Benzion (Benno) Margulies

Benzion was an open-minded, tolerant Orthodox Jew and a devout Zionist. Born in Skalat, Galicia, in 1890, one of the nine children (six sons, three daughters) of Mordecai and Feige (née Kesten) Margulies, he was an autodidact, well versed in Jewish and secular literature, fluent in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and, eventually, also English. He studied commerce and bookkeeping at commercial colleges in Vienna and in Eger, Hungary, before immigrating to Germany. By the time World War I broke out in 1914 his parents and all his siblings had moved to Mannheim, where he and several of his five brothers engaged in wholesale merchandising. Together with all but the youngest of his brothers, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army.

Benzion, who was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1916, stopped in Huyzhatyn on his way home in 1919. On his return to Mannheim he sent for Perl and her mother. The couple married in August, 1920. Their son Ze’ev (William) was born in June 1921 and a daughter, Edith, in 1923 (died 1929). Alice was born in 1926. All three of the children attended the Jewish elementary school in Essen, where several of the Margulies brothers had moved in the early 1920s.

In Essen Benzion was active both in the community of Jews from Eastern Europe and in the religious-Zionist Mizrachi movement. A delegate to Zionist Congresses in the 1930s, he was elected a member of the WZO Actions Committee after World War II. It was in all likelihood because of his public activities in the Jewish community that the family’s home was searched soon after the Nazis came to power. In August 1933 Benzion traveled to London, joining his youngest brother, Alexander, who had lived there since 1931 and had opened a small wholesale business in imported clocks and watches. Their mother also immigrated to the U.K. early in 1933, but it took several months before Benzion was able to obtain the entrance visas that enabled Perl, her mother and the two children to leave Germany. They arrived in London in May, 1934, only four days before William’s bar mitzvah. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/shalvi-alice