Nannette Bamberger was born in Bad Kissingen on January 30, 1870. She was the daughter of the Rabbi of Bad Kissingen, Moses Löb Bamberger (1838-1899) and his first wife, Sara Ettlinger (1842-1871), who was the daughter of a rabbi. Her brothers Simon and Simon Aron already died at a very young age. 

Nannette married her cousin, Rabbi Dr. Seckel Bamberger, who “was one of the most orthodox and learned rabbis of his era”, according to members of his congregation. In Bad Kissingen, he took over as the new District Rabbi from his father-in-law on November 8, 1902 and had to supervise 28 Jewish communities. The Bamberger couple had seven children, two of the sons continued the family tradition of becoming rabbis in Stuttgart and Mainz. Together with her daughter Kehla, Nannette managed the boardinghouse “Villa Adelaïde” in Promenadestrasse 5c (now 17), close to the Jewish Community Centre and the Synagogue. The generous house, named after her mother-in-law, had been built by the family themselves in 1908. 

Around 1920, she and her cousin Simon Unna (1864-1931) self-published a witty quartet game based on the Bible. By means of this quartet game that used “substantial sentences from the Bible that mostly contain moral instructions” they tried in a playful manner “to acquaint the adolescent youth with the Bible” as the accompanying text stated.

When Nannette Bamberger visited her daughter Adelaide in Palestine in 1938 before the Pogrom Night, her daughter and her husband Israel Jutkowski urged her not to return to Germany and stay in Palestine. But Nannette refused to comply arguing that she had just one daughter in Palestine but six children in Germany. Furthermore, she was sure that the situation in Germany would soon be back to normal. Her son-in-law Israel’s mother prompted him to prevent Nannette Bamberger from going back and use force if needed to make her stay, but she was determined to return to Germany. It was only after the Pogrom Night and its aftermath that she was forced to realize that she had interpreted the situation completely wrongly. Whereas all her other children had emigrated in 1939 (Simon and Iyras to Palestine, Moses Löb to England, Sarah to the Netherlands, and Seligman to America), she stayed in her home country together with her daughter Kehla. At the beginning, the Bamberger’s spa board was not in danger of being closed in 1938 like most of the other similar Jewish spa establishments were in that year. But in the following years Nannette saw herself confronted more and more with increasing restrictions of the Nazi regime. In 1938, the widow was forced to sell the handsome estate of “Villa Adelaide”. As a consequence, she and her daughter Kehla had to leave their house in Promenadestrasse and move into a so-called “Jews’ House” in Hemmerichstrasse 29 (now 12). She obviously planned to emigrate to Palestine as late as in 1940. Her moving goods had already been shipped to Trieste. But because of reasons not known her emigration plans failed.

On April 24, 1942, Nannette Bamberger like most of the other Jews who had stayed in Bad Kissingen was deported via Würzburg to Krasniczyn where she died in one of the extermination camps in the neighbourhood. 

(Hans-Jürgen Beck and Thomas Künzl; with additions)