Judische Museum

Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin and many other cities in Germany are home to thriving Jewish population.  Frankfurt which has always been known as a market center attracted Jews from all over Europe. Two museums in Frankfurt are dedicated to the history, culture and economic contribution of Jews covering  a period approaching a 1000 years.  Saturday we spent part of a day touring both sites, acquiring a better understanding of their tumultous history.  Much of this history is a grim reminder of our legacy of  ignorance and inhumanity.  None the less, it awakened a sense of how important it is to combat bigotry and intolerance in all its forms.

I will only a share a couple of highlights. One was the background imformation provided about Oscar Schindler.  After the book aptly entitled Schindler's Ark, Steven Spielberg followed with a  movie named Schindler's List.  When it first premiered in Germany, the impact was profound.  Spielberg captured the imagery and and the plight of the Jews.  I read newspaper clippings stating that Germans who watched the film wept openly.

 In the autumn of 1999, a suitcase belonging to Schindler was discovered, containing over 7,000 photographs and documents, including the list of Schindler's Jewish workers.  The document, on his enamelware factory's letterhead, had been provided to the SS stating that the named workers were "essential" employees. Friends of Schindler found the suitcase in the attic of a house in Hildesheim, Germany, where he had been staying at the time of his death. The friends took the suitcase to Stuttgart, where its discovery was reported by a newspaper, the Stuttgarter Zeitung. The contents of the suitcase, including the list of the names of those he had saved and the text of his farewell speech before leaving 'his' Jews in 1945, are now at the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem in Israel.  Schindler tried to reestablish himself in Frankfurt after the war, but was unsuccessful. It appears his early motives, though questionable, did not negate the decency and deep concern he felt at witnessing the abuse of so many of his former employees at the hands of the Nazis.  Schindler died in 1974, largely unrecognized for his contributions, but highly regarded by holocaust survivors throughout the world. 

In prewar Germany, with the coming to power of the Nazi party in 1933,  Jews were quickly earmarked for segregation from the Ayran population through antisemitic laws and policies.  From that time forward,  there was a steady migration of Jews out Germany and Austria.  Between January 1933 and December 1941, 104,098 Germans and Austrians refugees arrived in America, of whom 7,622 were academics and another 1,500 were artists.  The American Mercury ran a headline of one art show in New York, "Hitler's Gift to America".  The list of great thinkers was impressive including Albert Einstein, Wernher Von Braun, a host of world renown mathematicians, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich and the list goes on.  Paul Tillich, along with other famous refugees invitees, were asked to contribute lectures at the Benjamin Franklin Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania.  He closed his lecture by posing a question;  "Will America remain what it has become to us (exiles), a country in which people from every country can overcome their spiritual provincialism?  One can be both a world power politically and a provincial people spiritually."  He poses a pertinent question as relevant today as 65 years ago.