Jews in Kaisersesch after 1945

It is understandable, that there lived no jews in Kaisersesch directly after the war, but 1959 Arthur Kann founded another branch to his firm in Emmelshausen "Sweeters Kansa". He was born about 1930 and survived the holocaust, but his parents did not. But his firm, which produced textiles, became bankrupt in 1975.

1989 the school for mentally backwarded children was supposed to get a new name. Mr. Pfalz, teacher at that school, had talked about the theme of the jews in our district with his pupils . So he suggested not to name the school after a well-known person, but after the jewess Edith David from Düngenheim, who was deportated at the age of 14 on the 30th of April 1942, together with the jews from Kaisersesch. For this reason Mr.Pfalz wrote a letter to the sister of Edith David, who had emigrated to the USA in time. In this letter the last years of Edith's life and the situation in the years of the jew-baiting is described a little bit.

I do not want to enter into this, because it applies to the village of Düngenheim. But I want to mention, that the jews in Düngenheim were integrated, accepted and had a lot of friends too, as the letter shows2. But now back to the original theme. The school was not named after Edith David, but I do not know why. It is a pity , because it would have been a first step of reparation.

Kaisersesch still shows the presence of the former jewish fellow-inhabitants. There are 18 gravestones on this graveyard, which are only partly readable. On the 30th of April 1992, the 50th anniversary of the deportation, the scouts of Kaisersesch under the guidance of Werner Lutz inaugurated a commemorative table at the former diary, the place of the deportation. The scouts walked the same way the jews had to walk on that sad day 50 years ago. A second commemorative table was attached to the old school. That shows that even today in the time of new appearing of nationalsocialistic groups, humans think of their former fellow-inhabitants, the jews.

Two weeks after the anniversary an unexpected visitor arrived in Kaisersesch. Joshua Liberson, grandchild of Bernhard Siegler, visited Kaisersesch, the town of his ancestors, on his trip through europe. Here he applied to an old friend of his uncle Sylvian Siegler, Peter Klein, who went to school with him. Joshua Liberson wanted to know something about his ancestores on the one hand and on the other hand he could tell us things we did not know in Kaisersesch before. Then we visited the houses of the jews, the graveyard and the commemorative table. On the graveyard Joshua thought, that his great-grandparents, who died about 1920, could have been buried here. But, because this graveyard had not been build before 1921, his great-grandparents had to be buried on the jewish graveyard in Binningen, where the jews of Kaisersesch buried their deceased until that year. So we drove to Binningen and we really found three gravestones with the name Siegler, but we could not read the first name clearly. In good faith having found the right graves we drove back to Kaisersesch, where Joshua called his uncle Sylvian to get answers to some questions, I asked him. Sylvian Siegler himself had been to Kaisersesch in 1987 already , but only for some hours for a meeting of the classmates. So he had had only little time to see the changes in the course of time.