personal data
Rosenau Klara
Parents: Julius and Bertha Lion née Keller
Siblings: Victor Ludwig
Spouse: Albert Rosenau
Children: Helene
Bismarckstraße 15 (now 26)
biography
Klara Rosenau, née Lion was born in Mannheim on November 13, 1874 as the daughter of Julius and Bertha Lion, née Keller. She was the youngest of five siblings.
At the beginning of February 1898, she married Dr. Albert (Abraham) Rosenau who came from a long-established, wealthy Jewish family in Bad Kissingen. He had been born in Bad Kissingen in 1868, had studied medicine, quickly moved on in his career and received the title “königlich-bayerischer Sanitätsrat” (royal Bavarian Sanitätsrat= honorary title for a doctor). Initially, the couple lived in Monte Carlo where their daughter Helene (Auguste) was born in March 1900. In July 1913, the family moved to Bad Kissingen where Albert Rosenau practiced in his own spa establishment. Between 1916 and 1920, he lived in Bad Kissingen only in the summer seasons and stayed in Frankfort/ Main, Munich or Berlin in the winter months.
Together with her husband, Klara Rosenau ran an extremely renowned sanatorium in Bismarckstrasse that was known as “Westendhaus” by the people of Kissingen and which is now part of the Luitpold Clinics/ Heiligenfeld. After her husband’s early death in 1923, Klara Rosenau continued managing the sanatorium on her own. In October 1938, she saw herself compelled to sell the sanatorium to Dr Max Hoemann for a lot below its value. Few months later, in February 1939, she moved to her hometown of Mannheim where her brother Victor Ludwig lived. According to information provided by her daughter, she could afford “a comfortable life there as far as material values were concerned thanks to the fortune that Father had left” in spite of all the losses and restrictions imposed by the Nazis. She died – one year after her brother’s death – in the Israelite Hospital on September 19, 1940 and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery.
References
US Holocaust Memorial Museum/Holocaust Survivors…
Mainpost-Artikel, 01.06.2007
Datenbank Findagrave
Hans-Jürgen Beck, Kissingen war unsere Heimat, Stand April 2017, S. 675
Meldeunterlagen der Stadt Bad Kissingen
StA Wü Finanzamt Würzburg, Vermögenskontrollakten 202 Helene Rosenau
Photo credits
Westendhaus © Sammlung Bötsch, Stadtarchiv Bad Kissingen
Soldatenfoto Dr. Albert Rosenau © Datenbank Ancestry, Uri Rosenan, Israel
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