Frieda H. Sichel

Frieda Henriette Sichel , b. Gotthelft (born May 15, 1889 in Kassel ; died July 5, 1976 in Johannesburg ) was a German economist and South African social worker of Jewish origin.

Life

Frieda Sichel came from the upper middle-class, Jewish Gotthelft family, who had been running a printing company in Kassel since 1841 and had published the respected daily newspaper Casseler Tageblatt since 1853 . Her parents were Theodor Gotthelft (born July 26, 1850 in Kassel, died June 15, 1916 in Kassel) and his wife Fanny Alice Loewi (born November 20, 1861 in Paris, died October 1, 1923 in Kassel). Her paternal grandfather was Carl Gotthelft (born July 17, 1817 in Kassel, died June 14, 1880 in Kassel), who lived with his brother Adolph Gotthelft (born June 8, 1828 in Kassel, died September 19, 1901 in Kassel ) Founded the printing house in 1841.

She grew up in a built by her father in 1894 in Sophienstraße Villa and received her formal education at the of Julie from Kaestner led (1852-1937) Heuser's Higher School for Girls, the 1904 four-year real high-school courses to prepare for the high school offered. After graduating from high school in 1911, she studied social economics in Freiburg , Munich , Berlin and Heidelberg from 1911 to 1915 . She belonged to the circle around Max and Marianne Weber , and Karl Jaspers and Georg Lukács were fellow students . Her dissertation on John Stuart Mill , presented in Heidelberg in 1915 , was published in Schmoller's yearbook .

Max Weber encouraged her to tackle her habilitation , but she gave up this venture in 1915 to take over the management of the food price control office in Stuttgart . In 1916 she went to Berlin and organized sewing rooms for the national women's service there . Towards the end of the year, she wrote a study for the Arms and Ammunition Procurement Office on the use of women's labor in the war effort. Then she worked for the "Casseler Tageblatt", her family's daily newspaper in Kassel, where she represented an editor who had been drafted into the war .

In 1918 she married her distant cousin , three years older than her , the architect Karl-Hermann Sichel (born 1886 in Kassel, died 1972 in Johannesburg). In addition to bringing up her two children, she was active in the Jewish women's association B'nai-B'rith sister associations and as a board member of the Association of Economists in Germany and the Office for the Promotion of Workers' Interests, taught economics at the adult education center and the home economics and Trade school and headed the Kassel housewives' association that she founded.

After the so-called boycott of Jews on April 1, 1933, she worked as a provincial welfare officer for the Hesse-Nassau district in the emigration service at the instigation of Leo Baeck , the president of the “ Reich Representation of German Jews ”. Together with the lawyer Leo Oppenbeim, she founded the "Advice Center for Jewish Economic Aid and Development" in Kassel and a retraining program for highly qualified Jews who prepare for emigration from Hitler's Germany and immigration to other countries through training as craftsmen and farmers and through foreign language courses . They set up hachshara centers in small towns in the area , where especially students who had been expelled from their universities could learn some agriculture and also the Hebrew language in order to enable them to immigrate to Palestine .

In 1935, Sichel declined the invitation to succeed Bertha Pappenheim as chairwoman of the Jewish Women's Association (JFB). Meanwhile, she was already by the Gestapo been summoned and threatened, and after her June 29, 1935 Husband Karl-Hermann sickle prohibition had been occupied, emigrated the couple end in October 1935 after South Africa ; the two children Anna (born 1919) and Gerhard (born 1923) followed a few weeks later.

In 1940 she founded the retirement home and aid organization "Our Parents Home" in South Africa for Jewish refugees from occupied Europe and worked until 1961 in various organizations such as the Child Welfare Society, the Johannesburg Council for Care of the Aged, the Johannesburg Marriage Guidance Society and the Union of Jewish Women of South Africa.

Fonts

She later published an article on the history of the "Casseler Tageblatt" and two books on the subject of Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany:

• The Rise and Fall of the Kasseler Tageblatt. In: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook. Volume 19, Issue 1, 1974, pp. 237-243.
• From Refugee to Citizen. A Sociological Study of the Immigrants from Hitler-Europe who settled in Southern Africa. AA Balkema, Amsterdam 1966.
• Challenge of the Past. Pacific Press, Johannesburg 1975, ISBN 0-620-01866-6 .

Honors

• The country's largest newspaper at the time, The Star , voted her one of the top 20 women of the year in 1975.
• In the Kirchditmold district of her native Kassel, a small street has been named after her for several years.

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ Until 1873 the sheet was called “Gewerbliches Tageblatt und Anzeiger”; only under Prussian sovereignty could it be renamed "Casseler Tageblatt" in 1873.
2. ↑ 1914 renamed “Kästnersches Lyceum”.
3. ↑ The Lyceum was merged in 1923 with the “Städtische Studienanstalt der Realgymnasiale zu Cassel” founded in 1909, the forerunner of today's Heinrich Schütz School and the first girls' high school in the Kassel administrative district .
4. ↑ John Stuart Mill's Sociopolitical Changes ; Grand-Ducal Baden Ruprecht-Karls- University, Heidelberg, 1915.
5. ↑ jhbchev.co.za
6. ↑ Heither u. a .: Dismissed as a Jewish student. P. 24.

literature

• Luise Hirsch: From the Shtetl to the Lecture Hall: Jewish Women and Cultural Exchange. (Studies in Judaism). University Press of America, Lanham, Md., USA 2013, ISBN 978-0-7618-5992-5 , p. 263. (English)
• Dietrich Heither, Wolfgang Matthäus, Bernd Pieper: Dismissed as a Jewish student: Memories and documents on the history of the Heinrich Schütz School in Kassel. (National Socialism in Northern Hesse; Writings on regional contemporary history, issue 5). 2nd, enlarged and corrected edition. Publishers University Library Kassel, 1987, ISBN 3-88122-381-9 .