Rottenberg, Naftali

Merchant, Honorary President of the Jewish Community

Born: 17.09.1892 in Limanowa (today Poland)

died: 08.08.1961 in Wiesbaden

Rottenberg came to Wiesbaden on 15.02.1916 to open a textile store and married Sophie Deller on 12.09.1928. The couple were among the approximately 1,000 Eastern European Jews in Wiesbaden who were deported to Poland at the end of October 1938 (the so-called Polenaktion). There is no information about the fate of the Rottenbergs in Poland.

Due to the death of Sophie Rottenberg's mother, the couple returned to Wiesbaden in the summer of 1939 to settle family matters and property issues. The planned departure to Belgium was prevented by the outbreak of war on 01.09.1939. It is nothing short of a miracle that the couple survived the following years in Wiesbaden. Due to a clerical error in the registration office and the fact that their return had not been noted in the Jewish community's file and therefore did not come to the attention of the Gestapo, they had to a certain extent "disappeared from the scene" and officially no longer existed. However, they actually had to disappear from the public eye. Sophie Rottenberg's brother hid the couple from the persecution of the Nazi regime for six long years in his apartment at Adolfstraße 14. This "exile" finally came to an end when the Americans marched into Wiesbaden. The Rottenberg couple had survived, but 15 relatives had died in the Holocaust.

After the war, Rottenberg was initially refused compensation on the grounds that he had not been subjected to persecution, as the Gestapo had not known that he still existed. Rottenberg made himself available to the Jewish community immediately after the end of the war and took on the difficult task of establishing a new Jewish community in Wiesbaden. He succeeded in this over the course of ten years. In particular, he rendered outstanding services to the recognition of the community as a public legal entity. In recognition of his services, the community made him its honorary president.