Hans Elkan was born in Hohenems on March 22, 1900, the son of the last head of the Jewish community Theodor Elkan and his first wife Betti Menz. His mother died a few days after his birth. Hans Elkan was one of the last pupils of the Jewish School in Hohenems. Later he studied philosophy, musicology and ancient history in Freiburg, among others with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In the 1930s he tried to get a job as a teacher in his elective profession. He worked as a probationary teacher in Feldkirch and Dornbirn and was assessed as “very good”. However, he did not find a permanent position. In 1934 illegal National Socialists carried out an attack on the family home in Hohenems. In 1938 Hans Elkan took over functions in the religious community, which was in the process of being dissolved. In 1939, together with his father, he unsuccessfully tried to rescue the cult objects of the Hohenems synagogue to St. Gallen. In 1940 he and his parents were forced to move to Vienna and in 1942 he was deported to Theresienstadt, where the Nazis killed him in 1944.