Register of births in 1884 in Rădăuţi (Radautz), a town in Bukovina, Romania, near the Ukranian border.

Julius W. Schülein, “Main Synagogue and Frauenkirche”, water color, c. 1920

February 21 – July 31 in the Katherine and Clifford H. Goldsmith Gallery

Munich evokes images of the Oktoberfest and oompah bands, and in many ways, this reputation is well-deserved. This idyll of beer gardens and sausage is viewed, at least in the imagination of the millions of tourists that flock there every year, as quintessentially German – not exactly the sort of place one would find traces of a rich Jewish past. The fact that the National Socialists considered Munich the spiritual and organizational home of “The Movement” does little to dispel this notion.

Before the Nazi regime, however, Jews were instrumental in shaping the traditions and character of Germany’s third largest city, from Löwenbräu beer to the top purveyor of Lederhosen and Dirndl to the city’s champion soccer club. Like Jews across Germany, they considered themselves as much Germans as Jews, but they could add a third identity to their hyphenated existence – Bavarian.

Today, seventy years after the end of World War II, Munich is again home to a flourishing community of 11,000 members, the second largest in Germany.

This exhibition of materials from LBI collections documents the rich Jewish past and promising Jewish future of Munich.

This exhibit made possible by support from Allianz

Dr. William H. Weitzer

The Leo Baeck Institute has appointed Dr. William H. Weitzer as its new Executive Director, succeeding Carol Kahn Strauss, who will become the Institute’s International Director.  Dr. Weitzer, formerly the Executive Vice President at Fairfield University in Connecticut, earned his Ph.D in Environmental Psychology at the University of Massachusetts. He has served as an administrator and a consultant in a variety of areas, including strategic planning, institutional research, and assessment. Dr. Weitzer has over thirty years of experience in academic affairs, budget and finance, fund raising, community relations, and program evaluation.

Dr. Ronald B. Sobel, President of the Institute, expressed the pleasure of the Board in the appointment of Dr. Weitzer whom he noted brings a wealth of talent and experience to this position. “We have the expectation that new and exciting chapters in the history of the Leo Baeck Institute are about to be written.”

Carol Kahn Strauss

At the same time, Dr. Sobel praised the unprecedented leadership of Carol Kahn Strauss, who led the LBI for almost two decades. He said of Ms. Strauss that “her skills and devotion have brought great prestige and recognition to the Institute’s mission. We are pleased that she will continue to be with us as our International Director.”

Upon his appointment, Dr. Weitzer commented: “I am honored and excited by the opportunity to serve as the Executive Director of the Leo Baeck Institute. It is an opportune way for me to bring together various aspects of my life – being of German-Jewish descent, having involvement in Jewish communal life, working closely with faculty and scholars, and applying my professional and management skills in this new setting. I look forward to working with the Board of Directors, scholars, staff, and supporters of the LBI to preserve and utilize these unparalleled archives of German-Jewish history.”

In addition to his professional accomplishments, community involvement has been a priority in Dr. Weitzer’s life. While at the University of Massachusetts, he served on its Hillel Board and later was active in addressing equity and diversity issues in the West Hartford (CT) public schools, and is on the Board of the Jewish High School of Connecticut. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Lisa D. Grant, who is a professor at the Hebrew Union College.

Contact:

William H. Weitzer, Executive Director:  wweitzer@lbi.cjh.org

Carol Kahn Strauss, International Director: carol@lbi.cjh.org

(212) 744-6400

Dr. William H. Weitzer Named Executive Director of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York City

The Leo Baeck Institute, a New York City-based research library devoted to the study and the history of German-speaking Jewry at the Center for Jewish History, today announced the appointment of Dr. William H. Weitzer as its new Executive Director, succeeding Carol Kahn Strauss, who will become the Institute’s International Director. Dr. Weitzer, formerly the Executive Vice President at Fairfield University in Connecticut, earned his Ph.D in Environmental Psychology at the University of Massachusetts. He has served as an administrator and a consultant in a variety of areas, including strategic planning, institutional research, and assessment. Dr. Weitzer has over thirty years of experience in academic affairs, budget and finance, fund raising, community relations, and program evaluation.

