English translation of an article originally written in polish :
Żydzi z Freiburga na Śląsku (15 marca 2021) by Jacek Ziaja (Świebodzice)
Jews from Freiburg in Silesia
This article is a clipped attempt to approach the issue from the perspective and on the example of the fate of one Jewish family (Wolff) from pre-war Freiburg in Silesia. In addition, let the picture shown below be a supplement to the valuable item written by Dr. A. Gruzlewska (
Jews of the Province, 1812-1945) from Dzierżoniów, and at the same time a short genealogical journey into the interesting and not fully recognized history of the local community of the Mosaic faith (Jewish community) and the subsequent fate of its members.
Ad vocem of a letter from Israel to the mayor of Swiebodzice dated August 8, 1998. It all started with the beginning of August 1998. At that time an extremely interesting letter from... Israel arrived at the address of the Świebodzice magistrate. A Polish translation of this letter written in the original, interestingly in German, was published 4 years later in the pages of the monthly magazine
Świebodzice. History of the City in No. 9 (59) of September 2002.
The author of the letter turned out to be Mrs. Ulla (Ursula, Geula) Schkedi [a.k.a. Shkedi], née Wolff, who had been living since 1938, originally in the British Mandate Area of Palestine, and since May 1948 in the newly established Jewish state of Israel. She was born on February 1, 1921 in Świebodzice (Freiburg in Schlesien). It is noteworthy that she was one of the last people born in pre-war Świebodzice of the Jewish faith.
She specifically mentioned in her letter the heavily neglected cemetery, located at 17 Waldenburger Straβe (until 1945 Waldenburger Straβe or Waldenburger Chaussée 17), where her father, a merchant by trade and owner of a small clothing store, Philipp Wolff (born 28 May 1875, died 14 Jan 1938, Freiburg in Schlesien).
Further on, the letter’s author also mentioned her mother (Jenny Sara Wolff, née Pincus or Pinkus), who lived virtually undisturbed in her house at what was then Nikolaistraβe 5 (Mikołaja Street 5) in Świebodzice until 1942, when she was stripped of her property by the German authorities.
The clues left in the 1998 letter made it possible, after more than twenty years, to revive the topic and attempt to make new findings regarding the fate of the Wolff family, members of the local community, as well as the Jewish community, residents of the city before 1945.
Philipp Wolff (1875-1938) The learned and practiced profession of the head of the family was merchant (Kaufmann). Well, the senior Wolff specialized in trade. He ran a small textile and fabric store (women’s, men’s and children’s confections) at Nikolaistraβe 5 (formerly Friedenstraβe, now Nicolaus Copernicus Street 5). The Wolff family lived at the same address, one floor above the store.
All would perhaps have been calm and well, and the whole story probably wouldn’t even have happened, had it not been for the rising tide of social discontent in Germany, and the assumption of the office of chancellor by Austrian corporal (gefrajter), World War I veteran, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) in January 1933. A figure that forever changed not so much the course of German history, but that of Europe and the world, which on a micro-scale destroyed the lives and health of many millions of lives, including those of Jews, and did not spare the citizens of the German Reich of the Jewish faith.
Beginning in 1931, the number of Świebodzice Jews began a gradual decline, although the beginning of this phenomenon had its origins even before World War I. The downward trend deepened over the course of the 1930s, to reach, according to the last reliable statistics from the Reich census of May 17, 1939, before the outbreak of World War II (September 1, 1939), a limit of only 16 people, i.e. exactly five families (5 men and 11 women).
At the time, Philipp Wolff had been dead for just over a year. He passed away on January 14, 1938, in Świebodzice (Freiburg in Schlesien) at the age of 63, before the hell of the already pervasive anti-Semitic campaign throughout the Reich was unleashed for good. He was laid to rest in the local small Jewish cemetery (kirkut) that had existed since 1848 at what was then Waldenburger Straβe or otherwise Waldenburger Chaussee 17 (now 17 Walbrzyska Street).
