The Steinfeld Family

The history of the Steinfeld family begins with a constraint that became a heritage. Following the edict of Joseph II (1787) for the Habsburg territories, and later Prussian and Russian regulations of the early 19th century, Jews were required to choose or be assigned a hereditary surname. Many adopted names composed of elements drawn from nature — Stein (stone), Berg (mountain), Blum (flower), Feld (field). Steinfeld belongs to this family of creations. Reference dictionaries clearly distinguish the German locative origin — a habitational name derived from villages called Steinfeld, from Old German stein "stone" and feld "open countryside" — from the Ashkenazic Jewish usage, where the name was adopted as an ornamental compound of Stein "stone" and Feld "field" [Dictionaries of Eastern European and Judeo-German Jewish surnames, Beider-Menk, Avotaynu].

This distinction is not without significance. It speaks to something of the Jewish condition in diaspora: a people without land receives, or gives itself, names of land — fields, mountains, valleys, forests — as if to inscribe in language a belonging that the law denied them. To name one's family "field of stones" is also, without intending it, to speak of the hardness of the soil one cultivates and the tenacity required to make anything grow there. The same reference works attest to the presence of the Germanic root of the name, recorded in the great dictionary of Judeo-German surnames, which catalogues more than thirteen thousand names originating from the area of pre-1914 Germany [A Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames, Menk, Avotaynu]. From this German-speaking heartland, the name spread eastward — through Bohemia, Galicia, the Kingdom of Poland, and the Russian Empire — carried by Jewish migrations, such that Steinfeld families are found in Vienna and Frankfurt as well as in eastern Galicia.

To follow the name Steinfeld is to follow the very map of Ashkenaz. Works in onomastic lexicography situate the surname within two major documentary ensembles: on one hand, the Judeo-German sphere, where names were often adopted as early as the late eighteenth century in the German-speaking states; on the other, the sphere of Eastern Europe — the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland, Austrian Galicia — recorded in the separate registers established for each of these provinces [Dictionnaires des patronymes juifs d'Europe de l'Est, Beider, Avotaynu 2008-1996-2004].

From this dispersion arises a community of experience rather than a single lineage. The Steinfelds of Vienna, Bratislava, Galicia, or Bohemia do not necessarily descend from a common ancestor; they share a name, and with it a shared history made of mobility, adaptation, and faithfulness. It is this faithfulness — to Judaism, to study, to community — that gives the name its moral coherence beyond the absence of genealogical coherence. In the Ashkenazi world before 1939, a Steinfeld might be a merchant in Vienna, a scholar in a small Galician town, a craftsman in Frankfurt; all belonged to that dense communal fabric — the kehillot — where charity (tzedakah) and mutual aid (gemilout hassadim) were not optional virtues but the very backbone of collective life. We make no claim to connect these households through documents; we observe that they belong to one and the same world — the very world that the next generation would be called upon to defend at the peril of their lives.

It is in Vienna, in the months of dread that followed the Anschluss of March 1938, that the name Steinfeld inscribed itself most brilliantly in the history of Jewish rescue. Julius Steinfeld, a community leader in orthodox Vienna, was among those who made their position an instrument of aid. After the annexation of Austria by the Reich, Steinfeld worked to help Jews emigrate from Austria, negotiating — at great personal risk — with Adolf Eichmann to obtain exit visas for Jews seeking to flee Nazi Austria [Julius Steinfeld, Wikipedia]. These courageous interventions on behalf of his coreligionists earned him imprisonment by Eichmann himself.

Julius Steinfeld's actions did not remain isolated. In the autumn of 1938, in the wake of Kristallnacht, Julius Steinfeld, a community leader in Austria, called upon Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, imploring him to organize a transport of children to England for the orthodox Jewish youth of Vienna [Solomon Schonfeld, Wikipedia]. From this appeal was born a part of the Kindertransporte that snatched hundreds of Jewish children from the machinery of death.

Here, the history of this lineage touches the very heart of Israel's collective Memory. To save a life, the Talmud teaches, is to save an entire world; and the duty of redeeming captives (pidyon shevouyim) was held by the sages to be one of the highest forms of charity. By negotiating visas with the executioner himself, by organizing the departure of children he might never see again, Julius Steinfeld embodied this cardinal virtue — pidyon shevouyim and gemilout hassadim carried to the point of sacrificing his own freedom. That the name "field of stones" should be associated with such courage is not without a piercing gravity: in the hardest field of Jewish History, a Steinfeld made life rise.

