50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (3 page)

Miss Eleanor Shirley Jacobs, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Harris D. Jacobs, was married to Gilbert J. Kraus today at the home of a brother of the bride
.

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E
VENING
P
UBLIC
L
EDGER

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HILADELPHIA

B
EFORE
1939

A
lthough Eleanor had plenty of persuasive reasons to avoid involving herself in the rescue project, her husband never hesitated for a moment. If he harbored any doubts about his ability to succeed where others had not, he never expressed them to anyone, including his wife. Above all, Gil Kraus was a strong-willed man with a resolute sense of what was right. And he would pursue that no matter what anyone else thought of him.

Gil’s almost bullheaded conviction for doing the right thing did not come out of nowhere. His father, Solomon Kraus, had devoted years of his life to a wide variety of social, charitable, and philanthropic organizations and causes. Gil belonged to a German Jewish family that by the 1930s had long been an integral part of Philadelphia’s Jewish society. He certainly shared his father’s passion for championing the rights of those far less fortunate than himself. A long-shot effort to save the lives of imperiled children threatened by Hitler’s campaign against Jews no doubt struck in Gil the same empathetic chord that Solomon had responded to in earlier years.

All four of Gil’s grandparents made their way to the United States as part of the great migration of German Jews that took place during the 1840s and 1850s. His paternal grandparents, Leopold and Charlotte Kraus, immigrated to America in 1859, a few years after they were married. Their two oldest children, Fannie and Herman, were born in Austria, while two younger sons, Solomon and Milton, were born in Philadelphia. Leopold earned a middle-class living as a merchant—the 1880 U.S. census listed his occupation as a purveyor of “gents’ furnishings and goods.” Solomon, however, had bigger ambitions, and after a brief stint in the dry-goods business, he began a successful career as a Philadelphia real estate broker. In 1893, he married Eva Mayer, whose parents had come from Germany and settled in the small town of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, where Eva was born. By the time she married Solomon, he was both a prominent businessman and an active participant in Philadelphia’s rough-and-tumble Democratic politics. In 1892 he was chosen to cast a vote in the electoral college for Grover Cleveland, the successful Democratic presidential candidate that year. A few years later, Solomon ran for a judicial magistrate’s position, competing in a raucous citywide political convention that was held to select the Democratic slate of local candidates. The gathering turned into “an unparalleled scene of disorder lasting for nearly five hours,” reported the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, and culminated in fistfights on the convention floor. “Just before the close of the proceedings it became necessary to call in the police to clear the stage. Chairs were broken, several blows exchanged, and a handsome piano was treated in a manner that robbed it of its beauty.”

Solomon’s would-be career as an elected official soon came to an end after he decided to focus on business rather than politics. But he continued to cultivate valuable political as well as business contacts that served him—and later his son Gil—quite well. Chief among these useful contacts was Albert Greenfield, a scrappy young Russian immigrant who eventually would preside over a vast real estate and financial empire in Philadelphia comprising department stores, hotels, and a highly profitable mortgage banking company that helped to finance his various commercial enterprises. The two men seemed destined to be business partners when, in 1906, a precocious nineteen-year-old Greenfield first proposed a modest real estate deal with Kraus, who was twenty years his senior. “Greenfield and Kraus had similar personalities—aggressive, competitive, overbearing, tempestuous—and thus they took an instant dislike to each other,” a Philadelphia journalist wrote about the two men. “Each liked to be in charge of whatever he did, so the two did not work well together. On the other hand, as businessmen, each recognized the benefits to be gained from working with the other.”

In 1914, business ties turned into family ties when Greenfield proposed to Solomon’s oldest daughter, Edna. Solomon’s critical personal opinion of Greenfield had not changed simply because the blustery would-be mogul had been courting Kraus’s attractive, blue-eyed daughter. But Solomon was nothing if not a pragmatist, and he recognized a good deal when he saw one. The marriage would be socially advantageous and also good for business. And it would certainly be much easier to deal with Greenfield as a son-in-law than as a potential business rival. Solomon swiftly consented to the marriage. By the time that Gil began his own career as a corporate lawyer in the early 1920s, the Greenfield-Kraus enterprise controlled more than two dozen building and loan associations spread across Philadelphia, with assets approaching $35 million. The Russian immigrant and the son of German Jews also formed a highly profitable mortgage company that, soon enough, extended the reach of their business ties to New York City.

