3.Sara Marx is born
My Great-Grandmother’s Family
I have given you some background of how I ended up here writing. Let’s now look at the life and family into which my great-grandmother, Sarah Stern was born. Here are the beginnings of her family from the earliest record available.
My Great-Grandmother’s Family
The Stern Family
It is 1735 and Meier Stern, Sara’s great, great-grandfather, starts his life in a Jewish community in the small village of Völkesleier Germany. Völkesleier lies just south of the Hesse-Bavaria border and is about 50 km North of Würzburg.
The nearby cemetery confirms that Jews had been settled in the area from at least the 17th Century. However, there is no official evidence of Meier apart from a note in a family record.
The official records show the death of Wolf Stern (Sara’s grandfather), cattle dealer, on 15th March 1832 at the age of 64. His wife Sisle, née Aron died at the age of 78 in January 1836.
Wolf and Sisle had two sons, Aron, born in 1792 and Samuel born in 1799. This family of four lived through the Napoleonic period, when great armies crossed Europe from 1804, through to 1815. Life would once more be perilous for the civilian population. The southern German areas suffered more than say the north of Germany. They were mired in the so-called ‘French Wars’ for 25 years from the 1790s until 1815. The community survived and prospered.
In 1815, their eldest son, Aron married Rösle Hosef from the nearby village of Steinach. They had eight children but six died each within days of being born. Salomon, the second child, Wolf Josef and Rahel, the seventh and eight survived into adulthood and formed families of their own. By the 1930’s there was only one branch from them with the name Stern although their families exist with other names – we are all connected somewhere!
Sara’s Grandparents and their family
Aron’s brother, Samuel Stern married Jette Goldschmidt in 1829 and they had six children, of whom only three survived. Samuel probably held some land and may have been a merchant or cattle dealer as well. By all accounts, they were relatively wealthy. We shall hear of the descendants of these three families later as they crisscross the seismic events of the twentieth century. For now, we concentrate on Sara’s dad, their third son, Moses Wolf Stern, born in 1834.
Sara’s Parents
Moses Wolf Stern is also variously described as merchant or farmer, the word ‘merchant’ being a general catch-all that could mean anything. His commercial dealings probably included both descriptions. Some surviving letters show a firm and legible handwriting.
Moses Wolf Stern and Regina Eisenburg
Moses was 22 when, on the 11th of February 1857 he married the 25-year-old Regina Eisenburg of Kissingen. In proper tradition, the marriage was recorded as taking place in Regina’s hometown of Kissingen.
Register of Marriage
We will hear more of the Eisenburg family as they intertwine in later years. They set up a home in house number 54 (now called Quellengasse 2) in Völkesleier.
Despite their standing, it was a hard life and, as was common at the time, the women gave birth to large families but with many of their children not making it through their early years.
Sisla was the first, born at the beginning of February 1858 and died just over four months later in June. Their second daughter, Babette (Known as Besla) was born in April 1859, followed by Therese (known as Deitel) in September 1860. Two years later Sara was born in May 1862. From photographs of Sara in later life, one can see the likeness to her mother.
In all, Moses and Regina had seven children, three of whom died in infancy, leaving four girls, each creating their own dynasty as we will see. These four women married into the Gottlieb, Sondheim, Lehman and Marx families which are now spread all over the world, many, many of them in the USA.
Salomon, their only boy was born in 1866 and lived for just two months. Minna born a year later died within a year of her birth in September 1868.
I get the impression that Moses was desperate for a boy but gave up after Salomon and Minna died. Sara might just about remember her latter siblings and one wonders how they dealt with it emotionally in those days.
House number 54 – photograph taken in 1987
Jewish Life
There was a synagogue in Völkesleier at 4 Frohnstraße. It was the centre of Jewish life in the village. It was built in 1762, three years before Meier was born, a hundred years after the first Jewish presence there. Sara was the fourth generation of her family to be part of this community which would have provided stability and assurance of her identity. There were 105 Jews in the community at that time, making up about 16% of the village inhabitants. Sara would have grown up in a fairly accepting atmosphere within the village, while surrounded by the sounds and ceremonies of a Jewish life. Her religious teacher was employed by the synagogue. There was even a kosher butcher (shocket) in the village, from whom her mother would buy the meat for family meals.
The teacher also performed the duties of chazan (beadle) and so would have ensured an active role for Sara and her siblings in the community. The Bima cloth (Bima is a raised platform on which the Torah scrolls rest when being read) in the synagogue was donated by Sara’s grandfather Samuel confirming the degree of wealth and standing in the small community. Moses Wolf donated the Ark curtain in the 1860s.
Sara would have learnt Hebrew, and performed the duties of a Jewish girl in the household. It was not a practice at that time for girls to become Bat Mitzvah (daughter of the Covenant) at the age of 13, as it was for boys to become Bar Mitzvah (Son of the Covenant). These are joyous occasions taking place when the child becomes an adult at the age of 13. I wonder how Sara’s father, Moses Wolf felt with four girls to bring up, being denied this tradition and celebration.
The Jewish Community
The Jewish population reached a peak of 105 in 1847 but by 1933 had diminished to 33, even though the synagogue was renovated not six years earlier in 1927. Burials took place nearby in the villages of Altengronau or Pfaffenhausen. In 1933, six Jewish children studied religion in Völkesleier with a teacher from Hammelburg.
Interior of Völkesleier synagogue in 1932
Before closing this chapter, returning to the synagogue, as already mentioned by 1933 the Jewish population had diminished to 33 residents. From about 1936 after Passover, it became difficult for the community to perform services without the required minimum 10 men (minyan) and so from about March 1938, the community joined with the community of Dittlofsroda. It is incredible that the community strived for normality amongst increasing state-sponsored oppression and hostility.
Services only lasted until the pogrom on the eve of the 9th November 1938, known more widely as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. On this night the synagogue was a victim of total destruction and rioters also invaded some of the Jewish homes in the village. The synagogue premises were then sold off and converted into a barn. The police reported that by February 1939, three hundred years of Jewish presence and life in the town, had been wiped out and the Jewish community ceased to exist.
Although the original synagogue was eventually demolished in the 1970’s the village raised a plaque at the former Jewish community centre as below which says:
‘There was in Völkersleier a Jewish community, the interior of whose synagogue at Frontstrasse 4 was destroyed on the night of the pogroms in 1938. The village remembers its former Jewish fellow inhabitants.
MAY THIS BE A MEMORIAL AND AN ADMONITION’
Jews and being German
Later, I will talk about the Jews more generally in Germany and what it was like to be a Jew. The saddest of this all is that Jews were never really accepted as German, even though they had been living there since Roman times. This is true right the way up to modern times.
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Attributions:
Many of the documents and photographs here are, or at some time in the future will be, lodged as a family archive with the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Schenkung von Frau Anne Marx in liebevoller Erinnerung an ihren Mann Carl Theodore.
The register of wedding is a document held by the State Archive in Würzburg (Staatsarchiv Würzburg, Jüdisches Standesregister, Signatur 17). This is a copy requested by my father in 1988.
Additional information on the Jewish community and the synagogue at Völkesleier from https://synagogues-germany.anumuseum.org.il/index.php/synagogues-and-communities?pid=54&sid=1308:voelkersleier.