The funeral took place three days later on January 17, 1938, and was the last burial already after the formal dissolution of the Jewish community in Świebodzice (
Die Jüdische Gemeinde Freiburg in Schlesien) on October 1, 1936. Left behind was his widow, then 54 years old, Jenny Sara Wolff, née Pincus or Pinkus, and two daughters, an older one (age 17) named Ursula (Ulla) and a younger one (age 12), named Ruth Anne-Marie. The mother and her daughters, lived in a small corner tenement at Nikolaistraβe 5, owned by the family along with a clothing store located on the first floor.
Jenny Sara Wolff, née Pincus or Pinkus (1884-1945?) Well, in the course of the search, it turned out that it was possible to determine more precisely the mother of the author of the 1998 letter. She was the previously mentioned Jenny Sara Wolff, née Pincus or Pinkus. She was born on December 11, 1884 in Wronki on the Warta River (
Wronke an der Warthe). At the time, the town was located in the Szamotuły district (Kreis Samter) in the Poznań regency (
Regierungsbezirk Posen) of the former Grand Duchy of Posen (
Groβherzogtum Posen), Prussian partition.
Wronki (German: Wronke) was located in the territory of the then Prussian partition (Greater Poland), where at least from the first half of the 17th century there was a Jewish community with its own synagogue, ritual slaughterhouse and cemetery (kirkut). At the end of the 18th century, 382 Jews resided there.
How did she get from Greater Poland (Prussian partition) to Świebodzice in Lower Silesia ? Under what circumstances did she meet her future husband and the father of their daughters ? The questions remain, for the time being, unanswered due to the lack of disclosed accounts of witnesses or surviving members of the extended family, as well as friends, acquaintances, etc., from the wartime conflagration. Migration was facilitated by the common denominator of the two provinces, that is, firstly the fact that they remained within the borders of the Reich (close proximity, relatively short distance), and secondly the German language space. The fate of the family in the interwar period, apart from the business activities described earlier, remains more closely unknown.
Already a widow, in 1942 she found herself on a list of Jews whose property the German authorities had earmarked for confiscation, the carrying out of which in Lower Silesia (Niederschlesien) was directly handled by the Lower Silesian Provincial Tax Office, with its headquarters in the provincial capital, Breslau (Wrocław).
In the same year, 1942, she was on another list, this time a list of Jews designated for liquidation (extermination), where it was noted: [...]
zuletzt wohnhaft in Freiburg/Schlesien Landeshuterstr. 13 [...] (pol. last resided in Świebodzice/Silesia 13 Kamiennogórska St. [Today, the aforementioned street is named after Henryk Sienkiewicz. There is still a separate Kamiennogórska Street in the city, where a new municipal cemetery has been located since 1994 - author’s note]). Also on the same list was Gertrud Sara Horn, born on January 27, 1881 in Świebodzice (Freiburg in Schlesien), and living there in a tenement at Landeshuter Straβe 13 (list from 1942-1944).
Despite the fact that she was added to the Wrocław list of Jews destined for export to the Lublin ghetto and subjected to further extermination there, she was not disturbed and continued to live in her hometown. In 1942-1945 she even shared an apartment with Gertrud Sara Horn, a seamstress (Schneiderin), by then already the widow (German: Witwe) of a textile and fabric merchant, owner of a small clothing store and once also a member of the local Jewish community board (Markus Horn), living in an apartment building at Landeshuter Straβe at No. 13 (now Henryka Sienkiewicza Street). This state of affairs continued until January 1945, according to correspondence sent in 1998. According to her daughter’s account, she was then most likely arrested and taken to Breslau (German: Breslau), where she was murdered (?).
A different version is described by another author of memoirs (Jochen Heidrich from Germany; his aunt was the aforementioned Gertrud Sara Horn) published 13 years later in
Schlesisches Gottesfreundw August 2011. He claimed in his article that Jenny Sara Wolff remained in the city and was the last Jewish citizen of the city to survive until liberation by Red Army troops on May 8, 1945, and her further fate remains unknown to this day.
