Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Joseph Sher, Holocaust Survivor and Elvis Presley’s Tailor, Dies at 100

A Holocaust survivor who became a New Orleans tailor with such celebrity clients as Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, is dead at 100.

Joseph Sher died Thursday at Lambeth House, a New Orleans retirement community and assisted-living facility, The Times-Picayune reported. He was the oldest Holocaust survivor in New Orleans and the leader of the local survivor community, according to the Crescent City Jewish News.

During the Holocaust, Sher was sent to several Nazi-run slave labor camps, where he was forced to build roads. He was one of only three of 1,000 men on his detail to survive the experience. Sher, his two brothers and his wife survived the Holocaust, but he lost his parents and three sisters, who died at the Treblinka death camp.

In 1949, Sher, his wife and a child born in a displaced persons camp settled in New Orleans where he found work as a tailor, a trade he learned from his father in Poland.

Working at Harry Hyman Tailors, Sher specialized in performance clothes for entertainers and uniforms for tall hotel doormen. When the shop changed its name to Murphy the Tailor, Sher “managed dozens of employees, each working at a busy sewing machine,” the Crescent City Jewish News wrote. He retired in the 1990s.

“He could take a piece of fabric from anywhere on a garment and make the garment absolutely new-looking,” his son Leopold told The Times-Picayune.

Sher’s account of his experiences during the Holocaust

A funeral was held Friday morning at Congregation Anshe Sfard in New Orleans.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.