You are now standing outside Jagowstrasse 13. One of many Jewish families in Moabit lived here: the Gottfelds and the Lewins. Their descendant Benjamin Gidron, who lives in Israel as a retired professor, counts 28 Holocaust victims in his family. Most of them lived here in Moabit, and like other non-Jewish Germans, they were part of society, neighbours among neighbours. Some family members managed to flee in time. Their apartments were here and in Jagowstrasse 20.
Here, at number 13, lived Sally and Emma Gottfeld, born Lewin, with their five children. They were Benjamin’s grandparents. The Gottfelds were born in the 1890s and came from the region around Poznań, which belonged to Germany until 1919. During the First World War, Sally served in the Imperial Army, was wounded, and received the Iron Cross for rescuing his superior officer on the battlefield. He was a master plumber and ran a workshop in the second courtyard of the house, where he employed several people.
In April 1933, Sally was arrested for unknown reasons by Nazi paramilitaries – the “Sturmabteilung” – , detained for several weeks at the prison in General-Pape-Strasse, near present-day Südkreuz train station, and severely mistreated. Once released, he was barely able to work and made efforts to secure a visa for Palestine. After many desperate attempts, he received it and fled with his family to Haifa in December 1933.
Life there was hard. Sally was self-employed and lost most of his money to a fraudster. He had to take the three oldest children out of school so they could work and contribute to the family income. Until the mid-1930s, Sally advised his brother and his wife’s siblings, who all lived in Berlin, not to follow him to Palestine. He told them it was extremely difficult to make a living there. Presumably, he could not imagine how unbearable the conditions had become for Jews in Germany by then.
The November Pogroms of 1938 finally made it clear that there would be no future for Jews in Germany. But by then, it was too late for those without money or connections to leave the country. Almost all of Emma and Sally Gottfeld’s relatives in Berlin were deported and murdered.
The Gottfelds and their five children, all of whom married and had children themselves, survived in Palestine. Two sons later went to the US. Emma died in Haifa in 1961. After the death of his wife, Sally returned to Berlin. He died in 1964 and is buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Heerstrasse. There are seven Stolpersteine as a memorial to this part of the family, which were placed in front of the house at Dortmunder Strasse 3, their last Berlin residence. More than 20 descendants from the US and Israel travelled for the unveiling. This included the youngest daughter, Ilse, who was 4 when the family fled Berlin.
