Biography
Lore Jacobs (born Lore Gotthelf) is the daughter of Gertrud and Sigmund Gotthelf. She was born April 17, 1924 in Frankfurt am Main, where her father was a distributor of ladies hats. Lore had a half-sister, Friedel (b. 1910), the daughter of her mother and Hugo Muenster. Hugo died as a soldier in World War I, and Gertrud married Sigmund Gotthelf in 1922. Lore attended the Holzhausen Schule from 1931-1935, where the majority of the students were Christian. When Jews were forbidden to attend German schools, she was enrolled at the Philanthropin, a Jewish elementary and high school in Frankfurt. On Kristallnacht her father was arrested and taken to Dachau where he remained for three weeks. He returned in very poor condition. When the Nazis took over the family business, the Gotthelfs was forced to live off their savings, which was also later confiscated. The family had applied to emigrate to the United States, but their application numbers were high and the wait was long. They therefore registered Lore for a Kindertransport to England. She was accepted and left Germany on July 7, 1939. Her sponsors were the Quakers of Northampton, England. She lived with the Barnes family for 6-7 months until the area was militarized and people of German birth could no longer live there. Lore was then sent to live with a family in a farming village. When she was 16 she moved to Birmingham, where she took a course in nursery school education. Lore met her future husband, Erwin Jacobowitz, at the Singers Hill Synagogue Refugee Club. Their wedding at the Buckland Crescent synagogue in London was conducted by the rabbi of Lore's former synagogue in Frankfurt am Main. The couple changed their name to Jacobs. They remained in Britain until 1953 when they emigrated to Canada. Lore's parents were deported to Lodz on October 19, 1941, where they perished. Her half sister emigrated to the United States.
