Armin Wilkowitsch

Armin WILKOWITSCH: b. 14 July 1870, Kalwaria (Kalvarija, Lithuania) - d. April 1939, en route to America, suicide

"Oberkantor in Eger" for approximately 40 years commencing in 1906..

cf. notice of engagement, thanks to:

Armin WILKOWITSCH & Selma JELLINEK: ANNO, Neue Freie Presse, 1899-09-23, Seite 20

http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=nfp&datum=18990923&seite...

Biographical information initially thanks to relative Claudia Stevens supplemented with various sources including the following:

Armin Wilkowitsch | Cheb

http://encyklopedie.cheb.cz/en/osudy-a-tvare-chebu/armin-wilkowitsc...

Armin Wilkowitsch was a chief cantor in the Cheb synagogue, and a religion teacher at elementary schools. He was born on 14th July 1870 in Polish region then connected to Russia, in the village of Kalwaria. Today, Kalvarija is located in Lithuania. He started his career as a teacher in the Moravian Jewish municipalities Ivančice and Jevíčko, from where he left to Cheb in 1906. The local Jewish community employed him as a chief cantor and he remained in this capacity for the next 32 years.

Besides German, he probably mastered even Yiddish and Slavic languages, because during World War I, he was actively helping Jewish war refugees from Galicia and Bukovina. At that time, he became a sectional chief for interpreting and communication with refugees. These refugees acknowledged Wilkowitsch’s help in many official reports. At the end of World War I, between the years 1917 and 1918, he reportedly worked as a minister in the field on the eastern front.

Since the turn of 19th and 20th century, Armin Wilkowitsch regularly published historical articles, poems and short stories. Many of them can be found in the Viennese magazine Die Wahrheit. He is also considered the author of ghetto literature. That was where the plot of his story ”Iluj. A Novel from a territory occupied by Russians” took place. It was published in the Prague Brandeis illustrated Israelite folk calendar in 1917.

He became an important author for Cheb, thanks to his texts about the history of the Cheb Jewish community in the Cheb yearbook Egerer Jahrbuch in 1916 and 1920. His especially significant work is in Hugo Gold's book from 1934 - "Jews and Jewish municipalities in Bohemia in the past and presence". Only thanks to Armin Wilkowitsch, Cheb was able to gain back important information and photographs, including his own, after many decades of indifference to the Jewish past.

He also tried to compose music. In her memoirs, Ms. Lilly Pavlová, the granddaughter of the last Chairman of the Cheb Jewish religious community Eduard Löwy, recalls that with humour. At the celebration of the 80th birthday of Eduard Löwy in 1935, Wilkowitsch’s song was played and sang: "... First worship ceremony was held in the synagogue. Cantor Wilkowitsch wrote Prelude, by which we were very amused and it made us laugh ... " In 1938, before the impending Nazi terror, Armin Wilkowitsch emigrated with his wife and children to the USA, where his brother lived. Other members of the Jewish community were not so lucky. Eduard Löwy died in the concentration camp Theresienstadt on 9th August 1942.

And a long article with much valuable detail:

[PDF]zeszyt nr 03/2008 - Zbliżenia Interkulturowe

www.zblizeniainterkulturowe.wssm.edu.pl/wp-content/.../inter_zblizenia_3_2008.pdf

But also ...

From information of relative Claudia Stevens:

"Aunt Selma, nee Jellinek, was able to get to America with, I believe, her son. Her husband, Cantor Armin Wilkowitsch had remained behind but apparently also obtained passage by sea to America a bit later. He is "famous" for having jumped overboard - see below from news agency of 1939. The story also appeared in the Jewish press in America. Wilkowitsch was a colorful figure, frequenting the spas of that time (Mother remembers he was quite a lady's man and Selma was very jealous) and writing a newsletter for their entertainment.

Apparently with the destruction of his synagogue in Eger, the first in the area to be torched, the 70-year old cantor (who also had corresponded with and advised the young pianist Rudolph Serkin) lost the will to live ...

http://www.jta.org/1939/05/05/archive/70-year-old-refugee-writer-ta...

LONDON (May. 4)

The suicide of Armin Wilkwitch, 70-year-old Czech Jewish writer and cantor, on board a ship bound for the United States was reported here today. Wilkowitch, who had escaped from Eger, in the Sudetenland, to Prague where he had finally obtained an emigration permit to join his children in America, was reportedly depressed by recent events in former Czecho-Slovakia. He had been particularly affected by the burning of a synagogue in Eger, where for 40 years he had been a cantor, a contributor to several Jewish journals and the author of studies on the history of the Czech Jews.

cf. also ...

Passenger and crew lists of vessels arriving at New York, 1897-1942; index to passenger lists of vessels arriving at New York, June 16, 1897- June 30, 1902 ; index (soundex) to passenger lists of vessels arriving at New York, July 1, 1902-July 1, 1948; ark

https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-95FB-8JD?mode=g&i=42&c...

Selma Wilkowitsch Immigration 1930 New York, New York, United States Female 62 1868 Czech President Harding Armin Wilkowitsch Immigration 1930 New York, New York, United States Male 68 1862 Czech President Harding

N.B. His name is crossed through on this list ...