(CNN) -- New details have emerged about a Jewish immigrant who fled Austria as World War II was brewing, lived frugally in New York and left an estate whose size -- $300,000 -- astounded some.



Ida Blumin fled Austria in 1938 for the U.S. and married Walter Fischer, who earned money performing odd jobs.



In a story published Monday, CNN and other news organizations reported neither the woman's name nor much else about her, except for the fact that she had donated half of her estate to Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a school with which she had had no known contact.



Since then, CNN has contacted two of her friends and a relative, who have identified her as Ida Fischer, who was born Ida Blumin in 1911 in Vienna. They said she was neither a concentration camp survivor nor had she ever been homeless, as the school originally reported.



Her life story, however, was still remarkable.



In 1938, she, her mother, her sister and her sister's husband fled Austria, said Peter Last, a Jewish collectible coin and banknote wholesaler who lived on East 32nd Street and befriended Fischer 20 years ago, when she lived a block away.



The Blumins made their home in New York, where they had relatives. The 5-foot-2-inch immigrant married Walter Fischer, another Austrian, who earned money performing odd jobs. The couple lived with Fischer's mother; Ida Fischer earned money from a variety of office jobs.



Fischer, who was in her mid-70s when Last met her in the late 1980s, gave the impression that she was just scraping by, he said. "She hung around on the street and talked to everybody and people gave her food and clothes," he said. "She was very thrifty."



She once traveled with her mother to Israel, but did not appear particularly religious, Last said.



Gabor Szanto, who met Fischer nearly 40 years ago upon his arrival in the United States from Hungary by way of Italy, disagreed, saying his friend observed all the high holidays.



"I used to take her to the synagogue," said the hair colorist who has a shop on the Upper West Side and cut Fischer's hair for free. He received 25 percent of her estate. "She was a great believer in God."



He described her as "a free spirit."



"She would say she liked weak men and strong coffee," he said. "She was always being taken out to eat by one person or another; people bought her things, bought her food, bought her newspapers. But she wasn't a down-and-out bag lady with a pushcart like the people in the movie. She was very neat, clean and she was a decent person."



He said her penny pinching was understandable "because she lived through the Depression."



Last said that, throughout the years he knew Fischer, she lived on East 31st Street in a 10th-floor, sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment in a building for senior citizens.



Her rent -- about $145 per month -- was even lower than it would have been because she reported housing code violations in her apartment to authorities, who then declined to approve rent hikes, Last said.



But Fischer spent much of her time outside the building, where she sat on a bench dressed in old clothes and carried on a busy social life. "Everyone knew her," he said. "Everybody in the diner on the corner knew her."



Among her coterie was Rue McClanahan, who played Blanche Devereaux on "The Golden Girls" and lived on the block, he said.



Neighbors would sometimes give her items they no longer wanted. Fischer's frugality was legend: She recycled greeting cards, crossing off the name of the original recipient and replacing it with the new one. "She'd write on the top of it: 'From Ida,'" Last said.



Instead of paying extra to get an unlisted telephone number, she simply listed it under someone else's name, he said.



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