Solomon, along with many other German Jews, was avowedly nonreligious, espousing instead a highly secular form of Judaism that placed little stock in traditional religious practices. Although the Krauses were members of Keneseth Israel, Philadelphia’s most prominent Reform synagogue (which at the time eschewed—as most Reform congregations did—bar mitzvahs for thirteen-year-old boys), they embraced social assimilation, celebrating what they felt were true American holidays like Christmas and Easter. When he turned sixteen, Gil participated in a religious confirmation ceremony at the synagogue but, like the rest of his family, otherwise paid little attention to Jewish rituals.

But the Jewish spirit of social service and
tikkun olam
—the Hebrew phrase meaning “healing the world”—remained an integral part of life for the city’s Jewish community leaders, including Solomon Kraus. In the early decades of the twentieth century, even as assimilation threaded through the social fabric of upper-class German Jewish life, Jews were still Jews. There were Jewish social clubs, Jewish charities, and an abundance of Jewish philanthropy. In 1905, a group of forty-four prominent Philadelphia Jews formed a fraternal organization, which they named Brith Sholom—Hebrew for “Covenant of Peace.” The group pledged itself to providing an array of social services for newly arrived immigrants—primarily poor Jews who had been arriving in increasingly large numbers in the wake of pogroms in Russia and other Eastern European countries. By the time of Brith Sholom’s second convention, which took place in June 1906, Solomon had been chosen to be chairman of the group’s Committee on Charity.

Three years later, his commitment to public service resulted in the establishment of the Philadelphia Jewish Sanatorium for Consumptives—a hospital for patients suffering from tuberculosis. Solomon played a leading role in the project by making the financial arrangements to purchase farmland in Eagleville—a rural area thirty miles west of Philadelphia—that became the site of the hospital. He also offered the farm owner one hundred dollars out of his own pocket as a down payment on the land, which was purchased for a total of $6,500. Barely eight months after Solomon and others began discussing the hospital project, the facility opened its doors to its first four tuberculosis patients. In the years that followed, Solomon played prominent roles in several other Jewish organizations, serving as vice president of the American Jewish Congress, vice president of the Zionist Organization of America, and, in 1927, chairman of the United Palestine Appeal campaign in Philadelphia. By then, he had also been elected as Brith Sholom’s grand master.

As Solomon’s only son—Gil was sandwiched between his older sister, Edna, and his younger sister, Lillian—it was expected that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. Solomon cast a long shadow, and Gil wanted his father’s respect. Gil, in turn, was all Solomon could ask for in a son. Tall, ruggedly handsome, and determinedly athletic, he had sailed through the University of Pennsylvania, completing his undergraduate degree during the waning days of World War I. Along with several other classmates from Penn, Gil enlisted in the army even as the war was ending in the fall of 1918. He underwent a quick round of basic training at Camp Gordon in Georgia, which led to his continued assignment there as a bayonet instructor. His brief military career concluded in December, just weeks after the armistice silenced the guns in Europe and brought an end to the War to End All Wars. After returning home to Philadelphia, Gil, along with three army buddies, enrolled at Penn’s law school and wound up racing through the normal three-year course of studies in two years. Without obtaining a formal diploma, Gil was officially admitted to the bar in October 1921, sworn in by a prominent Philadelphia judge whose son had been one of Gil’s friends from the army.

At the age of twenty-three, he began his legal career in a small Jewish-owned firm, where he spent most of his time handling routine business matters—lease negotiations, small property disputes, simple bankruptcies—for the firm’s most prominent client, Albert Greenfield’s company. It was hardly glamorous or particularly interesting work. “Will you write to Miss Margaret Andrews, threatening foreclosure proceedings, as she has failed to pay her taxes for 1922,” Greenfield’s corporate secretary instructed Gil in one typical transaction. “Give her about a week or ten days to pay it, and if she doesn’t produce the receipted tax bill, I will then send you the papers to commence foreclosure proceedings.”

