Jacob Teitel was born on November 15, 1850, in the Russian Empire. He was a lawyer and, before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the only Jewish judge in Russia. Throughout his life, he represented the interests of people from the poorest social classes.
During the Russian Civil War, he emigrated to Berlin as a political refugee and founded the “Association of Russian Jews in Germany.” He also founded a children’s group that brought together children from different religious and social backgrounds. On December 23, 1923, the children of the “Weltvereinigung der Kinderfreunde” held their first meeting at Gormannstraße 3 on the edge of the Scheunenviertel district.
The children were looked after by an educational team that gave them a great deal of freedom in organizing concert and theater evenings and other events as part of progressive educational concepts. The future poet Mascha Kaléko and her first husband Saul Kaléko worked here, as did the child psychologist Fischl Schneersohn.
Frida Ogler, a member of the association, said to Teitel: “We feel completely free here … and feel like brothers and sisters.” The association existed until the Nazis came to power in 1933, when Teitel emigrated to Paris, where he died in 1938.
Sources/Literature:
- Elena Solominski: Helfen bedeutet Leben. Jacob Teitel und der Verband russischer Juden in Deutschland. 1920–1935, Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2023.
- Elena Solominski: Jacob Teitel und die Weltvereinigung der “Kinder-Freunde”, Webseite der Waldorfschule Berlin-Mitte, URL: https://www.waldorfschule-mitte.de/jacob-teitel-und-weltvereinigung-kinder-freunde/.