Rabbi Jacob Freimann’s funeral procession outside the synagogue in Holleschau.
A few days later Ella, my grandmother, wrote from Jerusalem; she had been waiting to hear more about the funeral:
Dear Mama,
We still can’t comprehend the great misfortune which has overtaken us … We are constantly with you all in our thoughts. It’s a relief to know that Trude was with you, dear Mama. All through these days we’ve been longing for news from you. Of course you won’t be wanting to make any decisions right now, but it would be good if you would join us here in Jerusalem. Annchen wrote to us about how loving and attentive Sophie and Josef have been. This is a great comfort to us who are so far away.
A host of documents indicated that Regina spent much of the following months settling bills and dealing with the numerous administrative demands which follow any death, a painful task made all the more difficult by the hostile attitude which will have permeated most of the bureaucratic circles with which she had to deal. A copy of the will indicated that the couple had agreed that they would inherit each other’s possessions and that, upon the death of the second partner, their fortunes would be divided equally among their six children. On 14 February 1938 Regina had to declare for the purposes of any potential tax liabilities that they had six adult sons and daughters of their own and no further step- or adopted children. She was required to provide addresses for all of them, a circumstance which was to prove invaluable to me in attempting to uncover the traces of their lives seventy-five years later.
At the same time as she was coping with the paperwork resulting from her husband’s death, she also had to prepare a thorough inventory of her household possessions in readiness for shipping them to Tel Aviv, where, despite various hesitations, she hoped to go to escape Nazi Germany and rejoin the three of her children already in Palestine. Such lists were demanded by the Nazi authorities from anyone seeking to emigrate.
Amid all these pressing practical concerns Regina also had to make urgent decisions about her future. A letter to Alfred in Jerusalem from a family friend who was also a member of staff of the Palestine Office indicated that she was struggling to make up her mind what to do. That her preferred option was to go to Palestine was not in doubt. Her husband had firmly believed that God would redeem the divine promise and bring about the long-delayed return of the Jewish people to its ancestral land. But he was now dead and Regina had to face the future alone. The Jewish community agreed to forward her widow’s pension to Palestine if her application to emigrate were to prove successful, and the proposed sum of 350 Reichsmarks each month was generous. But what if the international situation should deteriorate still further and the transfer of monies became impossible? Would she then find herself penniless in a strange country, dependent on her family for support? Alfred’s correspondent observed that most people were happy just to get out of Germany alive and to leave worrying about what would happen afterwards until they knew that they were safe. But Regina was clearly concerned lest she prove a burden to her children who were all now struggling to establish a new life in challenging circumstances in a land full of conflicts of its own. The last thing she wanted was to become a source of trouble to her nearest and dearest.
It would be impossible to judge whether these prepossessing concerns served to distract her from her grief, or to accentuate it. Her letters, both from this period and later, showed a selfless capacity to pass over or make light of her own sufferings. But her husband must have been in her thoughts all the time.
After all, they had been married for forty-six years. They were first cousins and had met in her parents’ home in Ostrowo, when the young Jacob, still a teenager but already an orphan, had travelled there to study Torah with her father, Yisrael Meir Freimann, the town rabbi. Regina was probably just thirteen when the man with whom she was to share her life came to live in her parent’s house. She no doubt looked up to him for his learning and diligence with proud admiration.
Back home in Holleschau, Sophie was well aware of where her mother’s thoughts lay. In a letter dated 11 July 1938 she included something special for her ‘Dearest Mama’:
The blue flowers in the envelope in the parcel grow near our dear departed Papa.
Regina Freimann, centre, surrounded by her family.
3: THE ROOTS OF A RABBINICAL FAMILY
The first time I explored the old Jewish Quarter in Kraków was at night, walking along Szeroka Street past the Remu Synagogue, losing my way in small alleyways to find myself at the back of the ancient cemetery, staring through the railings at the worn gravestones of generations of scholars of Torah. I searched for the marks in the entranceways to courtyards and houses where the mezuzot, cases containing the tiny roll of parchment inscribed with the injunction to write on the doorposts of every home the command to love the Lord your God, had once been affixed. In my mind was the picture taken in secret by Roman Vishniac in the late 1930s of an old Jew studying Kabbalah by candlelight. Not long afterwards he, his world and virtually all its inhabitants were destroyed. Yet I imagined I might somehow encounter his spirit, together with the souls of those who had for generations devoted themselves to the love of Torah, among these places of prayer and learning, now empty of the Jews who had imbued them with their yearning and devotion.
I had also noticed the sign above an unobtrusive entrance in Jozefa Street: Kove’a Ittim LaTorah (‘establish fixed times for Torah’), a name taken from the Talmudic dictum that every Jew must fix regular hours of the day and night for learning Torah. The building had once been a Yeshivah, a school for the intensive study of the classic Jewish texts and teachings. But I had no idea that there was any family connection. Here, however, was where my great-great-great-grandfather, head of the Rabbinical Court of Kraków, had taught his students Torah every day.
Among his children were Avraham Chaim Freimann, who would become the father of my great-grandfather, and Yisrael Meir Freimann, who was to be the father of my great-grandmother. Avraham Chaim remained as a rabbi and teacher of Torah in Kraków. After learning intensively among the greatest Torah scholars in Hungary, Yisrael Meir studied philosophy and oriental languages, receiving his doctorate from the University of Jena in 1860. He was called to the rabbinate of the beautiful old town of Filehne in the district of Posen in the same year. Also in that year he married Helene, the third daughter of the famed teacher Rabbi Yacob Ettlinger of Altona. When Steffi died and before it emerged that there was a plot available close to her sister on the Mount of Olives, I had been advised to tell the Burial Society that she was his great-great-granddaughter; such ancestry, even after four generations, would encourage them to accord her a place of honour in the ancient cemetery.
A single surviving photograph of Helene shows her to have been a beautiful and dignified lady; she was popular and much loved in the family. My great-grandmother Regina was born in Filehne on 12 January 1869. She was still a small child when the family moved to the nearby town of Ostrowo where, after a unanimous election, Yisrael Meir was appointed rabbi, serving there until his death. He was held in such esteem not only by the Jews but by the entire local population that in 1900, over fifteen years after he died, a street was named Freimannstrasse in his honour.
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Freimann and his wife Helene.
My great-grandfather Jacob was born in Kraków to Avraham Chaim and his second wife Sophie on 1 October 1866, Shemini