Heinz Steinitz
Heinz Steinitz was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) on April 26, 1909, to Walter Steinitz (1882-1963), a cardiologist and zoologist, and Marta Schindler Steinitz (1885-1926). He grew up in Breslau and was greatly inspired by his father to study science and to be an active Zionist. He studied medicine from 1927-1933 in the universities of Breslau, Freiburg and Berlin. Although he passed the Medical Board examination in 1933, and would have started work in a hospital in Berlin and in the Jewish hospital in Breslau, he was prohibited from practicing by the Nazi regime which came to power that same year. Together with his wife Ruth Aber Steinitz (1907-1995), a medical student as well, he left Germany in 1933 and immigrated to Palestine.
Walter Steinitz
The rise at the beginning of 1933 of the Nazi regime brought an end to both his medical and academic career. He immediately recognized there was no future for a reasonable life as a Jew in Germany. Consequently, he emigrated that same year, together with his wife Alma, to Palestine. He joined a group of Jewish German-born settlers who together founded in 1933 Ramot HaShavim, a village organized as an agricultural commune. For five years (1933-1938) he was member of the leading committee of the village. In 1939 he chaired the committee for less than a year. He was a highly educated person, a polymath with wide interests in the fields of life sciences, geology, philosophy and music. With his skills and experience as teacher, he led courses and gave lectures in the village on biological and agricultural topics relevant to farmers, and contributed to the cultural life of the village. Until his death in 1963, he made his living in Ramot HaShavim from a chicken farm, where he attempted to improve egg production by poultry breeding. After his death in Bad Nauheim, Germany, he was buried in Ramot HaShavim.