Sophie Harmelin

Sophie Harmelin was born on October 20, 1870, as Sara Garfunkel in Brody (Galicia, present-day Poland and Ukraine).

Her future husband, Moritz Harmelin, belonged to one of the oldest and most active Jewish tobacco-trading dynasties on Leipzig’s Brühl. That is why information about Sophie Harmelin’s life is also available.

As early as 1818, Jacob Harmelin was among the first Jewish fair brokers to be licensed in Leipzig. In 1830, his son, Marcus Harmelin, founded the first Jewish tobacco shop in Leipzig. Moritz Harmelin (b. 1868) established the family business as Europe’s leading supplier of Russian bristles. In 1895, Sophie’s first son Max was born; her son Wilhelm followed in 1900. In the mid-1920s, Wilhelm Harmelin earned his doctorate in law (Dr. jur.). Her husband, Moritz Harmelin, died in 1925. Wilhelm lived with his widowed mother at 2 Nordplatz and made a name for himself as a lawyer. Max continued to run the family business on his own after his father’s death.

In 1939, the sons were able to emigrate to England. The nearly 110-year-old family business was liquidated shortly thereafter.

In September 1942, Sophie Harmelin was deported from one of the so-called “Jew houses” at 15 Nordstraße to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and ghetto. She survived the ghetto as well as the typhus epidemic which had broken out there shortly before the end of the war in April 1945. At the age of 79, she died on April 22, 1949, as a result of years of persecution in Leipzig. Her urn was buried in the Harmelin family grave at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Leipzig.

After World War II, her two sons tried to establish a new business in London, but it failed. In London, Wilhelm Harmelin became the chronicler of the family business and of Jewish tobacco trade in Leipzig.