Moses Moritz Berlein (1818-1898)
Moses Moritz Berlein came from Marburg on the Lahn. When he became licensed to practice as an attorney in Rotenburg in 1843, he was among the very first Jewish lawyers in German-speaking countries. In 1848, however, he was one of the targets of the riots of that year against the Rotenburg Jews. In 1862 he was involved in the re-establishment of the Rotenburg gymnastics club. In 1899 his son Julius, who had meanwhile settled in London, made a donation of 3,000 Marks in order to set up a municipal archive in Rotenburg.
A longer version of this capsule biography is also available in English (translation by Prof. Judith Levi, Chicago).

Manfred Braunschweiger (1919-
He was born in Burghaun in 1919 and grew up in his native town. He attended the grammar school (die Lateinschule, (academic-oriented secondary school) in Huenfeld. After he was interned in Buchenwald just days after 9 November 1938, his mother sold all her property in order to buy him and his brother tickets to Shanghai – which won their release from internment and thus escape from Nazi Germany. During his turbulent years as a refugee in Shanghai (1939-1946), Manfred eventually found work in the food-supply sector. This stood him in good stead when he established an import-export company in America.
A longer version of this capsule biography is also available in English (translation by Rev. Martin Siebert).

Theodor Doellefeld (1895–1974)

Theodor Doellefeld was born and grew up in Rotenburg where he worked as a grain and animal feed merchant. In May 1930 he was appointed parnass [chief administrator] of the Rotenburg Jewish congregation. Deported to Riga in 1941 and used as a slave laborer on local farms, he managed to escape his concentration camp when the German eastern front collapsed in 1943/44. However, he was seized by the Soviet Russians, and sent to a Siberian labor camp until his release in 1958. In February 1959 he left Germany and went to Louisville, Kentucky (USA) where his daughter Kate had been living since 1938. Just a few weeks before his arrival in the USA his daughter Dina (born 1927) died; her early death was due to the lasting destructive effects of what she suffered in concentration camps. After returning from the concentration camp in 1945, she had unsuccessfully tried to settle in her Hesse home region; she had then moved to Chicago, Illinois (USA) in 1946. Theodor died in July 1974 on his way to a recreation visit to Baden-Baden in south-western Germany.

Willy Fackenheim, MD (1882-1943)
Willy Fackenheim was born and raised in Bebra, the son of the local innkeeper Isidor Fackenheim. After studying medicine in Wuerzburg, Willy received his license as a general practitioner in Wiesbaden in 1920 – but it was revoked by the Nazis in 1936 "on racial grounds." After the November 1938 pogrom, he was subjected to a terrible time in the Buchenwald concentration camp, about which his son Walter, who was also interned there, later published a shattering account. In 1939 the family managed to escape to Shanghai, where Willy was even able to practice his profession for a short time. However, due to his extremely adverse life circumstances, this opportunity did not last long: Willy died in Shanghai in 1943, as did his wife in 1945. The biographical material that follows is based substantially on the memoir of Willy's son Walter (Frank), People, Events, Stories: A Personal History 1920-1947 (published in San Francisco, 1984).

Chanan/Hans Floersheim (1923-
Hans Floersheim was born in Rotenburg in 1923 and grew up there, but moved to Leipzig with his family in the spring of 1933. From there his parents sent him to Amsterdam where he went underground after the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940. Thanks to good luck, his own audacity, and his quick-wittedness, he succeeded in escaping across the Pyrenees into Spain in April 1944 - on his fourth attempt. In October 1944 he made it to Palestine from Cadiz, Spain. After living several years on Kibbutz Hazorea (near Haifa), he moved to Kibbutz Yakum in 1947 where he has lived ever since. His report about his flight through western Europe was published in 2008 (in German) under the title, Across the Pyrenees to Freedom: From Rotenburg on the Fulda via Leipzig to Amsterdam and through France and Spain to Israel 1923-1944, with an introduction by Brigitte Meyer-Christ and Heinrich Nuhn. The book is presented here in a PDF-version. It attests to the courage of one individual while at the same time bearing witness to the role of reciprocal support and help from outsiders. Documents within the reading text and in the appendix show the deep roots of his family in their Heimat (home region) in the northern and eastern parts of Hesse.

