New edition of USE-IT Brno map

The new edition of USE-IT Brno maps is here and it also includes the Löw-Beer Villa as a part of a section devoted to Jewish heritage. The map mentions a short history of the Villa and its connection to Villa Tugendhat, points out free entry to the garden.

USE-IT maps are non-commercial, made by young locals. They are always free and up-to-date. Nowadays, these maps provide information for young travellers in almost 40 European cities – and one of them is Brno.

Exhibition about the conversion of the Löw-Beer factory

From September 30 to November 1, 2020, the Celnice Gallery hosts an exhibition of works by students of the Faculty of Architecture at Brno University of Technology, which deal with the functional transformation of the former Löw-Beer textile factory in Brněnec. The Löw-Beer family owned this factory until 1938.

In the same year, most family members were forced to leave their homes before the Nazi threat, many of them unfortunately died in concentration camps. The grandson of the original owners, Daniel Löw-Beer, founded the Archa Endowment Fund in 2018, which provides grants and supports projects for the conversion of the factory in Brněnec.

The best of Brno on a single tourist card

Since this year, the Löw-Beer Villa in Brno is involved in the BRNOPAS tourist card project, which provides its owners a number of discounts or free admissions to interesting places in Brno and its surroundings. The card can be purchased from one to three days, for adults or children under 15 years of age, and may include a public transport ticket.

With the BRNOPAS card, you get a 25% discount in the Löw-Beer villa to enter the permanent exhibition The World of the Brno Bourgeoisie Around the Löw-Beers and the Tugendhats, children have free admission. The card also offers benefits in other famous Brno villas: Tugendhat, Stiassni and Jurkovič.

The Löw-Beers

The family of the prosperous industrialists operating in the wool trade and the sugar industry come from Boskovice. In 1795, Judas Löw Beer (1724–1800) was registered as the owner of House No. 9 (today Traplova street 12). His grandson Moses Löw-Beer (1794–1851) became a lessee of a distillery in the Boskovice ghetto and gained the needed capital in this way to found a factory for spinning wool in Svitávka. His son Max Löw-Beer (1829–1887) considerably extended his father's textile enterprise in Svitávka and further expanded to Brno (the factory in today's Čechyňská street 14) and to Żagań, then under Prussian rule. In 1870 he founded a sugar factory in Záhorská Ves in Slovakia (formerly Ungereiden in Hungary).

His sons Rudolf, Alfred and Benno became associates in the “Moses Löw-Beer” company, one of the biggest in the Habsburg Monarchy. Apart from the wool and sugar production the company also operated in distilling (the distillery in the village of Markthof in Lower Austria).

As an important industrialist, Alfred Löw-Beer (1872–1939) was also, inter alia, the Vice-President of Woll-Industriellen-Verein Mährens in Brno. In 1906 architect Josef Nebehosteny built a house for his family in Svitávka, now known as the ´Small Löw-Beer villa´, but in 1913 Alfred bought Moritz Fuhrmann’s house in the residential area Černá Pole in Brno. He had three children with his wife Mariana, née Wiedmann – Max, Grete and Hans. Most of the family members fled to Great Britain to escape the Nazi terror in 1939, but Alfred Löw-Beer stayed in occupied Czechoslovakia to try and save as much as possible of the family fortune. At Easter time in 1939 he died on the run in unclear circumstances and his dead body was found on a railway track near Stříbro (Tachov District). At present the descendants of this influential Jewish family of entrepreneurs live in different parts of Europe and the Northern America.