When Gertrud Rubensohn married Rudolf Hallo in 1922, they deepened the friendship between two respected Jewish families. Two families with a long history in Kassel and Germany as evidenced by Rudolf Hallo’s Geschichte der Familie Hallo (1930), the Rubensohn family Stammbaum by Emil Rubensohn (1938) and Gertrude Hallo’s volume: The Hallos and Rubensohns: Three Centuries of Jewish Family Life in Germany (1962). Cultural interests and education played a major role in both families and both spouses were intellectual equals.

 

Gertrud Rubensohn, born on September 24, 1895, was the daughter of Toni (née Hammerschlag) and Emil Rubensohn from Beverungen, a successful businessman trading in animal feed and jute products and running a wool laundry in Bettenhausen. She had sisters Hedwig (*16.6.1897) and Elisabeth (*23.8.1900), who died in 1915. After the reform of the girls' school system in Prussia in 1908 and the establishment of the "Studienanstalt der realgymnasialen Richtung" (now the Heinrich-Schütz-Schule) in Kassel in 1909 gave girls the opportunity to take the Abitur and study for the first time, Getrud Rubensohn's apparently progressive parents took advantage of this opportunity to educate their daughters. Gertrud passed her school-leaving examination in 1915 and went on to study at the universities of Berlin, Munich and Göttingen, where she graduated in 1919/20. This made her one of the first women in Kassel with an academic education. Before her marriage, she worked as an actuary for Osram.

 

Born on September 26, 1896, Rudolf Hallo belonged to a family of court Jews and craftsmen who had lived in Kassel since the 18th century and owned a traditional painting business founded in 1816 - one of the few Jewish craft businesses in the city with branches in other towns and up to 300 employees. His parents were Wilhelm Hallo (1858-1928) and Henriette, née Plaut (1870-1928). After graduating from Wilhelmsgymnasium and participating in the First World War as a medic, Rudolf Hallo studied classical archaeology and art history at the University of Göttingen, graduating in 1923 with a doctorat.

 

After their marriage in 1922, Getrud and Rudolf Hallo initially moved to Frankfurt. Here, Rudolf took over the management of the "Freies jüdisches Lehrhaus" (an adult education institution) from Franz Rosenzweig, a friend of both families, who was no longer able to run it himself due to a serious illness. Hallo ended this work just one year later due to differences of opinion with Rosenzweig, but remained on friendly terms with him.

In 1923, the Hallo couple returned to Kassel, where their three children were born: daughter Susanne on October 13, 1923, their daughter Ruth on September 7, 1926 and their son Wolfgang on March 9, 1928. Rudolf Hallo now worked at the Hessian State Museum as a research assistant and librarian. His work focused on researching Hessian art and cultural history, especially Jewish history. Thus, with his significant involvement, a Jewish Museum was created as a separate department in the State Museum, which was to contribute to the understanding of Judaism with its evidence of Jewish life (almost exclusively on loan) - especially for non-Jews. Getrud Hallo was an indispensable advisor to him in this work and his extensive publishing activities. Rudolf Hallo did not live to see the dissolution of the Jewish Museum he had created soon after the beginning of Nazi rule. He died on a lecture tour in Hamburg on January 26, 1933 at the age of just 36.

 

His widow Gertrud was involved when many of the loans were taken from the Jewish Museum before April 1, 1933. In 1984 she wrote: "(The loans) were (...) taken to the Jewish community center in Rosenstraße very shortly before the boycott on April 1, unpacked and in a heap as if on a rubble dump, I think at night and in the fog. I was asked by the community to help identify the owners. Since we had no records and many of the owners, both private and communal and organizations, no longer existed or did not come forward, the impossible task had to be abandoned very soon. (...) The picture still haunts me." (quoted from Schmidberner, p. 76)

 

