Gertrud Weil, née Welkanoz (born 1888 in Berlin) belonged to the circle of young German Jews that formed around the medical student Siegfried Lehmann.
Together they founded the Jüdisches Volksheim (Jewish People’s Home) at Dragonerstraße 22 (now Max-Beer-Straße 5) in the Scheunenviertel in the Spandauer Vorstadt in 1916. It was a kind of youth club for Eastern European Jewish children, but also much more than that. According to Gertrud, it was “a place where Jewish life found physical expression, because Western and Eastern Jews, the educated and the ignorant, people of all ages met here”. Through contact and cooperation on an equal footing, a “happy mutual assimilation developed there, as much our precarious existence allowed it.”
Although Gertrud was the director of the Volksheim for the longest period of time and published several essays about its work in various publications, her contribution to the Volksheim is often only mentioned in passing or completely ignored. Yet contemporaries such as Gershom Scholem said of her that she was its “undisputed central figure.” According to Scholem: “She seemed to me to be the only trained social worker, but I was wrong, because she was an employee of a large bank by profession, and in fact there was not a single professional employee among the volunteers. But their combined knowledge was nothing compared to the tremendous influence, even magic, that [Gertrud] exerted on all the girls there.” Today, there is a memorial plaque at the former location of the Volksheim, which does not even mention Gertrud.
Together with her husband Ernst Weil, she was able to flee from the National Socialists to England, where she spent the rest of her life.
Sources/Literature:
- Gershom Scholem: Von Berlin nach Jerusalem. Jugenderinnerungen, Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, p. 85.
- Gertrud Weil: Vom jüdischen Volksheim in Berlin, in: Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik. Zeitschrift der Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden und der Hauptstelle für jüdische Wanderfürsorge und Arbeitsnachweise, 1 (1939), pp. 281–284, URL: https://archive.org/details/jdischewohlfahrtzen/page/n152/.