Each Child Is My Only One

In Each Child Is My Only One: Lotte Carlebach-Preuss, the Portrait of a Mother and Rabbi’s Wife, Miriam Gillis-Carlebach, the daughter of Rabbi Dr. Joseph Zvi Carlebach (1883–1942), last Chief Rabbi of Hamburg and its surroundings, describes her childhood in the lively household of a rabbi’s family with nine children, focusing on the special personality of her mother, Lotte Carlebach, née Preuss (1900–1942). The book starts with the history of the Preuss family, goes on to describe the marriage of Lotte to Joseph Carlebach, and portrays in detail their dynamic family life – until their deportation with their four youngest children to a Latvian concentration camp in 1942. The book is composed of two main parts. In the first section the reader learns about the events up to 1938, both inside and outside the Carlebach home; the second section covers the years 1938–1941, in which there was a lively correspondence mainly between the mother and those of her children who succeeded in emigrating from Nazi Germany. This part concludes with several testimonies portraying the special personalities of Rabbi Carlebach and his wife and their devotion to the unfortunate who benefited from their unbounded assistance and altruism during the Holocaust. Many photographs are included in the book, several of them taken by Lotte Carlebach herself. The book is a unique and personal testimony about Jewish life in Germany during the years of persecution that relentlessly led to the conflagration of the Holocaust.

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.