Siegfried Adlerstein

Zionist parental home in Wuppertal

Siegfried Adlerstein was born in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, the youngest of three siblings. His father had emigrated to Germany at the age of 16 from Galicia, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time, and worked in the credit business. He had been granted German citizenship in 1919 and owned a department store, which gave the family a good level of financial security. Because of his talent, Siegfried Adlerstein skipped a class after three years of primary school and went to the municipal secondary school in Wuppertal, where he learnt English and French as well as Latin.

Siegfried Adlerstein's Zionist father saw the time had come for the family to emigrate to Palestine following the success of the NSDAP in the Reichstag elections. However, his mother rejected these plans, citing her two sons' studies. Siegfried Adlerstein's older brother was studying law at the time and set up as a lawyer in Elberfeld shortly before 1933.

Medical studies

After graduating from high school in 1929, Siegfried Adlerstein began studying medicine in Heidelberg and Munich. He passed the Physikum in Bonn and completed his first clinical semester.

Short semester in Berlin

Siegfried Adlerstein was enrolled at Berlin University in the winter semester of 1932/33. He belonged to the Jewish fraternity "Hasmonea", which was organised in the Zionist umbrella organisation "Kartell Jüdischer Verbindungen" (KJV). On 28 February 1933, he returned from a nationwide conference of the KJV in Leipzig and saw the burning Reichstag. One day later, he left Berlin, as he had planned for some time, and travelled to his parents in Wuppertal. In the summer semester, he preferred to continue his studies in nearby Düsseldorf. There he experienced anti-Semitism first-hand: the Jewish students had to stand until all the "Aryan" students had found a place in the lecture theatre.

Emigration of the Adlerstein family

After the boycott campaigns against Jewish businesses in the spring of 1933, the family decided to emigrate. In July 1933, the older brother emigrated to Palestine after he had to "close down" his law firm. The parents did not want to arrive in the hot Israeli summer and postponed their emigration for a few months. They spent the summer in Carlsbad in the Czech Republic, while Siegfried Adlerstein travelled to the North Sea in Belgium after the end of the semester because he no longer felt safe in Germany. In October 1933, he travelled to his parents in the Czech Republic and took part in the Zionist Congress in Prague. As he feared problems with his papers, he preferred to bypass the German Reich via a complicated route through Belgium, Switzerland and Austria.

Siegfried Adlerstein's father had sold his business in the meantime, so that the family was able to utilise the maximum limit of 1000 pounds sterling per head for cash imports permitted when immigrating. The family was also able to bring additional assets out of Germany in the form of goods under the Ha'avara Agreement.

Cancellation of studies

After the other family members emigrated, Siegfried Adlerstein initially remained in Prague because he wanted to wait and see whether and where he could continue his studies - in Vienna, Prague or Switzerland. However, his plans came to nothing as his brother lost a large part of the family fortune due to business miscalculations and was no longer able to support him financially. His brother had imported machines from Germany and set up a tin can factory in Israel. Siegfried Adlerstein also emigrated to Palestine as a result.

Career in the insurance industry

Thanks to his good language skills, Siegfried Adlerstein found a job in 1935 in the travel department of a subsidiary of the "Anglo-Palestine Bank", the predecessor of the Israeli central bank. He moved to the insurance department, which was headed by another member of the KJV, and later rose to become head of the department himself. At the beginning of the 1950s, he set up his own business with another "Bundesbruder" from the YCL and founded his own insurance company with branches in Tel Aviv and Haifa. He sold his shares in the 1980s, but remained active as a consultant for a few more years.

Retirement

After his retirement, Siegfried Adlerstein devoted himself to caring for his ill wife and his hobby of classical music. He had held a subscription to the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra since 1936 and worked in the orchestra's archive on a voluntary basis until 1999. Siegfried Adlerstein died in Tel Aviv in 2002.