Visiting Jebenhausen and its Jewish Museum

My mother’s family came from Germany in the mid-1800s.  In the course of pursuing my genealogy addiction – oops, I mean research — I’ve identified three of their villages of origin. 

For two of those villages, Markt Erlbach and Mitwitz, I’ve found little or no information about the historic Jewish community. 

The third village – Jebenhausen, about 27 miles east of Stuttgart – is a jackpot.

Scholars have written articles and books on the Jews of Jebenhausen. The Jewish cemetery there is well preserved and documented. There is even a museum devoted to the Jews of Jebenhausen!

These resources were all easily accessible to me. I didn’t have to learn German or spend weeks sifting through dusty, hard-to-decipher handwritten archives. There are many people to thank for this, including other Jewish descendants who’ve shared their knowledge, Christian residents who restored the town’s Jewish cemetery after the Holocaust, and more. 

But the wealth of information is mostly due to the work of two men – Rabbi Aron Tänzer and Dr. Karl-Heinz Ruess.

Tänzer (1871-1937) was the last rabbi in Göppingen, a larger neighboring town that eventually subsumed the village of Jebenhausen.  Among his  many accomplishments was a 662-page history of the Jews of Jebenhausen and Göppingen, which included family trees. It’s because of Rabbi Tänzer’s charts that I’m able to trace my Jebenhausen family line back to the 1700s.

Portrait of Rabbi Aron Tänzer in the Jewish Museum

Dr. Ruess is the museum director for Göppingen, who decided to create a Jewish museum there in 1985 – a time when even big cities like Berlin and Munich didn’t yet have a Jewish museum. 

Because of Dr. Ruess’s efforts, the life and eventual destruction of Jebenhausen’s Jewish community is documented far beyond what one might expect for a town whose Jewish population never passed 600. 

Last month, my husband Sam and I traveled to Germany to visit our daughter, who was doing an artist’s residency in Berlin. It was our first time in Germany. Ten years ago, before I started doing genealogy, I’d never even heard of Jebenhausen. Now, I eagerly arranged a rental car for the day-long drive south to visit it.

Our first stop was the museum, located in a decommissioned one-room Protestant church.

The museum’s location in the church is part of its story. 

In 1777, the barons who controlled the village of Jebenhausen agreed in writing to allow a small number of Jews – initially just 20 families – to move there. In return, the Jews paid them annual “protection fees.” Over the next fifty years, the Jewish community grew to a peak of 550 people, about equal to the Christian population of 600. 

Exhibit in the Göppingen Jewish Museum showing the 1777 document that allowed Jews to settle in Jebenhausen. Note the Hebrew signatures on the right.

Then in the mid-1800s, Jews started moving out of Jebenhausen – many to America, like my ancestors, and others to larger German towns that offered more industrial infrastructure and economic opportunity. By 1900, there were so few Jews left that the synagogue was closed and the chandeliers and pews were donated to the local church.

By the 1980s, that church had also been closed and turned over to the city of Göppingen. Dr. Ruess realized that the state of Baden-Württemburg had over 1,000 museums but not a single one focused on Judaism. With the synagogue’s furnishings already in the church, he convinced city officials to turn it into the Gföppingen Jewish Museum, which opened in 1992.

Dr. Ruess met us at the museum and guided us through, which was helpful since the labels for the exhibits don’t – yet – have English translations. It includes sections on Jewish holidays and rituals, the growth of the Jebenhausen and Göppingen Jewish communities, and their destruction under Nazism, told movingly through stories and photos of some of the individuals who were killed or displaced. 

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  Göppingen Jewish Museum in Jebenhausen

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  Chandelier from the synagogue

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  Göppingen Jewish Museum, with pews from the synagogue

The synagogue chandeliers and pews are still there, along with portraits of the barons who first opened Jebenhausen to Jews. Among the artifacts is a colorful hanging sign of King David with a lyre that marked the King David Inn, the first of several Jebenhausen inns serving Jewish travelers in the 1800s.

Me with the King David Inn sign in the Göppingen Jewish Museum

After touring the museum, Dr. Ruess led us on a walk through what used to be the Jewish section of the village. The main street still exists – now paved and busy with automobiles, while back then it would have been dirt and horse carts. Many of the original houses still line it, although most have been updated with third floors, modern windows, new siding, etc. 

