Ber Ulmo

Rabbi Ber Ulmo (Hebrew: בער בן יונה אלמו, Bernhard Ber Ullmann, 1751 in Pfersee *, † March 21, 1837 ibid ) was the son of Jonas Ulmo and from 1781 until his death in 1837 his successor as Chairman of the Jewish community Pfersee ( near Augsburg ) and also also edger, a general practitioner and exchange dealer in Augsburg.

From 1770 he studied in Prague, among others in the Talmud school of Ezekiel Landau. His first marriage with the daughter of the doctor Feigele Jonas Jeitteles, with whom he studied medicine in Prague, remained childless. His illegitimate daughter Chava Leah was the mother of Ferdinand Wertheimer ( 1817-1883 ). From his second marriage to Sophie († 1832), daughter of Rabbi Moses Leib Sulzbacher six more children were born.

On Saturday evening before Yom Kippur in 1803 Ber Ulmo was having falsified in the synagogue of Pfersee on charges Wiener Bancozettel arrested. With him dozens of other members of Jewish communities were arrested at many other locations in Swabia as Kriegshaber or Ichenhausen the same time. Although the allegations were false and untrue, came the detainees who were imprisoned in Günzburg and Donauwörth under " Kafkaesque " conditions, until the spring of 1804 after 216 days again. In the time of Ulmo detention the famous " Pferseer handwriting " of the Babylonian Talmud was ( Cod Heb. 95) lost in Pfersee, now owned by the Bavarian State Library is located and in Munich as the oldest, almost completely preserved Talmud manuscript in the world applies.

About his arrest and detention conditions Ber Ulmo wrote a handwritten Hebrew report, which was translated into English in 1928 by his great-grandson Carl Jonas Ulmann New York and appeared as a small privately printed. A German translation by the handwriting of the original text was published in 2012.

Ber Ulmo died in 1837 on the evening of Purim festival and was buried in the Jewish cemetery, where generations of his ancestors were already buried.

Among his other descendants include the photographer Doris Ulmann and Richard Willstätter, in 1915 received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.