Ber Ulmo

Gravestone of Ber Ulmo at the warshaber Jewish cemetery

Rabbi Ber Ulmo (Hebrew: בער בן יונה אלמו, also Bernhard Ber Ullmann , * 1751 in Pfersee ; † March 21, 1837 ibid) was the son of Jonas Ulmo and from 1781 until his death in 1837 his successor as chairman of the Jewish community of Pfersee (near Augsburg ) and also a circumciser , general practitioner and exchange dealer in Augsburg.

From 1770 he learned in Prague, including in the Talmud school of Ezekiel Landau . His first marriage to Feigele, the daughter of the doctor Jonas Jeitteles , with whom he studied medicine in Prague, remained childless. His illegitimate daughter Chava Lea was the mother of Ferdinand Wertheimer (1817-1883). From his second marriage to Sofie († 1832), the daughter of Sulzbacher Rabbi Moses Löb, six more children were born.

On the Saturday evening before Yom Kippur in 1803, Ber Ulmo was arrested in the Pfersee synagogue on charges of forging Viennese banco tickets . At the same time, dozens of other members of Jewish communities were arrested with him in numerous other places in Swabia such as Kriegshaber or Ichenhausen. Although the allegations were false and false, the prisoners who were held in Günzburg and Donauwörth under "Kafkaesque" conditions were not released until the spring of 1804 after 216 days. During the time of Ulmos imprisonment, the famous "Pferseer Manuscript" of the Babylonian Talmud (Cod. Hebr. 95) was lost in Pfersee, which is now in the possession of the Bavarian State Library in Munich and is the oldest, almost completely preserved Talmud manuscript in the world applies.

Ber Ulmo wrote a handwritten Hebrew report about his arrest and conditions of detention, which was translated into English by his New York great-grandson Carl Jonas Ulmann in 1928 and published as a small private print. A German translation based on the handwriting of the original text was published in 2012.

Ber Ulmo died on the evening of Purim in 1837 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery , where generations of his ancestors had been buried.

His other descendants include the photographer Doris Ulmann and Richard Willstätter , who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1915.

literature

Ullmann, Ber Bernhard - Chronicle of the year 1803 - translated (from the original Hebrew), by Carl J. Ullmann. New York, 1928
Days of Judgment - Ber Ulmo's report from Pfersee - translated and commented by Yehuda Shenef, Kokavim-Verlag, 152 pages, 2012, ISBN 978-3-944092-00-3
Richard Willstätter: From my life, Verlag Chemie, Weinheim, 2nd reprint of the 2nd edition 1973, ISBN 3-527-25322-X .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Ulmo, Ber
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Son of Jonas Ulmo, his successor in office as chairman of the Jewish community in Pfersee, circumciser, general practitioner and exchange dealer
DATE OF BIRTH	1751
PLACE OF BIRTH	Pfersee
DATE OF DEATH	March 21, 1837
Place of death	Pfersee