Adolf “Dolf” Reichenbach

Dolf was born in Halberstadt in 1914. Nineteen days before his twenty-fourth birthday, he wrote from St. Moritz, urging his mother to leave Germany and believe that the family could live again with dignity.

In oral history recorded on 5 August 2026, his daughter Susan Reichenbach Heyman remembered that a non-Jewish friend warned him by telephone, asking whether Dolf was “planning to ski in Switzerland this weekend.” Dolf understood the warning and left that afternoon; the family remembers that authorities came looking for him a day or two later, but neither the friend’s identity nor the exact message has been documented, and no contemporary record of the call or later search has been found.

Ruth and Albert Rothschild were already in the United States before Dolf and Margarete’s American record trail was complete. A family account recalls that a friend of Albert’s, known only as Max, wrote a letter in support of Dolf’s move.

Passenger lists place Dolf and Margarete in New York in 1937 and again in May 1938. Dolf filed his first papers for citizenship in Massachusetts that September. He registered in Boston on 6 December 1940, giving his home as 3 Netherlands Road in Brookline and his employer as F & M Skirt Co. Brookline’s street lists keep Adolf and Margarete at 3 Netherlands Road through 1 January 1941, then place them together at 119 Park Street in 1942 and 1943. On 1 January 1944 Margarete was still at 119 Park Street, but Adolf was absent. Susan Ulmer never appears in those lists. The records therefore narrow the marriage window to after 1 January 1943 and by the family-held certificate of 15 May 1944. On that date the United States District Court in Boston admitted Dolf as a citizen; the certificate preserves his photograph and signature and gives his address as 119 Park Street in Brookline.

Susan remembers that Dolf began American life packing boxes at a department store called Raymond’s and worked his way up. The 1964 Boston directory names Dolph Reichenbach as president of Banner Sportswear Inc., a ladies’ sportswear business at 116 Harrison Avenue, eighth floor. His funeral eulogy says that his work at Banner included clothing design, joining a new American life to the trade in which his family had worked for generations. It also remembers his love of plants, music, food, travel, bridge, and argument: “He was a maven.”

A public-record summary associates Dolf with Bow Road in Newton and with Brookline and Canton, Massachusetts. The underlying residence records have not yet been identified, so these locations remain possible rather than established addresses.

He married Susan “Subie” Ulmer, who came from the Cleveland household of Jacob Morton “Yank” Ulmer, treasurer of S. Ulmer & Sons. They raised two children, and Dolf carried Halberstadt with him. Their son Paul J. Reichenbach transformed the inherited meaning of survival into forty-four years of building Reform Jewish camps, Israel programs and youth education. The descendants’ work in Jewish camping and education, congregational life, support for Israel and Zionism, and the preservation of memory belongs to the family story’s continuity, not merely its epilogue.