The Jews of Königsberg at the turn of the 20th century
Seizing the Opportunity - Immigration as a Model for Success
New in the City
Many young Jews, willing to work and anxious to get ahead, moved from the surrounding countryside and directly from the ‘Pale of Settlement’ to Königsberg where they quickly set about making a living.
Aron Liebeck remembers those colleagues from the boarding house:
“Max Klewansky […] had been born in the small town of Tauroggen, […] and brought with him from there a huge amount of high level Hebraic knowledge, less profane. With remarkable diligence, Klewansky learned to read and write German very well […] and was so self-confident in his skills that a few years later he could establish himself as an agent for the textile branch. Shortly after that he married Miss Marcus, a marriage blessed with a large number of children.” (Aron Liebeck)
30. Flora and Max Klewansky
(To read the picture description please move the mouse over the picture)
If you can’t read, here the descritions: Left column: Map with the towns of origin of Königsberg Jews; Merchant Louis Segall and Anna (nee Bernstein) with their children. The family came from Lithuania; The herring merchant Elieser Smoira with his family; he came from Proskurow, (today Chmelnyzky); middle column: Jakob Chaim (Efim) Garbuny-Gorbunoff, a grain broker, immigrated to Königsberg in the early 1900s from Vitebsk; The family of the lumber merchant Pines from Russia; The family of the merchant Menachem Sambursky and Selma (nee Kabak) 1916; right column: The merchant Max Mordechai Perlmann from Minsk with his father Nochim Perlmann 1898; The family of Sara Gitel and Mordechai Max
Perlmann in Neuhäuser (today: Mechnikovo).
Director's Cut
Meeting in Cafe Mersand
In 2016 we met another Königsberg family in Israel! Ori had a grandmother who always spoke of her beloved Königsberg in Israel. He was able to show us many pictures about his Klewansky family for our 2017 exhibition in Kaliningrad. The relatives of Ori attended the inauguration of the New Synagogue in Königsberg in 1896. And we also got more pictures for the next exhibition about the time of the emigration from Germany or the persecution and murder.
On this picture: Ori shows our chairman Ruth Leiserowitz pictures in the Café Mersand in Tel Aviv, which has always been a popular meeting place for immigrants from Germany.
