Hans Grüneberg, 26 May 1907 - 23 October 1982

Hans Grüneberg was the only child of Dr med. Levi Grüneberg (1879-1942) and Else née Steinberg (1880-1945). The parents and son were all born in Elberfeld, Germany, which was later fused with its twin city Bremen and renamed Wuppertal. His father was a general practitioner from 1906 to 1935, when ill health due to Parkinsonism and the menacing Nazi political situation led to the parents’ migrating to Palestine as it then was. Hans had anticipated them by migrating to England in 1933. Hans’s more distant ancestors came from Westphalia in western Germany, where they can be traced back to the 18th century. At that time and until the middle of the 19th century they lived, as did the whole of the Jewish population, in small villages where they followed the rural occupations open to Jews before the universal emancipation in Germany in 1869. Hans’s paternal grand father was born and lived the whole of his life in the village of Hachen in Kreis Arnsberg; his maternal grand father lived in the nearby village of Reiste. Both families independently moved to Elberfeld in 1879. Their children received secondary education, and his father was the first member of the family to go to a university (Bonn).