In 1934, Gertrud Hallo posthumously published her husband's last book, a biography of Rudolf Erich Raspe. In 1933, she moved with her three children from the family home in Thoméstraße to her parents' house at Kölnische Straße 51 (now the Alfred Delp House), where they lived until May and July 1936, when they moved to Frankfurt/Main. Until then, the children were unable or unwilling to attend a state school, writes Gertrud's son William (Wolfgang), who, like his sisters, was then admitted to the Jewish "Philanthropin" in Frankfurt. The mother was now faced with the task of supporting the family. She worked at times for a Jewish counseling center and in a housekeeping school of the Jewish girls' home, where the family lived in cramped conditions that hardly allowed for any privacy. This only changed when they managed to find a larger apartment very close to the Philanthropin at Scheffelstraße 24. Here, Gertrud Hallo ran a "boarding house" mainly for out-of-town students of the Philanthropin, for which she also employed housemaids. Not inconsiderable investment income (for example from shares in the Rubensohn jute spinning mill) apparently also contributed to her livelihood.

 

During her time in Frankfurt, Gertrud Hallo tried unsuccessfully to obtain a visa to emigrate to the USA. A way out presented itself after the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938, when the British government agreed to take in unaccompanied Jewish children from Germany under certain conditions. By the end of this humanitarian action, this amounted to around 10,000 children, the vast majority of whom would never see their parents again. Ruth, Susanne and Wolfgang were among the children who were lucky enough to escape in late March 1939 on one of these Kindertransports to England, where they were placed in boarding schools. They were also lucky enough to be able to embrace their mother there again, as she had also managed to get to England in 1939. After 18 months in England, visas finally enabled the family to enter the USA. In 1941, the Nazi state ordered their expatriation and the confiscation of their remaining assets in Germany.

 

Gertrud Hallo carried out various activities in the social sector in the USA. In New York, she worked for the "Cooperative Residence Club for Refugees from Central Europe" until the end of the war and then there and elsewhere for the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) in the reception and care of underage displaced persons from Europe - survivors of the Shoah. Beginning in the 1950s through her own retirement, she worked in a Jewish retirement home in Philadelphia.

She also published extensively - as she had already done to some extent in Germany - including translations from German, including texts by Rudolf Hallo. Of particular note is the translation of Franz Rosenzweig's "Star of Redemption", a fundamental work of Jewish thought in the 20th century, on which she provided invaluable assistance to her son William, its translator. Gertrud Hallo supplemented her husband's family history of the Hallos with that of the Rubensohns. Her son William summarized that her extensive publications reflected a lifelong active involvement in the affairs of her profession, her religion and her family. She died peacefully in Philadelphia on April 18, 1986.

 

Gertrud Hallo’s daughter Susanne Elisabeth (Hallo) Kalem, was committed to helping others throughout her life. She received her nursing degree from the Mt. Sinai School of Nursing in New York City in 1946. She was a member of the Mt. Sinai School of Nursing Alumni Association and director of the Red Cross Blood Bank of Springfield, New Jersey, where she resided for sixty years with her husband, Daniel Kalem, with whom she had four daughters (Alison, Jeanette, Toni and Rachel). Later, she returned to her career as a registered nurse at Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. She was a founding member of Temple Beth Ahmin Springfield, and was honored as Hadassah’s “Woman of the Year,” of which she was an active member for many years. She was always involved in volunteer work, fostered a Native American girl in Tucson, and initiated the Unicef program in Springfield. Her efforts transformed Halloween into an opportunity not just for children to collect candy but to receive donations for those less fortunate.

