Ella Auerbach

Ella Auerbach (born on January 15, 1900 in Frankfurt am Main as Ella Georgine Levi ; died on April 20, 1999 in New York ) was one of the first German female lawyers .

Life

Ella Auerbach was born in Frankfurt am Main as the eldest daughter of the guardianship and youth judge Ernst Levi and the violinist and concert master of the Bach community Martha Heidenheimer. With her younger siblings Margaretha (* 1902) and Bernhard (* 1914) Levi grew up in a middle-class, cosmopolitan home. She was a cousin III through her father. Degree of the pianist Grete Sultan and the director Ludwig Berger .

Until 1917 Ella Auerbach attended the Schiller-Gymnasium in Frankfurt . Due to National Socialist outbursts on the part of the director, she switched to the Odenwald School in 1917 and in 1919 was the first student at the boarding school to take the Abitur in Darmstadt. Against the concerns of his father, Auerbach began to study law in Frankfurt am Main in 1919.

On November 20, 1922, Auerbach passed her legal traineeship and was sworn in as the first woman in Bad Homburg as a legal trainee in early December 1922. During the subsequent internship, Auerbach met her future husband Richard Auerbach (1892–1980). Auerbach was a lawyer and lawyer in Berlin and a member of the board of the Jewish student association Kartell-Convent . The two married at the end of March 1925. When their daughter Brigitte was born in 1926, Ella Auerbach had to interrupt her legal traineeship in order to finally be able to successfully pass her assessor exam on February 14, 1928 in Berlin . With her admission to the Berlin Chamber of Commerce , Ella Auerbach became the first female lawyer at the court there. In 1929, their son Robert was born.

Only five years later, immediately after Hitler came to power in 1933, Ella Auerbach was expelled from the bar and lost her license to practice law and lost her position at the court. Instead of retiring from working life as a housewife and mother, from then on she helped her husband in his law firm in Berlin until he too lost his notary's office in 1935 due to the Nuremberg Laws . Since Richard Auerbach did not want to leave Berlin, the couple stayed in Berlin and supported other Jews in their wishes to emigrate.

Decisive for her own emigration on January 30, 1939, were the November pogroms of 1938 , during which Richard Auerbach narrowly escaped arrest. First the family traveled to England, where they had to wait for an immigrant visa to America. Since Ella Auerbach was aware that her law degree would not be recognized in America, she learned English shorthand and typing while waiting. In June 1940 both the Auerbach couple and both children had visas to America and reached New York by ship in September 1940 .

As early as December 1940, Ella Auerbach was able to find work through contacts with Paul Tillich and Fred Weißmann as a secretary and translator at the self-help organization Selfhelp of Emigrees from Central Europe, which was founded in New York, and thus secure the Auerbachs' financial situation. Auerbach trained as a social worker in evening courses from 1950 to 1953. In 1966 Auerbach left her job at Selfhelp to study comparative Jewish religious history at New York University for four semesters . For unknown reasons, she did not finish her studies, but went back to work as a social worker at the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies . After a year she returned to Selfhelp. In 1973 Ella Auerbach had to give up her job at Selfhelp due to a stomach ulcer, but she continued to support the organization on the board for a long time.

In 1968 Auerbach became president of the Sisterhood of the New York congregation Habonim, belonged for many years to the women's group of the Leo Baeck Institute and was a member of the American Federation of Jews from Central Europe .

When Ella Auerbach died on April 20, 1999, she left behind her two children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

literature

• Dorothee von Unger: Emancipation and Emigration. From the eventful life of Ella Auerbach. In: Aufbau, October 9, 1987 (Aufbau. The Jewish Monthly Magazine).
• Jutta Dick, Marina Sassenberg (ed.): Jewish women in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lexicon on life and work. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-499-16344-6 , pp. 34-35.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ It was not until 1920 that female students were admitted to the state examinations in Germany; from 1922 they were allowed to hold judicial offices.
2. ↑ Das Echo , Vol. 47, 1928; P. 628 The first female lawyer in the Supreme Court .
3. ^ Obituary in The New York Times .