Frieda Seif was the mother of Golda Seif who is also listed in this Memorial Book. In April 1940, she fled to the Neu-Isenburg Home of the Jewish Women’s Association where her daughter Golda had been accommodated for four months. The five-member Seif family had been forcibly expelled from their hometown of Reichelsheim in Odenwald and was therefore in a desperate situation (for the following, see the database of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main).

Richard Seif and his wife Frieda née Adler, both born in 1910, lived probably in the mid-1930s in Reichelsheim in Odenwald. Their oldest son, Jacob, was born in Verden in 1934, their two daughters, Golda and Judit, were born in Reichelsheim in 1937 and 1938. Richard Seif was a teacher.

Richard Seif was a teacher. Since the family lived in an official residence belonging to the synagogue in Reichelsheim, it can be assumed that Richard Seif was employed by the Jewish community.

In 1935, the Jewish students in Reichelsheim were excluded from public school, so Richard Seif had to take the six schoolchildren from Reichelsheim and other children from Fränkisch-Crumbach to the private Jewish district school daily with the municipal bus to Höchst in the Odenwald where he was teaching at the time. On one such trip in 1935, Richard Seif and his protégés were victims of an anti-Semitic attack. A student who survived the Shoah later reported:

"One day ... we saw a truck standing across the street at a distance. ... The owner of the truck got out of the cab and had a starter crank in his hand. He came up to us and, without saying a word, began to smash the windows of our bus, behind which we crouched and started to cry. "

During the November pogrom in 1938, the synagogue next to the Seif family apartment was raided and set on fire. Reichelsheim National Socialists under the leadership of a Squad of Bensheim SS-men also devastated numerous Jewish-owned houses and mistreated their residents. They dragged the terrified residents out of their homes and forced them to dance round a fire burned before the synagogue. The prayer books and Torah scrolls from the synagogue were burned in this fire.

Richard Seif was pushed in front of a moving car during the pogrom and narrowly escaped death.

On January 6, 1939, Frieda Seif fled to Frankfurt, Richard Seif followed her on July 15, of the same year. The children were accommodated at this time by relatives or institutions of the Frankfurt Jewish community.

After seeking refuge in the Jewish Women's League Home, Frieda Seif lived there for two years with her daughter Golda. When the establishment had to be cleared in the spring of 1942, Frieda Seif found accommodation and a job at the Jewish retirement home in Wöhlerstraße in Frankfurt but had to leave her daughter behind. Golda was reunited, as mentioned before, with her siblings Jacob and Judit, at the Women's Welfare Center at Frankfurt’s Hans-Thoma-Straße 24.

Richard Seif was taken to the Rivesaltes camp near the French town of Perpignan in 1942 and then deported to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp on September 11 via the Drancy transit camp near Paris. No trace of him exists there on.

Frieda Seif and her three children were among the 1378 men, women, and children who were deported from Frankfurt on September 15, 1942, to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Two years later, on October 12, 1944, they were taken to Auschwitz. The 32-year-old Frieda Seif and her three children; eight-year-old Jakob, five-year-old Golda, and four-year-old Judit were murdered in Auschwitz. Probably, they were selected immediately after their arrival and murdered in the gas chambers.

Source: Datenbank des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main. Texte: zeitsprung. Kontor für Geschichte: