Rosalie Westreich was born in Poland in 1908. When she was six month old the family moved to Frankfurt a.M., where her father, Chaim Westreich, opened a bicycle business. She went to school at the Philanthropin till the 10th grade and worked later as a secretary and stenotypist in Frankfurt. After 1933 she changed jobs frequently and emigrated to Paris in 1937, where she lived with her brother and his wife and worked as a nanny.
A few months later, she accepted a job as a secretary and translator with the Joint Distribution Committee and worked for them until the German invasion. She escaped to Bordeaux and made her way to England. In 1939 she emigrated to the United States of America. All family members survived by emigrating to the USA.
In the States, Rosalie Westreich kept working for the committee and was sent back to Europe in 1945, where she worked at the head office in Munich with displaced persons until 1949. In 1954 she was sent to Teheran/Iran by her employer, the Joint Distribution Committee, to observe and help the progress of Jewish Communities in Iran. She died in 2001.
From the guide to the Rosalie Westreich Collection, (Leo Baeck Institute Archives)
