Kati (Katilla) Engel was born in Bad Kissingen on November 17, 1894 as the second daughter of Josef Engel and his wife Sophie, née Seligsberger. The family who also included her older sister Jenny, lived in Schönbornstrasse 18 (now 26). Kati’s parents ran a flourishing spa hotel there, “Villa Engel”.

Her father fell ill and spent the last years of his life in a mental hospital. He already died in 1920. Her mother lived to experience the beginning of Nazi dictatorship and died in July 1934.

Kati Engel moved to Fürth and married the merchant Sally Lesser in 1929. The marriage was already divorced two years later. When the health of Kati’s mother no longer allowed her to continue running “Villa Engel”, Kati and her sister Jenny took on the management of the spa hotel. Due to increasing repressions since the beginning of the Nazi Era – e.g. non-Jewish spa guests of “Villa Engel” received menacing letters because they lived in a “Jewish house” – Kati Lesser sold the spa hotel in 1934 “below value” according to her description. She was afraid of Jewish real estate in Bad Kissingen increasingly losing its value because of the Nazi boycotts.

In June 1935, Kati Lesser married Hugo Heinemann in Fürth. He was a graduate mathematician and did research on the old Jewish cemetery of Fürth. A short time later, - in January 1936 - the couple emigrated to Haifa where Kati’s widowed sister Jenny already lived with her daughter. The Heinemanns’ two children were born soon afterwards: Jehudith Sara (*1936) and Moshe Josef (*1938). In Palestine, Kati Heinemann adopted the name Toba.

After World War II, Kati Heimann filed a refund request for “Villa Engel”. At the end of the lawsuit that lasted three years, the following decision was taken in December 1951: The new owner could keep the estate and had to pay 3,000 DM to Kati Heinemann plus the costs she had had to spend out of court. 

Kati Heinemann’s date of death is not known. She presumably died before 1962 because in later requests concerning the files in the years 1962 and 1970 respectively, only her husband Hugo Heinemann is mentioned (as “Erbe nach Lesser Kati” = heir after Lesser Kati). In the 1970s, Hugo Heinemann published the chronicle “History of the Jews in Fürth” in Israel. Its author was Grete Ballin who had written a chronology of the events in the town between 1933 and her deportation in 1943 by order of the Gestapo.