Jakob Edelstein

Jakob Edelstein (also written as Yacov, Yaakov, Jakub Edelstein or Edlstein; 25 July 1903 – 20 June 1944) was a Czechoslovak Zionist, social democrat and the first Jewish Elder in the Theresienstadt ghetto. He was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Life and work Jakob Edelstein was born into a devout Ashkenazi Jewish family in Horodenka, a city then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nowadays in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine. His parents were Motl and Mattil Edelstein, and he had a sister called Dora. to avoid the Russian army that incited a pogrom against the Jewish residents of Horodenka: nine Jews were hanged in the main street. When his family returned to Horodenka after the war, Jakob stayed in Brno to finish his studies at a business school. After his graduation he left Brno for Teplitz in northern Bohemia to work as a traveling salesman.

From 1926 Edelstein was involved in the Hechalutz, a Zionist youth organization and in World War II a resistance movement; later he worked at their head office. In 1929, Edelstein joined the Histadrut, an organization of trade unions for and later in Israel. For this purpose Edelstein travelled, with permission of the Gestapo, abroad to Bratislava, Vienna, Berlin, Trieste and Genoa between 1939 and 1941.

On 18 October 1939, Edelstein, Friedmann and another thousand Jewish men were, due to the so-called Nisko-und-Lublin-Plan, deported from Ostrava to Nisko in the Lublin reservation, a concentration camp in the General Government. After the Nisko Plan was dissolved, for pragmatic reasons, Edelstein returned to Prague in November 1939.

On 4 December 1941, by order of the head of the "Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague" SS-Sturmbannführer (major) Hans Günther, Edelstein and his family were deported to Theresienstadt. They were among transport "Stab, č".

The camp commandant SS-Obersturmführer Siegfried Seidl designated him as the first Judenältester (Jewish Elder) of the Jewish Council of Elders in the ghetto.

Edelstein and his associates were determined to prevent further deportations to the East by organizing a self-sustaining, productive community that the Germans would find indispensable to their war effort." " (Jewish work to save Jewish lives), was the idea behind Edelsteins policy.

In January 1943 Edelstein was replaced as Judenältester by Paul Eppstein and became his first substitute.

At a count in the ghetto on 9 November 1943 a difference of 55 Jews between the registered and the actual number of inmates appeared. Edelstein was accused of aiding the escape of inmates and was arrested on November 11, 1943.

In June 1947, on the three-year yahrzeit of Yacov Edelstein's death in Auschwitz, Max Brod wrote: "And so a Jewish hero left this world, a man who up to the end did everything he possibly could and never gave up.

Literature

Israel Gutman: Enzyklopädie des Holocaust - Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden, Piper Verlag, München/Zürich 1998, 3 Bände, Hans Günther Adler: Theresienstadt: das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft 1941-1945 Nachwort Jeremy Adler. Wallstein, Göttingen, 986 pages, 2005 Bondy, Ruth. Elder of the Jews": Jakob Edelstein of Theresienstadt, translated from the Hebrew 1989,