Benjamin M Emanuel and Marsha Smulevitz Emanuel are the parents of Ari Emanuel.
Ari’s father Benjamin M. Emanuel was a pediatrician.
He was born Benjamin Auerbach in Jerusalem in 1927 to Penina and Ezekiel Auerbach, a Jerusalem pharmacist. The family had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe in 1905, leaving their home in Odessa, which was then part of the Russian empire and now a city in southern Ukraine.
The Auerbach family changed its last name to Emanuel to honor Emanuel Auerbach, the 18-year-old brother of young Benjamin who died of an infection in 1933 after a bullet struck him in the knee after ricocheting off the pavement from a nearby conflict between protesters and police during the British occupation of Palestine.
Benjamin got recruited and became a member of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist group that operated in Palestine from 1931 to 1948 during the British Mandate.
He earned a medical degree from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
Following immigrating to the United States in 1953 as a young doctor with just $13 in his pocket, Dr. Emanuel would settle in Chicago two years later, and marry a young radiological technician named Marsha Smulevitz.
Emanuel also took a stand during his career, quitting the American Medical Association in protest over its position on national health care in the 1960s and a few years later backing a lawsuit against City Hall for allowing brain-damaging lead paint in buildings.
Benjamin Emanuel and Marsha Smulevitz Emanuel had four children; Rahm Emanuel, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Shoshana Emanuel and Ari Emanuel.
Dr. Benjamin M Emanuel died in October 2019.