Izchak Shkedi or Schkedi (1922–2010) His actual name was Eugen Mandellaub. He was born on June 1, 1922 in the German town of Heilbronn located on the Neckar River (Heilbronn am Neckar) into the family of a Jewish merchant (German: Kaufmann), who came from Kolomyia in the former Austrian partition (now Ukraine). Eugen’s father emigrated to the German Reich before World War I (1914-1918) around 1912. In 1937 he began agricultural training, which he most likely did not complete. Well, in March 1938, as a result of the growing repression of the Jewish population by the Nazi authorities, he irretrievably left the territory of the Third German Reich with his older siblings, his sister (Gisela) and brother (Max Markus). The surviving siblings left for Palestine, which was then a British mandate territory in the Middle East.
The parents, Simon and Adele (née Grünstein) and Eugen’s youngest sister (Sylvia) unfortunately did not escape repression and, worst of all, death. On October 31, 1941 (the official date of death), they were all exterminated in Belzec, a German extermination camp, although formally established on November 1, 1941 (after the Reich’s invasion of the USSR in June of that year) on the territory of occupied Poland (General Government).
Between 1938 and 1940 he was in a youth group in Tel-Chai. There he soon met and married Ulla (Ursula), née Wolff. It is likely that in 1940-1943 he received military training already in Palestinian territory. Later, from 1943-1956, he was a member of the border kibbutz Menara. In the summer (June 12) of 1947, he was naturalized and given a new identity. From then on he was listed in documents as Izchak Shkedi [or Schkedi]. During the First Israeli-Arab War (1948-1949), when Menara was cut off by Arab coalition forces, he was in charge of evacuating the children there. In 1956, he joined kibbutz Givad Chaim Ichud (Givat Haim Ihud), founded in 1952, where he was a tractor operator. He managed the nut plant continuously for the next 17 years. He also ran a repair shop. As a hobby, he was involved in breeding a miniature schnauzer (dog breed) named Bar-Luz (black and silver miniature).
According to the author’s private findings, Eugen Mandellaub a.k.a. Izchak Shkedi died a natural death on October 23, 2010, having lived to the age of 88 in kibbutz Givad Chaim Ichud (Givat Haim Ihud), where he had lived and worked since 1956. He was laid to rest in the local cemetery next to his wife.
Children and grandchildren of Mr. and Mrs. Shkedi The letter also mentioned Mr. and Mrs. Shkedi’s (aka Schkedi) three sons and as many as eight grandchildren. All are alive and living in Israel.
The author of the August 1998 letter to the city authorities, a pre-war resident of Swiebodzice (German: Freiburg in Schlesien until May 1945), Ulla [Ursula] Shkedi [aka Schkedi] née Wolff died eight years later on June 5, 2006 at the age of 85. She left a husband and three adult sons.
Jacek Ziaja (Świebodzice)
__________
August 8, 1998.
To the Mayor of
the City of Świebodzice / Poland / Silesia
Dear Mr. Mayor.
After 60 years I saw your city. I was born here in 1921. My name: Urszula Schkedi (née Wolff), I am of Jewish faith. I moved to Israel in 1938, where I live with my family – my husband, three sons and eight grandchildren.
My husband and our older son filmed and photographed the town during their stay in Swiebodzice. I was impressed by how much has been accomplished and how the city has developed.
Swiebodzice is a very beautiful, clean and smug city. Only horrible, shocking was the sight of a small, neglected Jewish cemetery. Although the grave of my late father is located, however, the graves are dilapidated and dug up. Perhaps there is an opportunity to clean up the grave and make a small inscription: Philipp Wolff born 28.05.1875 died 14.01.1938.
My mother Jenny Wollf, née Pincus, was in Świebodzice until January 1945 in her house at 5 Nikolaistraβe Street [German: Nikolaistraβe 5 – author’s note] from where she was later evicted to a small mansard apartment [a kind of living space in the attic floor – author’s note] at Packhofgasse [now Juliusz Słowacki Street – author’s note]. Is there still a house at 5 Mikołaja St., the property of my parents?
My mother disappeared after January 1945 and was probably murdered by the Nazis in Breslau.
I am writing this letter in German, as I do not speak Polish. I hope that you have the opportunity to translate it.
I would be happy to receive a reply from you.
Sincerely
Ulla Schkedi.
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
. Gidon SHKEDI, b. 8 Mar 1945, Tiberias, Israel 
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