Martha Jacob

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Martha Jacob
Full name	Martha (Marthel) Jacob
nation	Germany
birthday	February 7, 1911
place of birth	Berlin ,  German Empire
job	Qualified sports teacher
date of death	September 13, 1976
Place of death	Cape Town ,  South Africa
Career
discipline	Javelin throw
Best performance	38.24 m (javelin throw)

Martha Jacob (born February 7, 1911 in Berlin , † September 13, 1976 in Cape Town , South Africa ) was a German athlete . In 1929 she became German champion in javelin throwing .

Life

Jacob was born to Minna Nee and Adolph Jacob . Her mother died five days after she was born and her father died of flu just three months later. She grew up with close family members, her mother's older sister, Paulina Heimann, and Louis Heimann , the eldest brother of Jacob's mother. Jacob lived in a middle-class milieu in Tile-Wardenberg-Str. 26, which is located on the banks of the Spree in Berlin between the Wikinger-Ufer and the Hansa-Ufer.

Studies and career until 1932

Even as a young girl, Jacob showed interest in all kinds of physical exercise. She made her first sporting experiences at the age of six as a member of the oldest Jewish gymnastics club in Germany, Bar Kochba Berlin . There she learned gymnastics, gymnastics and dance. At the age of eight she won her first junior gymnastics competition, and at the age of 13 (1924) the first senior club forest run over 2 km. Since the Jewish sports clubs of the time did not offer the structure for high-class training and support, she joined the Berlin Sports Club (BSC) in the same year without giving up her membership at Bar Kochba. At the BSC she played in the hockey and handball team, among others together with captain Lilli Henoch , and won a number of prizes and good placements in athletics in both the junior and women's classes. Here her talent for the throwing and thrusting disciplines, especially in javelin throwing, emerged. In the fall of 1928 she moved to the Sport-Club Charlottenburg (SCC), where she trained from the multiple German decathlon champion Arthur Holz . In the same year she began studying at the German University for Physical Education (DHfL) in Berlin.

On August 7, 1928, the DHfL sent a gymnastics demonstration group to the Olympic Games in Amsterdam, to which Jacob also belonged. In April 1931, the IOC awarded DHfL the Coupe Olympique for this .

The greatest sporting highlight was the German Athletics Championships on July 21, 1929 in Frankfurt / Main. In her favorite discipline, the shot put, Jacob was only third. However, she surprisingly won the subsequent javelin throw. She defeated the current world record holder Auguste Hargus and with 38.24 m became the first and only time German champion in javelin throw in the area of ​​the German Sports Authority for Athletics (DSB). She missed the world record with her throw by only 15 centimeters.

The championship title was followed by the appointment to the national team for the second women's international match against Great Britain, which took place on 8/9. August 1929 took place in Düsseldorf. Auguste Hargus returned the favor in the javelin throw , Jacob came second. The German women's team won the international match. At the end of 1929 Jacob was fifth in the world's best javelin throwing list with 38.24 m, in Germany she was second behind Tilly Fleischer (38.25 m).

An invitation from the British Women's Athletic Federation followed , with the aim of training the British athletes for the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles in the spring and summer of 1931 . Jacob accepted the invitation, becoming the first foreign coach to be hired by the British Women's Athletic Federation . Her versatility and successful collaboration in 1931 meant that she was called back to England in the spring of 1932. After finishing her engagement and returning to Berlin, she devoted herself to her studies and her own training. In addition to regular starts for the SCC, she repeatedly competed for her Jewish club Bar Kochba. Despite her achievements, she did not take part in the first Maccabiade in Tel Aviv in March 1932 . In September of that year she started at the athletics championships of the German Circle of the Makkabi World Association in Leipzig and won there in the discus and javelin throw.

On June 21, 1932, she finished her studies at the DHfL and received the sports teacher diploma. The topic of the diploma thesis was: "Organizational questions and forms in women's athletics". For the SCC, she entered the association championships in August, where she achieved third place in the pentathlon .

time of the nationalsocialism

In April 1933, an extraordinary general meeting of the SCC decided to introduce an Aryan paragraph into the association's statutes. Jacob later reports on these events:

"I was evicted from the SCC in March 1933 because I was a Jew."

On the advice of her aunt, Jacob traveled to London in April 1933, where she still had contacts from her time as national coach. With little money and little luggage, she tried a fresh start here. But even as a well-known competitive athlete and trainer, as a qualified sports teacher and trained masseuse, it was almost impossible for her to find a lucrative job. Without an official work permit, their attempts turned out to be a difficult undertaking. Despite the dilemma, she started in various athletics competitions and in May 1933 set new records in discus and shot put . In September of the same year she was the only woman in the 25-strong British team to travel to the European Maccabi Championships in Prague, where she won gold medals in the javelin and discus throw.

