Subie grew up in Cleveland, earned a Bachelor of Science at Simmons in 1943 and built a family life with Dolf in Massachusetts.
Her memory of the telephone warning is how this archive knows Dolf left that afternoon.DolfLetterFamily
Susan Berne Ulmer was born on 3 April 1921 in Cleveland. The Simmons registers give her home as 2246 St. James Parkway in Cleveland Heights, the same street named in her mother’s 1958 notice. She attended Cleveland Heights High. A family studio portrait shows her at about seventeen or eighteen.
In 1939 she left Cleveland Heights for Simmons College in Boston and spent her freshman year at 21 Francis Street in Brookline. The college catalog writes that house as C.H. 21. In 1940–41 she was registered in General Science as a sophomore; as a junior and senior she was in the School of Preprofessional Studies. Simmons conferred her Bachelor of Science in 1943 from that school, not from the School of Science.
The 1943 yearbook already calls her Subie. She belonged to the Ellen Richards Club in her first two years and to the Art Guild, serving as secretary-treasurer in her second year. Her classmates voted her among the wittiest. Preprofessional Studies offered four programs, but the surviving record does not name which one she followed. No independent record has established professional work after graduation; Newton directories list her as Adolf’s wife.
Subie and Adolf “Dolf” Reichenbach were married by 15 May 1944, when his naturalization certificate described him as married. That is the date of Dolf’s naturalization, not a documented wedding date. Newton directories place them together at 26 Bow Road by 1949 and through at least 1963, then at 144 Fuller Street in West Newton in the later 1960s.
Subie and Dolf raised two children, Paul J. Reichenbach and Susan Reichenbach Heyman. Family photographs preserve the couple together later in life, and their descendants remember the home they made as the place where the story of Halberstadt, escape and rebuilding passed to the next generation.
Subie died on 6 June 2018. Her obituary identifies her as Dolf’s widow and names their descendants. A secondary cemetery index places Susan and Dolf at Temple Israel Cemetery in Wakefield, Massachusetts; an interment card or marker photograph would provide stronger burial documentation.
Her grandfather — Solomon Ulmer (1856–1937)
Solomon Ulmer was born in Hungary in 1856. In 1924 his son stood in Pétervására’s market square and wrote on the postcard, “MY FATHERS BIRTH PLACE.” As a teenager Solomon came through New York with almost nothing. The obituary has him at Castle Garden with twenty-four cents, then walking a 120-pound pack up the Ashtabula line to the Shakers and the Geauga farms. He kept a store in Shreve, Ohio, in the 1880s, married Laura Glueck in Cleveland in 1883, and turned a mortgage desk into S. Ulmer & Sons. “The Best Security on Earth is Earth,” the house said. In 1906 he owned Cleveland’s first large reinforced-concrete hotel, on Euclid, after Mayor Tom L. Johnson walked the permit through. In 1919 the firm bought the American Trust Building on Public Square and put Ulmer on the cornice.
He kept one foot in Hungary and one in Cleveland Jewish life. The Royal Hungarian consul wrote him on the firm’s thirty-first year. He sat with Abba Hillel Silver when the Board of Jewish Education was organized, turned a thousand-dollar Temple on the Heights bond back to the congregation, and spoke for Palestine mortgage bonds in 1926. That same year a brother, Soma, still kept a shop in Pétervására with the family name over the door. Soma’s wife, Róza Edelmann, is named on that town’s 1944 victim list. Solomon died in Cleveland Heights on 20 July 1937.
Her father — Jacob Morton “Yank” Ulmer (1886–1972)
Yank was born in Shreve on 19 November 1886, while the store was still Solomon’s. Central High, class of 1904. Western Reserve law, 1908. That fall Cleveland papers announced a new firm: Jacob M. Ulmer and Joseph M. Bernstein, Williamson Building. Bernstein was Fan’s brother. He later spelled it Berne. Yank married Fannie Bernstein. Their daughters were Janet, born 1916, and Susan, already Subie at Simmons, born 1921.
He was treasurer of S. Ulmer & Sons when five national mortgage houses signed Franklin Roosevelt’s construction-council standards in 1926. After cataracts, the work that lasted was eyes. In spring 1949 Mary Lasker remembered that “Mr. Ulmer of Ohio” came to see her about blindness in the United States. She had not thought about it. She then asked Congressman Biemiller to introduce a bill and Senator Murray to fold it into the omnibus act. That is how the word “blindness” entered the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness. Yank was secretary of the National Foundation for Eye Research, sat on the first NINDB council, and in 1957 the Jewish Publication Society thanked him for helping fund a new English Bible. He gave his files to the National Library of Medicine in 1969. He died in Cleveland on 2 November 1972.
Family and household
People connected to this life
- Adolf “Dolf” Reichenbach · husband
- Paul J. Reichenbach · son
- Susan Reichenbach Heyman · daughter
- Jacob Morton “Yank” Ulmer · father
- Fan Berne Ulmer · mother
- Solomon Ulmer · grandfather
- Janet L. Ulmer · sister · 1916–1999
Sources
Sources
- Family-held portraits RB-PHO-0310, RB-PHO-0311 and RB-PHO-0312
- Microcosm 1943, Simmons College, printed pp. 98 and 107
- Simmons College catalogs, 1939–44
- Newton, Massachusetts directories, 1949–1968
- Susan Ulmer Reichenbach obituary
- Reichenbach family genealogy and testimony
- PeopleLegacy cemetery index, treated as an unverified aggregation
- Solomon Ohio death cert 42876
- 1937 PD obit
- Yank 1971 bio
- 1924 album captions (awaiting scans — no JPEGs)
- 1906 concrete-hotel clip
- 1926 Louis Alexy letter
- 1929 Temple bond
- 1924 BJE minutes
- AJYB 40:393
- 1908 “A New Law Firm” (the clip says Bernstein, not Berne)
- Mary Lasker in Rowland, NINDS at 50, quoting 1965 Columbia oral history
- NLM MS C 225 gift 1969
- JPS certificate 15 Jul 1957
- hevesholokauszt Pétervására list
What remains uncertain
The surviving catalogs do not identify which of the four Preprofessional Studies programs Subie followed. Her civil marriage record has not been found. The public cemetery listing remains a secondary aggregation; the civil death certificate and an original cemetery record are not yet in the collection.