German Ambassador Peter Ammon hosted the opening of a new Leo Baeck Institute exhibition at his residence. “The Mendelssohns: A German Family of Scholars, Bankers, and Artists” was curated by the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) from its extensive collection of personal papers, books and other artifacts.
LBI’s current exhibit shows how Jews were instrumental in shaping the traditions and character of Germany’s third largest city, from Löwenbräu beer to the city’s champion soccer club.
On view through April 14, 2013 at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz
Between 1936 and 1949 Shanghai was the last refuge to 20,000 German and Austrian Jews, who flocked to the only place in the world that didn’t require a visa.
Leo Baeck Institute unveiled a new exhibit at the residence of German Ambassador Peter Ammon in Washington, DC that highlights the extraordinary contributions of German Jews in the fields of natural science, mathematics and medicine.
The towering figure of the Jewish Enlightenment was a short, humpbacked son of a Torah scribe from the rural German hamlet of Dessau, who rose to become an internationally renowned Enlightenment philosopher while remaining an observant Jew who defended Judaism and advocated for Jewish civil rights. Explore his life and work through images and links to digitized books.
At the 9th Leo Baeck Salon, seventeen young artists transformed shipping containers in an industrial Berlin neighborhood into art spaces with sculptures inspired by LBI collections. The artists, all students in Gregor Schneider’s sculpture class at the Berlin University of the Arts, engaged with LBI archives at the Jewish Musuem in Berlin.
Many Jewish and non-Jewish German artists alike had their work branded “degenerate” by the Nazis and were forced to flee Germany. Georg Stahl responded to the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic, and later World War II, with work that moved from a modernist style in the 1920′s to pure abstraction in the 1950′s.
The LBI exhibit “The Art of the Book” covers centuries of contributions by German Jews to literary culture. The “people of the book” have shaped the culture of the written word not just as authors, but also as collectors, designers, and illustrators. Although the exhibit is at the German Ambassador’s residence and not currently open…
LBI spoke to Christoph Kreutzmüller, one of the historians behind the new exhibition, “Final Sale. The End of Jewish Owned Businesses in Berlin” about why such a project was so long in coming, why Berlin was considered a safe haven by many Jewish entrepreneurs, and why it is important to make history personal.
The exhibition “Final Sale. The End of Jewish Owned Businesses in Nazi Berlin” documents the process by which Jews in Germany were expropriated through the examples of 16 Berlin businesses, but that is only half the story. It also demonstrates the flourishing of Jewish entrepreneurship in Berlin before 1933, when the city was a center of Jewish life.
Leo Baeck Institute receives major support from the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany. More info...
