Jews in Berlin: Biografien

Jews in Berlin: Biografien PDF Author: Andreas Nachama
Publisher: Seemann Henschel
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"Berlin was for centuries the center of Jewish life in Germany. Settlement, pogroms, trials against Jews, burnings at the stake and expulsion characterized its history from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Only after the Thirty Years' War did a new era begin. The eighteenth-century Berlin of Moses Mendelssohn was a city of Jewish emancipation and simultaneously a center of enlightenment. In this period and the generations that followed, Jewish Berliners and immigrants made important contributions to the city's economy. Jewish citizens strongly influenced the natural sciences and the city's cultural and literary life. Economic crisis and factors like inflation after World War I made an aggressive form of anti-Semitism possible, one that ultimately led to the death camps of the Holocaust. The last chapter of this illustrated book reports on new beginnings in the post-Shoah age." "This book is intended for everybody. Jews can reread their own history and better understand it. Non Jews can take up the book to realize that Jewish history is an important part of their own. Whether or not Berlin's Jewish past can be revitalized remains to be seen. The question of whether or not Berlin will ever again have a vibrant Jewish life - as it had before 1933 - is also open. Surely, the answer to whether or not this life will be integrated into the life of the city does not lie solely in the hands of its Jews. It depends on society as a whole."--BOOK JACKET.

Jews in Berlin: Biografien

Jews in Berlin: Biografien PDF Author: Andreas Nachama
Publisher: Seemann Henschel
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"Berlin was for centuries the center of Jewish life in Germany. Settlement, pogroms, trials against Jews, burnings at the stake and expulsion characterized its history from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Only after the Thirty Years' War did a new era begin. The eighteenth-century Berlin of Moses Mendelssohn was a city of Jewish emancipation and simultaneously a center of enlightenment. In this period and the generations that followed, Jewish Berliners and immigrants made important contributions to the city's economy. Jewish citizens strongly influenced the natural sciences and the city's cultural and literary life. Economic crisis and factors like inflation after World War I made an aggressive form of anti-Semitism possible, one that ultimately led to the death camps of the Holocaust. The last chapter of this illustrated book reports on new beginnings in the post-Shoah age." "This book is intended for everybody. Jews can reread their own history and better understand it. Non Jews can take up the book to realize that Jewish history is an important part of their own. Whether or not Berlin's Jewish past can be revitalized remains to be seen. The question of whether or not Berlin will ever again have a vibrant Jewish life - as it had before 1933 - is also open. Surely, the answer to whether or not this life will be integrated into the life of the city does not lie solely in the hands of its Jews. It depends on society as a whole."--BOOK JACKET.

An Underground Life

An Underground Life PDF Author: Gad Beck
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299165048
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
That a Jew living in Nazi Berlin survived the Holocaust at all is surprising. That he was a homosexual and a teenage leader in the resistance and yet survived is amazing. But that he endured the ongoing horror with an open heart, with love and without vitriol, and has written about it so beautifully is truly miraculous. This is Gad Beck's story.

From Berlin to Berkeley

From Berlin to Berkeley PDF Author: Reinhard Bendix
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412824071
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
From Berlin to Berkeley is an intellectual portrait of one of America's leading social scientists, Reinhard Bendix, and his father, Ludwig Bendix. It is a story of cultural identity and assimilation, of survivors from a course of events that destroyed millions of lives. Reinhard Bendix offers a profound and moving account of his father's life as a lawyer and critic of the German judicial system, his break with Judaism and identification with German culture, and his emigration to Palestine during Hitler's regime. Bendix then examines the relationship with his father and details his youth in Germany, his emigration to America, and his early career as a scholar.

Sojourners

Sojourners PDF Author:
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803212558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This absorbing book of interviews takes one to the heart of modern German Jewish history. Of the eleven German Jews interviewed, four are from West Berlin, and seven are from East Berlin. The interviews provide an exceptionally varied and intimate portrait of Jewish experience in twentieth-century Germany. There are first-hand accounts of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the divided Germany of the Cold War era. There are also vivid descriptions of the new united Germany, with its alarming resurgence of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Some of the men and women interviewed affirm their dual German and Jewish identities with vigor. There is the West Berliner, for instance, who proclaims, "I am a German Jew. I want to live here". Others describe the impossibility of being both German and Jewish: "I don't have anything in common with the whole German people". Many confess to profound ambivalence, such as the East Berliner who feels that he is neither a native nor a foreigner in Germany: "If someone asks me, 'Who are you?' then I can only say, 'I am a fish out of water.'"

