In this house lived Therese and Elias Hirsch. Elias Hirsch was born in 1888 in Ottorowo, a small town near Poznań, which was German at the time. During World War One, he was a soldier in the Imperial Army.
Therese Hirsch, born Therese Lewin in New York in 1893, was the eldest daughter of Isidor and Jenny Lewin. She was Emma Gottfeld’s elder sister. Just after her parents married in 1891, they moved from Bromberg to the United States, but returned three years after emigrating with a baby in tow. The most important souvenir they carried with them was an American passport for their daughter Therese. Later, they moved to this house.
Therese married her Elias during the First World War in what is today Poland, where Therese’s parents lived. After their wedding, the young couple moved to Berlin. In Jagowstrasse, Elias opened a bakery specialising in donuts. They had no children. He was religious and active in the Levetzowstrasse synagogue.
In 1938, Elias was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Buchenwald concentration camp. Therese tried without success to get an American visa for her husband. However, she did manage to get visas for Colombia. With these, Therese freed her husband from the concentration camp in July 1938. A month later, they left Berlin and fled to Cali in Colombia, where they stayed for over ten years. This meant they escaped the fate of deportation and murder that almost all other family members suffered who had stayed in Germany. Eleven years later, Elias and Therese went to Israel and found Therese’s sister Emma again. Elias once again opened a small bakery in Haifa. He died of a heart attack in 1955. Therese, who was known as Tessy in her family, was a very warm-hearted person. Since she had no children of her own, she took loving care of her sister’s children and grandchildren and took part in all family gatherings and celebrations. She worked as a nanny for a well-known family and died in Haifa in 1979.
