Siddy Wronsky

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Siddy Wronsky, 1936; archived in the Ida-Seele archive

Sidonie ("Siddy") Wronsky (nee Neufeld , Hebrew סידי_ורונסקי; born on July 20, 1883 in Berlin ; died on December 8, 1947 in Jerusalem ) was a German social worker , social politician and teacher.

Origin and education

Siddy Neufeld's parents were Max Moses Neufeld (1850-1931) and his wife Thekla (née Kleinmann). The couple had seven children, of which Siddy was the second oldest. She “grew up in an educated, assimilated Jewish family” and trained as a teacher after finishing school. After her exam, Siddy Neufeld completed a two-year postgraduate course in curative and special education. She then worked as a teacher for mentally handicapped children.

Siddy Neufeld was married to the businessman Eugen Wronsky, who had died in 1932. Little is known about this marriage.

Private welfare activities

In 1908, in addition to her work as a teacher, Siddy Wronsky took over the management of the archive for welfare , which had emerged in 1906 from the information center of the German Society for Ethical Culture founded by Jeanette Schwerin in 1893 . From 1922 to 1933 Wronsky was the director of the archive . and at the same time, following Albert Levy , head of the Central Office for Private Welfare, in 1925 she founded the German Journal for Welfare Care and was its editor until 1933.

From 1914 to 1919 Wronsky was a member of the board of the Berlin National Women's Service .

Activities in the training of social workers

Since 1915 Wronsky has been a lecturer at the Social Women's School founded by Alice Salomon in Berlin in 1908 , today's Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin . She held lectures "on historical and systematic questions of welfare, welfare for survivors of the war and the injured, and on professional studies and supervised the practical training of the female students". In 1925, Siddy Wronsky supported Alice Salomon's efforts to establish a German Academy for social and educational work with women and, after it was founded on May 25, 1925, was active as a lecturer and member of the board. “In the second half of the 1920s, she turned her theoretical interest more and more to the development of socio-educational methods. Here, together with Alice Salomon, she further developed the individualizing, pedagogical approach through the reception of the American social case work method and promoted cooperation between social workers, doctors, psychologists and psychotherapists. The advanced training events that she regularly held in the 'archive' together with the individual psychologist Manes Sperber and the psychotherapist Arthur Kronfeld were well known . "

Between 1929 and 1933, Siddy Wronsky also had an intensive exchange of views with Elisabeth Rotten , which also included Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze , the founder of the Berlin-East Social Working Group . “In this group, for example, we discussed in detail about Ben Schemen , because everyone involved knew Siegfried Lehmann from his time at the Jewish People's Home in Berlin.” Wronsky will come back to Shemen later in connection with her work in Palestine (see below).

Jewish social work

Siddy Wronsky got involved in the already mentioned Jewish people's home in Berlin in 1915 . Through this collaboration, through which she came into contact with Eastern Jewish refugees, she “found her way back to Judaism and became a Zionist”. From 1917 to 1933 she was chairwoman of the Jewish women's association in Berlin and from 1920 to 1923 chairwoman of the German national association of the Women's International Zionist Organization (WIZO). Immediately after the First World War, Wronsky was one of the founders of the Jewish Children's Aid , of which she was also a member. Also at the beginning of the 1920s, she and Beate Berger founded the Ahawah children's home of the Jewish community in Berlin. From 1927 to 1930 Wronsky worked at the Jewish Lexicon , until 1933 member of the board of the Jewish labor and migrant welfare , board member of the Central Welfare Office of German Jews and Zionist representative in the Prussian regional association of Jewish communities.

Social work in Palestine

After she had to resign her offices in the welfare organizations in 1933, Siddy Wronsky emigrated to Palestine in 1934. At the invitation of Henrietta Szold , she worked in Jerusalem in the social pedagogical department at Vaad Leumi , the official representative of the Jewish citizens in the Yishuv . In this function, she played a key role in the development of a modern Jewish welfare service in Palestine, for which Vaad Leumi had set up a training and research department especially , which also included a school she founded for social services , in which a two-year training and Further training for social workers was carried out. As in her time in Berlin, Wronsky propagated family welfare based on the case-work approach, which “in recent years has found another new design in Palestine on the basis of recent research, which shows new ways of productive work in social work the form of social diagnosis and social therapy ”. In addition, she focused on child welfare because, due to European persecution and expulsions, many isolated children or orphans immigrated to Palestine, for whom "society [...] in many cases required the replacement of the parental home". In this context, she refers to the "network of individual family care centers in the countryside [..] created by the social pedagogical department in Vaad Leumi , in which the child is accepted into the community and, if possible, educated for rural life". She provides a newly developed form of childcare for this individual placement in families:

“In addition to this individual accommodation in families, a new form of youth education has developed in Palestine in the children's villages, which takes place in Meir Schfeya on the slopes of the Carmel , in Ben Schemen near Lod , in Ahawa in Haifa Bay and in Kfar Noar Dati in the Find Emek Plain . These children's villages represent communities in which the children are brought up for rural life and in which the administration and the work are mainly in the hands of the children. The whole of life: lessons and leisure, festivals and business, culture and care is primarily determined by the children, and responsibility for community life lies in their hands. These children's villages, which take in 100-500 children and in which the children are educated in all branches of agriculture and housekeeping, have emerged as a happy form of new working-class education and represent a new example of modern social pedagogy like no other Form of education to promote the development of the sense of community and the social character in the children. "

