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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Sister of
W.H. Michaels family (1846-1860s)
Valentin family (1872-1925)
Moritz Jacobsohn family (1877-1889)
Bertha and Sophie Jacobsohn (1889-1926)
Bertha Jacosohn was born in Nienburg in 1837, the daughter of fur trader Anselm Jacobsohn and his wife Sara née Blanck, who came from Braunschweig. She was an older sister of Moritz Mendel Jacobsohn. She lived in Nienburg until the death of her parents in 1889, when she moved to Lüneburg with her younger sister Sophie.
The two unmarried sisters lived in the old patricians" house at Große Bäckerstraße 25, which for decades was the seat of the privately owned bank and the family home to the Jacobsohn and Valentin families. Bertha died in Lüneburg in 1926 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery.
Eva Valtin, a grandniece of Bertha and Sophie Jacobsohn from Hamburg, has a vivid and very special memory of how she and her siblings as children would visit the old ladies in Lueneburg:
"The greatest attraction of the house was found on the third floor. There lived, like little hidden animals, Bertha and Sophie, two unmarried sisters of my grandmother; spinsters if there ever were any. I am sure they were perfectly harmless but to us children, they were witches. They were small, never left the house except for visits to the synagogue. Of course, they were old at the time I remember them, and who knows, perhaps they have loved and been loved in their younger years. Children are cruel! Courtesy demanded that we visit the "aunts", as everyone called them, for about an hour every time we were in Lüneburg. We would be placed on the sofa covered with brown velvet. Then one of the "aunts" would approach a cupboard and, with an air of great importance, reach for a small china bowl filled with always the same kind of very small chocolate candies. We each invariably got three. I see the shape of the white bowl with a pink pattern today on this lonely and cold day, and savour the taste of the very sweet candies. Sometime the little aunts must have died - leaving no trace behind them except for this memory of their jealously-guarded candies."
Sources and info:
Eva Valtin: Unimportant Memoirs of a very Unimportant Woman. Manuscript, Athens, March 1964; Private collection Marianne Wakeling