People

Ferdinand (Uri Feivesh) Lindenberg was born in 1847 as the fifth of six children. His father was the prominent Vilsen merchant Gerson David Lindenberg, his mother Rosa, née Salomon, from Winsen an der Luhe.

He fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and was seriously wounded. In the 1880s, he appears to have moved with his parents from Vilsen to Lüneburg, where his siblings Henriette, Sophie and Adolf already lived. The Lüneburg address book lists him as a “gold worker” or goldsmith. He lived at Am Ochsenmarkt 1, together with his mother, the widowed Rosa Lindenberg.

Ferdinand Lindenberg died in Lüneburg in 1897 after a long and serious illness. The local paper "Lüneburgsche Anzeigen" stated that he had died as a result of his war wounds and had been buried by his fellow veterans, the "comrades-in-arms of 1870/71". He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Lüneburg. His gravestone reads in Hebrew: “Here is buried the bachelor Uri Feivesh, son of the Torah scholar Mr. Gerson.”

Ferdinand Lindenberg"s gravestone 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, it had been used as building material for the foundations of a makeshift home erected in 1944. When this makeshift home was demolished in 1967, the stones 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 Ferdinand Lindenberg: epidat - Forschungsplattform jüdische Grabsteinepigraphik, Lüneburg, lbg-5

Letter from Manfred Göske to Hermann Meer, January 29, 1985, on the subject of Jewish soldiers from Lüneburg; Manfred Göske Collection, Museum Lüneburg

Lüneburgsche Anzeigen, February 28, 1897

Hoyaer Wochenblatt, January 29, 1897