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Rebecca Selke (née Spanier) * 1881

Bismarckstraße 6 (Eimsbüttel, Hoheluft-West)

HIER WOHNTE
REBECCA SELKE
GEB. SPANIER
JG. 1881
DEPORTIERT 1941
ERMORDET
RIGA

further stumbling stones in Bismarckstraße 6:
Iwan Selke

Iwan Selke, born 10.6.1876 in Hamburg, deported 6.12.1941 to Riga, murdered
Rebecca Selke, née Spanier, born 12.4.1881 in Burgdamm, deported 6.12.1941 to Riga, murdered

Bismarckstraße 6

Iwan Selke was the youngest of four sons of the merchant Selke Elias Selke (born Febr. 16, 1833 in Glückstadt on the Lower Elbe), and his wife Sophie Behrens (born Oct. 16, 1834 in Hamburg). Iwan was the only one to live in Hamburg when the Nazis took over. As a result, he more or less assumed the role of a head of the family. His eldest brother Theodor (born Febr. 23, 1865) was eleven years older than him. Six years older was Julius (February 1869-July 24, 1888) who died at the age of 19 years. The third brother, Ludwig (born Nov. 9, 1874), was just one and a half years older than Iwan (born June 10, 1876-1942).

Theodor and Ludwig Selke left Hamburg well before the end of 19th century. Theodor had become a dental technician and left Hamburg together with his sister Frieda (1867-April 11, 1900) for the USA in 1887, Ludwig worked in Odessa in then Russia as a bank clerk.

Apart from Frieda there were four more sisters: the merchant Marie/Mary (April 21, 1863-Oct. 9, 1941), the saleswoman Eveline (Aug. 3, 1872-1942), the clerk Olga (Febr. 6, 1878-Dec. 5, 1941) and Rosa (Nov. 15, 1879- Nov. 13, 1947).

Selke Elias Selke, S.E. Selke for short, had come to Hamburg around 1850, when the majority of the Glückstadt Jews left the city. After his naturalisation in October 1860, he married Sophie Behrens. On December 11, 1863 he applied for a concession for a shop of manufactured goods in St. Georg, the eastern suburb of Hamburg, at Neustraße 45. From 1868 he ran a second shop for ribbon, Dutch and manufactory goods in Hamburg's Neustadt at Neuer Steinweg 98; in 1871 he gave up the first shop.

S.E. Selke moved from the Neustadt to St. Pauli and set up shop again permanently at Bartelsstraße 46. He adapted his range of goods to the new location by adding linen goods and millinery. With the following move in 1897 to Altonaerstraße 44 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel he once again adapted his business to the new surroundings and eventually worked on commission only.
None of the children went into his business. Iwan and Olga Selke lived with their parents until they died. The parents remained a contact point for the children throughout their lives.

When Iwan was ten years old, his eldest sister, Marie/Mary, married the merchant Levi Lievendag on Oct. 21, 1886, with whom she had nine children; only five of them reached adulthood.

Theodor Selke, by now a naturalised US citizen, returned to Hamburg on a visit in January 1894 to marry Bertha Hertz (born March 1,1871). The marriage took place on Febr. 28, 1894. Since then their trace is lost.

Ludwig Selke also got married in Hamburg, on January 5, 1901. His wife, Jenny Lewin, was born in Warsaw on May 17, 1877. They retained their German citizenship and moved to Odessa, where their five children were born.

S.E. Selke and Sophie Selke witnessed the divorce of their eldest daughter Marie/Mary in January 1905 and her remarriage two years later to the furniture dealer Friedrich Johannes Karl Burwitz (born May 25, 1852).

In 1906, Iwan Selke founded an export agency based at Knochenhauerstraße 9, which he registered in the commercial register. His residential address remained Altonaerstraße 44. He belonged to the Jewish community until his deportation in 1941.

His brother Ludwig came to visit his parents with his family in 1908 and stayed well beyond their death. His mother Sophie Selke died on March 25, 1908 at the age of 73, his father Selke Elias Selke half a year later, on Sept. 23, 1908, aged 75. The parents were buried side by side in the Jewish cemetery at Ihlandkoppel in Ohlsdorf, where their son Julius had been put to rest twenty years before.

After the death of his parents, Iwan Selke moved to Reuterstraße 4 on Uhlenhorst and in 1909 from there to Große Reichenstraße 15/17, sharing the flat with his brother Ludwig and his family. He had returned to work as a merchant. The following year they also moved together to Hasselbrookstraße 49 in Hamburg-Eilbek. On August 29, 1910, Ludwig Selke left again for Odessa.

Eventually after his siblings Marie, Theodor and Ludwig were married, Iwan Selke, then 35 years old, also married on February 12, 1911. His wife Rebecca, called Ekka, née Spanier, born April 12, 1881 in Burgdamm near Bremen, lived with her sister Bella, born Febr. 25, 1884, and their parents Jacob Spanier and Caroline, née Neumark, in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel.

When Bella and Rebecca Spanier were children, their father had moved to Hamburg. In the address book of 1887 he is listed as a merchant with the address Carolinenstraße, Holstenthorstraße. Shortly afterwards he moved to Tegethoffstraße 9 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel, which remained the family address until 1941. It is not known which schools the girls attended. Bella Spanier (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de) became a teacher and taught at a primary school in the working class area of Hamburg-St. Georg.

