People

Adolf Lindenberg was born in Vilsen in 1849, the youngest of six children. The Vilsen merchant family Lindenberg was closely connected with the Heinemanns in Lüneburg: Adolf"s much older sisters Henriette and Sophie had married the brothers Marcus and Salomon Heinemann in the 1850s.

Adolf, a trained banker, came to Lüneburg in 1877 to work in the Heinemann bank. In 1879 he married his niece Emma, eleven years his junior, a daughter of his boss and brother-in-law Marcus Heinemann, in the Lüneburg synagogue.

Adolf and Emma Heinemann had had five children together. They first lived close to the Heinemanns" ancestral home, in Bardowicker Strasse 8, then in Lüne, and from 1897 in Lüner Weg. There they lived in a beautiful villa with a large garden.

In 1906, Adolf Lindenberg became one of the managing directors of Heinemann Bank, which had become part of the Hannoversche Bank in 1900. Together with Gustav Heinemann, a cousin of his wife, he was now director of the Lüneburg branch and remained so after 1920, when the Hannoversche Bank was taken over by the Deutsche Bank.

As a bank director, Adolf Lindenberg also held positions on various supervisory boards, including the Lüneburg wax works. His granddaughter Helga remembered that the Jewish Lindenbergs always received a larger contingent of candles at Christmas, which they then sent on in parts to their (Christian-educated) grandchildren in Breslau.

After the death of his wife in 1921, Adolf Lindenberg lived as a widower in Lüner Weg. He died in 1929 and was buried next to his wife in the Jewish cemetery in Lüneburg. The death register of the Lüneburg synagogue community notes: “was cremated in Hamburg and the urn was buried here.”

The double gravestone of Emma and Adolf Lindenberg is one of the few that still exist in Lüneburg today, following the destruction and complete leveling of the Jewish cemetery during the Nazi era. Together with several other gravestones, their stone had been built into the foundation of a temporary building erected in 1944. When this temporary building was demolished in 1967, their shared gravestone, among others, came to light. In the early 1970s, the stones were removed from the foundation and re-erected in a row next to each other. The Lindenberg double gravestone was the last in the row. Although it had originally been a standing headstone with a German and a Hebrew side, it was not re-erected, but presented lying down.