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?
Please feel free to contact us so that we can update the pages.
Sara David was born on Nov 16, 1850 in Frankenhausen in Thuringia. Around 1870, she married merchant Siegmund Simon and moved to Güsten (Anhalt) to live with him. The town, located between Bernburg and Aschersleben, had a relatively large Jewish community at the time.
Sara and Siegmund Simon started a family with several children in Güsten in the 1870s. Siegmund Simon died around 1905. At this time, the Jewish community in Güsten disbanded and its members moved to larger towns.
The widowed Sara Simon, née David, moved to Lüneburg, where her daughter Ella lived. Around 1900, Ella and her sister Gertrud had opened the "Putz- und Kurzwaarengeschäft Geschwister Simon" in the town center. The store was first located at Große Bäckerstraße 5, then Am Sande 49 from 1903.
While Sara"s daughter Gertrud soon left town, her other daughter Ella stayed in Lüneburg for almost 35 years. And her store existed in a prime location on the central square Am Sande for just as long.
Sara Simon will have supported her daughter, especially when Ella became a widow in 1913 after a short marriage and now had to raise her son Rolf alone. In 1914, Sara moved in with her daughter and grandchild in the apartment at Am Sande 49, above the store. She died in Lüneburg on May 17, 1928 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery.
From 1938, Nazi activists desecrated and destroyed large parts of the cemetery. In the 1940s, the town had the cemetery completely cleared and the burial ground leveled. Most of the gravestones were chopped up and used for road construction and foundations.
When a makeshift home on the site of the Jewish cemetery was demolished in 1967, a few stones came to light again. They had been used in the foundations of the building. Small fragments with writing were also found. Among them was a fragment that a grandson of Sara Simon was able to identify as part of his grandmother"s gravestone during a visit to the cemetery in 1968.
It is unclear whether this fragment was ever erected, as Sara Simon"s descendants had wished. Today there is only a photo of the fragment taken in 1967. We currently do not know where this last reminder of Sara Simon has gone.
Name variants: Sarah
