Jacobs Helene

Jacobs, Helene Born in 1906 in Schneidemühl, in Posen-West Prussia, Helene Jacobs grew up in Berlin. After the outbreak of war, Jacobs, who belonged to the Dahlem community of the Confessing Church, became associated with a group of women who sent packages of food and clothing to the first Jewish deportees from Stettin. In 1940, she joined a group devoted to the study of the theology of Karl Barth, who had been expelled from Germany on account of his anti-Nazi teachings. There she met Dr. Franz Kaufmann, a converted Jew and a former senior civil servant, who had been forcibly retired in 1936. Living in a mixed marriage with a child, Kaufmann was protected from outright deportation. However, having learned from confidential sources about the dire fate of the Jews who were deported to the East, he organized – at great risk to himself and to the other participants – an informal network that concealed Jews slated for deportation. The underground network, consisting mainly of women from the Dahlem congregation, equipped the Jews in hiding with false papers and collected food-ration cards for them. In the framework of this activity, Jacobs concealed in her own apartment several Jews, among them Cioma Schönhaus. In the summer of 1943, the group was exposed as the result of a denunciation. Jacobs was arrested on the street by the Gestapo, tried, and sentenced to 30 months' imprisonment. She did not betray, however, the presence of Schönhaus in her apartment, thus giving him a chance to escape in time to Switzerland. Kaufmann himself was arrested in August and executed six months later without trial. As a Jew he was outside the normal jurisdiction of the courts. After the war, Jacobs, who studied to be a lawyer, became active in organizations dedicated to promoting understanding between Jews and Christians in the wake of the Holocaust. On May 28, 1968, Yad Vashem recognized Helene Jacobs as Righteous Among the Nations.