Finding the Arthur BACH Family (entry in progress)

[11 Jan 15 – started on the return ferry ride from Swartz Bay, Vancouver Island, BC to Tsawwassen]

I think it was in early 1998 that I ran across reference to Kurt BACH who died in Florida in 1994.  I must have run across the information about Kurt through an internet search for BACHs from Breslau.  That probably led to some form of death notice or obituary that not only referenced Breslau, but also identified Kurt’s synagogue in the Miami area.  The historical guess is that I sent an e-mail to the synagogue and heard back from Lotte GLOVER geb. LANDAU.

From there, things are still sketchy.  I think Lotte knew Kurt BACH but did not know about his family.  But, oddly enough, she did know of Mom’s great uncle Sanitätsrat Dr.med. Josef BACH of Breslau.  On 18 July 1998, I made the following note:
“her [Lotte’s] father Ezekiel LANDAU was a friend of Sanitätsrat Josef BACH in Breslau and visited him there.  She also recalled Ezekiel LANDAU may also have visited some family in Myslowitz (where Amalie (geb. LANDAU) BACH lived).  (Lotte’s half-aunt in Israel explained that the LANDAUs did not have much contact with the family of Josef BACH because the LANDAUs were orthodox, and Joseph BACH was ‘ein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens’.”

Lotte’s brother was R. Sol LANDAU (1920-2004).  In 2005, I ran across the entry in the online catalogue of the Jewish Theological Seminary for the “Papers of Conservative Rabbis and Synagogues”, which included this comment in connection with R. Sol LANDAU:
“Rabbi LANDAU’s father, Rabbi Ezekiel LANDAU (1888-1965) was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He was the great-grandson of the renowned scholar Ezekiel LANDAU (1713- 1793), also know as “Nodah Bi Yehuda” after the title of his most famous work.”

According to information attributed to Sol, his father’s father Isak LANDAU (1863-1943) was the son of a Jecheskel LANDAU.  This Jecheskel was a rabbi in Kempen and was named in memory of the Noda b’Jehuda.

I was not able to place these LANDAUs within the family of Amalie BACH geb. LANDAU (1836-1925) or to find any other link between them and the BACH family.  At the time, I did not realize that “Haskel” was a nickname for Jecheskel (Ezekiel), so I made up a link in the family to make Isak’s father Jecheskel LANDAU a son of my great great great grandparents Haskel LANDAU and Nesche LANDAU geb. LANDAU.

(28 Feb 15 – progress made on UA664 from YVR to ORD, en route to RDU and Chapel Hill)

In late 2013, knowing that Haskel LANDAU would not have named a son of his Jecheskel, I doubted the possibility of Isak LANDAU’s father being a son my great great great grandfather Haskel LANDAU.  In late 2014, after receiving the Jichus Brief that Wolf SCHEINWECHSLER provided to Samuel PLAWNER in 1930, and learning that Haskel (Jecheskel) LANDAU’s father was R. Jitzhak LANDAU of Wlodawa, I developed a new theory about Sol LANDAU’s grandfather Isak LANDAU — that he was named after Haskel’s father Jitzhak, and that it was his grandfather and not his father who was said to have been R. Jecheskel LANDAU of Kempen.  This would make Isak LANDAU (1863-1943) and Dr. Josef BACH (1867-1943) first cousins, as well as contemporaries.  By this theory, the identity of Isak’s father is unknown; he would either be another as-yet unknown son of Haskel and Nesche LANDAU, or he would be an as-yet unknown son of one of the known sons of Haskel and Nesche, or the son of one of their daughters, if the LANDAU daughter married a LANDAU.

But back to Kurt BACH — and the FRIEDLAENDERs of Brieg, Breslau, Shanghai and Peoria.  After finding the family of Israel BACH, I was inspired to look again for traces of Arthur BACH’s family.  Since Arthur had lived in Brieg, I did a search on Ancestry.com for BACH and Brieg.  This led me to the 1947 passenger list showing Kurt BACH’s entry to the US when he arrived in San Francisco from Shanghai.  He was born in Brieg in 1906.  I then found a family tree posted by Susan KOPPE which confirmed that Kurt was a son of Arthur BACH and Ida BLACHMANN.  From there, I found information about Kurt’s brother Hans and their sister Lotte Cäcilie FRIEDLAENDER geb. BACH.  They had all escaped Nazi Germany and found refuge in the Shanghai Ghetto.  The sister and her husband got to the US first and settled in Peoria, Illinois.  When the brothers got to the US, Peoria was their destination as well.

An obituary for Lotte Cäcilie’s son Lawrence identified other family members and within a couple days, I was in contact with Larry’s children and Larry’s brother who was 91 and living in New York.  One of Larry’s sons mailed me a photocopy of a great family tree which his uncle had prepared in Shanghai.  It was not just Kurt and his brother and sister who had spent the War in the Shanghai Ghetto.  Lotte Cäcilie’s husband and their sons also spent the War years in Shanghai.  The family tree prepared by Hanns Werner in the 1940s listed all the family members who had been in Shanghai.  It is a great handwritten family tree.  It filled in many gaps in this part of the BACH family tree.

(28 Feb 15 – and continued in the Lilly Library on the East Campus of Duke University)

To my surprise, the old family tree did not allow me to link the FRIEDLAENDERs to any of the other known FRIEDLAENDER families of Silesia.  But by coincidence, it did enable another connection to come to the fore.  In August 2015, Don and I met up with a BACH cousin from Iowa to make a day trip to Vancouver Island.  Her sister had married a FRIEDLANDER, originally a FRIEDLAENDER, who had been born in Shanghai when his parents were refugees there.  As it turned out, from the information in that old family tree, the father Georg FRIEDLAENDER was a first cousin of Werner who made that family tree.  My cousin and her husband were not related, but they were part of the same “Family Hedge”.  His uncle Siegmar (Zwi) FRIEDLAENDER (1899-1958) had married Lotte Cäcilie BACH (1902-1956), and Lotte Cäcilie was a second cousin of Erna LOEWENSON geb. BACH (1897-1996), whose granddaughter was the cousin of mine in question.

And to tie back into the LANDAU discussion above, Erna LOEWENSON geb. BACH was a daughter Dr. Josef BACH (1867-1943), who was a family friend (and probably cousin) of Ezekiel LANDAU, father of Lotte GLOVER geb. LANDAU.

And then there is the still unconfirmed connection of Erna’s husband Dr. Martin LOEWENSON (1891-1956) to the LOEWENSONs married into the LAUDON and JACOBSOHN families of East Prussia.  To be continued…

(An international and transcontinental blog entry.)