Ruth Guetzlaff-Katzenstein (1906–1988)
Born and brought up in Rotenburg, Ruth Guetzlaff-Katzenstein owed her survival in the Nazi period to the rescue operation of her non-Jewish mother who, in 1941, denied that her Jewish husband Siegfried Katzenstein was Ruth's biological father, and thus helped Ruth to secure an officially certified “Aryan” identity. Through a judicial decision Ruth was freed from the obligation to wear the discriminatory Star of David that was mandatory for Jews, and in this way escaped deportation to an extermination camp. Ruth’s Star of David is now displayed in a showcase in the Jewish Museum in the former mikvah in Rotenburg. It was for this reason that Ruth’s daughter Kathrin Reiher chose the title “Abschied vom Stern” (“Farewell to the Star”) for her account of her family's history, published in 2009 in the book, To Survive is to Remember: Life Stories of German Jews," edited by Wolfgang Herzberg.

Jakob Hahn, banker (1871-1943)
In the 1890s Jakob Hahn migrated from Rhina to Bad Hersfeld, where he set up a private bank which functioned until 1938. The biography that follows on Jakob Hahn includes material on the lives and the activities of his sons Isfried, Arthur, and Rudi plus their families. Arthur received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in law at the University of Wuerzburg. In 1925 he married into the Brach family, and became the manager of the family's big malt factory in Schoena near Dresden. Arthur Hahn’s daughter Hannelore is the president of the International Women’s Writing Guild (IWWG); her 1982 memoir, On the Way to Feed the Swans, was an important source for the Jakob Hahn biography that follows.

Dr. Josef Hahn (1909–1972)
Born in Bad Hersfeld, Josef Hahn passed his Abitur (university-qualifying) exams when he graduated from the local Gymnasium (academic-oriented secondary school, which in Bad Hersfeld was also known as die Alte Klosterschule, the "Old Monastery School"). At the University of Marburg he studied law and received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree there. After losing his position as a civil servant in 1933 on account of his Jewish descent, he emigrated to England to become eligible for a job in (and legal entry to) British Palestine. Thanks to his legal training, he became an Israeli civil servant in 1961, at which time he changed his surname to Haon (lit., "the power"). As financial attaché at the Israeli embassy in Bonn, he was mainly in charge of restitution claims concerning stolen Jewish property in Germany. The biography that follows includes information and documents about his wife Vera, née Klebe, who also came from Bad Hersfeld and who lives now in Jerusalem.

Herz Hess (1819-1892)
In the county of Rotenburg on the Fulda, Herz Hess served in his time as regional community president (parnass) for the county's Jewish congregations, and was also one of its citizens who paid the highest taxes. From 1873 until his death in 1892, he served a member of the Rotenburg town council. He owned the estate of Wuestefeld and the barracks in the Buergerstrasse. He also acquired the mill named Herrenmuehle [Nobleman's Mill], which had previously belonged to the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. His sons transformed this ancient mill near the Fulda bridge into one of the most efficient enterprises of its kind, until it burned down in 1923.
A longer version of this capsule biography is also available in English (translation by Prof. Judith Levi, Chicago).

Jakob Katz Rotenburg (1878-1942)
Master shoemaker Jakob Katz ran a shoe repair shop together with a retail shoe at 4 Steinweg in Rotenburg on the Fulda; he was the sole representative for Salamander shoes for over 20 years, a role which was cancelled by the Salamander firm in 1933 on account of “racial” reasons. Together with the telecommunications technician Jakob Koepping, Jakob Katz developed a "manual nailing appliance for shoemakers" for the purpose of attaching shoe soles, which was patented in 1913. The appliance is being replicated by the Occupational Training Institute of Kassel in cooperation with the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Kassel and is going to be exhibited in the Jewish Museum in the former mikwe (Jewish ritual bath) of Rotenburg. One additional indication of Jakob Katz' integration into his Rotenburg environment: in 1910 he was one of the founding members of the local goat-breeding club. Although his son Meinhold (born 1906) managed to escape to British Palestine from Glauchen (in Saxony), Jakob Katz as well as his wife Berta, née Neuhaus, and his daughter Frieda perished in the Shoah.