The main street of the onetime Jewish section of Jebenhausen / Photo by Ilana DeBare

To be honest, it felt less like a historic street than a modest, nondescript European suburb. It would be easy to drive down the street and not be aware of its past. But Dr. Ruess pointed out where the Jewish communal institutions used to stand – the synagogue, the school, the large house built by the Jewish community to accommodate families who were too poor to build their own houses.

The rabbi’s residence was still standing. And next door to it – also still standing, although a victim of some unfortunate remodel decisions – was the house that belonged to my ancestors.

The rabbi’s house (yellow) and the house that belonged to my Einstein ancestors (brown/grey) / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Community housing for poor families, around 1870-80

Jebenhausen synagogue, around 1890

My great-great grandparents Rosa Einstein and Salomon Wormser – the ones who brought those two silver kiddush cups with them to the U.S. – met and married in Jebenhausen in 1866. According to Tänzer’s book, the house at Poststrasse 103 was occupied by Rosa’s family members from 1842 through 1865. Rosa would probably have grown up there. 

Some of Jebenhausen’s Jewish residents took advantage of opportunities created by the start of industrial development in the early 1800s. Rosa’s family, like many others, became involved in the new, growing textile industry. Her father, Salomon Einstein, started a weaving mill together with his brother Joseph Leopold Einstein in 1842, and in 1852 the brothers opened another factory that manufactured corsets.  

Salomon Wormser wasn’t from Jebenhausen, but Tänzer says he was a partner in the corset factory. He was much younger than the Einstein brothers: In 1860, he would have been 23, while the brothers were around 60. Perhaps he boarded with the Einsteins. 

Did Salomon and Rosa fall in love in the Einstein home while he learned the corset business from her father and uncle? Or was their marriage a calculated economic move – partners cementing a business relationship, or an ambitious young man angling to marry the boss’s daughter? 

We’ll never know. But an unpublished memoir by my uncle Ira Skutch offers a glimpse of Rosa and Salomon’s relationship decades later in New York, where he became a corset importer. (Presumably developing a new market for the family business.)

As my grandmother told Ira:

“Grandma and Grandpa used to fight and bicker all the time. She didn’t use his first name or ‘Mister’ – she never called him anything but ‘Wormser.’ He had a pair of old brown shoes that he wore all the time because they were comfortable. Grandma kept at him constantly to get a new pair, until he finally couldn’t stand the nagging any more. When he returned from the store he said to Grandma, ‘All right. I have new shoes. But I’m going to keep these old ones, and I’m going to wear them to your funeral.’ And he did.”

Rosa and Salomon were hardly the only young Jews to leave Jebenhausen. Neighboring Göppingen had a river, which made it a better site for manufacturing. And America offered an escape from the anti-Semitism that was deeply ingrained in German society. 

Between 1830 and 1870, 300 Jews from Jebenhausen emigrated to the U.S. – such a dramatic exodus that one scholar wrote an article titled “From Württemburg to America: A Nineteenth Century German-Jewish Village on its Way to the New World.”

Dr. Ruess shows a chart tracking the rise and decline of the Jewish populations of Jebenhausen (left) and Goppingen / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Today the only Jewish denizens of Jebenhausen are the ones resting underground. We followed Dr. Ruess up the street, about ten minutes past the Einstein home, to the Jewish cemetery. There he directed us to the graves of Salomon and Babette Gutmann Einstein, Rosa’s parents. We also found the grave of my oldest known Jebenhausen foremother – Rifke Einstein, who was Rosa’s great-grandmother and thus my 5^th great-grandmother (my great-great-great-great-great grandmother). 

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  Cemetery with stone of Rifke Einstein (in front)

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  Rifke’s stone

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  My daughter and me at Salomon Einstein’s grave

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  Hebrew and German lettering on Salomon Einstein’s stone / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Rifke was born in 1733 and died in 1817, part of the first generation of Jews to move to Jebenhausen. We don’t know her maiden name or anything else about her. She may mark the outer limits of how far I can trace my family, at least with the currently available digital resources.

One of the striking things about my Jebenhausen family history is how it mirrors the broader trends in German Jewish history, as described in Amos Elon’s excellent book, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933.

