Ida Ehrlich was born in Bad Kissingen on January 4, 1857 as the daughter of the textile merchant Samuel and his wife Sara Ehrlich. 

Ida was handicapped and couldn’t work because of that. She and her nurse lived in a little apartment in the Kissingen Ehrlich-Haus after the Ehrlichs had bought the spacious house for their living quarters and shop in Ludwigstrasse. Her wealthy brother paid for all the costs that taking care of her required. She stayed unmarried and committed herself to the big Ehrlich Family with total dedication. 

“She was”, according to her grandnephew Joske Ereli, “the heart of the family. Thanks to her, our house was the centre for all parts of the Ehrlich families that were spread over all of Germany – in Bochum, Wroclaw … and Chemnitz but also abroad in England, Australia, and America. In our family people said, ‘we are going to visit Aunt Ida’ when they went to Bad Kissingen.’

In the Nazi Era, she was the only member of the Ehrlich family who stayed in Bad Kissingen. She was too attached to her hometown and didn’t want to go abroad because of her old age and her handicap. Thus, she was forced to experience the devastations of Pogrom Night in November 1938 in Bad Kissingen. This exhausted her so much that she suffered a stroke she didn’t recover from. In spite of being able to phone relatives in Berlin and Wroclaw and summon them for help, she died few weeks later on December 3, 1938. The burial on the Jewish Cemetery proved difficult. Trautel Lippmann, Felix Ehrlich’s granddaughter, and a “Fräulein Then”, Ida’s nurse of many years, succeeded in gathering some Jewish women for the burial, nevertheless. By means of a handcart, they took Ida to the Jewish Cemetery where a grave had already been dug. As it was not possible for any of the relatives to go to Bad Kissingen for the erection of her gravestone on the first anniversary of her burial, she didn’t get one. Thus, knowledge of the exact situation of her grave on the Jewish Cemetery got lost.

After the Nazi Era, an inscription to her memory was added to the family grave of the Ehrlichs. The words she wrote on a postcard to her relatives that had in the meantime fled to many countries of the earth in 1937 sound like a legacy: “Stay friendly with one another, stick together even when you are scattered in all parts of the world. This is the last wish of your old Aunt Ida.” (H.J. Beck, Kissingen war unsere Heimat, p. 575f.)