When posting about her sister’s death this past weekend, Jamie Lee Curtis invoked the language that their paternal Jewish grandparents spoke in an ode to both her late sister, Kelly Lee Curtis, and to their roots.
“Kelly always signed off any message or fare thee well with a Hungarian blessing,” Curtis wrote on Instagram. “Isten Veled, God is with you,” is an expression used to say goodbye to someone for a long time.
“Isten Veled to my sister of the sun and the moon,” Curtis wished her late sibling, who died at age 69 in her home while in hospice care on Saturday, May 30.
Kelly Curtis, an actor and producer who starred in shows like “The Sentinel” and movies like “Trading Places,” was Tony Curtis’ eldest daughter with his first wife, Janet Leigh. According to her sister, she was known as Aunt Cookie for her “powdered, almond, crescent cookies at Christmas,” and she was “proud of her Danish roots and Hungarian Jewish ancestry and was a devoted American patriot.”
Kelly passed away mere days before what would have been Tony Curtis’ 101st birthday, and Jamie wrote that “there’s a little bit of solace knowing that in whatever realm you end up in that he has two of his children with him, my late brother Nicholas and now my sister Kelly.” (Nicholas died in 1994 of a heroin overdose).
In the days since Kelly’s passing, Jamie, 67, is spending time revisiting old photos of the two of them (as many of us do in grief). Pictures taken on the eve of her wedding, in which the two are seen embracing. And then, pictures from their joint trip to trace the roots of their family (both their father’s Jewish Hungarian family and their mother’s Danish family) in 2012.
“We started out in Hungary, in Budapest, where Tony Curtis’ family, Schwartz, was from, a small town, Mátészalka near Budapest,” Curtis wrote to her followers.
The two went to Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe, which they joined efforts to restore, along with a group of Hungarian Jews. Their father, Tony Curtis, founded the Emmanuel Foundation, named after his own father, Emmanuel Schwartz, to help restore Jewish historical sites and promote Holocaust education, which became a vital part of the restoration.
“It’s a magnificent building with incredible history, and there’s a tree of life in this courtyard and each leaf has the name placed in memory of someone lost during the [Holocaust],” is how Curtis wrote of the synagogue. That Tree of Life memorial, created by sculptor Imre Varga in fact, was a donation from the Emmanuel Foundation. It commemorates the 400,000 Hungarian Jews murdered during the Holocaust, with 30,000 victims’ names engraved on the weeping willow tree’s silver leaves.
Jamie shared the picture of her and her sister holding hands, dressed in black, with straw hats shielding them from the sun, sitting under that tree.
Curtis and her sister were so moved to find plaques in honor of their father and his family under the tree, placed there by friend and producer Deborah Oppenheimer. In 2021, Curtis wrote that the tree is a “permanent reminder of the past and a motivator for change for the future of the Jewish people!”
“It was a once in a lifetime trip with my sister Kelly, and it bonded us in our history and family,” Curtis recalled, and counseled anyone who has a sibling to take “at least one trip, just the two of you, to trace a little bit of your family history. It will be a lasting and permanent and important memory. It is for me and is helping me in these days of grief and mourning.”
May her memory be for a blessing.
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