Sali Weil was born in Bad Kissingen on August 26, 1883 as the fourth of the eight children of the merchant Hermann Weil and his wife Klara, née Berg. His father came from Aufhausen in Wuerttemberg, which is a suburb of Bopfingen nowadays. At least at the end of the 1870s Hermann Weil moved to Bad Kissingen where he married Klara Berg, who was born there, and had eight children with her. The family lived in Weidgasse 10. In 1890, Sali’s father was given citizens’ rights by Bad Kissingen Magistrate. From 1896 till 1899, Sali attended the first three classes of Kissingen Realschule, the predecessor of contemporary Jack-Steinberger-Gymnasium.

At the beginning of 1905, the family moved to Frankfort/ Main where Sali’s father opened a food store in Rechneigrabenstrasse. Little is known about Sali Weil’s further life. Because of moving to Hesse, he was dismissed from the Bavarian army in 1912. In 1923, he married Frankfort-born Bella Dach in Frankfort. She owned a shop. Their daughter Gerda was born in Frankfort in October 1932.

During the Nazi era, the family was increasingly exposed to the harassment of the National Socialists. Especially during the November pogrom in 1938, the situation became threatening. Sali Weil was walking through the city with his daughter Gerda when the Gestapo came up behind them, grabbed him and dragged him off to the concentration camp. All this in front of his then five-year-old daughter, who was left alone crying on the street until some neighbors found her and brought her home to her mother. Sali Weil was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, but fortunately was released two weeks later on November 24 as he had already received visas for the family to come to America.

"In just those few weeks of brutal slave labor and beatings, he had lost 20 to 30 pounds, but he and the family were free to come in this country and start anew" (Andy Blumenthal, son of Gerda Blumenthal née Weil, Eulogy For My Beloved Mother, Gerda Blumenthal, January 15, 2014). In January 1939, the family boarded the "New York" in Bremerhaven and emigrated to the United States. Like many of the immigrant families who were forced to flee persecution, the Weils arrived here penniless, and Sali Weil, who didn’t even know the language, worked as a tailor to try and support the family (Ibid).

Sali Weil and his family succeeded in fleeing from Germany to the United States in time. In January 1939, the family went on board the “New York” in Bremerhaven and emigrated to the USA. Sali Weil died in New York in 1972 at the age of 88.

His younger brother Max, however, was deported to Mauthausen in 1942 and murdered on September 16. His sister Hermine, m. Goldschmidt and her husband Salomon were deported from Berlin to Kowno, where both of them died. Sali’s other siblings – Ida, Siegfried and Justin – and his parents had already died before the Nazi Era. The fate of his sister Lina (*1890) has not yet been clarified. She was still registered in Hölderlinstraße in Frankfurt in 1939/1940.