Wronsky assessed the accommodation of the young people who had come into the country with the youth aliyah in a similar way in cooperative settlements ( kvuzot ) and village communities ( moshavim ) and concluded from the perspective of 1945: “ Social work in Palestine is about to begin its third period. Your new task will be to summarize the existing services according to plan, fill in existing gaps and evaluate the results of the previous knowledge in order to meet the new needs of the near future. "

Commemoration

Stumbling block in front of the house, Barstrasse 23, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf

On October 23, 2019 , a stumbling block was laid in front of her former home, Berlin-Wilmersdorf , Barstrasse 23 .

Works (selection)

  • Guide to Welfare , 1921
  • The standardization of welfare in the German Reich , 1922
  • Present tasks of Jewish welfare , 1924
  • Source book on the history of welfare , Berlin 1925
  • Social therapy. Selected files from welfare work , Berlin 1926 (together with Alice Salomon )
  • On the sociology of the Jewish women's movement , 1927
  • Social diagnosis , 1927 (second edition)
  • Methods of Welfare , 1929
  • Social therapy and psychotherapy in the methods of care , Berlin 1932 (together with Arthur Kronfeld )
  • Social Work and the Jewish Community Idea in Palestine , 1936
  • Pioneering social work in Palestine , 1945

literature

  • Eckhard Hansen, Florian Tennstedt (Eds.) U. a .: Biographical lexicon on the history of German social policy from 1871 to 1945 . Volume 2: Social politicians in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism 1919 to 1945. Kassel University Press, Kassel 2018, ISBN 978-3-7376-0474-1 , p. 222 f. ( Online , PDF; 3.9 MB).
  • Manfred Berger : Who was ... Siddy Wronsky ?, in: Sozialmagazin 2000 / H. 6, pp. 6-8
  • Heitz, Gertrud: Siddy Wronsky, pioneer of social work; Bulletin of the Leo Baeck Institute, 1988, 80, pp. 19-36 ( ISSN  0024-0915 )
  • Wieler, Joachim: Siddy Wronsky. In: Dick, Jutta u. Sassenberg, Marina (ed.): Jewish women in the 19th and 20th centuries, pp. 406–407. Reinbek near Hamburg (Rowohlt), 1993 ( ISBN 978-3-49916-344-9 )
  • Heitz-Rami, Gertrud: Siddy Wronsky (1883–1947). Zionist and charity champion . In: Julius Carlebach (Ed.): On the history of Jewish women in Germany . Metropol, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-926893-50-8 , pp. 183-202 .
  • Ludwig Liegle / Franz-Michael Konrad (ed.): Reform pedagogy in Palestine. Documents and interpretations of attempts at a 'new' education in the Jewish community of Palestine (1918-1948) , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, ISBN 3-7638-0809-4
  • Peter Reinicke : Wronsky, Sidonie , in: Hugo Maier (Hrsg.): Who is who of social work . Freiburg: Lambertus, 1998 ISBN 3-7841-1036-3 , pp. 642-645

Web links

Commons : Siddy Wronsky  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e biography of Siddy (Sidonie) Wronsky
  2. ^ German Central Institute for Social Issues: History
  3. ↑ Headquarters for Private Welfare: About Us
  4. ↑ See also: German Central Institute for Social Issues (DZI): Digitization of the German Journal for Welfare Care
  5. ^ A b c Ludwig Liegle / Franz-Michael Konrad (eds.): Reform pedagogy in Palestine , pp. 232-233
  6. ↑ Ludwig Liegle / Franz-Michael Konrad (eds.): Reform pedagogy in Palestine , pp. 229–230
  7. ↑ See the chapter War, Revolution, Inflation: The Project "Jewish Children's Aid" , in: Claudia Prestel: "Youth in Need". Welfare Education in German-Jewish Society (1901-1933) , Böhlau, Vienna, 2003, ISBN 3-205-77050-1 , p. 197 ff. The chapter can be viewed online at Google Books
  8. ↑ See: Verena Hennings / Sabine Hering: Coining of the Jewish welfare through the Wanderfürsorge
  9. ↑ a b c Siddy Wronsky: Social Pioneering Work in Palestine , pp. 152–155. And in addition: Jewish Virtual Library: Siddy Wronsky
  10. ^ Siddy Wronsky: Soziale Pionier-Arbeit in Palestine , p. 155. According to Wronsky, the third period of social work mentioned here was preceded by the period up to 1925, which was followed as the second "the last 15 years up to the present" (the early 1940s) .
  11. ↑ printed in Ludwig Liegle / Franz-Michael Konrad (ed.): Reformpädagogik in Palestine , pp. 152–155
personal data
SURNAME Wronsky, Siddy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wronsky, Sidonie; Neufeld, Sidonie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish welfare politician
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 1947
Place of death Jerusalem