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Walter Rosenbaum
© Yad Vashem

Walter Rosenbaum * 1880

Rissener Landstraße 127 (Altona, Blankenese)

1941 Lodz
ermordet

further stumbling stones in Rissener Landstraße 127:
Frieda Rosenbaum

Frieda Rosenbaum, née Nachum, born 01/30/1906 in Hamburg, deported to Lodz 10/25/1941, deported on from there 09/24/1942, murdered
Walter Rosenbaum, born 12/17/1880, deported to Lodz 10/25/1941, murdered

Rissener Landstrasse 127

Frieda Nachum and Walter Rosenbaum got married in the winter of 1939 – at a time when discrimination, persecution and arrests hardly left Jews in Germany room to breathe. Frieda was 33, Walter 58 years old. He came from what was then Eastern Prussia, from the town of Rössel (now Reszel in Poland). His parents were Alexander and Ida, née Eichelbaum. Frieda was a native of Hamburg; her parents, Magnus Nachum and Alma, née Goldschmidt, had married in the Hanse City in 1897, the year in which Magnus Nachum set up his own business, M. Nachum & Co, scrap metal. After two moves, the company from 1905 on stayed at the same address in Hammerbrook, Wendenstrasse 27. Magnus and Alma also moved their home several times before they found a permanent home for the family that by then included three daughters; in 1913, the Nachums settled at Hartwicusstrasse in Hohenfelde, on the banks of the Mundsburg Canal.

Frieda had two elder sisters, Gertrud Ruth, six years her senior, and Dora, who was five years older. Frieda attended the Paulsen Stift School from the 1st to the 10th grade. This high school for girls from poor families had been founded by the Hamburg social reformer and suffragette Charlotte Paulsen and established after her death in 1866 in a low-income district of the historic center of Hamburg – where today the Chile House and the neighboring office buildings constitute a part of Hamburg’s World Cultural Heritage. At the school, girls of different religion, Jews among them, got an education that not only comprised housekeeping and needlework, but also science object lessons and English. Magnus and Alma Nachum, who must have been very poor, took advantage of this opportunity. Obviously, it was important to them to provide their daughters with a good education – instead of urging them to marry early or to go to work to earn money.

When Frieda Nachum attended the Paulsenstift school, it had moved to Bülaustrasse in St. Georg. After graduating, Frieda absolved the Hamburg Social School for Women founded in 1917, where she was trained as a social worker. Her sisters, too, had received professional education. Gertrud became a medical assistant, Dora a teacher at a school for nurses. In 1925, directly after completing her training, Frieda was hired as a social worker by the Hamburg Jewish Community.

Three years later, she became the secretary of Rebecca Zadik, who headed the department of professional counseling and procurement of apprenticeships of the association of self-employed Jewish craftsmen and business people – which in turn belonged to the Jewish Community. In the summer of 1931, Frieda’s mother Alma died at the age of 59, whereupon Magnus Nachum gave up the apartment in Hartwicusstrasse, where the family had lived for almost twenty years. For a short time, he found a new dwelling at Hofweg 50, but already in 1933, he moved to Berlin, where his middle daughter Dora now lived.

Frieda from then on lived as a subtenant in Hamburg; in 1936, her work for the Jewish Community took her to Wilhelminenhöhe in Blankenese. The large property at Rissener Landstrasse 127 had been donated to the Community around 1922 by the Dr. Gotthold Foundation, with the intention of establishing a hospital for mentally ill Jewish people. Until the planned start of the necessary remodeling, the Community put the property and the existing building at the disposal of the Jewish welfare organization for children’s recreation as a temporary vacation home for the duration of two years.

On account of the large demand, the Gotthold foundation decided to permanently dedicate its donation to that purpose. But that also required construction work. The renowned Hamburg architect Semmy Engel was commissioned to design and execute the project. He had the building heightened by two stories, adding several dormitories, wash- and bathrooms .as well as a sunny reclining room, a reading room, a children’s play room, an isolation room and a synagogue. Two ritually run kitchens guaranteed kosher meals. The existing veranda was turned into an open terrace; a spacious balcony offered a wonderful view of the Elbe River. In 1925, a department for babies and children up to six years of age was added and enlarged up to 1930. In 1931, the Community transferred this department back to the Paulinenstift in the Hamburg City.

Instead, Jewish youth organizations now used a part of the premises as a country youth center and starting point for nature hikes in the area. From 1935, the building was also used as a Jewish youth hostel and youth recreation home, and there were also rooms for lodgers.

