People

Jacob Valentin - not to be confused with Jakob Valentin from Nienburg, husband of Mathilde Heinemann - was born in Hoya in 1817. He became a banker and lived in Sarstedt. There, around 1859, he married Friederike Jacobsohn from Nienburg, 18 years his junior, a sister of Lüneburg banker Moritz Jacobsohn, who came from Nienburg. In the following years, their children Ferdinand, Albert, Richard and Anna were born in Sarstedt.

In 1872 Jacob Valentin came to Lüneburg with his whole family. There he became the partner of his brother-in-law Moritz Jacobsohn. Together they ran the long-established private bank "W.H. Michaels Nachfolger" in Große Bäckerstraße. The Valentin family also lived in this house, which had a beautiful garden and a kind of pavilion in the backyard. Jacob Valentin"s granddaughter Eva Valtin later recalled: "At the end of the yard, there was a small garden with a tiny summer house, the delight of the children. I can still hear the clicking of the door when it closed. It seems that this garden was the only recreation of my grandfather. Here he tended the little flower-beds, pruned his few fruit trees and took great pride in his rose-bushes.”

Like Moritz Jacobsohn, Jacob Valentin was also active in the Lüneburg museum association and donated various objects to the museum. His eldest son Ferdinand later joined the bank, the other three children left Lüneburg to settle down in other places.

Jacob Valentin died in 1903 and was buried in Lüneburg"s Jewish cemetery. His gravestone reads in Hebrew: "Here is buried a noble man, full of integrity, the ornament of his family. Mr. Jacob, son of Mr. Joshua. He died at a good old age on the evening of Yom Kippur [5]664." Jacob"s widow Friederike lived in Lüneburg for almost twenty years until she too died in 1921 and was buried next to him.

The double gravestone of Jacob and Friederike Valentin is one of the few that still exist today after the destruction and complete leveling of the cemetery during the Nazi era. Together with several other gravestones, the Valentin stone was built into the foundations of a makeshift home erected in 1944. When this makeshift home was demolished in 1967, the Valentin stone, among others, came to light. It was several years before the gravestones were re-erected in the early 1970s, albeit not in their original location and only as fragments.

Sources and info:

Gravestone for Jacob and Friederike Valentin: epidat - Forschungsplattform jüdische Grabsteinepigraphik, Lüneburg, lbg-9

https://www.jüdische-gemeinden.de/index.php/gemeinden/h-j/966-hoya-weser-niedersachsen

https://www.jüdische-gemeinden.de/index.php/gemeinden/s-t/1729-sarstedt-niedersachsen

Eva Valtin: Unimportant Memoirs of a very Unimportant Woman. Manuscript, Athens, March 1964; Private collection Marianne Wakeling

Name variants: Jakob