Jebenhausen
Debbie and I have had a number of experiences in Germany that we are writing down that have nothing to do directly with our family stories…though I guess they do, writ large, have a lot to do with our family stories, but that will be the last post I put together on the way home or later. But I will say that one of the things we keep discussing is whether or not the things we are seeing are what we thought we would see. In some cases, the answer is yes, in many cases, the answer is no.
I didn’t imagine that Stuttgart was going to be so massive and cosmopolitan. I kept asking Debbie…do you think Grandpa Harry would recognize this? We crisscrossed the river eight or ten times as we went from one place to the next…and we did so through tunnels under the river…or through the hills. My guess is that he would not recognize much. But then again, he left German citizenship behind 85 years ago. He’d be 107 today. He may have spoken English with a German accent but he spent far more of his life as an American than he did as a German.
Neither here nor there, but in the new very modern, chic, cosmopolitan Stuttgart, I ran into my 3rd cousin twice removed, Albert, on our way out of town.
Cousin Albert.
As we continued crisscrossing generations and cities on our circuit through Germany, we followed the Rems River from Stuttgart for about 45 minutes in our rented Link & Co. hybrid. And as we have been doing, we tried to put ourselves in the same mental space as our ancestors as they moved on from one city to the next. I wrote yesterday about visiting the graves of Bernhard and Paulina (nee Rosenthal) Ostertag, my Great-Great Grandparents in Stuttgart. Bernhard was born in Oberdorf in 1835 and died in Jebenhausen in 1900. Paulina was born in Jebenhausen in 1833 and died in Stuttgart in 1910. They were likely buried in Stuttgart because their daughter Anna, my Great-GrandAunt, made the arrangements.
Stuttgart to Jebenhausen is 43 KM. Jebenhausen to Oberdorf is 75 KM. If you decided to move to the next city…our guess is that you likely rarely, if ever, saw your family you left behind in person again. Providing for your spouse and children often forced you to make existential decisions. But the result of those decisions made life better, I assume, for each cluster of generations. Stuttgart was a step forward for these people…until it wasn’t. Jebenhausen, Muhlbach, Oberdorf…the same could be said for each of them. These people were trying to do the best they could for themselves and their families. My family. I sit in awe of them as I look backwards and try to understand their lives.
A year ago, I had never heard of Jebenhausen. I am tempted to share the history of this special village in South West Germany (Swabia). But I will refrain because it has already been written better than I can write it. I am grateful to Ilana DeBare who I found by googling Jebenhausen. As is the case with most people who trace family back to Jebenhausen, Ilana and I are related (at least) through marriage. She was gracious in zooming with me to advise me on my trip and has written a beautiful blog post of the history so I don’t have to. You can find it here.
The long and short of it is that in 1777, seven Jewish families were given permission to settle in what would become Jebenhausen. As it turns out, my ancestors…and Ilana’s ancestors…were part of those seven families. From 1777 until the mid 1850s, they built an incredible village mostly sustained by cattle trading and textiles. They built a synagogue and a vibrant community. My Ostertag and Rosenthal ancestors established small textile empires that would sustain parts of the family in Stuttgart and also in the United States, though those same businesses, it seems, would also cause deep wedges in the family that were buried for a hundred years until I started to peel back the pieces. That is for another future post, but suffice it to day, business and family often don’t mix so well.
I am especially grateful to Dr. Karl-Heinz Reuss who had the foresight and fortitude in the 1980s to establish a museum of the Jewish experience in Jebenhausen. I found him through Ilana’s post and he was so giving of his time to help me prepare for our trip and to spend an entire afternoon with Debbie and me showing us the museum, the town, and the cemetery. He took it upon himself to research which of my family lived in which house and to curate a special tour for us. The museum is in the old church building. It is outfitted with accoutrements from the old synagogue which were gifts from the Jewish community when they built their new synagogue in Goppingen. It is worth a visit if anyone is ever anywhere near it. Below is Dr. Reuss and me outside the museum.
The museum has a Star of David sculpture jutting out from the side of the church building which you cannot miss when driving past the building. I took this photo from where we parked the car at the supermarket down the street. I immediately knew which building we were looking for. If nothing else, those who know what the building is, are faced with some level of awareness each time they pass it. Those who don’t might be moved to find out. At the height of Jebenhausen’s Jewish history, in the mid 19th century, the Jewish community made up 50% of the local population. Today there is only one known Jewish family in the area who relocated from Tel Aviv for work purposes, not because they are connected historically to Jebenhausen.
