Leopold Bornstein
Leopold Bornstein was born on November 3, 1873 in Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland, to Basia and Yosef Bornstein. According to family lore, he was a cantor at the Great Synagogue from 1914-24, in addition to serving as a rabbi and shochet (ritual slaughterer) for the city’s Jewish community. The number and names of Leopold’s siblings, all of whom perished in the Holocaust, are unknown, as is the identity of his wife, but he had at least three children who survived the Shoah: Sigfried (“Siggi”), Paola (Skolnik), and Artur.
In 1937, two years before the Nazis annexed Danzig, Leopold and his wife fled to Prague. However, in 1939, Hitler also invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. In 1942, Leopold was deported to Theresienstadt, where he died on November 8, a few months after his arrival.
It is unknown how Leopold’s three surviving children escaped the Nazis but Artur, who was born in September of 1897, was living in Munich in January 1925 when he married Chaja (Helene) Goldberg. Helene was born in Tarnow, Galicia, on September 26, 1900, and moved to Germany in 1907 with her parents, Bentsion (Benno) and Gisela (Gitel) Goldberg. She had four siblings (names, ages and fates unknown, except for one brother, Bernard, who later lived in London). Artur and Helene moved to Berlin soon after they were married and had a son, Heinz (Harry), that October. The couple divorced in 1930 and Artur took their young son to safety in Spain, then France, before emigrating to British-mandate Palestine in 1935. Artur initially worked as a painter before opening a smoke shop at 122 Allenby Street in Tel Aviv.
In 1936, as Artur and Harry settled into their new life, Helene fled from Berlin to Amsterdam, where she was hidden by a non-Jewish family following the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. It is believed that she was captured in November 1943 when she snuck outside one day for a bit of fresh air – against pleas from her rescuers not to take the risk – and that she was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.
Harry, then a teenager, wrote countless letters to various authorities, desperately trying to secure a visa for his mother to join him. He received a cable dated April 10, 1943 from the International Red Cross in Geneva requesting the immediate granting of entry papers for his mother. Unfortunately, this effort was not fruitful, just as Harry’s previous attempt to obtain immigration papers directly from the British government was denied on grounds that the quota allotted in the 1939 White Paper was already filled.
After the war, Harry received a telegram from the Jewish Office in Weteringschans, Amsterdam, informing him that Helene Bornstein had been deported to Auschwitz on November 16, 1943. That is how he finally learned the fate of his mother.
Harry’s father, Artur, remarried, to Magda Lange, and they had one son together, Michael Josef, the father of Michelle Bornstein, mother of Heschel graduate Sydney Hankin (High School class of 2023). After World War Two, Artur and Magda moved back to Germany. He passed away from a heart condition on November 25, 1968. Harry was an ardent Zionist who fought in the Haganah and went to great effort to honor the memories of his mother and grandfather. He died in New York on June 23, 2012.
Leopold’s story is documented on this website, and additional information and documents related to his experiences can be found here. In 2026, a memorial known as a Stolpersteine was placed on the ground outside Helene’s last-known residence in Amsterdam.
