Jenny Elbogen was born into a Jewish family on 12 June 1882 at Schloss Thalheim, Lower Austria, the youngest child of Guido Elbogen who became President of the Anglo-Austrian Bank in Vienna, and his wife Rosalie , whom he married in 1868 in Paris. She had three sisters ; and Hermione and Helene and a brother. Jenny Elbogen was educated at home by a Miss Allen, a governess from Devon, England. She became sufficiently fluent in English to translate Axel Munthe’s memoir The Story of San Michele from English to Esperanto for publication in 1935.
Political views
Politically she had very determinate and fixed views, many inherited from her father. She was an ardent Habsburg monarchist and wished to see the Habsburg heir, Otto von Habsburg, restored to the Austrian throne after the Second World War. However, she was also an internationalist, as demonstrated by her enthusiasm for Esperanto. She opposed the Zionist movement's call for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people and ceased all contact with two of her daughters after they left Austria to live in Mandate Palestine. Although her father Guido Elbogen had donated money towards the construction of a new synagogue in Sankt Pölten, she was a secular Jew and an atheist.
After Guido Elbogen died in 1918 she inherited Schloss Thalheim; her father had bought it in 1882 just before she was born. She lived there and in Prague with her husband Friedrich Weleminsky ; they married at Schloss Thalheim on 4 December 1905. He was a lecturer in Hygiene at the German University, Prague and developed tuberculomucin Weleminsky, a treatment for tuberculosis. The couple ran Schloss Thalheim as a model dairy farm. Facing Nazi persecution for being Jewish, they found sanctuary in 1939 in Britain where she continued to translate books into Esperanto, wrote poetry and taught English to other refugees. After the Second World War and the death of her husband, Jenny Weleminsky spent several years in Vienna, returning eventually to London, where she died of breast cancer on 4 February 1957, aged 74. She and her husband had four children together. Two of their daughters emigrated in the early 1930s to Mandatory Palestine where they took new names – Eliesabeth became Jardenah, and Dorothea was known as Leah. Their eldest daughter, Marianne, came to Britain just before the Second World War. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren now live in Britain, Israel, Australia, Sweden and Germany.
