The rabbi’s son who became the Handcuff King
While many Jewish magicians of his era disappeared into stage personas, Harry Houdini kept his heritage in plain sight. He died 100 years ago this October.
Melbourne once watched Harry Houdini take to the sky. On March 18, 1910, the escape artist made one of the first powered flights in Australian history at Diggers Rest. A century after his death on October 31, 1926, there’s another side to the showman worth revisiting: the rabbi’s son who never pretended to be anyone but himself.
Harry Houdini died 100 years ago in a Detroit hospital, aged 52, about a week after he took the stage with a raging fever.
Most people remember him for the chains, the straitjackets and the water torture cell. But people talk far less about where it all began. And as the story goes, it began with a rabbi’s son from Budapest named Erik Weisz.
Weisz was born on March 24, 1874, to Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz and Cecelia Steiner. The family left Hungary to escape antisemitic discrimination and arrived in the United States in 1878, settling in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father served as rabbi of a Reform congregation.
Money was tight, then tighter still after the family moved to Milwaukee. By nine, young Erik was already working as a trapeze artist. According to Aish, he was bar mitzvahed by Orthodox Rabbi Bernard Drachman.
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