Hermann had many Ringel cousins in Berlin

Hermann had many Ringel cousins in Berlin

• Sep 03, 2020
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I have known for a while that Schija's brother Leib Ringel also moved to Berlin because he served as a witness on some of the vital records I have. Recently, with the availability of record searches of the Berlin Landesarchiv, a slew of new records show the extent of the Ringel family in and around Berlin's Jewish Scheunenviertel district. 

Leib Ringel married Pessel Apfelbaum and they had seven children, four girls and three boys. One of the sons, five years younger than our Hermann Ringel, was his cousin Hermann Ringel. After his birth I have nothing else on him and four of the other children. But one of the sons, Moses, named for his grandfather, died at age 6. The eldest child was Zierel, or Tziril, who we have encountered before as a listing in the Yad Vashem victims database. Now we know about her husband, Josef Apfelbaum, also a victim, and their son Leon Apfelbaum, born in Berlin in 1902, who escaped to the United States and died in Dade County, Florida, in 1983.

Leib and Pessel and their seven children lived at Strasburgerstraße 57, just a few blocks from the Ringel home on Lothringer Straße where Hermann later lived. (I don't yet know where Hermann lived as a boy, but it must have been around these same few blocks.)

Daughters are usually harder than sons to track, but the Landesarchiv records show us the married names of Schija's two sisters, Reisel and Basze Sure. For Reisel, who married Arye Reich, we also have her four children, Rosa Lea (named for her grandmother), Rubin, Amalie and another Hermann, born between 1887 and 1893. The Reich family lived at Rosenstraße 27, on the south side of the quarter. Reisel died at age 53 in 1917. I have marriage information for the two Reich daughters. Amalie married Salli Sinzheimer in 1910 and Rosa Lea married Franz Julius Mau in 1916. In 1923, the Sinzheimer family lived at Lothringer Straße 54, apartment 2, downstairs from our Ringel family members. The records seem to show that Salli Sinzheimer emigrated to Palestine. That bears further study. 

The youngest of the original Ringel siblings, Basze Sure, married in Berlin in 1899. Her husband Josef Herzig may have been an egg and poultry dealer. They lived at Lothringerstraße 12. I don't have information about any children or their future fate. 

So besides Schija Ringel's three children (and a fourth who died), his siblings accounted for at least 11 other Ringel cousins in the neighborhood, more than that if the Herzig's had children. They were all Hermann's first cousins, and their numerous offspring were Helga's second cousins.

My point is there were a lot of Ringel relatives in Berlin, and most within a four-block radius. When Helga was born in 1924, in the more upscale Jewish neighborhood of Charlottenburg, she was a part of an abundant family network that had been flourishing in Berlin for almost 50 years. .