Manfred Katz, Beisefoerth
Manfred Katz was the son of the horse trader Salli Katz and his wife Betty (née Rosenblatt) in Beisefoerth near Melsungen. Immediately after the November 1938 pogrom, the family fled from their hometown of Beisefoerth to Kassel. In December 1941 Manfred Katz, together with his younger sister Doris (Dorette), was deported to the Riga ghetto. Although his parents and this sister perished in the Holocaust, he survived his imprisonment in several concentration camps. In July 1945 he reached Frankfurt am Main. His older sister Ilse Johanna, who had been able to flee to the USA in 1940, managed to get him a US visa in May 1946. After completing his studies in engineering, Manfred Katz became a leader in the area of developing computerized elements of the transportation industry. [The material for the longer biography of Julius Katz which is in preparation was made available to us by Manfred Eifert.]

Willy Katz (1898-1988)
Willi Katz belonged to a family which had lived in the small town of Nentershausen for many generations. As late as October 31, 1935, he – like many German Jewish veterans – was awarded the Cross of Honor for Frontline Soldiers for his service in World War I, by the “Fuehrer and Chancellor of the Empire," i.e. Adolf Hitler. But in November 1938, during the "Kristallnacht" pogroms, he was severely beaten by Nentershausen storm troopers, and his living quarters and business premises were vandalized and plundered. In October 1940 Willi, his wife Martha, and his three sons escaped to Ecuador where he managed to continue his work as a shoemaker specializing in orthopedic footware. Later on, his eldest son Siegbert (Bert) worked as an employee for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston where he was involved in the Apollo space program. Willi’s son Karl (Carlos), who has lived in New Jersey after leaving Ecuador in the 1950s, has been a highly qualified and successful electrical engineer who holds a number of patents on power cables. Willi’s son Manfred (now deceased) ran the popular restaurant Schwender’s in Hamburg.
A longer version of this capsule biography is also available in English (translation by Willy's son, Carlos Katz).

Sally Katzenstein (1865-1942)
Sally Katzenstein was born in the Hessian village of Heinebach, near Rotenburg on the Fulda. In 1889 he relocated to the island of Sylt to pursue his painting; he became a much honoured and esteemed artist and town councillor, and thus a figure in Sylt's civic life. He converted to Christianity in early 1908. His career as a painter began at the Duesseldorf Academy of Art as a student of Professor Eugen Duecker’s. The sea and costal landscapes were his most important motifs. He first signed his paintings as Sally Katzenstein, and later as Franz Korwan, the name he adopted officially in 1924. In October 1940 he was deported from Baden-Baden to the internment camp at Gurs near the Pyrenees; he perished two years later in the Noé internment camp. In 1991 the artist’s work was shown in a solo exhibit in the Jewish Museum in Rendsburg (Dr.-Bamberger-Haus), and also in Keitum on the island of Sylt in 2002.
There is also an English version of this biography (translation by Prof. Judith Levi, Chicago).

Isidor Landsberg (1881-1923)
Isidor Landsberg was the teacher at the Jewish elementary school in Hersfeld from 1921 until his premature death in 1923. He died of the lingering effects of wounds that he had suffered while serving as a medic in World War I. After being expelled from the Hersfeld secondary school (the "Alte Klosterschule") in 1934 for being "non-Aryan," Isidor's twin sons Simon and Jakob (born 1922) were able to study for a time at the strictly Orthodox Talmud-Torah School in Frankfurt, beginning in 1936; soon after, Isidor's widow and other children moved to Frankfurt as well. Isidor's daughter Karla and four of his five sons survived the Holocaust by emigrating to Palestine. However, his widow Rini (née von der Walde) and his son Jakob perished in the Holocaust; the latter was shot by German soldiers in Yugoslavia.

Marga Levi (1927-1943)
Marga Levi was born in Gemuenden on the Wohra near Marburg but, after her parents’ divorced, grew up with her grandparents in Niederaula. On November 8, 1938, in mortal terror as the perpetrators of the pogrom against the local Jews were pursuing her, she leapt out of the window of her grandparents' inn, suffering severe injuries. She was then just eleven years old. Her traces lead to the Rigo ghetto in 1943, when she was sixteen, but disappear thereafter. The story of her life and fate is here presented as an illustrated radio play, based on the fictitious diary written about her by Daniela Eckstein, who had written the text when she was a pupil in Niederaula.

