Bertha Blumenthal, née Mannes, worked as an employee at the Israelite spa hospice and only stayed in Bad Kissingen for a short time. She was born in January 1908, daughter of Dr Salomon Mannes and his wife Klara, née Jacobi, in Schwabach in Central Franconia and grew up with six siblings in a large family. Bertha's parents came from the former Prussian province of Posen (Polish since 1919). They had met at the teacher and rabbinical seminary in Berlin, where Klara studied and her future husband taught. After the turn of the century, they moved to Schwabach. Bertha's father was the district rabbi of Schwabach/Fürth from 1903 until the rabbinate was dissolved in 1932, making him responsible for nine religious communities in the area and also the state rabbi for many years. He was also head of the local Talmud Torah school.

In May 1928, twenty-year-old Bertha Mannes came to Bad Kissingen and worked for a spa season as a volunteer at the Israelite Spa Hospice on Altenberg, where her older sister Recha had also been employed a year earlier. The training at this Jewish spa facility was certainly in line with the ideas of her religiously influenced parents, and Dr Mannes certainly also knew the Bad Kissingen District Rabbi Seckel Bamberger, at whose instigation the Kurhospiz am Altenberg had been opened in the summer of 1927. Bertha moved back to Schwabach in October 1928.

At the beginning of the 1930s, she was probably living in Frankfurt/Main (her last German passport was issued there in 1933), where she married Lazarus (Ludwig) Blumenthal, born in Karlstadt/Main, in December 1935. The decision to leave Germany was certainly made at this point, as the young couple emigrated to Palestine in January 1936 and in October of the same year their daughter Hinde Ayalah was born in Jerusalem, followed by two more daughters, Adina and Nurit. In 1940, the family, who continued to live in Jerusalem, received their certificate of naturalization in Palestine.

Bertha's husband Lazarus (Ludwig) worked as a baker, he died in July 1954 at the age of 44, Bertha Blumenthal worked as a cook at a school in Jerusalem, her daughter Ayalah became a nurse, Adina a secretary in a travel agency and Nurit an English teacher. Bertha Blumenthal was 73 years old and died in Jerusalem in April 1981 at the age of 73.

Bertha's parents survived the Nazi era. They had moved from Schwabach to Frankfurt in 1935, when anti-Semitism had become unbearable in the Central Franconian Nazi stronghold, and fled to England on November 9, 1938, the day of the November pogrom. Dr Salomon Mannes later taught at what is probably Europe's best-known Jewish college (yeshiva) in Gateshead. He died in London in 1960 at the age of 88; his wife survived him by ten years. All of Bertha's siblings were also able to escape persecution and murder by the National Socialists in time. Her older siblings Julius and Recha emigrated to Palestine like her, Abraham (Hillel) and Israel went to the United States and the youngest siblings Moses and Ruth fled to England.

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