Beate Berger (nurse)

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Beate Berger (born in Niederbreisig in 1886 ; died on May 20, 1940 in Kirjat Bialik near Haifa ) was the director of the Ahawah ( Beith Ahawah ) Jewish children's home in Berlin . Between 1933 and 1939, she managed to rescue more than 100 Jewish orphans to Palestine .

Origin and first professional experience

Beate Berger's grandfather, Theodor Berger, was the head of the Jewish community in Niederbreisig. Her father, Jonas Berger, was a wine and grain dealer; her mother was Henriette (Jatia) Pelzer from Speicher / Eifel near Trier. Berger lost her father at the age of six. Her mother now had to look after her and her four siblings alone. Therefore, the mother sent Beate to friends in a village in the mountains. The feeling of being rejected shaped Berger from an early age and she was able to understand the orphans in the Jewish children's home well. In 1910, Berger began nursing training at the Jewish Hospital in Frankfurt am Main, which she completed in 1912. During the First World War , Beate Berger volunteered as a surgical nurse at the Red Cross. From 1916 to 1918 she worked in the "German Medical Column for Bulgaria". She was used in the Alexander Hospital in Sofia.

The Ahawah children's home in Berlin

The former hospital of the Jewish community in Auguststrasse in Berlin-Mitte has been used as accommodation for Jewish refugee children from Eastern Europe since the end of World War I. This resulted in the children's home initiated by Beate Berger in 1922, which she renamed Beith Ahawah (“House of love ”). She mainly took in Eastern European children. Most of them were social orphans or pogrom children . Others had lost their parents during or after World War I , so that by the early 1930s the home was looking after around 120 children, for which Berger had hired teachers and carers from all over Europe and Palestine. The home was Zionist oriented and worked for progressive educational concepts. The children lived in family groups. A children's council decided on the important matters of everyday life in the home. Minna Mühsam, the co-founder of the Jewish children's folk kitchen and wife of the doctor Hans Mühsam, as well as the Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber belonged to the group of sponsors that Beate Berger wanted to be the head of the Beith Ahawah .

New beginning in Palestine

After the National Socialist " seizure of power ", which Beate Berger regarded as life-threatening for her protégés, she began evacuating the home to Palestine and in 1934 set off with the first group of children from Berlin to a place near Haifa, where the Heim was reopened under the same name. When Beate Berger traveled to Germany for the last time in 1939, by then she had brought more than 100 children out of Berlin, whereas the traces of the other children are lost in the concentration camps .

Shortly before her death, Beate Berger had appointed the former head of the Jewish rural school home in Herrlingen , the pedagogue Hugo Rosenthal (Josef Jashuvi), who had already had very close relations with Beith Ahawah in Berlin , as her successor. Rosenthal / Jashuvi ran the home from 1940 to 1956. Hanni Ullmann was his successor until 1970 . The Ahawah children's home still operates today as the Ahava Village for Children & Youth .

Beate Berger, who was called "Sister Superior" by her protégés and was considered very strict, died in Palestine of a heart disease.

Movie

  • Ayelet Bargur (Director): The House on Auguststrasse. (“The house on Auguststrasse”), documentary film, Israel 2007, 63 min.
  • Nadja Tenge and Sally Musleh: Ahawah - children of Auguststrasse. Documentary, Germany, 2014, 60 minutes.

literature

  • Regina Scheer : AHAWAH The forgotten house. Searching for clues in Berlin's Auguststrasse. Structure of Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-7466-1008-7 .
  • Ayelet Bargur: Ahawah means love. The story of the Jewish children's home in Berlin's Auguststrasse. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-423-24521-2 .

Web links

  • Gregor Brand: Beate Berger - educator and Zionist from Niederbreisig. In: Eifelzeitung. September 8, 2010. (eifelzeitung.de)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Beate Berger in the database Jüdische Pflegeegeschichte - Biographies and Institutions in Frankfurt am Main.
  2. ↑ Hilde Steppe : "Consoling the sick and honoring Judaism". On the history of Jewish nursing in Germany , Mabuse Frankfurt am Main 1997, table 10:70.
  3. ↑ a b Karin Wittneben : Beate Berger , in: Hubert Kolling (Hrsg.): Biographical Lexicon for Nursing History “Who was who in nursing history” , Volume 4, Elsevier Munich 2008, pp. 26-30.
  4. ↑ Memorial plaques in Berlin: Jewish children's home 'Ahawah'
  5. ↑ Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . ed. from the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 28.
  6. ^ Peter Wilhelm A. Schmidt: Introduction. In: Hugo Rosenthal (Josef Jashuvi): Memories of life. edited by Micheline Prüter-Müller and Peter Wilhelm A. Schmidt. Publishing house for regional history, Bielefeld 2000, ISBN 3-89534-378-1 , pp. 19-20.
  7. ^ Ahava Village History
  8. ↑ Ahawah - Children of August Street
personal data
SURNAME Berger, Beate
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Head of the Jewish orphanage Beit Ahawa in Berlin
DATE OF BIRTH 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Niederbreisig
DATE OF DEATH May 20, 1940
Place of death Kirjat Bialik near Haifa