Alongside the savior, the name Steinfeld also bears the figure of the master. The transmission of Talmudic knowledge — that unbroken chain from Sinai which tradition calls shalshelet ha-kabbalah — finds among contemporary bearers of the name a concrete relay. Thus Rabbi Berach Steinfeld, of whom it may be said, on the basis of his own publications, that he was for twenty-four years maggid shiur — a teacher of Talmudic courses — in various synagogues, engaged in kashrus certification and teaching in institutions [Rabbi Berach Steinfeld, OU Torah]. This example, modest in comparison to the dramas of the twentieth century, nonetheless conveys the essential: Judaism perpetuates itself less through heroes than through patient teachers, those who, week after week, open the Talmud before a circle of students.

This vocation of transmission refers back to one of the most enduring virtues of the Memory of Israel: talmud Torah ke-neged koulam, "the study of the Torah is equivalent to all the commandments." The kashrus overseen by such a master is not merely a ritual matter; it is a pedagogy of daily life, a way of inscribing holiness into the humblest of gestures — that of eating. By watching over the table of the faithful as well as over their study, a Rabbi Steinfeld extends this concern for Jewish Law (halakha) lived not as constraint but as a discipline of attentiveness to others and to the world. One measures here how fully a single surname can unite, a century apart, the negotiator of visas and the dispenser of lessons: two faces of the same faithfulness.

The Shoah struck the Steinfelds as it struck all of Ashkenazic Jewry. The German-speaking and Eastern European world from which the name had emerged — those kehillot of Vienna, Galicia, and Bohemia evoked above — was annihilated within a few years. Many bearers of the name were murdered; others, like the children saved through the action of Julius Steinfeld, survived and rebuilt families in England, the United States, and the Land of Israel. Here, archive and memory answer each other without quite overlapping: we know, from historical sources, the scale of the disaster and the Viennese rescue effort; we cannot, in the absence of a continuous genealogical register, reconstruct every individual fate. This is why this chapter belongs to the intersection — where established fact (the rescue, the destruction) meets family tradition and transmitted memory, without either being able to fully prove the other.

From this ordeal, the name emerged scattered but alive. The Steinfelds of today — rabbis, teachers, merchants, active members of their communities — bear witness to this continuity. The name "field of stones" then takes on a new resonance: the stone, in Jewish tradition, is what remains when everything else has been swept away — the stone of the Temple, the tombstone (matzevah) that preserves the memory of the dead. Studies in medieval epigraphy remind us how much the engraved stone served, for Jewish communities, as the very medium of memory, sometimes the sole remnant of an effaced presence [Jewish Tombstones and Epigraphy in Medieval Castile, Cantera Burgos & Millás Vallicrosa, 1956]. That the name Steinfeld carries within it this substance — stone — is not without significance: it is, in its way, a living memorial, a field where the stones of remembrance have never ceased to be raised.

From the edict that imposed the name to the night that threatened to erase it, the Steinfeld lineage traces an exemplary trajectory of the Ashkenazi experience: a name of land given to a landless people, scattered from the Rhine to Galicia, tested by catastrophe, and yet sustained. What this lineage will have expressed, among all its virtues, most fully, History has written in clear letters: the courage of rescue and the care for others. In the gesture of Julius Steinfeld — negotiating with Eichmann, risking imprisonment, calling for help to snatch children from death — is condensed the highest of the virtues that Jewish tradition has carried across the centuries: pidyon shevouyim, the redemption of captives, and pikkuah nefesh, the saving of lives, held by the sages to be superior to nearly every other commandment.

To this virtue of courage responds, in quieter counterpoint, that of transmission — the patient study of the Law, fidelity to halakha, the care to teach. Together, they form the double inheritance of a name: the stone that shelters and the field one cultivates. Where the archive falls silent, the Memory of Israel continues to speak, and the "field of stones" remains what it has always been — a harsh yet fertile place, where, against all expectation, life rises again.