Markus Linz (1800-1884)
He is the focus of the legendary tale “Der Markusdeech” (The Markus Pond), told in the local dialect. This tale served for generations to mischaracterize the extensive attacks made by Rotenburg citizens on the Jewish part of the population as if there had been rioting of the rural population from the neighbouring villages. In Rotenburg the notion of the breakthrough into liberty, which is generally connected with the year 1848, was not directed against royal authorities and the landed gentry, as was true elsewhere, but instead degenerated into violent attacks on the town's Jewish minority. It took heavy military intervention to stop the attacks which continued from March to June 1848. Our Rotenburg 1848 project of which the Markus Linz section is taken [cf. “THEMES” on our website] makes use of various archival documents and includes videos and tape recordings.

Hans Lowenberg (1914-2004)
About a year after the night in March 1933 when several local Jews were beaten up and his family's business subject to an arson attack in their hometown of Schenklengsfeld – where his ancestors had lived for generations - Hans Loewenberg himself was dragged from his motorcycle and violently attacked by Nazi activists. Although he managed to put up an effective defense, his parents shipped him off to an uncle in Prague out of fear for his ultimate safety. To satisfy his wish to emigrate to British Palestine and to qualify for an entry visa, Hans then traveled to Denmark for an agricultural apprenticeship (known in Hebrew as Hachsharah, or "preparation") beginning in August 1935; with that preparation, he then succeeded in emigrating to British Palestine in 1937, where he became a member of a kibbutz near Haifa. In 1942, he married Marga Loew, who came originally from Wilhelmshaven. During World War II, Hans Loewenberg volunteered to join the Palestine Brigade of the British Army, which fought at El Alamein; and later served in the Jewish Brigade, a 5000-man Jewish unit in the Eighth British Army, which fought in Italy. After the founding of Israel, he also served in the Israeli armed forces. In 1951 he and his family emigrated to the USA, where he put his earlier experience in the family business to use by establishing a small supermarket. Upon his retirement in 1978, he and Margo moved to Davis, California. Hans Loewenberg was the first Jew from Schenklengsfeld to return to his hometown after World War II, in order not to forget and to document the past for the succeeding generations. He played a leading role in the publication in 1988 of the book, The History of the Jewish Community of Schenklengsfeld. Many of the chapters that he and his wife wrote on the daily life and the religious customs of the Jews of Schenklengsfeld are reproduced in full, in the longer biographical entry under his name. The biography of Hans Lowenberg’s younger brother Martin can also be found on our website hassia-judaica.

Isfried Neuhaus (1925-
Isfried Neuhaus titled his 1997 memoir, A Collection of Thoughts and Memories, and it has served us as an essential source for the longer summary of his life. The eight-year-old Isfried Neuhas arrived in the USA in the summer of 1933, together with his parents, David Neuhaus and Frieda, née Katz. In 1934 his maternal grandparents, Baruch Katz and Sara née Nussbaum, also arrived. This was made possible for the Baumbach family because they could find refuge in East Amwell, New Jersey with close relatives (several siblings of the grandmother from Heinebach), whose ancestors had emigrated already in the 19th century. In 1935 the family moved to the borough of the Bronx in New York City, where Isfried's father had found work. From 1943 to 1945 Isfried Neuhaus served in the US Army, and was deployed to the South Pacific. After studying business administration, he worked as a Certified Public Accountant in New York until his retirement in 1995. He now lives with his wife Margot in the Washington Heights neighborhood on the northern end of Manhattan, a neighborhood where so many German Jews settled in the 1930s that it came to be known (unofficially) as "Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson."

Jakob Nussbaum (1873-1936)
Jakob Nussbaum was born in 1873 in Rhina, a village in the eastern part of Hesse that had a Jewish majority in the second half of the 19th century. Nussbaum made a substantial contribution to helping the impressionistic style of painting gain acceptance in Germany. He was one of the leading impressionist painters, but his work also reflected other artistic currents of the times. He cooperated closely with Max Liebermann (1847-1935), the distinguished German-Jewish art collector, printmaker, and impressionist painter. For a period of ten years Nussbaum was president of the Frankfurt Society of Artists before escaping to British Palestine in 1933. There he settled in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, but was to live there only three more years before his death in 1936. A monograph by Claudia Mueller, on which much of the longer biography here is based, gives detailed information about his oeuvre.

