The Israelitisches Waisenhaus (Jewish Orphanage) in Dinslaken was founded in 1885 and continued to function until the demolition of the house and the expulsion of its inhabitants during the November pogrom of 1938.
Dr. Leopold Wormser’s idea to establish an orphanage in this small town on the Lower Rhine was strongly supported by the local Jewish community. Already in 1886, as many as fourteen orphans lived in Dinslaken. In 1913, Dr. Wormser left the orphanage because of his age and his successor was Dr. Leopold Rothschild.
The orphanage children attended the Jewish elementary school in Dinslaken, which was only a few minutes’ walk from the house. The orphanage also arranged vocational training for the young people at the end of their schooling. Only a few pupils attended the “Höhere Knaben- oder Mädchenschule” (Higher Secondary School for Boys or Girls).
By 1935, the home had been there for fifty years. The anniversary publication reported that a total number of 320 children were admitted in those fifty years.
Since 1935, Leopold Rothschild had been trying to transfer the Dinslaken Jewish orphanage to Palestine.
In October 1938 he travelled to Palestine, where three of his adult children were living. He asked his daughter Miriam, who had trained as an educator in Berlin, to live in the Dinslaken orphanage during his absence. She was supporting Yitzak Sophonie Herz, who had started working at the orphanage as an educator in March 1938.
Early in the morning of 10 November 1938, the orphanage was attacked by National Socialists, who drove the children out of the house. That evening, the children initially found refuge in the Jewish elementary school, and then later moved to a restaurant. Important objects, documents and money were destroyed and stolen.
With the agreement of the Cologne Synagogue Community, the children were brought to Cologne on 17 November 1938.
On 20 December 1938, 42 children and young people were able to leave Germany for Belgium with the Kindertransport from the Dinslaken orphanage. In the same way, other residents of the orphanage reached the Netherlands.
Of the 42 children and young people who fled to Belgium, 26 survived. Eleven children and young people were deported from Mechelen, Westerbork and Drancy to Auschwitz and Majdanek extermination camps; one survived Auschwitz. One boy was killed in France. Five children returned to Germany in 1940, they were deported and murdered. AP