Placing my family’s story within these broad brush strokes:

Before Napoleon’s conquest of Germany in the early 1800s, Jews were completely excluded from German society. They were barred from owning land and from entering skilled trades and professions. They were prohibited from living in many cities.

The first Jewish families who settled in Jebenhausen were cattle traders and peddlers, two of the few occupations open to Jews. Their houses were built by local Christian craftsmen, since Jews were not allowed to practice trades such as carpentry.

Until the 19^thcentury, German Jews often did not have surnames and were known simply as “Isaac son of David” or “David son of Salomon.” (This poses obvious challenges for tracing family history.)

In Jebenhausen, Jews made an active decision to adopt surnames around 1818-20, earlier than in some other parts of Germany. Tänzer quotes an 1818 letter from two Jewish leaders to local officials: 

“Royal esteemed district office: There are several family fathers (heads of household) without a family surname and that has caused many disputes, and also created difficulties in recording the Jewish families in the noble books. We therefore have initiated that every Jewish Family should establish a permanent family surname. We therefore request to publicly distribute the following list of newly adopted surnames, so the nuisance of having two or three of the same name will finally stop.” 

As German Jews won more economic and social freedom through the 1800s, they increasingly identified with and assimilated into German culture. 

The gravestones of the Jebenhausen cemetery reflect this gradual assimilation of Jews into German society. The oldest stones like Rifke’s are entirely in Hebrew. Salomon Einstein’s mid-century stone is mostly Hebrew, but his name is also written in German letters. Then there are stones from the early 1900s that are entirely in German, like Christian gravestones of that time. 

The exodus of Jews from Jebenhausen to Göppingen and Stuttgart reflected the larger movement of Jews to urban areas through the 19th century, as Germany industrialized and cities dropped their restrictions on Jewish residency.

And of course the decimation of the Göppingen Jewish community during the Holocaust mirrored the fate of German Jewry overall.  Although Rosa Einstein moved to America, several of her siblings stayed behind. Some of their descendants – my distant cousins – died in concentration camps. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, one of them was Fritz Elsas, a former mayor of Berlin and part of the liberal opposition to Hitler. 

No one in my family was aware of these distant relations. I never knew until exploring my Jebenhausen roots that we had relatives who died in the Holocaust. 

There are so many factors that shape our lives – our parents’ economic class and social milieu, the values with which they raise us, the schools we attend and the friends we make. If any of those were different, I would be a different person.

But sometimes I feel that all those factors are dwarfed by a single decision made 150 years ago by people I never knew – the decision by Salomon Wormser and Rosa Einstein to move from Jebenhausen to America.

Postscript: In my last blog post, I promised to disclose my connection to that other Einstein — the one who didn’t sell corsets. Albert, who was born 38 miles away from Jebenhausen in Ulm, is apparently my fifth cousin, three times removed. Don’t ask me to detail the path. My head will explode.

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My daughter, me, and Dr. Ruess in front of the Göppingen Jewish Museum

I’d like to express my deep thanks to Dr. Ruess for his work on the museum and on the history of Jebenhausen’s Jews, and to other Jebenhausen descendants who have helped piece together the community’s story. 

In particular, thank you to Stephen Weil of Chicago – a descendant of Rosa Einstein’s sister Ricke and thus my fourth cousin – who recently commissioned an English translation of Rabbi Tanzer’s book that is available for free online through the Leo Baeck Institute.

Resources on the Jews of Jebenhausen

Jews in Jebenhausen and Göppingen– short online article with pictures on Edjewnet.com

History of the Jews Residing in Jebenhausen and Goppingen– English translation of the 1927 book by Rabbi Aaron Tanzer, in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute.

From Württemburg to America: A German-Jewish Village on its Way to the New World– 1989 article by Stefan Rohrbacher in American Jewish Archives.

Göppingen Jewish Museum – hours of operation and contact information (in German)

Next blog post: The stories of some of my other recently-discovered German ancestors. They include two New World tragedies.

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The genealogy drug

I don’t smoke tobacco. I don’t patronize California’s newly-legal marijuana industry. I drink, but only a little.

I do genealogy.

Filling in my family tree has been an occasional obsession in recent years. It goes in fits and starts. When I first signed up for Ancestry.com, I wallowed in the deluge of information about past relatives, some of whom I’d barely heard of. Then I hit a point of diminishing returns and stopped. Several years later I checked back in, found new leads – Ancestry and the other genealogy web sites continually digitize new records – and re-immersed myself. 