Manfred Oppenheim > Moshe Naveh (1924-
Manfred Oppenheim was born in Rotenburg in 1923. and grew up in nearby Bad Hersfeld where his parents ran a kosher butcher shop. In 1936 the family fled to Palestine, where Manfred changed his name to Moshe Naveh. In his new home country he became one of the leading specialists in developing new water sources. As co-author of history textbooks, his son Eyal Naveh has become known as one of Israel’s “new historians,” who hope to contribute to the mitigation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by making each side more aware of the other’s point of view (“Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative”). The longer biography is in preparation.

Prof. Dr. Siegfried Oppenheim  > Daniel Penham (1914-1999)
Siegfried Oppenheim's family home stood at 1 Reichsstrasse in Bad Hersfeld. In March 1933, at the age of 19, Siegfried passed his final examinations at the Hersfeld Gymnasium (the academic high school that was also known as the Old Monastery School). Just a few months later, he fled from the National Socialist regime to Besançon, France; then, after German troops came to occupy France, he saved himself by fleeing to the USA in 1941. After changing his name to Daniel Penham, he returned to Germany in 1945 as an American soldier and an intelligence officer. To his great disappointment, he had only very limited success in his efforts to organize the rebuilding of the University of Heidelberg without people who had been active in the Third Reich. Nevertheless, he was able to contribute to the removal from their teaching positions of some professors who had collaborated too closely with the Nazi regime. However, he soon found himself confronted by a whole phalanx of German high school teachers, who wanted to portray themselves as victims of the fallen regime and in no way as beneficiaries thereof, much less as having been its supporters or actual perpetrators. In 1964 he became a Professor of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University in New York. As a scholar, Penham made his name through his studies of the Renaissance philosopher Budé or Budaeus, whose monumental work De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum [On the Transition from Hellenism to Christianity] he translated first into English and then also into French; he also compiled a critical edition of the work.

Heinz Harry Rothschild (1921-2004)
At the end of the 19th century, the Rothschild family moved from Weiterode (now a district within the town of Bebra) to what was then the county seat of Rotenburg on the Fulda, where Joseph Rothschild and his son Isaak (the grandfather of Heinz Harry) established a dye shop at 9 Marktplatz. In 1920 Albert Rothschild, Heinz Harry's father, married the Swiss-Jewish woman Irma Dreifuss, whom he had come to know during his time as a prisoner of war. Of Albert's eight siblings, four met a violent death: his two brothers Hermann and Joseph died at the front in World War I, and his two sisters Recha and Selma met their deaths as victims of the Shoah. In June 1938 Albert and Irma Rothschild, together with their children Heinz Harry and Thea, managed to escape to the USA, where Heinz made his living as a sales representative. In this occupation, the fact that he had received commercial training in Frankfurt from 1935 to 1938 stood him in good stead. After 1945, Heinz Harry Rothschild returned to his hometown of Rotenburg three times, the last of which was in June 1996, when he came with his daughter Karen. On that occasion detailed conversations were held with him, which have formed the basis for the longer biography here. From 1955 on, his nephew Joseph Rothschild (born in 1930) taught at the renowned Columbia University in New York as a professor of political science and East European history; he also was part of the foreign policy advisory circle of US President Jimmy Carter in the 1980s.

Moritz/ Morris Milton Rothschild (1873-1943)
Although eleven-year-old Moritz Rothschild emigrated to America with his mother and his siblings in 1884, he nevertheless remained faithfully linked to his hometown of Rotenburg on the Fulda. In America he took the first name of Morris. After studying law and business administration, he pursued a career in the printing trade. He became head of a large printing establishment in Chicago as well as a paper factory and a knitting plant. He recorded his managerial administration expertise in a sort of guidebook called Bank Advertising, published in 1912. This successful businessman and entrepreneur was not lacking in honorary positions. He was appointed director of his Jewish congregation in Chicago, and director of various Jewish charitable institutions in Chicago. The renowned Idlewild Country Club chose him as its president. During the times of adversity in Germany that marked the 1920s, Morris Rothschild served in many different ways as the benefactor for needy people and social services in his hometown of Rotenburg. He donated money for the local Ambulance Service and for a playground with a wading pool in the Saint George Kindergarten, whose visitors from that time remember him as the "Donation Uncle from America." In 2010, the connecting pathway between Heinz-Meise Street and the lower entrance to the Jewish cemetery in Rotenburg was named in honor of Moritz Rothschild – with an explanatory panel that states, "Benefactor for his hometown." Morris Rothschild's family tree can be traced back for multiple generations. His great-grandfather David Marcus was named as a Schutzjude {"protected Jew"] in Rotenburg on January 18, 1792. [The term Schutzjude or "protected Jew" refers to a protected status - originating centuries earlier - which only a few Jews in a particular place could buy from the local ruling authority, usually for a high fee, and which would allow them residence and economic possibilities. He adopted the family name Rothschild in 1808 for himself and his nine-member family.

