Last Update: Oct. 3, 2012: To put a link to
Humanistisches Judentum by Georg H. Shikmoni (the husband of Elsa (b. Benscher) Shikmoni, the sister of Erna Bach).
of the Bachs).
Previous Update:
Aug. 12, 2000. [Thanks (again) to
my first-cousin-once-removed Gabriel Bach
and my great-aunt Liesel Bach.]
Aug. 20, 1999 (thanks to Larry Fried),
April 6, 1999 (thanks to
Gabriel(Gabby, grandson of the above Gabriel), for many
corrections and some additions of previous version),
Jan. 2, 2000.
April 14, 2003. (Thanks to Angela Bungert for
the picture of Gabriel Bach.
Dec. 29, 2004.
Jan. 11, 2007 (to report the death of Yehuda Yerushalmi).
Feb. 14, 2007 (to report the death of Liesel Bach).
July 4, 2009 (to report the birth of Ma'ayan Bach)
Gabriel Bach
(July 9, 1861- Jan. 28, 1921), and Mina (b. Vorchheimer)
Bach lived in Unsleben, a village in Bavaria, Germany.
Gabriel was a horse merchant.
Here is a picture of
Gabriel Bach with his helper (courtesy of Angela Bungert).
Their children
were: Hedwig, Rosa, Victor, Arthur, Martha, Selmar, Robert, and
Hugo .
Martha(1899- Oct. 21, 1918) died from the flu epidemic,
and Arthur (1900-1924) also died young.
The first-born was my paternal grandmother
Hedwig Bach Zeilberger (July 7, 1890- June 1975).
(See http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/family/hedwig.html
about her son Yehudah, and Yehudah's
sons Doron and Gil).
After Hedwig, came Rosa. Rosa married Arthur Benscher. They had
one child: Walter. Walter is married to Gretchen, and they lived
in Rockville Center, Long Island.
In 1994 they moved to Northfield, NY. They
have 3 married children.
Daniel, (who is the father of Jason),
Leslie, (who is the mother of Elise and Sarah),
and David.
After Rosa, came Victor Bach. After tenth grade, Victor
entered the Hirsch Copper and Brass
company, one of the greatest metal companies in Germany.
Starting out as a clerk, he rapidly
climbed the executive ladder, until he became General Director.
Victor Bach was very active in the Zionist movement in Germany,
serving as director of Keren Hayesod.
He married Erna Benscher Bach
(sister of his sister Rosa's husband). Victor Bach and Erna
Benscher Bach had
two children Ruth Bach (b. Jan. 15, 1923) and Gabriel Bach
("Gabby") (b. March 13, 1927).
Right before the war, in late 1938, Victor and his family
escaped to Holland, two weeks before Kristalnacht, and in 1940
emigrated to Palestine, after he managed to transfer a large
part of his fortune, by putting it under his relatives' names,
who were already there. Thanks to him, many of his relatives
were able to emigrate from Germany before it was too late.
In Palestine, and then Israel, he became a member of the Board
of Directors of Bank Leumi, and founded and directed the first
Israeli company for mutual funds, PIA.
Victor and Erna's daughter, Ruth Bach, had a very interesting
life. Between 1940 and 1945, she worked under
Richard Graves, the commissioner of labor in the British
mandate to Palestine. Between 1951 and 1953 she worked in the
Israeli consulate in New York, and between 1953 and 1959 she
was executive secretary of Teddy Kolack, who was then Chief of
Staff in the prime minister's office, who was also in charge
of tourism. She was then appointed to be in charge
of entertainment and culture in the Israeli cruise-boats
Jerusalem (1959-1962) and Shalom (1962-1967).
She later became public relations officer of Tel-Aviv
Hilton, and before retiring, she managed the
guest-house for creative artists, of the project Mishkanot
Shaananim, an artist colony in Jerusalem, where the famous
windmill stands.
Victor and Erna's son, Gabriel Bach
studied Law in England.
He is a graduate of University College, London,
from where, in 1998, he was awarded Fellowship.
In 1949 he was awarded
the Buchanan prize from the Lincoln Inn
for the best student of the year.
