Sammy Gronemann

Sammy Gronemann was born in 1875 in Brodnica

Gronemann was born in 1875 in Strasburg, West Prussia, today Brodnica in Poland. His father, Selig Gronemann, became chief rabbi of Hanover, and the family moved there in 1886. In 1902 he married Sonja Gottesmann, who died in an accident in Tel Aviv in 1936.

He finished school in Hanover in 1894 and then studied Talmud in Halberstadt. In 1895 he entered the Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin but left to study philosophy and law at the University of Berlin.

He worked as a public prosecutor in Hanover from 1900 and opened his own law practice in Berlin in 1907. He was legal counsel of a German writers' association from 1909 to 1933 and defended Ahad Ha'am in a 1923 case. In the Zionist movement he chaired its Court of Honour from 1911 and was chief judge of the Zionist Congress Court from 1921 to 1947.

He wrote for the satirical Zionist magazine Der Schlemiel and published the satirical novel Tohuwabohu in 1920. He left Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933 and moved to Tel Aviv in 1936. There he wrote plays for the Hebrew stage, many translated by Nathan Alterman, and he died in Tel Aviv in 1952.