Private funeral services were held May 4 for Irene Leonard, 94, a native of New York. She passed away peacefully April 27. Born in Manhattan on the Lower East Side to Hungarian immigrants, Gregory and Kathryn Lenard, she was orphaned at the age of five when her father died in the 1918 flu pandemic and her mother died two years later. Irene, christened “Irma” and her three sisters, Mary, Helen and Kathlyn, became wards of the Catholic Guardian Society which changed their last name to “Leonard”. Another sister, Margaret, had remained behind in Dejtar, Hungary when her parents left for America in 1908. With the death of her parents, Irene was never again to see her uncle, Stephan Lengyel or the house that Gregory Lenard was building for his family in Connecticut or to have any further association with her Hungarian ancestry. The youngest sister, Kathlyn, was soon adopted but the three older girls were sent to Sacred Heart boarding school in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., where Irene lived from 1918-1925 before completing her education at Our Lady of Victory in Tarrytown, NY. A lifelong lover of good food, Irene found her calling and spent many years as the rectory cook for the priests of Holy Family Church in Union City, N.J. She is survived by her friends, Elizabeth and Charles Serra and her niece and nephew Helen and Gardner Haskell. Services arranged by the Leber Funeral Home, Union City.