Dr. Ronald B. Sobel, President of the Institute, expressed the pleasure of the Board in the appointment of Dr. Weitzer whom he noted brings a wealth of talent and experience to this position. “We have the expectation that new and exciting chapters in the history of the Leo Baeck Institute are about to be written.”

At the same time, Dr. Sobel praised the unprecedented leadership of Carol Kahn Strauss, who led the LBI for almost two decades. He said of Ms. Strauss that “her skills and devotion have brought great prestige and recognition to the Institute’s mission. We are pleased that she will continue to be with us as our International Director.”

Upon his appointment, Dr. Weitzer commented: “I am honored and excited by the opportunity to serve as the Executive Director of the Leo Baeck Institute. It is an opportune way for me to bring together various aspects of my life – being of German-Jewish descent, having involvement in Jewish communal life, working closely with faculty and scholars, and applying my professional and management skills in this new setting. I look forward to working with the Board of Directors, scholars, staff, and supporters of the LBI to preserve and utilize these unparalleled archives of German-Jewish history.”

In addition to his professional accomplishments, community involvement has been a priority in Dr. Weitzer’s life. While at the University of Massachusetts, he served on its Hillel Board and later was active in addressing equity and diversity issues in the West Hartford (CT) public schools, and is on the Board of the Jewish High School of Connecticut. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Lisa D. Grant, who is a professor at the Hebrew Union College.

The Leo Baeck Institute is a research library and archive that contains the most significant collection of source material relating to the history of German-speaking Jewry, from its origins to its tragic destruction by the Nazis and continuing to the present day. Dating back almost two thousand years, when Jews first settled along the Rhine, the Jewish communities of German, Austria, and other German-speaking areas of Europe had a history marked by individual as well as collective accomplishments.

Founded in 1955, the LBI was named for the rabbi who was the last leader of the Jewish community in Germany under the Nazis. Rabbi Leo Baeck survived the concentration camp of Theresienstadt to become the first President of the Institute. The Institute was established with offices in New York, London, and Jerusalem, with New York as the principal site of the LBI Library and Archives. Since the opening of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, LBI NY also maintains a branch of its archives there.

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Image:

Dr. William H. Weitzer, Executive Director of Leo Baeck Institute

http://www.lbi.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/william_weitzer_lbi.jpg

Press Contact:

David Brown
Office: (212) 744-6400
Cell: (646) 820-3256
dbrown@lbi.cjh.org

German film director Margarethe von Trotta accepts the Leo Baeck Medal in New York on November 28, 2012.

German film director Margarethe von Trotta accepted the Leo Baeck Medal on November 28, 2012 at the Leo Baeck Institutes annual gala award dinner in New York City.  The full text of her acceptance speech follows below:

Margarethe von Trotta:

I am honored, and deeply moved that the Leo Baeck Institute has chosen to award me this medal – and in front of such a distinguished audience.

Carol Kahn-Straus has asked me to say something about my films tonight. I will gladly try my best… though our Ambassador has already done an excellent job of introducing me, for which I would like to thank him.

I should begin by saying that I began my career as an actress, and only realized my long-held dream of becoming a director when I was already of a certain age. No doubt that was in part due to the fact that I’m a woman. After all, it is only in recent history that women have come to be considered capable of independent thought and action.

Of course, there have always been exceptional women who challenged this notion. And indeed, these are the women my films are about. I will only talk about three of my films tonight – three films that are not only about precisely such women, but which also deal with German and German-Jewish history.

The first of these is Rosa Luxemburg, which I shot in 1985.

“The history of humanity is in the throes of labor. New social forms are pushing toward the light.”  Rosa Luxemburg wrote this in 1905.  Later, in 1917, while being held in protective custody to prevent her from campaigning against the war, she wrote: “History always knows best, even when it seems to have lost its way hopelessly in a dead end.”  Or, as she put it in 1918, in another letter from prison: “History alone will find the solution for its own problems and has blown up many dungheaps that have stood in its way.  It will succeed this time too.”