In 1953, he entered the office of the Israel State
Attorney, rising through the ranks, ultimately becoming Israel's
chief State Attorney between 1969 and
1982. When he was Deputy State Attorney, in the
early sixties, he was a member of the prosecution team of four
in the trial of Adolf Eichmann
.
In 1968, 1970, and 1980, he represented Israel at United Nations
conventions in Switzerland, Japan, and Venezuela.
From 1982 until his retirement,
he was a Supreme-Court Justice.
In 1997 he was awarded the honorary title of "Yekir Yerushalaim"
(Distinguished Citizen of Jerusalem).
In November 2000, he visited Berlin, and interviewed with
Engelbert Sauter for German TV, the resulted in a very nice
pictorial bio of Gabriel Bach
.
Gabby is married to (another) Ruth,
Ruth (b. Arazi) Bach. Ruth Arazi Bach is the daughter of
Yehuda Arazi (1907-1959)
, Haganah leader and
organizer of "illegal" immigration to Palestine
(see his entry in Encyclopedia Judaica, and
Yael Rosemann's 1995 book (in Hebrew), about him, called
"Melekh Hatkhbulot").
Gabriel and Ruth (b. Arazi) Bach have 3 children:
The next child of Gabriel and Mina Bach was
Hugo Bach (1901- Oct. 11, 1946). Hugo was married
to Magda Levine Bach.
He was an active Zionist and emigrated to Palestine
already in 1922.
Hugo and Magda had two children: Miriam and Gideon.
Miriam is a lawyer, who lives in Tel-Aviv, and who is the
single parent of Michal.
Gideon Bach
is the Chair of the
Dept. of Human Genetics
at the Hadassah Medical School of the Hebrew University,
and an expert in the Jewish genetic disease Tai-Sachs.
Gideon has two daughters:
Irit Bach, (b. Feb. 1971), and Galia Bach, (b. Oct. 1974).
In 2004 Gideon became a grandfather.
The second-youngest child was Selmar. He was born
on March 28, 1898 in Unsleben. He served in
World War I in the 5. Infanterie-Regiment,
2. Ersatz Bataillon, 1. Kompagnie (we still
have his Militar-Pass). Between Oct. 11, 1938 and
Dec. 3, 1938, he was a prisoner in the notorious
Buchenwald Concentration Camp, near Weimar.
Thanks to his brother Victor,
he got out and made it to Palestine,
where he lived in the same Building as Hedwig.
He was married, but did not have any children.
He died in the early 1950s.
The youngest surviving child of Gabriel and Mina Bach was Robert Bach
(1902- c. 1984).
Robert was the most cheerful and fun-loving of his family,
always cracking jokes, and in a good mood.
With his brother Selmar, he
ran the family business of horse-trading,
first in their native Unsleben, and between 1933 and
1939, in nearby Meinigen (their address was 2 Feodoren Str.,
and the business was at Leipziger Str. 18).
In 1934, he married Liesel (b. Stiefel) Bach (Aug. 12, 1910- ca. Feb. 5, 2007).
Liesel is the daughter of Karl Stiefel (who was killed in WWI),
and Frieda (b. Kahn) Stiefel.
Robert and Liesel immigrated to Palestine in the
late thirties, owning and running a dairy farm outside of Jerusalem.
When Jerusalem expanded, and their dairy farm became part of the suburbia,
they were forced to move out. They went to Sa'ar Heffer, in the
Sharon, growing citrus. Robert and Liesel have one daughter: Esther
Bach Yerushalmi (Esti) (b. Meinigen, 1938).
Esther was married to Yehuda Yerushalmi (?-2006), who was
a member, and later
director, of the Dan Bus cooperative. Esther and
Yehuda have two children:
Added Oct. 3, 2012: Erna's brother-in-law,
Georg H. Shikmoni, wrote a fascinating essay (in German) called
Humanistisches Judentum (with a forward by A. Einstein).
Robert passed away in the mid eighties. Liesel is alive
and well, and celebrated her 90th birthday on Aug. 12, 2000.
Liesel still swims everyday!
Gabriel Bach's parents were
Meier and Zerlina Bach.