When I’m not in one of these immersion phases, I barely think about genealogy. But when I’m “on,” it does feel a bit like a drug.

There’s a visceral thrill in adding data to the family tree – a new relative, or a new factoid about a relative. It’s the same small exhilaration as filling in a crossword clue, or finding the missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. There’s a rush of dopamine pleasure.  You feel the rush… and you want to do it again… and again… and again… 

Screenshot of part of my tree on Ancestry.com

Of course there’s no end. For every third cousin you add to the tree, there is a spouse. There are the spouse’s parents. There are the spouse’s parents’ siblings, and their spouses, and their children, and those children’s spouses… Some of the people I ve encountered on Ancestry have family trees with 30,000 people in them. 

Thirty thousand people in your family tree! I’ll never go that far. My approach is more like driving with headlights at night: I only want to see a reasonable distance away. Still, I understand the temptation. When you’ve added every detail you can find about your great-grandmother, why not add her brothers? And then the brothers’ spouses. And then those spouses’ siblings… 

But what underlies the druggy rush? Some of it is simply a compulsion for order, like straightening my sock drawer. Ahh, every relative accounted for! Every sock paired with its mate, even if only for a day!

More existentially, it feels like pushing back a curtain of darkness. Pushing back the curtain of how much we don’t understand, and will never understand, about our world and our history. Even if we are only pushing that curtain a nano-centimeter.

Growing up, I had very little information about my ancestors. As a child I knew three of my four grandparents, all of whom were born in New York. Beyond that, I understood we were Jewish – and we came from Europe sometime in the 1800s – but that was all. There were no relatives still living overseas, no handed-down stories about “the old country.” I was 100 percent American, and might as well have sprung fully grown like Venus from a seashell. To the extent I imagined my immigrant ancestors, they were stereotypes from Hollywood – Tevye and Goldie in Fiddler on the Roof, trudging mournfully from Anatevka towards the promised land of America.

Not my family

Nothing. Darkness. My family story – and by extension the narrative I told myself about where I fit into history – began around 1890 in New York. Nothing before that.

Internal narrative is what this is about. Externally, it makes no difference: Things like race and social class are much more determinative of how the world treats me than the identity of my great-great-great-great grandparents. But internally I do tell myself a story about who my ancestors were, and what different paths my life could have taken, and by extension who I am, and it matters very much where that story begins. 

An American story that begins in 1890 is different from one that begins before the Civil War in the era of slavery.

An immigrant story that begins in sweatshop poverty is different from one that starts with middle-class tradespeople or business owners. 

A Jewish story that takes place wholly in 20^th century America is different from one that has parallel narratives in America and Nazi Germany.

If you’ll indulge me, over the next several blog posts I’ll share what I’ve learned about my ancestors’ lives through this geneology addiction. My family doesn’t have any royalty or mass murderers,* but it is far more interesting and unexpected than I imagined back in the days when all I envisioned was Fiddler on the Roof.

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*Spoiler: It turns out we do have a very distant connection to Albert Einstein, but that is less interesting than other things I found. 

A Tale of Two Kiddish Cups

Each Passover, I polish two silver kiddish cups from my mother’s family for our Seder table.

As a child, I never paid the cups any attention: They were just part of the fancy silverware that my mom kept in the dining room credenza. As an adult, I knew they were heirlooms but had no idea where they came from. The cups were engraved, but no one knew what the inscriptions and initials meant.

Our two heirloom kiddish cups / Photo by Ilana DeBare

Then, over the past five years, I started exploring my family history through online resources like Ancestry.com and Jewishgen.org. I discovered that the kiddush cups – and part of my family – have their roots in the Bavarian towns of Jebenhausen and Goppingen.

One line of my mother’s family – my Wormser and Einstein ancestors – emigrated from Jebenhausen to the United States in 1868.  They brought the cups with them.

Here’s what I know about their story:

On June 10, 1868, a young family made up of Salomon Wormser, Rosa (Rachle) Einstein Wormser, and their one-year-old son Max sailed out of Hamburg on a ship called the Holsatia. 

Salomon was 31 years old and Rosa was 23. They had been married two years earlier in Jebenhausen, then moved to Stuttgart where they had Max before departing for America. 

The taller silver cup bears the initials SW – which presumably refers to Salomon Wormser. I suspect it was a wedding present when he and Rosa were married. 

The smaller cup bears the inscription “Zum andenken von S. Landauer,” which is German for “a souvenir of S. Lindauer.” As I learned more about my family tree, I saw that Rosa had a sister – Sara Einstein – who married a man named Salomon Lindauer in 1861 in Jebenhausen. My guess is that this cup was a memento from that wedding: Perhaps the couple or their parents gave commemorative cups to the people closest to them.

Our Lindauer kiddush cup / Photo by Ilana DeBare

But back to the story of Salomon Wormser, Rosa, and Max. Twelve days after they set sail from Hamburg, they arrived in New York.  On July 23, 1869, they had a second son – Louis Wormser, who ultimately became my great grandfather.

In New York, Salomon ran a corset importing business – probably buying inventory from family and friends in Jebenhausen, which had an active corset manufacturing industry. He was not wealthy but not poor either. The fact that his family could buy silver kiddush cups as wedding gifts indicates they had some resources, as does the fact that Salomon emigrated together with his wife and baby son. (German Jewish men from poor families typically emigrated alone, and married or sent for their wives only after they had established some financial security in America.)

Census records list the occupation of Louis Wormser, my great grandfather, as a manufacturer of children’s clothing.  My mother knew him as “Papa Lou,” but he died long before I was born. Lou’s daughter was my grandmother Ethel. When she died, the cups were passed on to my mother and then, with my mother’s death, to me.

My great-great grandmother Rosa Wormser’s grave marker in Westchester County, New York

When Salomon and Rosa traveled across the ocean to start a new life in America, these cups must have been a precious reminder of home and the loved ones they left behind.

The tall SW cup is interesting in that the pictures encircling it are not traditional Jewish religious images. Cherubs and dragons, they’re more typical of German Romantic imagery. To me, they indicate how German Jews of the mid-1800s identified with German culture and aspired to be part of German society. They held the same ideas about beauty and art as their Christian neighbors. Yet Jewish efforts to assimilate into German society in the 19th century were consistently rebuffed: Even if they converted to Christianity, even if they served in the German military, they were not accepted as “real” Germans.

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  Details of SW kiddush cup

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(For a masterful and readable history of German Jewry during this era, see The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933, by Amos Elon.)

Just last week, noodling around with my online family tree, I started wondering about the line of the family that stayed behind — in particular, the descendants of the “S. Lindauer” on my cup.

It turns out that Salomon Lindauer and Sara Einstein had a daughter Bertha, who married a man named Julius Elsas. They in turn had a son named Fritz Julius Elsas. Born in 1890 in Stuttgart, Fritz converted to Christianity like many Jews of that era who aspired to acceptance in Germany society. He studied politics and law and married a Christian woman of Jewish descent.

Elsas entered politics – running briefly for mayor of Stuttgart but then withdrawing because of anti-Semitic attacks. In 1931 he was elected mayor of Berlin by the city council there, but had to resign his position when the Nazis took power.

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  Fritz Julius Elsas / Photo from Ha’aretz

Because of his “privileged mixed marriage,” Elsas didn’t face the same persecution as other German Jews, according to an informative biographical article in Ha’aretz. He became involved in the liberal resistance to Hitler, writing secret position papers to help plan for a post-Hitler Germany.

In the wake of the 1944 failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, Elsas was rounded up with many others in the German resistance. He was executed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in December 1945.

Elsas would have been my grandmother’s second cousin — thus my second cousin twice removed. He and my grandmother shared the same great-grandparents. But my American branch of the family long ago lost touch with the German branches. Until delving into genealogy, I never knew we had relatives who remained in Germany or who died in the Holocaust.

This spring, my daughter Becca is living in Berlin and working on a creative project that involves our family history. I polished the kiddish cups early this year, so I could send photos of them to a small Jewish museum in Jebenhausen, which we will visit when we go see her.

This Friday evening, the cups will again be placed on our Seder table — but with more levels of meaning than before. Initially a memento of my childhood, they’ve also become a connection with my German Jewish origins, with those 1860s ancestors who decided to move to America, and with the distant branch of the family that did not make such a fortunate decision.