Ettie Steinberg


Ettie Steinberg was one of only a few Jewish Irish persons killed in the Holocaust in the second World War.
Esther Steinberg was born to a Czechoslovakian couple, Aaron Hirsh Steinberg and Bertha Roth, on 11 January 1914. Her family included six siblings and lived at 28 Raymond Terrace, near the South Circular Road in Dublin. They were educated in St Catherine's School in Donore Avenue.
Steinberg worked as a seamstress in Dublin where she met and married Belgian Vogtjeck Gluck in Greenville Hall synagogue in Dublin on 22 July 1937. The couple returned to his home in Antwerp. However the rising tensions of the Nazi actions meant they moved to be further away, and Leon, their son, was born in Paris. They continued to flee the approaching Germans and eventually succeeded in gaining visas to travel to Northern Ireland, arranged by the Steinberg family in Dublin. However the papers arrived a day too late. The family were rounded up and put on a train to Auschwitz where Steinberg, her husband and her son died.
Clearly aware of what the danger was, Steinberg wrote a postcard to her family and threw it from the train. It read “Uncle Lechem, we did not find, but we found Uncle Tisha B'Av” which meant “we did not find bread, but we found destruction”. A stranger found the postcard and posted it. They arrived on 4 September 1942 and, it is believed, were immediately executed.
A memorial to her is at a secondary school in Malahide, Co Dublin, as well as at the Irish Jewish Museum in Portobello, Dublin.