Lina Pollack, née Prausnitz (c. 1836 – 1864)

Lina Pollack, née Prausnitz, was the first wife of the Görlitz merchant and later banker Simon Pollack (1814–1885). She belonged to one of the city’s established Jewish families and lived during a period of growing prosperity and civic participation among Görlitz’s Jewish bourgeoisie.

Lina married Simon Pollack in the early 1860s and died on 11 February 1864, at the age of only twenty-eight. Her premature death, recorded in the Görlitz civil registers, marked an early tragedy in a family that would later become emblematic of the city’s Jewish professional class.

Her grave in the Jewish Cemetery of Görlitz is among its most remarkable surviving monuments. The ornately carved butterfly on her tombstone — a rare nineteenth-century symbol of the soul’s transformation and resurrection — has long drawn the attention of visitors. For generations, it has been described as one of the cemetery’s most moving memorials, a quiet emblem of youth, fragility, and enduring beauty preserved in stone.

© Lauren Leiderman 2025