Iwan and Rebecca Selke remained in Eimsbüttel after their marriage and moved permanently to Bismarckstraße 6. They lived a middle-class life. In the summer of 1915, Iwan Selke was drafted into the Imperial Army at the age of 39.
Before the end of the First World War, Rebecca's father, Jacob Spanier, died.

Without any income, Iwan Selke's tax arrears to the Jewish community added up. They were later waived. Until the Great Depression, he earned a taxable income each year and met his dues to the Jewish community in full. The marriage remained childless.

At the age of almost 48, Iwan Selke's sister Eveline married Julius Osiakowski (born Febr. 10, 1872), a skilled watchmaker, merchant and traveller of the same age. Their marriage was contracted on January 27, 1920.

At the end of the inflationary period, Iwan Selke moved his company to Große Bäckerstraße 6/10. By the time of the Great Depression, his business had recovered. He undertook trips, from 1924 on with his wife Rebecca on a joint passport. However, the Great Depression caused his business activities to collapse again, he gave up the separate office and worked from home.

Eveline Selke started her own household goods business in Hamburg-Hamm in 1909, which passed to her husband after her marriage. It lasted through the inflationary period, but then fell into insolvency during the Great Depression. Her brother Iwan helped with small loans, but this did not prevent Julius Osiakowski from having to turn to welfare.

This affected all the siblings still living in Hamburg to varying degrees, as they had neither assets nor sufficient pension entitlements and were no longer fully able to work for reasons of age: Marie/Mary Burwitz's husband had been untraceable since 1910; she brought up her children as a trader, needlework teacher and seamstress. Her sons were unable to support her as their income hardly fed their own families. A one-time support from the USA arrived in 1928 from Rosa Selke, who sent her sister Marie/Mary a package of clothes. This is the only trace of Rosa and of the American relatives at large. Ludwig Selke and his family had emigrated from Danzig to the USA in the early 1930s but had not been heard of later.

Bertha Peiser, née Osiakowski, had been widowed since 1911 and was poorly off as was Olga Selke, who had lost her job as a clerk and correspondent in 1929. Her situation improved somewhat in 1938 when she received an old-age pension of RM 47 per month. She joined the Jewish Community in 1939, when the Nazi state demanded this of all people they regarded as Jews.

Apart from Iwan Selke, only Iwan Osiakowski, Eveline's brother-in-law, had a regular income from his lottery business at Tresckowstraße 43 in Eimsbüttel. When he died on April 28, 1938, he left his widow Berthe, née Lewie, born January 8, 1870 in La Chaux de Fond in Switzerland, and their daughter Paula, born November 15, 1902 in Hamburg, penniless.

There are no indications of emigration plans by any of those named here.

Even before the start of the autumn deportations in 1941, Iwan Selke's eldest sister Marie/Mary Burwitz died of natural causes at the age of 78.

His sister Olga committed suicide in her flat at Innocentiastraße 37 on December 6, 1941, the eve of the fourth deportation, which led to Riga. Both were buried in the Jewish cemetery in Ohlsdorf.

Bella Spanier, Rebecca/Ekka Selke's younger sister, being less than 60 years old, was called up for the first deportation of Hamburg Jews to the East on October 25, 1941 destined to the ghetto of Litzmannstadt/Lodz. This was the age limit set for the large-scale deportations of Jews in 1941 to work for the "reconstruction of the East” by the Reich Security Main Office.

The local Gestapo did not strictly adhere to these guidelines especially when it came to relatives, as became apparent with the transport to Riga on December 6, 1941: Rebecca and Iwan Selke, aged 60 and 65, from Bismarckstraße 6, and Berthe Osiakowski with her daughter Paula from Tresckowstraße 43, aged 71 and 39, were deported to Riga with this transport. They, like most of those deported in the autumn of 1941, received their order to "evacuate" while still at their long-time home addresses.

Whatever assets Rebecca and Iwan Selke still had were confiscated on January 15, 1942 and transferred to the Chief Finance President. Iwan Selke's bank balance amounted to RM 937.50 while Rebecca's balance of RM 2732.44 included the auction proceeds of RM 1321.35 for the household. Since there were no heirs in the case of anyone from the Selke and Spanier and Osiakowski families the credit balances were added to the global agreement with the Federal Minister of Finance in 1958.

None of the siblings were still living in Hamburg when Eveline and Julius Osiakowski were deported to the "old peoples’ ghetto" of Theresienstadt on July 15, 1942. (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de)

None of the aforementioned learned anything about the fate of their relatives or survived the deportation.

Translation by Hildegard Thevs
Stand: February 2022
© Hildegard Thevs

Quellen: 1; 3; 4; 5; 7; 8; 9; Hamburger Adressbücher; StaHH Bürgerregister; 213-13 Rückerstattungssachen, 15803, 16892, 17054, 18382; 335-2, Personenstandsbücher; 351-14 Fürsorge, 1029, 1651, 1677, 1835; 376-2 Gewerbeanmeldung, VIII C 77 Nr. 6770; 411-1, XXXV III 4132; http://www.igdj-hh.de/friedhofsdatenbank.html; https://www.jüdische-gemeinden.de/index.php/gemeinden/k-l/1021-kalisch-suedpreussen; https://www.jüdische-gemeinden.de/index.php/gemeinden/e-g/737-glueckstadt-schleswig-holstein.
Zur Nummerierung häufig genutzter Quellen siehe Link www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de/Recherche und Quellen.