These were good years for Rabbi Jacob and his wife. It was here that their third daughter Wally was born in 1894. Ernst, the first boy, followed in 1897, Trude in 1898, and their youngest child, Alfred, in 1899. The rabbi was able to find time to follow both his professional duties and his academic pursuits. He had a deep interest in history and became an important contributor to the work of Mekitsei Nirdamim, an international society devoted to the publication of scholarly editions of classic Jewish texts. He was appointed inspector of religion for the Jewish schools of northern Moravia and became chairman of the union of rabbis of Moravia and Silesia. It was in this capacity that he received a telegram from the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef in 1906 thanking him for the ‘patriotic tribute’ he had offered on behalf of his colleagues, though it was not clear what the occasion was on which he had contributed these congenial greetings.
Rabbi Jacob Freimann teaching in the synagogue.
In 1914 Jacob Freimann was called to the rabbinic seat of Posen, made famous by his illustrious predecessor Rabbi Akiva Eger. Twenty years later, in an accolade on his seventieth birthday, an admirer described his life there:
… his outstanding diplomatic skills, and above all the exemplary and deeply Jewish rabbinical home, run with tact and dedication by his life’s partner, created the atmosphere of his rabbinic incumbency. Then came the war years; it was necessary to look after wounded soldiers, prisoners of war and brothers in occupied lands. More than ever before, the troubles which afflicted the surrounding communities with their rich Jewish life poured into Posen. All important legal and political issues came before the Posen rabbinate for resolution.
When Posen became part of Poland as a result of the Treaty of Versailles following Germany’s defeat in the First World War, most of the city’s Jews, who spoke German, identified with German culture, and who felt threatened by the rising anti-Semitic tones of Polish nationalism backed by major elements of the Catholic Church, left to live in the Reich. However, Jacob and Regina remained until 1928, when they eventually moved to Berlin after he was offered the position of rabbi of the city’s oldest synagogue in the Heidereuterstrasse. ‘The Nazis destroyed it; there’s nothing left of it,’ my father told me. Nevertheless I went to visit the site where it had once stood. My father was correct; all that remained was a plaque noting that this had been the first of Berlin’s many synagogues: ‘Consecrated in 1714, the last service was held here in 1942, before the building was destroyed in 1945.’
Though he was sixty-two when he came to Berlin, Rabbi Freimann’s energies were in no way depleted. He taught history, literature, and practical rabbinics at the Hildesheimer Seminary where he himself had studied forty years earlier. He was appointed Av Bet Din, head of the rabbinical court. His reputation and authority extended well beyond the city, and beyond Germany itself; questions of Jewish law and scholarship were sent to him for his opinion from all over the world.
The early years in Berlin should have been a period of profound satisfaction for Jacob and Regina. Their six children were well settled in their lives; they were all married and their sons and sons-in-law were successful at their occupations. Their eldest daughter, Sophie, had remained in Holleschau where she had married Josef Redlich, grandson of the town’s former rabbi, whose family had been manufacturers of spirits for two generations. According to one account they possessed a rum distillery. But it seems more likely that they produced a variety of liquors. They were wealthy, but, after almost two decades of marriage, not blessed with children. They felt deeply at home in Czechoslovakia and had a wide circle of clients and friends across the neighbouring towns and villages. Trude had stayed in Poznań where she married Alex Peiser, a doctor at the city’s Jewish hospital; they had one child, Arnold, born in 1928. Jacob and Regina’s older son Ernst had studied medicine and, after serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army for the duration of the First World War, settled in Frankfurt, the city with Germany’s second largest, but oldest and most famous, Jewish community. Despite his professional obligations he was an ardent student of Judaism; in his memoirs he carefully recorded the names of all the major scholars and teachers with whom he had learnt Torah in every city in which he had lived. He had married Eva Heckscher, the daughter of a banker from Hamburg, and they soon had a thriving young family. The youngest of Jacob and Regina’s six children, Alfred, had completed his studies and was shortly to be appointed to the judiciary in Königsberg. Although it had been the city of Kant, it wasn’t renowned for its Jewish community, but the government had posted him there and events were soon to prove that the move to East Prussia was beschert (ordained in heaven) – as the Yiddish term succinctly put it. For it was here that he would meet his future wife. Wally too was married, to an eminent doctor; he had a passion for song- birds which, to the horror of other members of the family, he allowed to flap freely around their home. Wally was the only one of the six siblings later to be divorced. Sadly, she had no children. I remember visiting her when she was an old lady, a wizened figure who made a living by administering injections, existing in rather Spartan style in a flat on King George Street in the centre of Jerusalem. In fact, she had really wanted to become a doctor but because at the time women were apparently not allowed to study medicine, she had to settle for being a nurse instead. She was a brilliant cook. I stayed with her on my first ever visit to Israel when the somewhat grim asceticism of her manner rather frightened me. I never met her at her best or had the opportunity to appreciate the person she really was.
Ella and Robert Wittenberg, my grandparents, had initially settled in the small town of Rawitsch, where my grandfather owned a timber mill. My father once showed me a picture taken after the war, possibly as late as the early 1960s. The name Wittenberg was still displayed in large letters on a board by the entrance; nobody had thought it necessary to take it down. Evidently the possibility that any members of the family might one day return was too remote to merit consideration. After he died I searched every folder of my father’s papers but was not able to recover that photograph. My father was born in Rawitsch in 1921; two years later the family moved to nearby Breslau. My father would have been too young to understand but the move was probably occasioned by the election of a nationalist mayor, Kazimierz Czyszewski, in 1922. The Polish Nationalist Party was notoriously anti-Semitic. The Jews of Rawitsch suffered discrimination and persecution, including the refusal to hand them the keys to the synagogue. In October 1923 the Jewish community of Rawitsch was formally dissolved and its properties made over to the State Treasury.
Ella and Robert Wittenberg, my grandparents.
Breslau, a beautiful city on the Oder, had a substantial Jewish population and a famous rabbinical seminary named after the nineteenth-century founder of Conservative Judaism, Zecharias Frankel. I visited the town in 2010 for the rededication of its best-known synagogue, Zum Weissen Storch (At the White Stork). I wasn’t even able to look for ghosts; my father had never told me where they lived or what synagogue they had attended. I only knew that he had been a pupil at the Jewish school; a small photograph showed a rather bare and miserable playground. It was there that he and his classmates used to play football whenever their Jewish studies teacher was called to the phone in the middle of the lesson, according to my father a rather frequent occurrence. He vividly remembered how those boys too slow to return to their seats on time would be lifted back through the window by their ears. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘It did hurt.’ The family had been prosperous. ‘At midnight we would break for a large meal, with goose fat,’ my father said, remembering how they had honoured the custom of studying Torah all night on the festival of the Giving of the Law. ‘My mother’s recipes would say “Take twenty eggs,” he recalled, listening to my brother or me as we read out the more modest list of ingredients for a cake from some new-fangled, cholesterol-conscious work. ‘Who would dream of doing that today?’
It appeared too that the Wittenberg parents rather spoiled their children, as the disapproving tone of a letter from Sophie