MY WATCH WILL GO ON
Titanic vic’s ticker fetches 57G at auction
It’s a tarnished old watch, corroded into silence by the same salty waters that swallowed the Titanic. But while it can’t tell time, it does convey a sad, centuryold love story.
The silver, 3-inch timepiece — auctioned for $57,500 on Saturday — was owned by Sinai Kantor. He was 34 when he and his bride, Miriam, 24, took a doomed voyage from Russia to the United States by way of the Titanic, in April 1912.
Sinai, who had planned to become a doctor upon settling in The Bronx, drowned with the silver, Swiss-made watch in the pocket of his green suit.
Miriam, who planned to study dentistry, survived.
The watch has Hebrew numbering on its dial, and on its back, an embossed design of Moses holding the Ten Commandments.
If he had pulled it from his pocket when the Titanic jolted against an iceberg on April 14, , some 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, it would have read 11:40 p.m.
Sinai may have glanced at it while on deck, watching
KEEPSAKE: Titanic survivor Miriam Kantor (inset) held onto this Hebrew-lettered pocket watch for decades. It sold Saturday. It had been recovered from her husband, who drowned as the ship sank. as Miriam was ushered “women and children first” into Lifeboat 12.
The Titanic would stay afloat just two more hours, until 2:20 a.m.
Along with his watch, Kantor also had a little telescope in his pocket, and in those two hours he may well have watched his bride’s bobbing lifeboat as the ship slipped deeper and deeper into the water. Sinai’s body was recovered eight days later by a British cable repair ship, the CS Mackay-Bennett. He was embalmed en route to New York, clothed only in his underwear, records show. Miriam buried him in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, then fought an extensive legal battle to recover his effects — his green suit and overcoat, a notebook, the pocket telescope and a corkscrew.
And his pocket watch, which remained in family hands as Miriam relocated to Massachusetts. While she remarried, it’s been said that up until her death she paid to have fresh flowers placed on Sinai’s grave every April 15th.
On Saturday, the watch was purchased through Heritage Auctions by John Miottel, a California museum owner who has three other timepieces from the Titanic disaster — including one that belonged to Col. John Jacob Astor IV, the wealthiest passenger to perish in the disaster.