Dr. Nechuma (Natalie) Friedländer (1888–1942)

1st cousin 2X removed. Dermatologist, Holocaust Victim

Dr. Nechuma Friedländer, also known as Natalie, was born on 18 July 1888 in Boryslaw, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now located in Lviv Oblast, Ukraine. She was the daughter of Amalia Mamcze Rothenberg and Berl Joel (Dov) Friedländer, a Jewish couple who raised a large family rooted in Galician Jewish tradition. Her mother, Amalia, came from the extended Rothenberg line - a family marked by deep ties to Jewish religious life, learning, and resilience. Her father, Berl Joel, was 32 at the time of her birth; Amalia was 28.

Nechuma grew up in a vibrant, multilingual, and multicultural environment, likely speaking Yiddish at home, German in her studies, and Polish in public life. She would have come of age during a period of social transformation and growing antisemitism in Galicia, but she pursued a professional path rarely accessible to women - let alone Jewish women, at the turn of the century.

Against these odds, Nechuma became a medical doctor, specializing in dermatology. Her attainment of a doctoral degree signals both her academic excellence and her family's commitment to education. She lived and worked in Drohobycz (modern-day Drohobych, Ukraine), a town known for its oil industry, Jewish cultural life, and interethnic tensions that worsened during the 1930s.

Nechuma never married and had no known children. She shared her life with her siblings, including Bibcia Albina (b. 1894), Matilda (b. 1894), and Pepa (b. 1902), who were also born in Drohobycz. All three sisters are believed to have perished in the Holocaust.

By 1942, as Nazi occupation tightened its grip on Drohobycz, Nechuma was recorded as living at Strypoko 12, unmarried and still practicing as a dermatologist. She was 54 years old. Medical documentation and wartime lists indicate she remained in the city during the height of Jewish persecution. Drohobycz was part of the Lwów District of the General Government, where mass deportations, executions, and the liquidation of ghettos formed part of the genocidal policies of the Third Reich.

Nechuma, like countless others, vanished into the abyss of the Shoah. Her name survives on a list of persecuted persons, preserved through the work of archives and remembrance institutions. Her life - as a physician, a daughter, and a woman who defied the constraints of her time - ended in silence, yet her memory lives on in the records, in family history, and in this act of remembrance.