I was born as Georg Gerson Igersheimer on December 7, 1926, in Hamburg, Germany, in a Jewish family. My ancestors had lived in Germany for many centuries. There is speculation that our Minden ancestors may have come to Westphalia from Poland in the mid-seven-teenth Century. […]
By the second half of the nineteenth Century, we know that they all engaged in commercial activities. […]
They were increasingly acculturated – assimilated would not be the right word - into German middle-class culture, while maintaining a Jewish religious identity. […]
My grandfather, Gerson Igersheimer, was born in 1859 in the medium sized town of Bad Mergentheim in Northern Swabia, approximately two miles from the village of Igersheim. His parents ran a small general störe. In 1871 the family moved to Frankfurt, where Gerson married Lina (Carolina) Mela. Her ancestors were Sephardic Jews who had fled the Catholic Inquisition in the sixteenth Century. […]
By the time she grew up, however, the family belonged to the Ashkenazi (German) Orthodox congregation in Frankfurt. Otherwise I know little about the Mela family.
My maternal grandfather, Max Minden, was born in Hamburg, also in 1859. The Mindens originally came from Minden in Westphalia, and in the eighteenth Century moved to Altona on the outskirts of Hamburg. At the time Altona was under Danish rule, and Jews had greater freedom than in the neighboring Hanseatic city of Hamburg. […]
As far as I know, there were no conversions to Christianity. […] Both Liberal and Orthodox Orientations were present in my family.
My father was brought up in a very observant Orthodox family in Frankfurt, in the congregation that had been founded by Hirsch. That congregation in the 1870s separated from the main Jewish community in Frankfurt, which it considered too Liberal. In 1912 the family forbade his sister, my aunt Martha, from marrying a Liberal rabbi and instead arranged a marriage with a decidedly Orthodox businessman in Hamburg.
My mother’s father, Max Minden, was the son of the cantor of the central Liberal synagogue, the Temple, in Hamburg. I suspect that my grandmother Sophie also came from a Liberal family in Oppenheim. My grandfather Max seems to have been religiously indifferent but was active in Jewish philanthropy. He helped to resettle Russian Jews in the United States and made at least two trips to the United States to see how they were doing. He became a prosperous businessman, with a firm with branches in Hamburg and Hüll, England, that imported eggs and other agricultural products from Russia. There is speculation that his sudden death in February 1914 may have been a suicide due to financial difficulties. […]
Of the ten of my grandparents’ children who grew to adulthood, four married non-Jews and broke all ties to Judaism. Two became Christian Scientists. Others remained loosely Jewish, while the oldest son, Henry, became an observant Orthodox Jew and his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren remained Orthodox. […]
In the first years of their marriage my parents kept an Orthodox household. […]
My father seldom went to religious Services except on the High Holy Days and on the anniversary of the deaths of his parents, but we very frequently observed the Friday evening Sabbath Kiddush Service and meal at the home of my father’s sister Martha and her family.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 23ff