Each Child Is My Only One ─ Lotte Carlebach-Preuss, the Portrait of a Mother and Rabbi's Wife

Miriam Gillis-Carlebach recounts her childhood as one of nine children in the household of the last rabbi in Hamburg and its surroundings, focusing on the special personality of her mother Lotte Carlebach-Preuss (1900-42), as a representative of all the mothers lost in the Holocaust. She discusses beginnings, ten years in Altona and on the Elbe, and the free and Hanseatic city of Hamburg, After 1938, she presents letters her mother send from the camps, in sections on between the lines, each child is my only one, a father also writes to his children, and gloomy echoes. Annotation c2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Miriam Gillis-Carlebach was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1922. At age sixteen she was expelled from Nazi Germany after a nerve-racking Gestapo interrogation, and arrived in British-controlled Palestine in 1938. She worked as a teacher and lecturer for many years, received her PhD in special education, and founded a Center for Hebrew-language dyslexia and reading disorders in Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, in 1986. Today she is Professor of Jewish History as well as the Director of the Joseph Carlebach Institute at Bar-Ilan, which she founded in 1992. Her main research interests include German Jewry (especially concerning Jewish life in Hamburg and the writings of her father, Joseph Carlebach), children during the Holocaust and Hebrew Letters. She has published many books and articles in German, English, and Hebrew, including Jewish Everyday Life as Human Resistance 1939–1941, The Three Great Prophets (Hebrew) by Rabbi Dr. Joseph Carlebach, and has been the recipient of honorary degrees, such as, Senator h.c. of Hamburg University, as well as several awards, including the esteemed German Federal Cross of Merit. Miriam Gillis-Carlebach lives in Petach Tikva, Israel, and has four children, 14 grandchildren, and a growing number of great-grandchildren.