After 1830, more than 100 people of Jewish denomination lived in Catholic Sommerach with its more than 700 inhabitants. Undisturbed by their Christian neighbors, they went about their various trading activities. In a wine-growing village, it was almost a matter of course that some of them also earned their living from the wine trade and even wine-growing.
Wine plays an important role in Jewish culture. Wine is part of a Sabbath celebration. However, certain rules must be observed on this feast day for strictly observant Jews.
Because God created heaven and earth in six days and rested from his act of creation on the seventh, Friday evening to Saturday night is also a day of rest for devout Jews.
They are not allowed to carry out any creative work or make fire or light or generate heat, as this creates something new. But how could you eat on the Sabbath and at the same time observe the strict regulations? Drinking was not the problem, it was the preparation of food.
Gottlieb Waldorf, a master tinsmith from Sommerach, found a remedy. You could call him a pioneer. Because what the Zomat Institute in Israel is working on today - namely an appliance that can also be used on the Sabbath - Waldorf anticipated 150 years earlier.
He called his progressive invention "Sabbath cooking machines" and advertised it in the magazine "Der Israelit".
For devout Jews, food must be cooked in advance and should be kept warm if possible. Gottlieb Waldorf's cooking machine had precisely this keep-warm function. According to the inventor, it kept the food warm for 24 hours using cheap fuel.
Because certain dishes also had to be separated according to Jewish food rituals, the appliance had various "compartments (probably pots) for meat and milk dishes of any size" and also one container each for coffee and milk, according to the advertising text.
His success proved him right, as he said he had orders "from the most distant regions". He was "intent on taking on an apprentice, of Israelite denomination, who had enjoyed a good education".
Apparently this worked out, because in the last advertisement from 1884, the signatory appears as "Gottlieb Waldorf's successor, Sommerach am Main."
The master craftsman and inventor himself, whose year of birth is not known, had already died by this time and was buried in Rödelsee in 1878. He outlived his wife Betty by two years.
Elmar Hochholzer
