Poznań trip report

[lethargic_man]

This is my father's mother's mother's mother's father, Myer Goldberg. In the early 1850s, he came to the UK from Posen in Germany, today (as beforehand) Poznań in Poland. I do not know whether this means the city or province of Poznań; in the absence of further evidence, I will take it to refer to the city.

 

(If the above images do not display, and you have permission to view my family tree, you can see them here and here, but DreamWidth won't let me embed them directly for some reason.)

Myer was co-founder, trustee and first treasurer of Leazes Synagogue, Newcastle. In Memories of a Yiddisher Geordie, Murray Rosenberg writes (p.13):

The Wardens' box was occupied for many years by Mr John Bernstone [...]. The treasurer was Mr Meyer Goldberg, tall and imposing with a patriarchal beard. In his high hat and frock coat, always dressed impeccably, he bore himself with an aristocratic air so that he could have been taken for anything but the gentlemen's tailor in Blackett Street which he was.

A delve through The Jewish Victorian reveals the following, from 24th October 1873:

Mr M. Goldberg having retired from the office of Treasurer of Newcastle-on-Tyne congregation, a vote of thanks was passed to him for his exertions on behalf of the congregation.

However, Rosenberg paints a different picture, referring to the power struggles between the anglicised Jewish establishment of nineteenth century Britain, into which Myer had been absorbed, and the immigrants who came over in the 1880s and 1890s:

Underneath the Synagogue were the school rooms in which the annual general meetings were held that were always very stormy. East and west had usually something to quarrel about especially on the Sunday when the Limpet wardens were finally ousted and Benjamin Turner as President and my father as Treasurer ruled in their stead. The foreigners had succeeded. The English faction known as the Jesmondites were led by Bernstone, Goldberg and Leting whilst the foreign element voted for my father, Turner, Lewis and Alexander [...].

I had the opportunity to visit Poznań^* a week ago; I have never before been to any of the places my ancestors came from, so this was a new experience for me.

* The "ń" is pronounced like "gn" in French or Ñ in Spanish. And the "ł" in other names in this article, like W in English.

The centre of Poznań is dominated by the picturesque Old Square, which was largely reconstructed after being bombed during the War; this means that whilst the view I saw there was largely that my ancestors saw, the buildings themselves are not the same, with exceptions, such as the five-hundred-year-old building in which the Croissant Museum is located. (Note: some of the following photos can be clicked through to higher-resolution versions.)

Photo credit: © A.Savin, Wikimedia Commons

Bamberka woman
Photo credit: Radomił Binek, Wikimedia Commons

The Croissant Museum itself is well worth a visit, for the spiels they give daily. They have St Martin's Croissants in Poznań (the Polish word for them is very similar to the Yiddish rogel), inspired by the shape of St Martin's horse's shoes, and, as they put in there, just looking at them can give you diabetes. The five-hundred-year-old decorated beams in the ceiling in the below photo were only discovered recently, when the panelling put below them a century and a half ago was removed.

The Old Square is dominated by the Town Hall, above the clock of which every day at noon two mechanical goats emerge, turn to each other, and butt heads twelve times. Today this is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Poznań, but the goats go back centuries, to before there was such a thing as tourism. How did somebody come up with these sorts of things as a good idea at the time?

Photo credit: © A.Savin, Wikimedia Commons

Photo credit: Radomił Binek, Wikimedia Commons

Jewish life in Poznań was centred, from the thirteenth century onwards, on the street still called today Jewish Street (ulica Żydowska):

There have been a surprising number of people I have met called Posen, Posner or Poznanski, for a town that never had more than eight thousand Jews at its peak in the nineteenth century.

The next photos show the buildings, on ulica Żydowska, of the former Salomon Beniamin Latz Home for the Elderly and Infirm. This in turn occupied the site, until 1908, of three synagogues at the location. Might one of them have been my ancestors' regular?

The largest synagogue in Poznań was the New Synagogue, constructed in 1910, long after my ancestors had left. A plaque on the door gives, in Polish, Hebrew and English, its history in brief: "To the memory of the Poznań Jews murdered in the years 1939–1945 by the German occupiers. This building housed a synagogue which was desecrated and turned into a swimming pool by the Germans during World War II." See this article for photos of the building as it originally was (including the dome on the roof destroyed during the War), and of the interior, and the complete story of the "swim-a-gogue".

Photo credit: Roweromaniak, Wikimedia Commons

The square in front of the building is now named Rabbi Akiva Eger Square.

There was a Jewish cemetery on ulica Głogowska; however, it was destroyed during the War; and its tombstones used to pave roads and line an artificial lake. Some gravestones have since been reconstructed close to the site of the original graves, notably that of Rabbi Akiva Eger, one of the foremost halachic authorities of the nineteenth century:

Another notable Jew to have come from Poznań was Rabbi Yehuda Loew, the Maharal of Prague, whose birth in Poznań is commemorated today with a statue of the Golem:

Photo credit: MOs810, Wikimedia Commons

There is a small Jewish community today in Poznań; here is their community centre building:

Moving back into the wider Polish history, here's the monument to the Polish Underground during the War:

Photo credit: MOs810, Wikimedia Commons

And here the one to the 1956 uprising against the Communist government:

Photo credit: Radomił Binek, Wikimedia Commons

Lastly, here is a monument to the Polish codebreakers before and during the War. In 1939, with the shadow of war looming, they took the decision to share their work breaking the pre-war version of the Enigma code with the British and French authorities, and it was working from the start point of that work that the British were able to achieve their later success breaking the later, more complex, versions of the Enigma code:

Photo credit: Fallaner/Pnapora, Wikimedia Commons

Comments

[khiemtran]

Thanks for sharing!