Manhattan, NY – Mystery ‘Bag Lady’ Who Gave $100K Gift to Hebrew University Identified

Manhattan, NY – The mystery woman who left an Israeli college more than $100,000 in her will was an “eccentric hippie” whose family fled the Nazis.

She also was a penny-pinching New Yorker, charmed strangers and adored her adopted hometown.

What Ida Fischer wasn’t was a bag lady who lived on the streets and relied on handouts from strangers – the picture painted by officials of Hebrew University.

Instead, a portrait of Fischer emerging from interviews and court records shows a reclusive refugee who was lively and charming among friends, but who shunned the remnants of her fractured family.

“To her, material things meant nothing,” her friend Gabor Szanto said. “She was wearing the same jacket the day I met her and the day she died.”

Asked why Fischer would donate so much to a university she had not attended, Szanto said, “She was a very religious Jew.”

Over the weekend, Hebrew University officials reported getting a big donation from an anonymous New Yorker who died two years ago at age 92.

Officials described her as a concentration camp survivor who had once been “homeless” on the upper West Side. They said she made money moving the car of a man to whom she left $100,000.

They refused to identify her, saying she didn’t want to be known as a bag lady.

Szanto and others whose lives Fischer touched said she “would have been horrified to be described as homeless” and insisted she lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Turtle Bay.

“She wasn’t even close to a bag lady,” Szanto said. “She was just not fashion conscious.”

Fischer’s nephew, Peter Lynwander, said he hadn’t seen his aunt in 35 years but insisted “she was never penniless.”

“When she was young she was a very lively woman,” he said. “She was fun-loving.”

Her will, which The News found in Surrogate Court, specifies that Hebrew University gets half of Fischer’s $250,000 estate. Szanto and Fischer’s friend, Sylvia Last, got the rest.

Other records revealed Fischer had a sister named Ann, who lived in Teaneck, N.J., with whom she apparently had little contact. She died in January.
“She and my mother didn’t get along,” Peter Lynwander said. Fischer had two cousins in New York she hadn’t seen in years.

“All members of the family seem to have been estranged from one another,” wrote lawyer Renate Model, who tracked down Fischer’s sibling. “The family was scattered as a result of World War II.”

Last is the wife of the executor of Fischer’s will, Peter Last, who confirmed he used to pay her $5 to move his car. Szanto said he wasn’t surprised Fischer had a gentleman friend to help her.

“Many men hired her to move cars,” he said. “She brought her ash tray and smoked her cigarettes and collected her money.”

Fischer’s true love was her adopted city, Szanto said: “She loved New York passionately.”

Born Ida Blumin in Vienna, Fischer and her mother, Louisa, escaped the Nazis in 1939, Szanto and university officials said.

When “the Gestapo came to take her and her mother away,” she told them the people they were looking for lived two floors up, Szanto said. Court records say Fischer’s father, Benjamin, may have been killed in 1938.

Fischer fled to Paris, then New York, where she made dolls and hats in Chinatown, Szanto said.

She soon married a man named Walter Fischer, but by 1951, she was living in Florida with her mother, Szanto said.

Her husband returned to Vienna in the 1970s, where he died, court records show. Fischer was a registered nurse in Miami, before returning to New York.

One of Fischer’s neighbors, Ursula Heindl, said they met when Fischer moved into a subsidized apartment on E. 31st St. in 1980.
“She was living in boarding houses on the upper West Side with her mother,” Heindl said. “Then her mother passed away.”

Heindl said she and Fischer used to sit on the stoop and talk. “She loved my potato pancakes,” she said.

Heindl said her friend slowly descended into dementia. “In the last year of her illness, she disconnected herself completely,” she said. “She was angry with people who wanted her to do things, like take a pill.

“At one time, she was zaftig. At the end, she was nothing but skin and bones.”