Patience was never Gil’s strong point, and he quickly grew eager to make his own mark both in the law and in society. Within a few years of starting his career, he formed his own small firm with two other attorneys while continuing to handle legal and business matters for his brother-in-law Greenfield, which guaranteed a steady stream of work. Gil by now was living in an apartment in Philadelphia’s stately Hotel Majestic, located only a short distance from his law office. The Majestic also happened to be just a quick trolley ride away from Baker Bowl and Shibe Park, Philadelphia’s two baseball stadiums that were home to the National League Phillies and the American League Athletics, respectively. Given its location, the Majestic was the preferred hotel for many of baseball’s top stars in the 1920s, including Rogers Hornsby and Babe Ruth. The prestigious address certainly would have appealed to Gil, who proudly relished his own athletic career at Penn.

It was during these early days of Gil’s legal career that he began courting Eleanor Jacobs, the beautiful young daughter—one of six children—of Harris and Rosa Jacobs. Eleanor’s parents had immigrated to the United States from Latvia and settled in New Jersey several years before Eleanor was born, in Philadelphia, in 1903. Precisely how and when Gil and Eleanor first met is not known, but it is unlikely that their families would have been close or even known each other, given the significant disparity in their social standings. Whatever the circumstances of their meeting, however, it is hardly surprising that Gil and Eleanor, despite a six-year age difference, were attracted to each other. A photograph accompanying a newspaper announcement of his appointment as an assistant city attorney in February 1924 revealed a young man with a full head of dark wavy hair and a strong jawline. The handsome lawyer also happened to be witty, intelligent, urbane, and ambitious—in other words, quite a catch. But in Eleanor Jacobs he had met his equal: with her soft doe eyes, porcelain skin, keen sense of fashion, and a charming wit of her own, she immediately enchanted all those around her. She certainly proved enchanting to Gil.

That summer he traveled alone on the SS
Paris
steamship, which sailed from New York City to Le Havre, France. From there, Gil journeyed to Germany and Austria during an extensive European tour that apparently did not interfere with his obligations back home in Philadelphia. He must have done quite a bit of thinking about the petite brunette he had been seeing while he was away. Not long after his return from Europe, he and Eleanor were married in a small ceremony held at the Philadelphia home of Eleanor’s brother Frank. Presiding over the ceremony, which took place on October 9, 1924, was Rabbi William Fineshriber, who had arrived in town only a few weeks earlier to take up his new position as chief rabbi at Keneseth Israel. At the time of the wedding, Eleanor had not yet turned twenty-one, which meant that her father had to sign a legal form—“Consent to the Marriage of a Child or Ward”—that gave permission for his daughter to marry.

Four years later, in July 1928, Gil’s father died suddenly in Atlantic City, where he and his wife had recently taken up residence in an apartment at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Solomon was sixty-two years old and had retired only a few years earlier from his position as vice president of Albert Greenfield’s real estate and finance company. A memorial service, which took place at Keneseth Israel, attracted an overflow crowd of more than three thousand people and was attended by Philadelphia’s mayor, district attorney, and scores of other political, civic, and business leaders. At the time of his death, Solomon was still serving as grand master of Brith Sholom, and he was lauded by many for his years of service and commitment to the organization and its goals. “To work for his people was his great passion,” Rabbi Max Klein, the spiritual leader of the city’s Adath Jeshurun synagogue, wrote in a memorial tribute. “And to help make their dreams come true was the joy of his life.”

Seven months later, Eva Kraus passed away in Philadelphia at the age of fifty-four. In sharp contrast with the publicity that accompanied her husband’s death, Eva’s obituary was limited to a three-paragraph item in the
Jewish Exponent
, one of Philadelphia’s two Jewish newspapers. A private funeral service was held at the home of her daughter Edna. She was buried next to her husband in a Jewish cemetery in Northeast Philadelphia. Gil, barely into his thirties, now found himself heir to the Kraus legacy even as he continued to thrive professionally and socially.