I am grateful to Jebenhausen’s long serving Rabbi Aron Taenzer who died almost 90 years ago. In 1927, he had the foresight to document his community. In his book on the history of Jebenhausen, which is more than 500 pages long, he included charts of family trees, cemetery maps, occupations and so much more. Most, if not all of this history would be lost were it not for Rabbi Taenzer. As a rabbi myself, I am moved to help my community preserve their stories too. I learned in Rabbinical School, and as a rabbi, how important it is to preserve documents and information at the synagogue for posterity. I am even more aware of that now. Thanks to Rabbi Taenzer, and the work that Dr. Reuss has done, I was able to see where several of my ancestors lived, worked and died. I was not able to do this in many other places.
The house of Lob (died1831) and Voegele Juda (died in 1807) Moses, My Great X4 Grandparents. It was originally built to house poor families as they worked to build their own houses.
The house of Great-Great Grandmother, Paulina (nee Rosenthal) Rosenheim and her first husband, Ulrich Rosenheim who died in 1856. She would marry again, my Great-Great Grandfather Bernhard Ostertag and continue to live here. . Bernhard and Paulina are whose graves we visited in Stuttgart.
This is the grave of Voegele Juda Moses, who was born in May of 1751 in Nordstetten. She died on September 25, 1807. Her father was Juda from Nordstetten, her mother was Chajah (Helene). She married Loeb Moses from Malsch (1745-1831) on 6 September 1778 in Malsch. The lived in Jebenhausen.
Voegele was my 4th Great Grandmother.
We don’t make headstones like this anymore. You can get an entire bio off of these stones. But this stone, like so many in these cemeteries, is unreadable. Thankfully this cemetery was photographed in the 1980s with the inscriptions preserved.
I love two things about her bio.
Her and Loebs’s anniversary is only 3 days different than Debbie’s and mine…about 222 years before us.
For those who know Game of Thrones, Voegele’s father’s name on her grave, my 5th Great Grandfather, is “Juda from Nordstetten.” The lion is the symbol of Judah. The Lion is the king of the Jungle. NORD means North. Judah of Nordstetten. My Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandfather was the King of the Nord.
We cleaned off graves a bit, but cleaning can be just as damaging as the elements. We brought colorful stones from home to leave on the headstones as a sign that these graves had been visited.
This is Hannele Rosenthaler (Paulina’s mother), my Third Great Grandmother. Her stone is totally weather worn. Many of these stones were made from sandstone and have, at this point, succumbed entirely to the elements. But it was still legible in the 1980’s so we know it is her. Hannele Rosenthaler, Daughter of Lob Moses Sontheimer, born Dec. 12, 1795, died on October 6, 1859.
Jebenhausen is like a time capsule. The holocaust permeated almost everything Debbie and I saw in Germany. From how people referred to it…we heard it referred to as “that thing that happened” a couple of times…to conversations we had as we walked down the street in each city. As we do, Debbie and I developed some humor around some pretty dark stuff. Jebenhausen of course has a holocaust story, but for my family, my direct line at least, the Holocaust is not their Jebenhausen story. Most of them had moved on to other places like Stuttgart and Piqua, Ohio long before the holocaust. Their Holocaust stories were in other places. They weren’t there when that community was destroyed, so for me it was glimpse into the lives of my 3rd and 4th Greats.
Many hints of my family remain in Jebenhausen. Some things were obvious because there were signs up documenting the story.
Distant cousin Heinrich Sontheim (1820–1912), also known as Honas Bär Sontheimer, was a prominent late-19th-Century tenor and kammersänger (chamber singer) based in Stuttgart, Germany. He built a huge villa and stables that are still there. The town is quite proud that he came from Jebenhausen.
The villa he built when he retired. He lived in it for a brief time but returned to Stuttgart and used it occasionally.
His stables
Some things were more subtle…like evidence on a door. Dr. Reuss showed us that on several old doors, you can see where the mezuzah was.
From a distance…clearly an old door.
Close-up, you can see the nail holes and slight impression from a mezuzah removed long ago.
Today, Jebenhausen is a pleasant, and tiny, little neighborhood in the hills. It covers 4.5 square KM. There are 4312 residents. For those living there now, few probably know the story of their neighborhood. But some do. And Dr. Reuss and the museum have done a lot of work to preserve the memory of Jewish Jebenhausen.
