Leo Baeck Institute - New York

A coin likely minted soon after the founding of the mint in Vienna under Duke Leopold V. The creation of the mint in 1194 is the first document mentioning a Jewish person living in Vienna. This was a man named Shlom (also known as Solomon), and he served as Vienna's first Master of the Mint (Münzmeister). Shlom and his family were killed a few years later in a pogrom in Vienna caused by Crusaders.

Why was the mint created? During the Third Crusade, King Richard I ("The Lionheart") insulted Duke Leopold V. Upon returning home, Richard was captured, imprisoned, and held hostage by Leopold. To secure his freedom, Richard paid an immense ransom of 50,000 pounds of silver (roughly 12 to 15 tons, depending on historical accounts). Duke Leopold decided to put this newly acquired wealth to use by striking and forging coins. This marked the beginning of minting in Vienna.

The Todesco Palace near the Vienna opera. (Photo: Wikipedia).

The years following the 1848 revolution saw the city of Vienna grow and enlarge quickly. Through the second half of the 19th century, educated immigrants in particular, including many Jews, were able to build a solid and in some cases spectacular career. for themselves.

Loans and investments from Jewish bankers and industrialists permitted the development of progressive technologies. Salomon Rothschild financed the Nordbahn railway and hence access to salt, coal, and iron. Together with the Guttmann brothers he developed the Witkowitzd (Vitkovice) industrial plants in Moravia. For his part, Hermann Todesco was involved in the development of the Südbahn railway and built a textile factory in Marienthal, south of Vienna. Like other rising families, the Todescos built a large residence on the new Ringstrasse (pictured here). It was here that Sophie von Todesco held a much frequented salon.

Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum, better known as the “Queen of Fences” was a Prussian immigrant running a dry goods store with her husband and four children. She was also one of the biggest crime bosses the city of New York had ever seen. Find articles about Marm Mandelbaum in the comment section below.

Julius Rosenwald with students at the The P*e Dee Colored School in Marion County, SC, built in 1922-23. Image courtesy of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

Julius Rosenwald was the son of poor Jewish immigrants from Germany that came to the United States in the 19th century, settling in Springfield, Illinois. He rose professionally to become the chief executive director of Sears, Roebuck, and Company in the early 1900s. Black educator Booker T. Washington persuaded him to use some of his wealth to help African American children. Between 1913 and 1932, Rosenwald donated $20,000,000 to build 5,300 schools for blacks.

Rosenwald's gifts required matching funds. Hundreds of black communities, some desperately poor, pulled together the money to take advantage of Rosenwald's philanthropy. Most of the Rosenwald buildings have disappeared today, though a few remain, operating as schools, day care centers, and community buildings.

Judaism as Flowers: The Materialized Ideology of the New Synagogue of Szeged The greatest architectural monument of Szeged’s Jewish community is the New Synagogue (1900–1903), designed by Lipót Baumhorn (1860, Kisbér—1932, Budapest). He designed twenty-six synagogues in the...

After Hi**er took power, the author and communist Bertolt Brecht fled N**i Germany. Following brief spells in Prague, Zurich and Paris, he moved to Denmark. From there, Brecht also travelled frequently to Copenhagen, Paris, Moscow, New York and London for various projects and collaborations.

When war seemed imminent in April 1939, he moved to Stockholm, where he remained for a year. After Germany invaded Norway and Denmark, Brecht left Sweden for Helsinki, Finland, where he awaited a pending visa to the United States. This poem, titled 1940 by Brecht, captures the rising fear that, for refugees from N**ism, there were few places left open to them to seek a new life. Here is the poem in an English translation.

1940

I

Spring is coming. The mild winds
are freeing the islands from the winter ice.
Trembling, the people of the north await
the battle fleets of the House Painter.

II

Forth from the libraries
come columns of butchers.

Pressing their children to their bosoms,
mothers stand and peruse the heavens,
confounded by these new inventions of learned men.

III

The design engineers sit bent
over their desks in the drafting rooms:
One mistaken number and the cities of the enemy
will remain undestroyed.

IV

Fog enshrouds
The streets
The poplars
The farms and
The artillery.

V

I am located on the little island of Lindigö.
But recently at night
I had troubled dreams and dreamed, I was in a city
And discovered that the street signs
Were in German. Bathed in sweat
I awoke and with great relief
I saw the fir tree in its nighttime black outside the window
And I knew I was in a foreign land.

VI

My young son asks me: Should I learn mathematics?
I’m tempted to say, what for? That two pieces of bread are more than one
Is something you’ll figure out pretty quickly.
My young son asks me: Should I study French?
What for, I’m tempted to say. This regime is going under. If
You merely rub your hand over your stomach and groan
They will understand you just fine.
My young son asks me, should I study history?
What for, I’m tempted to say. Learn how to stick your head in the ground,
And maybe that way, you’ll be overlooked and somehow survive.
Yes, learn mathematics, I say to him,
Learn French, and learn history.

VII

At the whitewashed wall
Stands the black military suitcase with the manuscripts.
On top of it lie my short ci**rs, the matches and the copper ashtray.
The Chinese scroll that depicts the Doubting Man
Hangs over it all. The masks are here as well. And next to the bed
Stands the small, six tube loudspeaker.
In the morning
I turn on the radio and listen
To the victory announcements of my enemies.

VIII

In flight from my fellow countrymen
I find myself newly arrived in Finland. Friends
That I did not know yesterday, put up a few beds
In clean rooms. On the radio
I hear the victory announcements of the scum. Curious,
I pore over the map of this part of the world. Way up in Lapland
Approaching the Northern Sea of Ice,
I see there is still a little door.

_________________________________

Image: a Finnish soldier on guard in Lapland, Finland, in February 1940. From the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive.

Lore Groszman and her father, Igo Groszman, at the Volksgarten in Vienna in October, 1928. Lore Groszman as an adult became the author Lore Segal. Photograph from the collection of the family.

In January 1943, at age seventy, Leo Baeck was deported to Theresienstadt.
Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, was presented as a model settlement while functioning as a waystation to death. Of the 140,000 Jews sent there, fewer than 9,000 survived.
Baeck arrived and was given privileges as an honorary member of the Council of Elders. He refused most of them. He worked alongside other prisoners, even pulling the hearse used to transport bodies.
He delivered lectures in crowded barracks on Plato, Kant, Maimonides, Greek philosophy, and Jewish thought, entirely from memory. He had no books. Hundreds came to hear him.
By early 1945, the N**is had scheduled his ex*****on for May 9.
On May 8, the Red Army arrived and liberated the camp.
He was seventy-two.

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BACKUP der Geschichte 2.0: Zukunft der Erinnerung deutsch-jüdischer Geschichte Geschichte erzählen im digitalen Zeitalter. Was passiert mit der Erinnerung, wenn Zeitzeug:innen fehlen? Wie behaupten sich Fakten in einer Welt voller Reels, KI und Informationsflut? Wir diskutieren, wie historische Vermittlung heute funktioniert – zwischen Social Media, Print und den Herausford...

A Torah Mantle from the Bethaus Montefiore or Montefiore Prayer House in the Jewish Museum on Dorotheergasse in Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019). Apart from the often impressive synagogues scattered around pre-war Vienna, there was also a number of smaller prayer houses and prayer rooms (shtiblach) in apartment buildings. One was the Montefiore Prayer House at Taborstrasse 38 in Vienna, in the Leopoldstadt district, which was founded by the Association of Nordwest Bahnhof baggage porters.