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Hedy Bienenfeld

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Hedy Bienenfeld
Hedy Bienenfeld-Wertheimer
Personal information
Full nameHedwig (Hedy) Bienenfeld-Wertheimer
CitizenshipAustrian-American
Born17 October 1907
Vienna, Austria
DiedSeptember 24, 1976(1976-09-24) (aged 68)
Resting placeVienna Central Cemetery
Sport
SportSwimming
Event(s)breaststroke, freestyle
ClubHakoah Vienna
Medal record
Women's swimming
Representing  Austria
European Championships
Bronze medal – third place 1927 Bologna 200 m breaststroke
Maccabiah Games
Gold medal – first place 1932 Israel 200 m breaststroke
Gold medal – first place 1932 Israel 100 m backstroke
Gold medal – first place 1932 Israel 4x100 m freestyle
Gold medal – first place 1935 Israel 200 m breaststroke
Gold medal – first place 1935 Israel 4x100 m freestyle
Silver medal – second place 1932 Israel 100 m freestyle
Bronze medal – third place 1932 Israel 300 m freestyle

Hedwig "Hedy" Bienenfeld, also known after marriage as Hedy Wertheimer (17 October 1907 – 24 September 1976) was an Austrian Olympic swimmer.[1] She won a bronze medal in the 200m breaststroke at the 1927 European Aquatics Championships. She competed in the same discipline at the 1928 Summer Olympics. At the 1932 Maccabiah Games and 1935 Maccabiah Games in Mandatory Palestine, she won a combined five gold medals, one silver medal, and one bronze medal in swimming.

Biography

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Swimming career

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Hakoah Vienna swimmers Fritzi Löwy, Hedy Bienenfeld, and Idy Kohn (1927).
Hakoah Vienna swimmers and coach; from left: Judith Deutsch, Hedy Bienenfeld, Coach Zsigo Wertheimer, Fritzi Löwy, and Luci Goldner

Bienenfeld was Jewish, and competed for the Jewish sports club Hakoah Vienna, which had been founded in 1909 in response to the "Aryan clause" that banned Jews from joining other sports clubs.[2][3][4][5][6]

In 1924, at 15 years of age, Bienenfeld won the annual Austrian five-mile open-water swimming competition Quer durch Wien (Across Vienna) on the Danube that gathered about 500,000 spectators.[3] In 1925, she was second, after Löwy who swam freestyle.[3]

Subsequently, she became a popular swimsuit model for Austrian magazines.[7][8] She won nearly every Austrian national breaststroke title in the 1920s–1930s.[9][10][11]

Bienenfeld won a bronze medal in the 200 m breaststroke at the 1927 European Aquatics Championships in Italy, at 19 years of age.[12] Until the 2000s, Bienenfeld remained the only Austrian to win a swimming medal, together with Fritzi Löwy, who finished third in the 400 m freestyle at the same 1927 European Aquatics Championships.[6]

She competed in the women's 200 m breaststroke at the 1928 Summer Olympics at 20 years of age, and came in 13th.[13][14]

On 28 April 1929, Bienenfeld established the world 500m breaststroke record, at nine minutes.[3][6] She was the inspiration for the character "Lisa" in the novel The Pupil Gerber (Der Schüler Gerber) by Friedrich Torberg, which was published the following year.[15]

In 1930, she married her swimming coach, Zsigo Wertheimer (1897–1965).[6] In 1937, she set a new Austrian 100m breaststroke record.[6]

At the 1932 Maccabiah Games in Mandatory Palestine she won gold medals in the 100m backstroke, 200m breaststroke, and 4x100 m freestyle, a silver medal in the 100m freestyle (as Löwy won the gold medal), and the bronze medal in the 300m freestyle.[16][17]

At the 1935 Maccabiah Games in Mandatory Palestine she won gold medals in the 200m breaststroke and 4x100m freestyle.[16]

Later life

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Being Jewish, she and her husband fled Austria after its 1938 annexation by Nazi Germany before World War II, known as the Anschluss, and moved first to Great Britain landing at Dover on 8 December 1939, and on 18 July 1940 were interned in Rushen Internment Camp on the Isle of Man.[18] They then moved to London on 31 December 1940, and then to the United States.[18]

There, they worked as swimming instructors in New York, and then ran a successful real estate business in Florida. In 1952, they became American citizens. After the death of her husband in 1965, she returned to Vienna.[6] There she helped financially her lifelong rival and then close friend Löwy, who was fighting breast cancer. Bienenfeld did not have any children.[9][10] Upon her death, she was buried in the Jewish section of Vienna Central Cemetery.[1]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b "Hedy Wertheimer 1906 - 1976". BillionGraves Record.
  2. ^ Bernard Postal, Jesse Silver, Roy Silver (1965). Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports
  3. ^ a b c d Propp, Karen (13 June 2011). "Swimmers Against the Tide". Lilith Magazine.
  4. ^ Jewish Vienna, 2004.
  5. ^ "Hedy Bienenfeld". Olympedia.
  6. ^ a b c d e f "Swimming against anti-Semitism during Interwar era: Hedy and Fritzi". Playing Pasts.
  7. ^ "Hedy Bienefeld on the cover of Der Raucher". Jewish Women's Archive.
  8. ^ Nicholas Blincoe (2019). More Noble Than War; A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine
  9. ^ a b Watermarks Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine. Pressbook of a documentary by Kino International
  10. ^ a b Karen Propp. Swimmers Against the Tide. Lilith, Summer 2011.
  11. ^ Gunnar Persson (2019). Stjärnor på flykt; Historien om Hakoah Wien
  12. ^ Hedy BIENENFELD. les-sports.info
  13. ^ Hedy Bienenfeld Archived 2012-11-09 at the Wayback Machine. sports-reference.com
  14. ^ "Hedy BIENENFELD | Results | FINA Official". FINA - Fédération Internationale De Natation.
  15. ^ ""DANUBE FOOTBALL" – VIENNA'S IDENTIFICATION WITH FOOTBALL – AND THE "DANUBE MAIDENS" – VIENNA'S FEMALE SWIMMING CHAMPIONS (until 1938)". Central European Economic and Social History. 3 September 2018.
  16. ^ a b "Maccabiah Games before World War II". sport-record.de.
  17. ^ Ron Kaplan (2015). The Jewish Olympics; The History of the Maccabiah Games
  18. ^ a b "Miss Hedwig Wertheimer - Second World War Internees". iMuseum - Manx National Heritage.
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