F E O   K A H N
Biography

   Feodore (Feo) Joseph was born on December 15th 1909 in Trier. She and her two sisters Hildegard and Ruth went to the Auguste-Victoria High School in Trier. Their father wanted all his daughters to be able to have a higher education.

   Feodore Joseph studied English and Romance Studies in Cologne, Freiburg and Paris. After graduating in 1934, she became a trainee teacher doing teaching practice at the Jewish grammar school Yavneh in Cologne. Her tutor was the rabbi Dr Siegmund Stein. She was only a few years older than her pupils and very soon became one of the most popular members of the teaching staff. She also gave private tuition in her flat at 29 Moltkestraße. In 1936, the school principal Klibansky took on the young trainee teacher, but warned her not to repudiate the orthodox traditions of the school.

   Feodore Joseph studied English and Romance Studies in Cologne, Freiburg and Paris. After graduating in 1934, she became a trainee teacher doing teaching practice at the Jewish grammar school Yavneh in Cologne. Her tutor was the rabbi Dr Siegmund Stein. She was only a few years older than her pupils and very soon became one of the most popular members of the teaching staff. She also gave private tuition in her flat at 29 Moltkestraße. In 1936, the school principal Klibansky took on the young trainee teacher, but warned her not to repudiate the orthodox traditions of the school.

   Selma (née Forst) and Salomon Joseph, Feodore’s parents, and Hilde, her sister who was still in Germany, were also able to leave for England in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. (Hilde had been married since 1936 to Hans Jacobi, who was the son of a teacher of the Lützowstraße Jewish Municipal ‘Volksschule’; both were lawyers.) Leo and Feo Kahn had a son and a daughter. The Kahns had a longstanding friendship with the artist Ludwig Meidner, who had taught at the Yavneh and had also emigrated to England.

  After 1945, Leo Kahn worked at the Wiener Library in London and at the Imperial War Museum. He published several books and poetry collections by various poets. As a lawyer, he did research for the Nuremberg trials and also for the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. He died in London in November 1990.

   Feodore Kahn visited Cologne several times, invited by Mr and Mrs Corbach. In 1990 she came to the opening of the exhibition ‘The Yavneh in Cologne’. Together with her sister Ruth Graupner, she visited their native city of Trier for the last time in 2007.

   The preparations for Mrs Kahn’s hundredth birthday in December 2009 gave a significant impetus to the project ‘The Kindertransport from North Rhine-Westphalia’. Lore Robinson, who had been a pupil at the Yavneh, was a guest at the Yavneh Learning and Memorial Centre in the summer of 2009 and she made an urgent suggestion to the staff members at the Centre that they should visit her former teacher, Feodore Kahn. Lore Robinson explained that in December Mrs Kahn would be 100 years old and there would certainly be a gathering at her birthday of many former pupils of the Yavneh, almost all of whom were rescued by the Kindertransport and brought to Great Britain.

   In the spring of 2010, the research project called ‘The Kindertransport from North Rhine-Westphalia’ actually took off with a first visit to London. Mrs Kahn was in the best of health and was able to welcome us to her house in London where Lore Robinson had prepared the traditional English 5 o’clock tea. The lively and humorous conversations between teacher and pupil and the many exchanges about the story of the Kindertransports from Cologne and other cities all contributed in many ways to a most memorable afternoon. Until her death Feodore Kahn lived in her house in London, staying in close contact with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She died on 13th October 2015 at the age of 105.
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