Already since 1933, the Jewish community used the Wilhelminenhöhe as a Hachshara center or settlers’ school for young Jews from Hamburg and the surrounding area, who prepared for an emigration to Palestine at the nursery garden, the agricultural school or the housekeeping school. In 1934, the Hachshara was discontinued on account of its Zionist orientation, and a training course for gardeners introduced instead. To this end, fields were plowed around the house, and a greenhouse was built. As the department of the Jewish Community that employed Frieda Nachum also handled "professional reorientation” since 1933, which included the Hachshara, she spent most of her time at Wilhelminenhöhe, where she met her future husband.

Walter Rosenbaum headed the training courses for future gardeners. After their marriage in 1939, the couple moved from Blankenese to Ohlsdorf, where they found an apartment of their own at Fuhlsbütteler Strasse – quite near to the Jewish cemetery in Ilandkoppel. Frieda’s sister Gertrud, who had also moved to Berlin in the meantime, also married in that year and now bore the name Gertrud Hammer. Dora, too, had married, but was soon divorced. In view of the precarious situation for Jews in Germany, Frieda and Walter Rosenbaum had also considered fleeing from the country – leaving would theoretically have been an option for them up to 1941. But they stayed in Hamburg. On October 25th, 1941, Frieda and Walter Rosenbaum were deported to Lodz. On September 24th, 1942, Frieda was taken from the Lodz ghetto to the extermination camp in Chelmno and murdered there. Walter Rosenbaum remained in Lodz, in August, 1943, he moved within the ghetto. The circumstances of his death in Lodz are unknown.

Frieda’s father Magnus Nachum was deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt on July 28th, 1942, and transported on to the Treblinka extermination camp on September 26th, 1942, where he was murdered by gas the same day. Frieda’s sister Dora was deported from Berlin-Moabit to Auschwitz on March 12th, 1943, where she was killed in the gas chamber. She had last lived at Trautenaustrasse 12 in the Wilmersdorf district, where a Stumbling Stone was laid for her in 2012. Their sister Gertrud managed to flee to Palestine; she settled at the Kibbuz Degania, founded in 1920. After the death of her first husband, she remarried and took the name Rut Tabori. In 1955, she deposited memorial pages at Yad Vashem for her two sisters, her father and her brother-in-law Walter.


Translated by Peter Hubschmid
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: April 2018
© Frauke Steinhäuser

Quellen: 1; 2; 4; 5; 8; Archiwum Panstwowe w Lodzi, Ankunfts- und Abgangsdokumente des Gettos Litzmannstadt; Röh/ Larisch, Die Anfänge der sozialen Frauenschule; Stein, Jüdische Baudenkmäler, S. 118 ff.; Rita Bake, Paulsenstiftschule, in: Hamburger Frauenbiografien-Datenbank, http://kurzurl.net/MeGwp (letzter Zugriff 26.2.2014); Rita Bake, Gertrud Bäumer, in: Hamburger Frauenbiografien-Datenbank, http://kurzurl.net/VuemY (letzter Zugriff 26.2.2014); Ina Lorenz, Verein selbständiger jüdischer Handwerker und Gewerbetreibender in Groß-Hamburg, in: Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (Hrsg.), Das Jüdische Hamburg. Ein historisches Nachschlagewerk, Online-Ausgabe, http://kurzurl.net/LjP6X (letzter Zugriff 9.12.2013); Artikel Hachschara, in: Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (Hrsg.), Das Jüdische Hamburg. Ein historisches Nachschlagewerk, Online-Ausgabe, www.dasjuedischehamburg.de/inhalt/hachschara (letzter Zugriff 26.2.2014); Magnus Nachum, in: Institut Theresienstädter Initiative (Hrsg.), holocaust.cz, http://holocaust.cz/de/victims/PERSON.ITI.553099 (letzter Zugriff 9.12.2013); Dora Nachum, in: Koordinierungsstelle Stolpersteine Berlin (Hrsg.), Stolpersteine in Berlin, Berlin 2013, www.stolpersteine-berlin.de/de/orte-biografien (letzter Zugriff 26.2.2014); Stolpersteine Trautenaustr. 10, in: Berlin.de, Das offizielle Hauptstadtportal, Lexikon: Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf von A bis Z, http://kurzurl.net/j2Qbu (letzter Zugriff 26.2.2014).
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