Hermine Lebenhart née Porges
Sub-clan AP  

 

What is a Sub-clan?

 

Sub-clan AP — matriarchal anchor: Hermine Lebenhart née Porges, proprietress of the "Herma Porges" fashion salon (d. St. Gilgen, Salzkammergut, suddenly on Tuesday 28 July 1936).

Funeral Sunday 2 August 1936 at 11 a.m. at the Jewish Cemetery in Strašnice. (Day-of-week check: 28 July 1936 = Tuesday ✓; 2 August 1936 = Sunday ✓.)

"Modesalon Herma Porges" — first documented Porges-owned business

Hermine is uniquely identified as "Inhaberin des Modesalons Herma Porges" ("proprietress of the Herma Porges fashion salon") — making her the first documented Porges-affiliated commercial business owner in the obituary corpus.

The "Herma Porges" Modesalon would have been:

  • A women's haute-couture / made-to-measure tailoring business
  • Operating under the trade name "Herma Porges" (using the diminutive Herma of Hermine as the brand identity)
  • Most plausibly Prague- or Vienna-based (her residence was Prague but Salzkammergut summer residency suggests possible Vienna anchoring)

Inter-war Modesalons were significant commercial-cultural institutions in the Vienna-Prague Habsburg-successor world, often run by women entrepreneurs and particularly by Jewish women, providing both an upper-bourgeois clientele service and a respected female professional identity. Hermine Lebenhart's salon places her in this select inter-war cohort, opening a previously-undocumented "luxury commerce / fashion" sector to the Porges affinity profile.

Death at St. Gilgen — Salzkammergut Alpine resort

St. Gilgen is a famous Austrian Alpine resort town on the Wolfgangsee in Salzburg state, ~35 km east of Salzburg city. Hermine's "sudden" death at a summer resort suggests cardiovascular event or stroke during vacation — a typical inter-war upper-bourgeois pattern of summer-residence mortality.

Family

Husband: Emil Lebenhart (alive 1936, signs the obituary as widower "in the name of all bereaved"). The minimalist faire-part requesting that "condolence visits be foregone" follows a discretion convention often associated with the Reform-Jewish or assimilationist Bohemian-Jewish bourgeoisie of the inter-war period — see also Anna Borchardt 1928 (Sub-clan T, explicit Reform-Jewish identification).

Holocaust trajectory

Hermine's death in 1936 spared her the Anschluss-era persecution. Her husband Emil Lebenhart (alive 1936) would have been at extreme Anschluss-era risk after March 1938 if Vienna-resident, or Protectorate-era risk after March 1939 if Prague-resident.

  • Search holocaust.cz, DÖW, and Yad Vashem for Lebenhart Vienna or Prague transports 1938-1944
  • The "Herma Porges" Modesalon would have been "aryanised" under Nazi commercial laws after 1938; business records may survive in Austrian or Czech state archives

 

Source: obituaries published in Prager Tagblatt (Prague, 1878–1938) and Neue Freie Presse (Vienna, 1864–1939).