However, these successes did not improve their income and living conditions. So she moved to France in 1934, hoping to get a work permit there. Since French women's athletics was not yet at an international level at that time, she was offered the opportunity to prepare the Olympic team for the Olympic Games and, as an Olympic talent, she was offered a work permit within the framework of an exemption. When it became known that she was a German Jew, she was denied this support. Due to her athletic achievements, which she demonstrated in various competitions, she qualified for participation in the 2nd  Maccabiade from April 2 to 7, 1935. In Palestine, however, she did not start for the British or French, but for the German team. 7,000 athletes from 27 countries took part in the world's largest Jewish sports festival. She narrowly missed victory three times: in the shot put, javelin and discus throw she won the silver medal behind the US champion and world record holder in the discus throw Lillian Copeland .

In her search for a livelihood, she ended up in the Netherlands a little later , where one could legally earn money without a work permit. Here she met Leo Kerz , a stage designer and lighting master who was already well known at the time . He had learned his trade from the avant-gardist Erwin Piscator in the Weimar Republic and, after the war, was to work on Broadway for many years, along with other posts . They celebrated their engagement in the Netherlands.

Despite the increasing marginalization of Jews in Germany, Jacob was always drawn back to Berlin to take part in Jewish sports festivals and to visit family and friends on these occasions. It last started in July 1935 on the sports field of the Jewish community in Berlin in Grunewald. On the occasion of this visit, she received a police summons. Through her stay in Great Britain, her participation in the European Maccabi Championships in Prague and the 2nd Maccabiade in Tel Aviv, she became acquainted with Henry Mond , an influential industrialist and President of the World Maccabi Association. Presumably in connection with boycott efforts abroad, an attempt was made to gain information from her about how the British establishment thought of the Germans and the Olympic Games. Immediately after the interrogation, she decided to leave Germany. That same night her uncle drove her to a train station. From here she fled back to the Netherlands by train via Belgium .

exile

Since attempts to obtain a permanent work permit and thus a real livelihood in Europe were unsuccessful, she was forced to look for alternatives. Her oldest cousin was in South Africa for a rowing competition in 1933. When he found out about developments in Germany, he stayed in South Africa. With his help, Jacob obtained a permanent visa for entry and emigrated to Johannesburg in 1936 . There she married Leo Kerz, from whom she separated after three years of marriage.

She earned her living with massages. She continued her training. In 1937 she started at the South African Athletics Championships and won the javelin throw.

She met her second husband, Barney Shore, immediately after arriving in South Africa in 1936. She married him in 1940 and moved to Cape Town, where their two daughters Sandra (* 1942) and Hazel (* 1944) were born.

Jacob visited Germany with her husband in 1952. The house in which she had lived no longer existed. Of her family, only Paulina had survived, who had followed her to South Africa in 1939.

Jacob died in Cape Town on September 13, 1976 at the age of 65.

Remembrance and remembrance

Due to the commitment of her daughter Hazel and the American Jewish Committee , the SCC agreed to commemorate its Jewish members with a plaque in the club house. On August 7, 2014, the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district gave a previously unnamed square at the Heerstraße S-Bahn station the name Martha-Jacob-Platz.

literature

• Berno Bahro, Jutta Braun and Hans Joachim Teichler (eds.): Forgotten records. Jewish athletes before and after 1933. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86650-038-9 , pp. 77-87.

Web links

• Sports under the Star of David

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Berno Bahro: Martha Jacob - "I have dedicated myself to sport". In: Berno Bahro, Jutta Braun and Hans Joachim Teichler (eds.): Forgotten Records - Jewish athletes before and after 1933. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86650-038-9 , p. 77– 87.
2. ^ Newspaper interview with Martha Jacob, July 1929 (private archive Hazel Shore)
3. ↑ BZ at noon. No. 216, Report: “A Revelation”.
4. ↑ The athlete. dated July 23, 1929.
5. ↑ Newspaper interview with Martha Jacob, July 1929 (PA Hazel Shore).
6. ↑ Berno Bahro, Jutta Braun and Hans Joachim Teichler (eds.): Forgotten records. Jewish athletes before and after 1933. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86650-038-9 .
7. ↑ Sport under the Star of David ( Memento of the original from March 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on germanroadraces.de 
8. ^ District Office Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf