Henny Simon née Loewenthal

Henny Löwenthal married Paul Simon on 2nd November 1911. He was 32, she was 30. She and Paul had a daughter, two years later, Marianne

Paul Simon came from Klaipeda, a city in Lithuania near the Baltic coast, whose German name was Memel, and which was part of Germany at the time. Jews had only been allowed to settle there from the early 19thC and its Jewish population numbered only 1000 in the 1880s. It is likely that Paul was living in Berlin by the end of the nineteenth century, along with his six siblings and parents, Elise and Julius. Henny was born in Berlin.

The city was a magnet for Jews from Eastern Europe. Between 1880 - 1930 eight new synagogues were built in Berlin. By the turn of the century, there were more than 110,000 Jews living there, comprising more than 5% of the total population. Back in 1850 there had only been 9,500. Coming from small towns and villages, Berlin would have seemed to our relatives to a place where the future was being built with its bright electric lighting at night, its new tram system, and its apartment blocks adorned with art nouveau figures and decorations

The Weimer era, from after WW1 until the Nazis took power in 1933 was a golden age for Berlin’s Jews. Max Reinhardt’s plays were in the theatres, while Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill composed music, Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter conducted orchestras and and Max Liebermann and Lesser Ury painted in the style of German Impressionism. Our great grandmother, father and great uncles and aunts and their children inhabited a cosmopolitan world though we know very few details about their lives.

Paul Simon died young of natural causes on 15th July 1922. Henny had a doctorate, though it is not known in what subject, perhaps she practised medicine. She moved to Dortmunder Straße 9 in 1935, almost certainly forced to by the Nazis who were evicting Jews from their homes and concentrating them in particular areas and blocks. Here she was in the heart of the Jewish quarter of Moabit - the city’s largest liberal synagogue used to stand round the corner of Levetzowstraße.