Richard Weissenstein's residential house with a cardboard and paper factory

   
In 1909, Arthur Corazza designed a residential building with an adjacent production area for the cardboard and paper factory. The building permit was received on 9 July 1909. The cardboard factory was moved to Jihlava from Smrčná near Jihlava, where the Jewish entrepreneur Alois Neumann had founded the company in 1893 for the needs of his local glassworks and ran a small cardboard manufacturing business in rented rooms at no. 11"At Abraham's". In 1897, he employed 20 workers, with Richard Weissenstein as the leader. It was Weissenstein who later commissioned the architect Corazza to design a new building in Jihlava. In order to increase the production capacity, the company started to build its own workshops and later moved its production to Jihlava. The reason for the move was an effort to bring production closer to Jihlava customers and rail transport. On 1 January 1910, Weissenstein officially took over the business from Neumann.

At the time when the plans were drawn up, the Weissenstein family was already living at Srázná no. 6 and 8. Richard Weissenstein (28 May 1876 Fryšava pod Žákovou horou – 20 January 1958 Herzliya, Israel) with his wife Emma (née. Pollak, 21 November 1879 Jihlava – 22 November 1943 Terezín) had two daughters, Helena (27 November 1903 Jihlava – 15 January 2005) and Berta (3 March 1905 Jihlava – 1977) and sons Theodor (9 January 1907 Jihlava – 28 September 1944 transport to Auschwitz) and Rudolf (17 February 1910 Jihlava – 20 October 1992). From 1912, Alois Neumann and his family also lived in Srázná Street, at no. 10. He commissioned Corazza to design a glassworks and wooden goods factory on the same street in 1912. Neumann’s new company specialised in dining and smoking tables, perfume bottles, and other small glassware. The buildings are no longer standing today, but until recently, they were part of the premises at Srázná Street no. 40/167.

A low manufacturing building with a pent roof and window openings facing the plot existed on the south edge of the cardboard factory site. The building contained an external toilet where Weissenstein had electricity installed in 1908. The architect Corazza created a central courtyard open to the north by adding a single-storey production facility to the west and a two-storey residential building with a cellar and a mansard roof to the east, towards Srázná Street. The original production facility on Srázná Street was thus partially replaced with a new factory building. Corazza designed the residential building so that other buildings could be attached to the gables on both sides. The owner later acquired the adjacent southern plot but the production facility was not extended there, which means that a continuous street line was not created. The residential building itself was given a decorative Art Nouveau façade with local ceramic azure cladding. The massive geometrically decorated entrance gate faced the passage to the courtyard. The windows were divided by small transoms in the fanlight and decorated with a dentil. On the residential floor, two rounded avant-corps with windows stood out from the profile of the façade in a playful way. The high mansard roof was complemented by dormers with elliptical windows. The architect placed a coachman's room, kitchen, and several other rooms in the basement. On the ground floor, a central passage separated the residential and operational parts. The operational part included a storage room and a small study, while the second part contained a two-room flat with a kitchen, toilet and bathroom, as well as a staircase that extended into the courtyard with a small rounded avant-corps. On the first floor, there was a flat of the factory owner and his large family – there was a kitchen with a pantry, a toilet, a mirror room, a drawing room, a children's room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room with access to a small terrace overlooking the courtyard. The living space faced the street, the study and the factory owner's office faced the factory yard. A laundry, drying room, mangle room, and toilet were located in the attic under the mansard roof. The residential building was connected to the production part via a skylight that led through all floors and a second industrial spiral staircase with a riveted railing anchored to the columns. The construction was carried out by August Österreicher and the year 1910 can be found on the portal above the main entrance.

The facilities for the production and processing of paper products were single-storey buildings without a cellar, with the exception of the north-western corner, where space for a coke cellar was created to level out the sloping land. In September 1911, August Österreicher designed horse stables and a coachman's flat in the courtyard. The plans for the establishment of a factory for the large-scale production of military clothing date back to the autumn of 1915. Österreicher equipped the old building with 30 sewing machines, which were synchronously connected to the central engine. In 1927, the builder Emmanuel Lang added new rooms in the courtyard wing to allow expansion and installation of newer equipment. In 1929, two warehouses were completed, and in May 1934, the stables were converted into a garage for employees' motorcycles.

The paper and cardboard processing factory employed over 120 people. Folding cardboard boxes, shipped flat so that customers could unfold them themselves and save space during storage and transport, became a production speciality. The company catered for the knitwear, footwear, textile, leather goods, buttons, jewellery, confectionery, and perfumery industries. Mrs Emma Weissenstein acted as proxy, i.e. the person authorised to act on behalf of the owner. The factory communicated in the Czech, German, French, and English. This is how it worked in 1933, but everything changed after a few years.

Due to the loss of foreign trade and the destruction of the shoe factories, Weissenstein lost a large number of customers even before the Second World War and had to reduce production considerably. During the Second Czechoslovak Republic, the situation was not easy and Jewish citizens experienced hardship. When the Protectorate was established on the morning of 30 March 1939, the synagogue was damaged by a fire and Richard Weissenstein, as chairman of the Jihlava Jewish Religious Community, was involved in writing the minutes of the negotiations on the further fate of the burnt-out building. The situation began to escalate almost everywhere. Jihlava fell into German hands again, and Jewish businesses were subjected to Aryanization, i.e. the expropriation of the property of persons of Jewish origin and its transfer into the hands of "Aryan" administrators, and later often the property owners. Before the planned eviction, Weissenstein had to give the entire property to the Oberlandrat office and Hans Grimshandel became the government commissioner of the plant. The custodian bank also sent its fiduciary to the plant. Weissenstein's efforts to transfer the proxy to a person from the factory, i.e. someone who understood the production, were met with disapproval. Mr and Mrs Weissenstein were deported to Terezín. During the Protectorate, the apartment block housed a labour office headed by DrLöffel.

Only Richard Weissenstein, seventy years old at the time, lived to see the liberation of Terezín in 1945. He briefly returned to Jihlava to resume his business and to rebuild several Jewish associations, but to no avail. In 1948, the factory was nationalised and incorporated into the national enterprise Moravian-Silesian Paper Mills Olomouc (Moravskoslezské papírny Olomouc). Weissenstein emigrated to Israel. In 1953, the building in the courtyard was converted into office space for the Wholesale Grocery Store (Velkoobchod s potravinářským zbožím); the flat on the first floor was divided into several smaller units. In April 1956, plans were made for major renovation of the premises and the addition of a printing house. The completed production part reached the level of the residential building, and an elevated stage with a clubhouse was built above the flats. The Jiskranewspaper was also printed there. In August 1968, the printing house was taken over by Soviet soldiers who piled up the letters for manual typesetting so that the newspaper could not be produced. After 1989, the printing house redirected into books and advertising publications, and the letterpress technology was replaced with offset technology. After the printing house went bankrupt, the buildings became the property of a new owner, who plans to convert them into residential units while preserving the original façade of the residential building.

FK
Literature and other sources 

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