The History Festival and Family Connections – more on the Topaz family and beyond
By Rabbi Dr Walter Rothschild, Berlin
One of the things which fascinated me about the History Festival was how many links - some of them admittedly vague or distant - I had with so many of the places being researched. Including Minehead.... My late mother's family was extensive - her own mother Margaret Topaz was one of seven girls and two boys - their parents Jacob and Sarah Topaz (née Rosinski) had come from Vitebsk to Sunderland and the children later spread as noted.
Margaret passed away when I was very small and we have a photograph of myself on her lap and I have a VERY faint childhood memory, also of not being allowed to go to her funeral but being told that she was ''going to be put into a box and put into the ground'' and in my bedroom on a wardrobe was a cardboard box (labelled 'Carnation Milk') and I lay awake wondering how they could fit her in to a box like that - nobody had told me it was a BIG box. From this experience I learned to try to explain to children always as fully as possible.
My late aunt Irene Lilian Chavert wrote a novel based very closely on the family history which we (my sisters and I) found after her death and published it on Amazon/Kindle last year as 'The Kreutzer Chronicles' (link below). It captures the flavour and atmosphere of the immigration of that period and the atmosphere in Northern England. Kreutzer was indeed the family name one generation back. Meyer Isaac Kreutzer was an itinerant musician who married Doris Hyman. Doris came to England with her children but without her husband...... originally planning to stay in Germany but the German border officials were so rude to her that she decided not to stay in the country but to go further on! Of course all these stories are 'oral tradition' and come in contradictory variants. The story goes the name was changed to Bergson on arrival at Sunderland.
One story we were told by our aunt, which I incorporate even into my cabaret act (I perform 'rabbinic cabaret' in Germany quite extensively when conditions allow) is that shortly after their wedding Maggie had a dreadful dream in which an elderly lady, possibly her Grandmother, came to her and told her that her new husband would be killed in the trenches. She begged her to try to prevent this and the mysterious lady said she would do what she could. Later my grandfather Herman came back and said that a strange thing had happened, one night he had heard a voice calling and seen an elderly lady beckoning to him, he clambered over towards her and - a shell hit just where he had been. Hmmm. Either one believes such stories, or one does not. I do believe them.
Herman and Margaret had Irene ('Renée), Louis and Esther - our mother. Irene became a lecturer at a teacher training college in London, was briefly married but with no children; Louis made aliyah, married a sabra, lived many years in Ashkelon and then in Jerusalem, and also died childless. So on this side we had an uncle and an aunt and many great-uncles etc. but no cousins. Herman was a tailor and after some unsuccessful attempts to find him accommodation in Bradford he became a resident at Donisthorpe Hall in Leeds, the Jewish Old Age Home, and we visited him there. But he was buried in Bradford, in the Birks Fold (Orthodox) cemetery at Scholemoor.
My mother married Edgar Rothschild who had been born 1924 in Hanover, was sent to England aged 15 in 1939 (after his father Walter had lost his post as a judge in Hanover, had moved to Baden-Baden to be closer to the French border, and had been schlepped to Dachau after Kristallnacht.) Originally sent to Seaford College, then to London, he was moved to Bradford because Bradford Grammar School had found a way of employing several refugee teachers - Jews or Quakers or Socialists - and one of them, Dr. Artur Flehinger, was the former head of the Gymnasium in Baden-Baden. So this explains the geographical movements and why we became Yorkshire tykes. So much depended on family links and acquaintances in those desperate times. He worked in various factories then joined the RAF, training as a meteorologist and later serving in Vienna, Udine and Delhi. Mother became Deputy Head of a Primary School and Dad became a maths teacher at various schools in Yorkshire.
Edgar and Esther married at the Spring Gardens (Orthodox) synagogue but became active members at the Bowland Street (Reform) one, which had been built earlier and so never needed to use the word 'Reform' in its name to distinguish it. For many years Dad was Hon. Secretary, Hon. Treasurer and eventually Chairman. The slide he took during the stone-cleaning of the synagogue is quite bizarre because (a) nobody realised until the work started that the stone underneath the grime was that colour and (b) nobody knows now why the work stopped half-way in such a jagged haphazard manner! But it WAS completed later. Visible is a young me in a brown Bradford Grammar School blazer and Joyce in the middle and Sylvia (now also a rabbi) on the left. Being a small congregation, every individual counted and for many years when there was no rabbi or only a monthly visit from the rabbi in Leeds a rota of lay leaders led services - including we three, which certainly came in handy in terms of later career choices! Normally as a family we went to the Friday evening services (6pm), I had to get Saturday mornings off school to go to morning services for a year while preparing for my Bar-Mitzvah. Dad passed away nine years ago.
I have written a biography of Rabbi Dr. Erich Bienheim who was my first rabbi, formerly of Darmstadt then Buchenwald, then on the'Dunera' to Australia, etc. and incorporating a history of the congregation. It has been published in German and in English, the latter on Amazon. I am currently working on family histories and also on Ephraim Rothschild of Stadtoldendorf, a distant relative with a fascinating biography - he wrote to Bismarck complaining about some of his policies!