Elenora (Hertz) Poznańska (1830 - 1914)

Born 1830 in Warszawa, Królestwo Polskie

Descendants

Died 17 Feb 1914 at about age 84 in Lodz, Posen West, Posen, Preußen, Deutsches Reich

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Biography

Leonia (Łaja) Hertz was born in 1830. Her parents were Mojżesz and Cypa (nee Margulis) Hertz. Leonia's father worked as a secretary of Jewish hospitals in Warsaw and was quite a famous person in the circle of Warsaw merchants

Leonia Hertz and Izrael Poznański, who was two years younger than her, were married on March 4, 1851. The families had previously decided to sign a premarital agreement. The husband's contribution to the property community was a small manufacture based on the production of handlooms, then worth 500 rubles. On the other hand, Leonia brought a cotton shop in Warsaw as a dowry and allowed Israel to establish valuable contacts with the Warsaw bourgeoisie. He became one of the kings of cotton of Lodz, Poland.

The Poznański couple had numerous offspring: four sons - Ignacy, Herman, Karol and Maurycy (the father of Isabel Landsberger-Poznanska) - and three daughters - Anna (Ajdla, later wife of Jakub Hertz ), Joanna Natalia (later wife of Zygmunt Lewiński) and Felicja (Fajga, died in infancy ). Only the death of Izrael Poznański in 1900 ended the relationship.

Both Leonia and Izrael were Jewish. They were often involved in charity. One of their initiatives was to finance the construction of a Jewish hospital in the 1880s, which was the first in Łódź to open a ward for tuberculosis patients in 1898. The hospital exists to this day as the "Szpital Kliniczny Nr 3 im. dr Seweryna Sterlinga Uniwersytetu Medycznego".

Contrary to Mina Konsztadt and Teresa Silberstein, Leonia Poznańska née Hertz, the wife of Izrael Poznański, was not an active philanthropist: she was not interested in art. Maria Kaminska recalled her as a woman who could neither read nor write. The only information indicating Poznański’s wife’s artistic taste concerns purchase of the works titled Zburzenie Świątyni Jerozolimskiej [The Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem] by Tadeusz Popiel in Warsaw’s “Zachęta” in 1886. In the same year – in which was obviously a matter of chance, she won one of Samuel Hirszenberg’s paintings. The Łódź press reported that she also offered 75 roubles to Hirszenberg, aimed at supporting him in his studies in Munich.^[1]

She died on February 17, 1914, in Łódź.

Sources

1. ↑ Building the “New Jerusalem”: Jewish artistic patronage in Łódź, 1880–1907. By Irmina Gadowska, University of Łódź, Institute of Art History. https://www.ejournals.eu/pliki/art/14177/

See also:

• https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonia_Pozna%C5%84ska
• Ewa Grzelak, The Poznanski family : Jewish entrepreneurs from Lodz, Lodz, 2010, ISBN 9788392886730 (Poznanski Genealogy and Family Tree)
• http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/person/27,izrael-kalmanowicz-poznanski/
• http://www.baza-nazwisk.de/suche.php?data=31438

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Sasha Meyer for creating Hertz-129 on 21 Aug 13. Click the Changes tab for the details on contributions by Sasha and others.

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