Additional biographical material is in preparation

Julie Sommer (1886-1942)
Julie Sommer was the mother of Ruth Holländer, Roger Herz-Fischler’s mother. She was born in Heinebach in 1886, as daughter of Sarah Katzenstein of Frankenberg and Koppel Sommer of Heinebach. In 1914 she married Joseph Holländer of Hilchenbach (near Siegen). Both Julie Sommer and Joseph Holländer were deported to Zamość, Poland in 1942, and there murdered. In 1937 their daughter Ruth was able to emigrate to the U.S. where she married Sigmund Fischler from Leipzig. In 1940 their son Roger was born in Washington Heights (located in the upper part of Manhattan), the home to twenty-five thousand German-Jewish refugees. What follows is divided into two parts. The first part contains material, in a very abbreviated form, from the chapters, “The Hilchenbach Group”, “Common Ancestors” and “Selma Holländer and Freddy Furcht” of Roger Herz-Fischler’s book A Triple Love Story / The Ancestors of Eliane Herz and Roger Fischler. The entire book, divided into chapters for convenience, can be found at either of the following two sites:

https://people.math.carleton.ca/~rhfischl/GENEALOGY/GENEALOGY.html
http://web.ncf.ca/en493

The second part is a copy of the chapter (with the page numbering, etc. unchanged) “The Heinebach Group” from the book A Triple Love Story. The genealogical tree on the first page above shows the maternal ancestors of Julie Sommer through the great-grandparents. The tree on the first page of the second part shows the paternal ancestors of Julie Sommer through the great-grandparents. Since their retirement Eliane and Roger Herz-Fischler have written three books related to the history of their families.

Dr. Siegfried Sommer (1859-1925)
Siegfried Sommer was born and grew up in Rotenburg. At the Friedrichsgymnasium [academic high school] in Kassel he was a classmate and close friend of Prince Wilhelm, who would later become the German Emperor William II (Wilhelm II). Many of Siegfried’s letters have been preserved, which testify to his great enthusiasm about his friendship with his Royal Highness. In his later years as a high-ranking judge, Siegfried Sommer was one of the most successful Jewish lawyers in government service in Germany. Just a few weeks before his death in 1925 he became president of the "Senate," a section of the Frankfurt appellate court.

Siegfried Fred Speier (1916-1996)
Siegfried (Fred) Speier was born on March 19, 1916 in Niederaula, where he had a happy childhood. Until 1938, his father, Sally Speier, ran a retail store on Ziegenhainer Street in Niederaula, where he sold manufactured and household goods, including china. In the longer biography [that follows] his memories of life in village society are discussed as well as his bitter and humiliating experiences of the discrimination and persecution under the Nazi regime. In January 1935, at the age of 18, Siegfried managed to reach Louisville, Kentucky, in the USA, where he established a store selling hardware and electric appliances. This undoubtedly helped to save his parents' lives, for they were able to leave Nazi Germany for Louisville in December 1938. Known in America as Fred Speier, he returned to his childhood home for the first time in 1958, and visited five more times thereafter. For his last visit in June 1994, he came for a memorial ceremony at the Jewish cemetery in Niederaula and for the installation of a memorial plaque. The longer biography also reports on the visit of the former pastor of Niederaula, Karl-Werner Brauer, to Kentucky in June 1990, when he was made an honorary citizen of Louisville for his commemorative activities.

Samuel Spiro (1885-1960)
He was born in Schenklengsfeld, Hersfeld County, in 1885. In our project we present his memories of his youth in the state of Hesse which he wrote in 1948 as “Jugenderinnerungen aus hessischen Judengemeinden” (Youth Memories from Hessian Jewish Communities) which were published in the book “Buerger auf Widerruf: Lebenszeugnisse deutscher Juden 1780-1945” (Citizens Subject to Recall: Memoirs of German Jews 1780-1945), edited by Monika Richarz 1976ff. Samuel Spiro’s account includes the activities of his grandfather Herz Spiro as Jewish teacher in Schenklengsfeld; the photo on the left shows Herz Spiro's tombstone in the Schenklengsfeld Jewish cemetery. In addition, he describes his father Jakob Spiro's role as Jewish teacher in both Schenklengsfeld and Fulda. Although Jakob Spiro had forced young Samuel to attend the strictly orthodox Breuer yeshiva in Frankfurt, Samuel soon dropped out in order to take up the study of medicine. He escaped to British Palestine where he worked in a hospital.

Benjamin Stiefel (1872 -1945)
Born in the Meissner town of Abterode, Benjamin Stiefel was the last Jewish teacher in the village of Baumbach (now part of the township of Alheim). Before teaching in Baumbach, he had been the teacher in the Jewish school in Werther in Westphalia. Benjamin’s sons Bruno (born 1907) and Herbert (born 1915) were able to escape to the USA in 1935. His son Joseph (born 1910) was one of the German Jews who had escaped to Denmark and whose lives were later saved from Nazi roundups in a heroic and daring rescue in the fall of 1943, involving many Danish citizens and Danish fishermen who smuggled the Jews out in fishing boats across the Oresund (a narrow Danish strait) to safety in Sweden. In New York, Herbert made a name for himself by specializing in zippers, thus becoming the subject of a story (“Zipperman Herbert Stiefel”) by Mark Singer in the famous magazine The New Yorker in 1987.

Joseph Strauss(1895-1965)
The Strauss family of merchants serves as a typical example of the destinies of the Jews of Huenfeld. The Strauss family originally came from nearby Rothenkirchen. In their house in Fuldaer Strasse the family ran a thriving grocery. In Elisabeth Sternberg-Siebert’s portrayal (which follows), Joseph Strauss’ son Alfred, who survived the Holocaust by going into hiding in Holland, gives a detailed report about his life during the years of persecution. In addition, Joseph’s wife Lilli, née Wertheim (from Naumburg near Kassel), presents the shocking account of her deportation to Riga in December 1941.
A longer version of this capsule biography is also available in English (translation by Rev. Martin Siebert).

Moshe (Morris) Werthan (1937-
Morris Werthan was born in Nashville, Tennessee, USA where he spent the first five decades of his life. In the 1990s he made aliyah (immigrated) to Israel, and he and his wife Libby have been living in Jerusalem for almost twenty years. For a long while he knew only that his ancestor Meier Werthan had one day come from Germany and laid the foundations for an important production center for packing material in Nashville, which later became the setting for some of the scenes of the feature film Driving Miss Daisy. In 2007 David Blumenfeld and Moshe's wife Libby produced a 27-minute documentary film called Crossing the Narrow Bridge, which traces Moshe Werthan's search for his roots to Rotenburg on the Fulda in Germany, the site from which his ancestor emigrated in 1865. The film was chosen for the Nashville Jewish Film Festival in November 2007 and was also shown on Nashville public television.

Joseph Wertheim (1834-1899)
Joseph Wertheim was born in the house at 4 Scheunengasse in Rotenburg on the Fulda, the son of the linen and thread merchant Leiser Wertheim and his wife Rosalie, née Ballin, whose family also came from Rotenburg. In 1868 he founded a sewing machine factory with an iron foundry of its own. In 1873 this enterprise was incorporated as the Deutsche Nähmaschinen-Fabrik von Jos. Wertheim, or the Jos. Wertheim German Sewing Factory. In 1883 its annual output amounted to 35,000 sewing machines produced by its 600 employees. Joseph Wertheim had trained as a specialized mechanic in an apprenticeship in the Breithaupt precision engineering firm (Mechanisch-mathematisches Insthitut Breithaupt) in Kassel, and he had acquired the know-how for setting up a sewing machine factory while working in the firm of Wheeler & Wilson in New York in the 1860s. In 1932 his descendants transferred the Wertheim manufacturing plant to Barcelona, Spain, where it was integrated into the Rapida S.A. company which Carlos Vallin (aka Karl Wertheim) was in charge of. In 1943 this company was taken over by the Olivetti Group. It had meanwhile concentrated on the production of high-quality technological products in the field of electronic data processing, logistics, and household appliances, and has become one of the leading Spanish companies in these lines of business.