Ernestine Tuteur, née Kissinger was born in Bad Kissingen in 1851 as the fifth and youngest child of Loeb Kissinger and his wife Marianne, née Schwedt.

In 1876, she married the owner of a leather factory Benjamin Tuteur from Kaiserslautern, who was six years her senior, and moved with him to Kaiserslautern. The Tuteur family came from nearby Winnweiler, where Benjamin had been born in 1845. Around 1865, he had moved to Kaiserslautern with two of his brothers. Ernestine and Benjamin had seven children. Their daughter Clara and their son Ludwig and their families became victims of the Shoa just like the older son Moses Eduard. The other children died earlier or survived the Nazi Era. After her husband’s death in 1916, the oldest son Eduard Moses took on the leather factory that produced garters and shanks for shoes and employed about 60 workers in 1930.

Ernestine Kissinger-Tuteur lived to experience ostracism and persecution of the Hitler regime. In December 1938, she moved to Mannheim to her daughter Clara who lived there with her husband Salomon Lehmann. Ernestine’s son Moses and his family whose apartment was probably destroyed in the Pogrom Night of 1938, found shelter there at the beginning of 1939.

Ernestine Tuteur was spared deportation as she died few months before the Jews living in Mannheim were deported to Gurs. She died on January 27, 1940 at the age of 89 and was buried in Kaiserslautern.

Her son Eduard Moses, his wife Tillie, their 14-year-old son Karl-Heinz, their daughter Clara and her husband Salomon were deported to Gurs in Southwestern France in October 1940. The adults were deported from Drancy collective camp to Auschwitz/ Oświęcim Extermination Camp two years later and killed there. Ernestine’s grandson Karl-Heinz who was also deported to Gurs, was safeguarded from France to La Roche in Switzerland, where he survived the war.