shopped at malls. The business closed in 1980.
One of 12 children, Mr. Silbernik grew up in a rigorously religious home in a tight Jewish community in Lodz, Poland. He worked in textiles before running the shoe factory, his son said. Separated from his first wife, Tyla, and two children, Sonia, born in 1936, and Igor, born in 1940, Mr. Silbernik was forced into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
When Bergen-Belsen was liberated, Mr. Silbernik learned that five of his brothers and sisters had been in the camp as well, unbeknown to him. The siblings in the camp were dead, as were his wife, children and most of his extended family, Marty Silbernik said.
With two friends, Mr. Silbernik formed the Central Jewish Committee to help fellow Holocaust survivors get food, clothing and proper papers and reunite with relatives.
He married Clara Spiegler, and the couple had a son. Mr. Silbernik’s sister had come to the United States in the early 1900s, and they were able to join her in 1949, settling in Chicago. He went into the women’s clothing business with Sam and Seymour Weintraub.
The Silberniks lived in the Budlong Woods neighborhood for many years before moving to Skokie. Clara Silbernik died in 1969.
In retirement, Mr. Silbernik worked out regularly at the Jewish Community Center’s health club, where he had a large group of friends, many of them fellow Holocaust survivors, and lunched with friends at Myron & Phil’s on Devon Avenue.
“He always dressed well; he was a gentleman in every way,” said longtime friend Meyer Rubinstein.
In addition to his son, Mr. Silbernik is survived by a sister, Lola Nortman; two grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Services have been held.
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ttjensen@tribune.com