HISTORY.  Rosa Luxemburg believed in history as though it were a person – but with a vision and power wiser than that of people.  She looked to the future full of confidence and hope, convinced that the 20^th century would lead people toward a better, more just world.

“We will live and we will experience great things yet.”

In November 1918, with the war over, she was released from prison, but was soon arrested again in Berlin the following January, murdered and thrown into the Landwehr Canal.  While still at the Hotel Eden, which is where the henchmen first brought her,  she asked them “which prison will you take me to?”  Meanwhile, her killers were already waiting for her outside the hotel.

This utopian dream of hers, this extraordinary faith in the world, is something I tried to contradict with the images in my film. For example, when, at the turn-of the-century New Year’s Eve Party, August Bebel talks about how the 19^th century was the century of hope and the 20^th will now be one of fulfillment, a huge sign is raised behind him with the number 1900 on it, white carnations against a background of red.  Bebel speaks about fulfillment as the red of the carnations spreads behind him like a bloodstain. And, when Rosa Luxemburg is led to her death at the end, she descends the hotel stairs along a flowing red carpet that cascades into the depths, like a stream of blood – a sign of what is yet to come during this century of “fulfillment.” In this sense, to my mind, Rosa Luxemburg was the first victim: a Jewish woman murdered by Freikorps soldiers who would later become members of Hitler’s Brownshirts.

The second film is Rosenstrasse, from 2002. The story is set in February 1943, in the midst of the “dark times,” as Hannah Arendt would later call these years. Non-Jewish women have gathered on the Rosenstrasse in Berlin to save their Jewish husbands from deportation to Auschwitz. An uprising that is neither organized nor instigated by any group. Each woman is there for her own husband, out of love for her husband alone. Yet, with each passing day, as more and more women show up, their individual determination turns into a powerful collective protest through which they ultimately succeed in saving their husbands. A true story. These women had no faith left in the future; they knew all too well about the frustration, hardship and dangers that the century brought them, they lived in a horrifying present untempered by any Utopian dream. But they were every bit as fierce and courageous as Rosa Luxemburg.

Two films that feature Berlin. I was born in Berlin, and I was already alive at the time of these brave women’s protest, yet I only learned about it much, much later, after the fall of the Wall. As a little girl, I walked through the bombed-out city, which bore witness to the destruction and misery wrought by the Nazis, though my generation only learned about the true extent of the moral breakdown many years later – and we had to wait even longer for an admission of guilt.

And now, a few words about my new film: Hannah Arendt. In contrast to Rosa Luxemburg, who looked forward to a future filled with hope, Arendt is the one who looks back – back to the “dark times.” In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism and in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she vividly analyzes in great detail what happens to people in a totalitarian system. She writes about “the superfluity of men as men” and about the “total moral collapse” that occurred in the very century August Bebel had welcomed as the century of fulfillment.

Hannah Arendt left her native Germany in 1933 – not by choice, but in anticipation of what she saw coming. She would have become a victim of the Nazis had she not managed to flee in time from the French internment camp of Gurs to immigrate to the United States. Our film only deals with the four years from 1960 to 1964. Eichmann is kidnapped in Argentina and put on trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt reports on the trial for The New Yorker and what she writes sets off a controversy that lasts for years. In Eichmann, she sees not a monster but a mediocre, career-minded bureaucrat – not stupid, but incapable of thinking for himself.

Arendt the thinker and Eichmann the unthinking. Yet perhaps even Hannah Arendt had a Utopian dream – not that of Rosa Luxemburg, who had more faith in history than in people, but a philosopher’s: she believed that thinking can protect us from evil, from criminal acts. Perhaps she ascribed the same positive power to thinking that Rosa saw in history, making it unbearable for her to imagine that – as the contemporary German philosopher and Arendt-expert Bettina Stangneth put it – an evil philosophy might be possible.

