Moritz Manheimer
Moritz Manheimer (born May 1, 1826 in Gommern near Magdeburg , † March 27, 1916 in Berlin ) was a German businessman and philanthropist .
Life
_J%C3%BCdische_Versorgungsanstalt.jpg)
Manheimer came from a family with a Jewish tradition. Moritz Manheimer went to Berlin with his brothers David and Valentin Manheimer . In 1837 Valentin and David founded the clothing company " Gebr. Manheimer " at Jerusalemer Strasse 17. The company focused on quality from the start and supplied customers from the upper classes. Valentin Manheimer left the joint company as early as 1840 and founded " V. Manheimer, factory of ladies 'coats and mantillas " at Oberwallstrasse 6 , the first factory for ladies' coats in Berlin, whose range was also internationally successful.
Moritz Manheimer stayed with the clothing company “Gebr. Manheimer ”and from 1866 at the latest, orders from the Prussian army for uniforms and coats made him a very wealthy businessman who now also worked as a banker. He later switched to his brother Valentin's company as a partner. In 1857 Moritz Manheimer became a member of the Society of Friends . After 1872 he left the company and in the second half of his life was only active as a charitable benefactor.
Moritz Manheimer is neither related to nor by marriage with the Berlin merchant and oil trader Moritz Manheimer (1794–1868), who gained a certain fame through the portrait of his family. The painting is now in the Jewish Museum Berlin .
When Moritz Manheimer and his wife Bertha, geb. Lehwess found that their marriage would be childless, he began to worry about the poor and disadvantaged. He organized his charitable work with German thoroughness (“His heart was Jewish, his method was German”), advertised his projects and asked not to give him a piece of jewelry for his birthday. B. a new bed for one of his houses. He founded over 40 projects, where he not only gave the money, but also looked after everything on site. It was important to him to know the residents of his retirement homes personally and to listen to their concerns and stories. Together with others, he financed the Jewish old people's home at Grosse Hamburger Strasse 26, and donated the Pankow apprentice home and the hospital on Oranienburger Strasse . Out of old attachment he also donated a retirement home to his former home town of Gommern , which was used as a youth hostel until October 2011 and donated a large amount to have the small Jewish cemetery in Gommern cared for "forever". The Manheimer Foundation also took care of the promotion of young talent and organized regular competitions, e.g. B. on the subject "Are philanthropy, justice and tolerance tied to a certain form of government, and which form of government gives the best guarantee for its implementation", which also inspired the young Siegfried Kracauer to his first major work. The Reform Jew Manheimer was an admirer of the Enlightenment man Moses Mendelssohn and made little difference whether the beneficiaries were Jewish or Christian. If a poor Jew came into his office and brazenly pointed out to him that as a rich man he was obliged under Jewish law to help him, he could get very icy. The older the Manheimers got, the younger the population they cared for became. Towards the end of his life he was particularly interested in the very young, as infant mortality was an acute problem at the time.
In 1882 he bought a large piece of land in today's Schönhauser Allee 22 in order to have the Second Jewish Pension Fund built there, a retirement home for poor Jews who were allowed to spend their retirement years there, provided they reached the age of 60 and lived in Berlin for at least 15 years had. On November 11, 1883, the new old people's home was opened in the presence of Empress Augusta . The house borders on the neighboring Jewish cemetery and so he decided to have a tomb built from the same yellow-brown bricks in such a way that - sliding over the cemetery wall - there is an optical unity between the grave of the founder and the house. As architects, he hired Albert Bohm and Paul Engel, the house architects of his brother Valentin, who had already designed his department store on Oberwallstrasse in a bold mix of styles. In this way he - entirely the merchant - came to an imposing grave for little money. The house was opened with twelve residents, and the first extension was completed just four years later. Further donations from Zimmer made a second extension necessary, which was inaugurated on April 8, 1892.
Manheimer's burial place has been preserved and preserves the historicism of the 1880s: a Romanesque screen gallery, a niche vault in the shape of a shell in the Renaissance style , manneristically decorated columns with composite capitals and a richly ornamented entablature, as a crown a lunette gable of the brick Renaissance, above and on the sides classical acroterra .
Fate of the pension institution
In 1943, residents and staff of the care facility were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp . In 1945 the People's Police moved there. After the fall of the Wall , it was used by the police for ten years. Then the house stood empty for another ten years until it was sold in 2010. Condominiums bearing the name “Haus Manheimer” are to be built here by the end of 2012.
Gommern
The Jewish cemetery in Gommern was leveled by the National Socialists, and in 1960 a memorial was built on the site. Moritz Manheimer is an honorary citizen of Gommern.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Inka Bertz: Family Pictures. Self-representation in the Jewish bourgeoisie , Cologne 2004, especially pp. 47–49.
- ↑ Eugen Fuchs, page 357
- ↑ Please add proof. Alfred Etzold?
- ↑ A cellar tells the story of research by the association unter-berlin e. V. to the VP inspection at Schönhauser Allee 22
literature
- Alfred Etzold, Joachim Fait, Peter Kirchner, Heinz Knobloch : The Jewish cemeteries in Berlin , Henschel-Verlag , Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-362-00557-8
- Eugen Fuchs: Moritz Manheimer . In: New Jewish Monthly Issues , Issue 12 of March 25, 1917, pp. 356–359. Online version .
- Etty Hirschfeld: The old people's homes and the hospital of the Jewish community in Berlin , in: Series of publications by the Jewish community in Berlin, around 1935
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Manheimer, Moritz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German businessman and philanthropist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 1, 1826 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Gommern |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 27, 1916 |
| Place of death | Berlin |