Stumbling stone for Edith Goldschmidt-Weil, née Weil

Edith Goldschmidt-Weil, born on September 4, 1873 in Stuttgart, came to Offenbach in 1893 after her marriage on March 2, 1893 to the Jewish Offenbach factory owner Adolf Hermann Goldschmidt. The marriage remained childless.

Together with his brothers, the husband ran the trimmings factory (decorative textiles) founded by his father Salomon Goldschmidt at Frankfurter Strasse 80, a medium-sized business. The business ran into financial difficulties in the mid-1920s and closed in 1930.

Although Mrs. Goldschmidt-Weil was not a founding member of the Association of Progressive Women in Offenbach in 1906, initially called "Frauenwohl", she was a member from the very beginning. In 1910, she was a member of the association's board and became its first chairwoman in 1912. Her issues included the participation of women in juvenile court assistance, as probation officers and in taking on guardianships. These goals were achieved in the 1920s.

During the First World War, like all other "Frauenwohl" members, she was active in the numerous war relief facilities.
After the local branch of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (General German Women's Association) was re-established in around 1925, as well as in the association of all Offenbach women's clubs from 1912, Edith Goldschmidt-Weil was active in the association's management. From the mid-1920s onwards, she organized lectures and provided advice on school, education and career issues, as well as motivating women to get involved in social and local politics on a voluntary basis.

In 1918, she joined the local executive of the liberal German Democratic Party. However, she did not run for political office, presumably due to the state of health of her husband, who died in 1921, and the economic problems of the family business caused by the war. However, she was appointed to municipal commissions for the girls' further education school and the utilities and hospital deputation, among others, and took on these tasks until 1933.

After the NSDAP came to power, the non-partisan and pacifist General German Women's Association was one of the unpopular organizations. The local group in Offenbach was dissolved.

Edith Goldschmidt-Weil lost her duties as a result of the new appointments to honorary positions in the city - she was an emancipated woman with a politically liberal attitude and was also Jewish.

As the community of heirs sold the property at Frankfurter Strasse 80 in 1938 in order to finance Goldschmidt-Weil's Offenbach relatives' emigration, she moved her residence to Stuttgart.

From there she was deported to Theresienstadt on August 22, 1942 and died in the ghetto or concentration camp on September 13, 1942.

It was not until December 1945 that an obituary for her was published in the New York "Aufbau" by her relatives living in exile in England, Argentina and India.