Slow Fire

Slow Fire PDF Author: Susan Neiman
Publisher: Quid Pro Books
ISBN: 1610270304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
BERLIN--East and West, day and night--in the 80s before the Wall fell. Through the eyes of a U.S. philosophy student. And Jewish, which makes for moments awkward, poignant, crass, funny, and always lurking. A city was divided, America the occupier, and the cigarettes not named Salem because it sounds too Jewish. The debut memoirs from the author of Moral Clarity, a N.Y. Times "2008 Notable Book."

From Berlin to Jerusalem

From Berlin to Jerusalem PDF Author: Gershom Scholem
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
ISBN: 1589882784
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
"A serene, lucid and stylish essay in intellectual autobiography that at the same time commemorates a vanished world."—Times Literary Supplement "An extraordinary life—one that itself takes on symbolic, if not mystical, significance." —Robert Coles From Berlin to Jerusalem portrays the dual dramas of the author's total break from his middle-class German Jewish family and his ever-increasing dedication to the study of Jewish thought. Played out during the momentous years just before, during, and after World War I, these experiences eventually led Scholem to immigrate to Palestine in 1923. "Gershom Scholem is historian who has remade the world…He is coming to be seen as one of the greatest shapers of contemporary thought, possibly the boldest mind-adventurer of our generation."—Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review "A remarkable book."—Harold Bloom "[Scholem] vividly describes the spiritual and intellectual odyssey that drew him…to a rigorous immersion in the texts of Jewish tradition."—Library Journal

Four Girls From Berlin

Four Girls From Berlin PDF Author: Marianne Meyerhoff
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1620459132
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
A pair of silver Regency candlesticks. Pieces of well-worn family jewelry. More than a thousand documents, letters, and photographs Lotte Meyerhoff's best friends risked their lives in Nazi Germany to safeguard these and other treasured heirlooms and mementos from her family and return them to her after the war. The Holocaust had left Lotte the lone survivor of her family, and these precious objects gave her back a crucial piece of her past. Four Girls from Berlin vividly recreates that past and tells the story of Lotte and her courageous non-Jewish friends Ilonka, Erica, and Ursula as they lived under the shadow of Hitler in Berlin. Written by Lotte's daughter, Marianne, this powerful memoir celebrates the unseverable bonds of friendship and a rich family legacy the Holocaust could not destroy. "What a delightful book, and important, too. It gives us the courage and inspiration to utterly reject the fatalistic idea that fratricide, polemic, and enmity between Christians and Jews is inevitable and unchangeable. Finally, it reminds us never to forget or fail to appreciate those forces of light that bear witness to, and instill hope for, mankind and our world."--Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, President, International Fellowship of Christians and Jews "Four Girls From Berlin is an evocative story of friendship, challenged in the most sinister environment. For Christians, it echoes the words of Jesus, 'greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends.' The friendship of these four women, three Christians and a Jew, speaks of a greater humanity that in the face of the Nazi horror could not be broken. I strongly recommend men and women of all faiths to learn from it."--The Venerable Lyle Dennen, Archdeacon, London, England

Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews

Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews PDF Author: Leonard Baker
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Days of Sorrow and Pain, winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, tells the story of Germany’s Jews under the Nazis and of one man’s valiant efforts to help them meet the horrors of the Hitler regime. Leonard Baker explores the disintegration of German society, the plight of German Jews and the philosophy of Leo Baeck which enabled him to guide his people in their struggle for survival. After Hitler came to power, German Jews formed the Reichsvertretung with Leo Baeck at its head. As Berlin’s leading Rabbi and one of the foremost Jewish theologians in the world, Baeck was the rallying point for all Jewish factions. He dealt secretly with emissaries from abroad to arrange for Jews to emigrate and saw to it that Jewish children received a religious education. Young men were trained for the rabbinate in Berlin as late as 1942. Leo Baeck chose to remain in Germany as long as there were still Jews there. He was arrested five times, once after writing a prayer to be read in all German synagogues reminding Jews that even “in this day of sorrow and pain,” they bowed only before God and never before man. After his last arrest in 1943 at the age of 69, Rabbi Baeck was sent to Theresienstadt where he hauled trash carts by day, and organized educational programs for his fellow inmates at night, consoling them, becoming one of their strengths. After the war, having survived the Holocaust, Baeck never sought revenge, but worked for reconciliation between Germans and Jews. He became a world leader of liberal Judaism and never doubted the ultimate triumph of good over evil nor underestimated the responsibility of the individual to bring about that triumph. “Only now, more than twenty years after Baeck’s death, has Leonard Baker, a writer on American political history, given us a full life story. Drawing on nearly a hundred interviews with persons who knew Baeck and supplementing these with a rich variety of printed and archival sources, he has succeeded in fashioning an intriguing portrait of the rabbi-scholar called upon to assume leadership in a time of crisis. The inherent drama of the subject together with Baker’s practiced writing skill has made for a book of broad popular interest. It has even been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography.” — Michael A. Meyer, American Jewish History “There are several outstanding reasons why this book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography. The evidence of extensive research and scholarship exists in one of the most complete oral and written bibliographies that is presently available on contemporary German Jewry. Baker’s writing style, journalistic at times, is free from conventional pedantry, but is satisfying enough for even the most stodgy academe. Furthermore, the historical flow of the text leaves little doubt that this is one serious author... Rabbi Baeck is shown as both the German as a Jew and the Jew as a German. Writing with an obvious appreciation for the role of the Jews in modern German history, Baker explains Baeck in the context of Reform Judaism...” — Michael W. Rubinoff, German Studies Review “Baker has written a marvelous account of Baeck’s long and remarkable life.” — Lew’s Author Blog “Baker tells Baeck’s story in relation to the history of the German Jews down to his death as an expatriate in England in the 1950s... Baker’s narrative is scholarly and simple in tone, as it should be; and although chiefly a study in Jewish history, it is also a study in historical tragedy and moral will...” — Kirkus Reviews

Survival in the Shadows

Survival in the Shadows PDF Author: Barbara Lovenheim
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504009703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
National bestseller: This “harrowing” true story of two Jewish families who survived hiding in the heart of the Nazi capital “honors the human spirit” (Andrea Dworkin). In January 1943, unable to flee Germany, the four members of the Arndt family went underground to avoid deportation to Auschwitz. Ellen Lewinsky and her mother, Charlotte, joined them; a year later, Bruno Gumpel arrived. Hiding in a small factory near Hitler’s bunker, without identification cards or food-ration stamps, they were dependent on German strangers for survival. When Russian soldiers finally rescued the group in April 1945, the families were near death from starvation. But their will to live triumphed and two months later, four of the survivors—Erich Arndt and Ellen Lewinsky, and Ruth Arndt and Bruno Gumpel—reunited in a double wedding ceremony. Survival in the Shadows chronicles the previously untold story of the largest group of German Jews to have survived hiding in Berlin through the final and most deadly years of the Holocaust. Relayed to Barbara Lovenheim by three survivors from the group, the riveting story is a touching portrayal of the bravery of these seven Jews, and a heartfelt acknowledgment of the fortitude and humanity of the compassionate Germans who kept them alive.

Soaring Underground

Soaring Underground PDF Author: Larry Orbach
Publisher: Howells House
ISBN: 9780929590158
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Orbach's memoir is a stylish and inspiring account of his life in Berlin's underworld of "divers" where young Jews survived by street smarts and an indomitable spirit which he delicately portrays. After his father is arrested and his mother and sister go into hiding, the young man is left to his own devices finding company among other survivors who outwit the Nazis in surreal adventures. Finally, betrayed by an informer, Orbach is sent to Auschwitz. But, as he says himself, he has left that part of his journey for others to tell, concentrating instead on the humanity and faith which he found on Berlin's streets. Distributed by Paul and Company. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR