Rudolph Steinberger was born in Bad Kissingen on May 1, 1924 as the youngest child of the Jewish Cantor and Teacher of Religious Education Ludwig Steinberger and his wife Bertha, née May. Just like his older siblings Herbert and Hans Jakob (Jack), he enjoyed a protected childhood in the first years of his life. His father was greatly respected as a Cantor and Teacher of Religious Education in the spa town and Rudolph describes the life of his family in retrospect as “carefree, but not luxurious”.

This carefree, happy time for the Steinberger family ended abruptly after the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933. Very soon afterwards, the Steinbergers were also exposed to the harassment of the Nazi authorities. Therefore, the parents decided to get their two oldest sons out of Nazi terrorism into safety and send them to the United States on a children’s transport. The rest of the family stayed in Bad Kissingen for the moment. Since the school year of 1934/35 Rudolph Steinberger attended Kissingen Realschule like his brothers before him and was – his grades prove it – an outstanding student. His class teacher Dr. Ehrle emphasizes at the end of class 1: “The student is very well gifted, very diligent and decent, his performances have been exemplary.”

Certainly, Rudolph had to suffer from the increasing anti-Semitism. When he was eleven or twelve, his classmates began to harass him vehemently because of his being Jewish. His parents sent him to a Jewish private school in Frankfort/ Main, Realgymnasium Philantropin. He lived in Frankfort with an orthodox family whose attitude towards religion impressed him a lot. After the death of Bertha’s mother in August 1936, who had spent the last years of her life in Bad Kissingen, the Steinbergers made up their minds to leave Germany in the face of the more and more dangerous situation in Germany and emigrated to the USA in May 1937.

Rudolph Steinberger remembers the depressing circumstances of the emigration: “My parents and I emigrated to the United States in 1937 without much fuss, in a legal fashion. We didn’t have any money at all (10 Reichsmark were the highest amount of money you could legally take with you from Germany). We were supported by Jewish charitable associations and lived on a farm in Aurora in Illinois for one year thanks to the generosity of Barnett Faroll, Jack’s foster father in Winnetka”.

In America, Rudolph Steinberger first attended high school in Aurora and Chicago before he went to Wright Jr. College in Chicago for years. In Chicago, he enrolled at University of Chicago in 1943 but was drafted for the Navy in the same year. After his basic training, he was transferred to Hawaii. Though he got his naturalization as an American citizen there, he was first regarded as an “enemy alien” and sent back to the United States shortly before the sailing of his unit. Rudolph Steinberger changed to a medical unit and worked for one year at Brooklyn Naval Hospital before he was released from the Army in 1946 after the end of the war.

Rudolph then took up his studies of Chemistry at the University of Chicago again. In 1949, he married his fellow student Geneva Gaus who came from a Protestant German American immigrants’ family in Chicago. After their marriage, she worked as a versatile artist and artisan with many talents. They had three children (Michael 1951, Andrew 1953, and Elizabeth 1964) and enjoyed 55 happy years together before Geneva died in 2004.

After Rudolph had got his doctorate in Chemistry on the chemical processes in the cancer cycle in 1950, he accepted an offer of the firm “Hercules Incorporated”. Until he retired in 1986, he worked very successfully in many areas in this firm, at the end as a manager. After retiring, he committed himself to various civil society initiatives and local projects in Kennett Square, among them as a chairman of the Kennett Area Parks Authority where he collaborated in the development of Anson B. Nixon Park in Kennett Square. Until old age, he regularly wrote for a local paper and published comments in his own column that were read by lots of people. The death of his beloved wife Geneva in 2004 meant a heavy blow to him. Rudolph Steinberger died in Kennett Square on March 2, 2017 at the age of 92.

An obituary gives an impression of Steinberger’s character: “Rudi combined extraordinary intelligence and curiosity with reticence, modesty and openness. He had a high degree of intellectual and moral integrity. He was a wonderfully amiable person with a well-defined public spirit and an inexhaustible sense of humor.”