Kate Rosenheim

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Käte Rosenheim (born January 13, 1892 in Berlin , † December 4, 1979 in Cupertino , USA ) was a German-American social worker of Jewish descent.

Live and act

Kate Rosenheim was the eldest of two daughters of the doctor and private lecturer Theodor Rosenheim and his wife Hedwig, née Lipmann. For the well-to-do, nonbelieving Jewish parents, their children's education was of great importance. Attending theater and concerts as well as larger trips were the focus of family life. Käthe received some private lessons and attended the Kallmorgensche Höhere Töchterschule . Then she, who had been involved in the Jewish Women's Association since 1904, chose one of the traditional variants of self-employment in her circles - the profession of welfare worker. From 1909 to 1912 she attended the Social Women's School in Berlin, which was founded and directed in 1908 by Alice Salomon . Then Käte Rosenheim completed an apprenticeship as an infant nurse and attended lectures at Berlin University.

She worked in many areas of welfare work: until 1914 in child welfare , from 1914 to 1915 in the National Women's Service , from 1915 to 1916 in the library of the women's vocational office , from 1916 to 1918 in the war office in the Marche as a transport guide and advisor for female assistants . Between 1918 and 1919 Käte Rosenheim worked for the German League for the League of Nations (women's department), from 1919 in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior , where she became the personal secretary of Minister Carl Severing . From 1930 to 1933 she was employed as a department head for welfare in the government department of the Berlin police headquarters .

When the National Socialists came to power, Rosenheim was driven from her position of responsibility on the basis of the law to restore the civil service . She then got involved with the Central Welfare Office for Jews in Germany . There she took over the organization of the emigration of children and adolescents (up to 16 years of age) to a safe country and after the November pogroms of 1938 she herself accompanied some child transports to England. She experienced first hand the strange mixture of happiness and pain, of gratitude and concern from the parents of the children and young people and from the transport escorts.

By August 1939, Käthe Rosenheim and her staff were able to enable around 7,000 children and young people to flee Germany. When the Second World War broke out in September 1939 , the Kindertransporte to England came to an abrupt end.

At the beginning of 1941, Käte Rosenheim and her mother fled to the USA via France , Spain , Portugal and Cuba . There she studied at the New York School of Social Work and worked until her retirement - in 1958 - as a social worker in New York and San Francisco .

Between 2003 and 2004, five students from the Schiller Gymnasium and three students from the Catholic School of Our Lady in Berlin researched the rescue of Jewish children from Nazi Germany. In doing so, they particularly took into account the enormous achievements of Käte Rosenheim and Recha Freier . The resulting exhibition could be viewed in the Centrum Judaicum until January 31, 2005 .

Works

  • Interterritoriale Kinderfürsorge , in: Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege 1936, pp. 93–99
  • The children's emigration department , in: Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt , July 14, 1939, p. 5 online version .

literature

  • Sabine Hering (ed.): Jewish welfare in the mirror of biographies . Fachhochschulverlag, Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 3936065802 , pp. 376–383
  • Gudrun Maierhof: Assertiveness in chaos. Women in Jewish Self-Help 1933-1943 . Frankfurt 2002, pp. 168-171, 204-206
  • Hans Muthesius (Ed.): Alice Salomon, the founder of the social women's profession in Germany. Your life and work , Cologne 1958
  • Barbara Rosenheim: Emigration and Social Work. Käthe Rosenheim, for example . Augsburg 2004 (unpublished thesis)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Barbara Rosenheim 2004, p. 8 ff.
  2. ↑ Muthesius 1958, p. 336
  3. ↑ cf. Kate Rosenheim 1939, p. 5
  4. ↑ Maierhof 2002, p. 168 ff.
  5. ↑ Schiller-Gymnasium: The AHAWAH project
personal data
SURNAME Rosenheim, Kate
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American social worker of Jewish descent
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1979
Place of death Cupertino , USA