Jenny Kissinger, née Baer came from Mannheim and was born there in November 4, 1884 as the daughter of Max and Henriette Baer, née Strauß.

She married Albert Kissinger, who owned a clothes shop and tailoring business at Kissingen Marktplatz that had gained great reputation and moved to Bad Kissingen to him. Their two children Max and Ernst were born in 1908 and 1910. The family felt deeply rooted in the spa town and Jenny and her husband Albert couldn’t make up their minds to flee from Nazi repressions in Germany in the 1930s. Their sons Ernst and Max, on the other hand, had emigrated to Palestine at the beginning of the Nazi Era. They tried, in vain at the beginning, to make their parents flee.

It was the atrocities of Pogrom Night of 1938 that opened Albert Kissinger’s eyes. Ernst Kissinger remembers: “He realized now that staying in Bad Kissingen would endanger their lives and decided to endeavor a highly dramatic flight from Germany together with his wife. As you know, all male Jews in Bad Kissingen were arrested. My father was already very ill at that time (Parkinson) and was not arrested because of that. Nevertheless, my parents escaped the next day, just like they were, to the Northern border (I don’t remember the place name) and were sent back. They went through the whole of Germany to the southern border where they were let in by Switzerland as cousins living in Switzerland had provided guarantees for them. In July 1939, they could eventually immigrate here (to Palestine). You can imagine what that meant for elderly and ill people in psychological and physical respects. I can only tell you the bare facts as it is impossible to find words for the suffering and feelings they endured. That they could get out of Germany in November 1938 without suffering any harm is close to a miracle.” (quoted from H.-J.Beck, Kissingen war unsere Heimat, p. 494f)

The circumstances of the forced emigration of the family to Palestine were described in detail by Jenny Kissinger’s daughter-in-law Oda, née Scheuer: “He (=Ernst Kissinger) had arrived in 1933 and had already suffered in Germany, in Kissingen. At school, people shouted at him: ‘Dirty Jew pig!’ He emigrated at the beginning of 1920 all on his own and without any money as the first one of his family, which made them say: ‘Have you gone crazy? Into the desert? What do you want to do there?’ His brother followed him, and his parents arrived very shortly before the beginning of the war, just with a small suitcase. Nothing else. Just the clothes they were wearing. Had left everything in Kissingen in a hurry, just to get away. My mother-in-law to be had said for a long time: ‘It is so wonderful in Bad Kissingen, why should I leave? Who interferes with us here? We have actually been here for centuries.’ And the sons who were both in Palestine, were raging and did whatever possible until their parents arrived here on literally the last ship and were completely shattered. Before, they had gone to Switzerland because a relative there had vouched for them. There, they were sitting in a furnished room for months until their sons could send the certificate. I didn’t get to know my father-in-law. He died in 1941 when the Italian bomb fell on Tel Aviv.” (by Treuenfeld, Andrea: In Deutschland eine Jüdin, eine Jeckete in Israel. Geflohene Frauen erzählen ihr Leben, Gütersloh 2011, p. 173)

After their dramatic odyssey across Germany, the Kissinger couple lived in Lausanne for some time before they could emigrate to Palestine together in July 1939. But there were only few years left in Palestine for the seriously ill Albert Kissinger. He already died in 1941 at the age of only 60. His wife Jenny outlived him by 31 years: She died in Israel in 1972 at the very old age of 88. The country and its people remained foreign to her, as her daughter-in-law Oda reports: “She never really settled in here, she couldn’t adjust and was deeply unhappy. She was fastidious, they had been very well off in Kissingen. She was used to having new clothes all the time, but you couldn’t have that here, people didn’t have any money. And she had arrived with nothing, that was horrible for her. And then the climate which she extremely suffered from” (quoted according to H.-J.Beck, p. 495).