Memory Lane: Letters from a German POW to Boro Park

The year was 1919, and it was the heat of World War One. In faraway Tomsk, deep in Siberia, sat a German prisoner of war named Siegfried (Pinchos) Jeidel (pronounced Yeidel), from an illustrious and upstanding family in Frankfurt. He was drafted to the German army during the beginning of the war, and was caught by the Russians at some point, and exiled to Siberia. From there, he penned a heartrending letter to his cousin, Selig Moshe Schwarzchild, a pillar of the Boro Park community. 

Selig Moshe Schwartzchild 

On a 1937 letterhead of Boro Park’s Yeshiva Eitz Chaim appear the names of its officers. The very first name on the top left corner—a few rows above that of Irving Bunim—is S. M. Schwarzchild, honorary president. This is on account of his herculean work on behalf of the yeshiva, as well as many other Boro Park institutions. 

The Schwatzchild family were yerei’im ushleimim who lived in Frankfurt for hundreds of years. In fact, among the names of the seven signatories of Rav Shamshon Rephael Hirsch’s Austritt Gemeinde charter in the year 1828 was Dayan Rav Aaron Moshe Schwartzchild. About Rav Aaron Moshe it is written in the Frankfurt Yizkor book that, “he was a humble tzaddik who was straight and self-effacing. His Torah was his vocation, and in it he toiled night and day—despite the travails of the time, and the dearth of bread and water. Until his old age, he remained a beacon of light to his people.” 

Reb Selig Moshe was a great-grandson of Rav Aaron Moshe, and he immigrated to America in the year 1893. He came to Boro Park around the year 1910, and was one of the earliest mispalelim at Congregation Shomrei Shabbos Anshei Novogrod (also known as ‘Silkowitz’s” which we have profiled here in the past). Here, he served as a ba’al korei and ba’al tefillah for many years. This, despite the fact that the Shul davened nusach sfard, and he, hailing from Germany, davened nusach Ashkenaz. 

Selig worked on behalf of the Sondheimer Metals Company, which was owned by Shomrei Torah Umitzvos in the city of Frankfurt, and this is how he supported his family handily. In the years leading up to WWII, he sent funds and affidavits to Germany to help family members leave the country before the impending Holocaust. 

The letter that Siegfried sent to Boro Park is heartrending, and filled with details about his life in Siberia, his hopes for his imminent return to Frankfurt, his thanks to his cousin for his crucial assistance at a dire time… and an astounding glimpse into his mesirus nefesh for Yiddishkeit in Siberian captivity. 

Epilogue 

A grandson of Reb Selig Moshe relates, “We moved in to Boro Park when my parents sold the house in Flatbush and gave the money to a person who flew to Switzerland and "bought" altogether 1400 people from the concentration camps. We lived at first in 1359 50th Street (the home of the Schwarzchild grandparents), and later at 1401 55th street until we came on Aliyah after Succos of 1948.”

He recalls the home of his Schwarzchild grandparents, and remembers accompanying his grandfather to Shul. Selig Moshe was niftar in Boro Park in the year 1949 at the age of 75, following a lifetime of good deeds. 

His cousin Siegfried, on the other hand, suffered a much more difficult end. Returning to Frankfurt around 1920, he remained ill, and finally succumbed to his wounds on 18 Kislev, 1922. His gravestone, which still stands in the Hirsch section of the Frankfurt Judische Friedhoff (cemetery) alludes to his mesirus nefesh for Yiddishkeit under the most trying circumstances—in the midst of which he penned a letter to Boro Park of yore.