 

Gertrud Hallo's daughter Ruth, who married fellow German-Jewish refugee Otto Landman in the USA, embarked on an academic career while also raising their three children (Wendy, Jessica and Jonathan). After arriving in the USA, she initially lived with relatives. She graduated Vassar College Phi Beta Kappa, then studied anthropology at Columbia University with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, among others. She completed her doctorate in anthropology at Yale University. From 1964 to 1990, she taught as a professor at the American University in Washington D.C. As a cultural anthropologist, her main focus was on understanding and finding practical solutions to social problems. Topics she addressed included alcoholism in various ethnic groups, the acculturation of Mexican immigrants in the United States, police-community relations, the roots of racism, and the creation of community through community gardening and yard sales, for which she published the book "Creating Community in the City: Cooperatives and Community Gardens in Washington D.C." in 1993. She served both as Chair of the Department of Anthropology and as Chair of the Faculty Senate at American University. She was also politically active and supported the Democratic Party, especially Hillary Clinton during her time as First Lady. Ruth Hallo Landmann died on June 19, 2005 at the age of 78.

 

Gertrud Hallo’s son William was one of the most prominent scholars in his field of Assyriology. He studied at Harvard College and took his PhD at the University of Chicago. He married Edith Pinto, whom he met on his Fulbright year in the Netherlands and with whom he had two children (Ralph and Jacqueline). He first taught at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. From 1962 to 2002, William Hallo taught Assyriology and Babylonian literature at Yale University and was curator of the Babylonian Collection there, the largest collection of Sumerian and Babylonian texts. It was not least the decipherment of important finds from the earliest period of written culture that made him one of the world's most renowned representatives of his subject. According to the University of Kassel, which awarded him the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship in 1991 as the first native of Kassel to do so, Hallo made a significant contribution to an "overall cultural-historical interpretation of human history".

William Hallo returned to his native city of Kassel for the first time in 1986 to speak at the International Franz Rosenzweig Congress on the problems and experiences of translating Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption into English (1971). He also spoke on translation problems as part of his guest professorship, but above all in a three-hour lecture on "'Origins - the Ancient Oriental Background of Some Human Achievements, in which he particularly addressed everyday life in the early cultures of Mesopotamia - the position of women, the school system, the financial system, but also the calendar and mythology," writes the University of Kassel. William Hallo died on March 27, 2015 at the age of 87.

 

 

Wolfgang Matthäus

June 2024

 

 

 

 

Sources and literature

 

 

Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt/Main

A.62.02 Nr. 10 (Gertrud Hallos Ausbürgerung)

HHStAW

Best. 519/3 82 (Devisenakte Wolfgang Hallo) | Best. 519/3 25377 (Devisenakte Gertrud Hallo) | Best. 676 5695 (Steuerakte Gertrud Hallo)

Schularchiv der Heinrich-Schütz-Schule Kassel

Unterlagen zur Reifeprüfung 1915

Stadtarchiv Kassel

Best. S 1 Nr. 176 (Rudolf Hallo) | Einwohnermeldeunterlagen

 

Wolfgang Hermsdorff, Die Brüder Hallo in Kassel (Ein Blick zurück Nr. 243), HNA vom 18.2.1967

Ders., Kunstsinn und Heimatliebe als Familienerbe (Ein Blick zurück Nr. 998), HNA vom 22.1.1983

Hans Mosbacher, Rudolf Hallo, in: Jüdische Wochenzeitung für Kassel, Kurhessen und Waldeck vom 3.2.1933

Ekkehard Schmidberger, Rudolf Hallo und das jüdische Museum in Kassel, in: Juden in Kassel 1808-1933. Eine Dokumentation anlässlich des 100. Geburtstages von Franz Rosenzweig, Kassel 1986

Universität Kassel, Franz-Rosenzweig-Gastprofessur

Washington Post vom 22.6.2005 (Nachruf auf Ruth Hallo Landman)

Yale Universitiy, Nachruf auf William Hallo

Stadtmuseum Kassel

Bestand mit den Unterlagen von Wolfgang Hermsdorff zu "Ein 'Blick zurück"

 

Familienfotos und Aufzeichnungen zur Familiengeschichte (insbesondere von Gertrud Hallo und William Hallo), zur Verfügung gestellt von Jaqueline Hallo.