Here you can find names, dates of life, biographies and family stories about Jewish life in Lüneburg. Do you have further information, corrections, photographs, documents or suggestions?
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Sophie (Zippora) van Biema was born in Leer in 1819. Her parents Samuel Benjamin van Biema and Sara, née Levi Cohen, had married in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands in 1814. They later immigrated to Germany and started a family in Leer in East Frisia. After that, the family seems to have lived in the Netherlands again - several of Sophie"s siblings at least settled there and started families.
Sophie, however, remained in Germany. In 1840, she married merchant and tanner Simon Salomon in Lüneburg, who had come to Lüneburg from Winsen/Luhe. Together they had eleven children. Ten of them survived and grew up in Lüneburg. Sooner or later, they all left the town, some as far as the US or the Caribbean.
After her husband"s death in 1889, Sophie Salomon, nee van Biema, continued to live in Lüneburg as a widow. She died in 1894 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery.
Her gravestone is one of the few that remained after the cemetery was destroyed and completely leveled during the Nazi era. Together with several other gravestones, it had been used as building material for the foundations of a makeshift home which was erected in 1944. When this makeshift home was demolished in 1967, Sophie Salomon"s stone came to light, along with a few others. It took a few more years before the gravestones were re-erected in the early 1970s, only as fragments and not in their original position.
Sources and info:
Gravestone for Sophie Salomon: epidat - Forschungsplattform jüdische Grabsteinepigraphik, Lüneburg, lbg-4
About the van Biema family, Leeuwarden
http://germansynagogues.com/index.php/synagogues-and-communities?pid=59&sid=808:leer
Name variants: Bima
