Hanna Munk

Hannchen Bamberger

• Germany, Hesse Marriage Index, 1849-1931
• Relation: Bride
• Birth: Jan 30 1890 - Bad-Kissingen
• Marriage: Feb 16 1914 - Frankfurt Am Main, Hesse, Germany
• Groom: Leo Munk
• Parents of bride: Moses Löb Bamberger, Esther Holdschmidt

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The following is by Esther (Mooze) Herskovics:

Since the GENI project has turned us all into driveling idiots, let me take it one step further. Aviva had been quite unaware that Granny Hanni Munk-Bamberger (6.13 in the Bamberger Stammbaum, was the last in a very large family. So let me clarify a few things:

6. 1, 2 and 3 were my grandfather Moses Loeb (Moshe Aryeh) Bamberger’s children by his first wife, Sara Ettlinger (daughter of the Oruch Laner). One boy died in infancy and one during his birth; his mother died during that birth, too. One daughter, Nanette, survived, married a cousin, also named Bamberger; they had seven children. One of the children was Seligmann Bamberger, who lived with his wife Else in W. 98th Street. He is well remembered by some of you for his weird looks – you would have been afraid to meet him on a dark night, though he would not have hurt a fly. You may also remember his daughter Hanna, who was a psycho-therapist and never married.

A grandson of Nanette is Yehoshua Yeshaya Neuwirth, the author of Shmirat Shabbat KeHilchato.

6.4 Sarah, married to the Hungarian-born Sandor Shemaya Rosenbaum. They were the parents, inter alia, of Judith Grunfeld and the grandparents of Naomi Grunfeld. In later life, they lived in Strasbourg, where they died after much suffering in the Shoah. A grandson of theirs, Ariel Broch, lives today in Shdemot in the Beit Shean Valley, and he sometimes writes letters to the editor of the JPost. I knew him and his siblings when they were little kids; when Opa and Willy were interned on the Isle of Man during WWII, Granny and I stayed with his family in Letchworth, England, because we needed to get out of the Blitz in London, and his mother (whose husband was also interned) was expecting their sixth child. I was about 15 at the time, and it was my job to do the weekly laundry for the whole family on a washboard. Such fun.

6.5 Ben-Zion was a WWI casualty. I believe he didn’t die in battle, but rather he succumbed later to wounds sustained in battle. I knew his wife, Leah, when we lived in England during WWII. She then also lived in London. They were childless, and she never married again.

6.6 Joseph was a hunchback. As the story was told to me, when he was a very young child, someone helping my grandmother in the household dropped him and caused his injury. He did marry, though, and made a living. He came on aliyah during the 1930’s. His oldest son, Shlomo, was one of the founders of Kibbutz Chafetz Chaim and was in charge of the laundry there for decades. He just died a few months ago. One of his nine children lives in Kiryat Moshe and her husband is a very active member of the Mossad Harav Kook shul.

His daughter Rosel-Judith lives on Sderot Herzl here, volunteers at Yad Sarah, and sometimes I meet her there.

There were two other sons – one deaf-and-dumb, who married a deaf-an-dumb woman, made a good living as a carpenter, I think, and had two normal daughters.

The youngest, Ben-Zion, spent some time in Cologne during the 1930’s and lived in our house. He died quite young.

6.7 Isaac, known to all as their beloved Uncle I (pronounced EE). He was a physician, who also came to “Palestine” during the 1930s and practiced in Jerusalem. He never married. The story goes that he fell in love with a non-Jewish woman but would not marry her, because he didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings. My mother loved him dearly.

6.8 Judith. I know nothing about her, but noticed in the Stammbaum that she died at aged 24.

6.9 Was a dentist, who died at age 39, not married. If my memory doesn’t fool me, he, too, was wounded in the war.

6.10 Kela. She also made aliyah with her family during the 1930’s. She lived in Haifa. On my first trip to Israel in 1968, I looked up her daughter Emmy there. There was a gorgeous view from her apartment of the Hermon.

Another daughter, Judith, was married to Leo Wissmann, who built the famous furniture factory in Jerusalem which still exists and is probably now run by the third generation. Leo spent nine months in Jordanian captivity during milchemet haShichrur. He was a very interesting fellow; it was a pleasure to listen to his stories. Judith may still be alive. When we first came on aliyah, I met her a few times.

6.11 Mendel. Had four children (one of them Moshe Ayalon of Sde Eliyahu fame) and was a dentist in Jerusalem, after making aliyah in the 1930’s. (Incidentally, his wife, Rachel, nee Winter, was the sister of the above-mentioned Leah, who was married to my uncle Ben-Zion.)

6.12 Nathan. Before they made aliyah early in the 1930’s, he and his wife and only son lived in Frankfurt, where he was in the book business. In Israel he continued in this field, and had a firm by the name of Bamberger & Wahrmann. Some of you will remember Aunt Martha, a high official in WIZO, whom I used to visit regularly when we came to Israel. She was his widow. The son, Moshe, worked for Yediot Aharonot in book publishing until he died at age 58.

It is strange, but with all the siblings Granny lost, I don’t remember her ever sitting shiva. I think that, perhaps, when the siblings died in Palestine – Israel, at a time when communications were very slow, the family did not inform her of her loss until after the shloshim.

My poor grandmother (for whom I am named, she died a year and a half before my birth), must have had a very tough life. My grandfather died aged 61 (in 1899), when my mother was just nine years old. He had been the rabbi in Bad Kissingen, Bavaria, a post in which surely he did not accumulate a fortune. After his death, my grandmother had to support her large brood (although some of them were grown-up already), and she did this by running a boarding-house. ( Bad Kissingen was a spa to which people came for health reasons.) Add to this that three of her ten children died during her lifetime.