Arendt’s motto – as she never tired of repeating – was: “I want to understand.” That’s also my aim in making films. And just like her, I continue to hold on to the hope that she affirms in her final speech in the film: “It is the ability to think that gives us the strength to avoid catastrophes in the rare moments when the chips are down.”

And now I would like to play a little bit the Oscar-game: I want to thank those of my film family who are here with me: Oliver Mahrdt from German Films; Sabine Schenk, a producer who worked on the New York sections of both Rosenstrasseand Hannah Arendt; Martin Weibel, who helped me to produce all three films, and who inspired me to make a film about Hannah Arendt. He inspired me together with Pam Katz, my brilliant, dedicated co-author. We started writing together and we had to wait a long time until the realization. And my very special thanks to Barbara Sukowa, with whom I did 6 films, we just had our 31^st birthday of collaboration. Without her genius and her confidence, her critical mind and her never failing friendship, I would not be standing here so happily on this wonderful evening.

Thank you all, and thank you, Carol.

German Ambassador Peter Ammon at the LBI Gala Award Dinner on November 28, 2012 in New York.

Ambassador Peter Ammon presented the Leo Baeck Medal to German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta at the Leo Baeck Institute’s annual gala dinner in New York on November 28, 2012.

Ambassador Peter Ammon presents the Leo Baeck Medal to Margarethe von Trotta in New York on November 28, 2012

On November 28, 2012, German Ambassador Peter Ammon awarded the Leo Baeck Medal to German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta during the annual Leo Baeck Institute Gala Award Dinner at the Waldorf≈Astoria in New York.

The Leo Baeck medal is presented annually to an outstanding individual whose work in the cultural, political or social realm reflects the ideals of tolerance and respect for human dignity embodied by Rabbi Leo Baeck and the German-Jewish culture he represented.

In his address, Ammon called von Trotta one of “Germany’s best film directors of our time” and lauded her willingness to tackle uncomfortable issues in her films.  ”You never never shy away from going right to the heart of society’s most controversial debates,” said the Ambassador.

Ammon cited Trotta’s films such as Rosa Luxemburg (1986) and Marianne and Juliane  (1981) and Hannah Arendt (2012) as critical explorations of Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century that spurred reckoning and dialog.  ”You never give easy answers, but you made us see more clearly that, in an uncertain world, we need tolerance and respect, paired with firm judgment and the will to continue the struggle,” he said.

Born 1942 in Berlin, von Trotta began acting in German films in the early 1960′s and achieved her breakthrough as a director with The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, which she co-wrote and co-directed with Volker Schlöndorf based on the Heinrich Boll novel of the same name in 1975.  Her subsequent films often focused on pivotal moments in German history through the experience of women that shaped them, such as the early 20th century socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg, the 12th century mystic Hildegaard von Bingen, and the non-Jewish wives of imprisoned Jews who agitated for their husbands’ release from a Nazi prison on Rosenstrasse in 1943.

Her most recent film, a biographical portrait of the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, sits firmly in this tradition.  The film focuses on Arendt’s experience covering the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem between 1960 and 1964.  Her writings about the trial resulted in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem and a storm of controversy in which many, including Arendt’s closest friends and colleagues, criticized her harshly for what they saw as a portrait that trivialized Eichmann’s crimes and blamed the victims for their suffering.

Von Trotta expressed admiration for Arendt’s fearlessness and intellectual curiosity:  ”Arendt’s motto – as she never tired of repeating – was: ‘I want to understand.’  That’s also my aim in making films. And just like her, I continue to hold on to the hope that she affirms in her final speech in the film: ‘It is the ability to think that gives us the strength to avoid catastrophes in the rare moments when the chips are down.’ ”

Related:  Full Text of Ambassador Peter Ammon’s Laudatio for Margarethe von Trotta

Related:  Full Text of Margarethe von Trotta’s Acceptance of the Leo Baeck Medal

Bohemian Hebraist Moritz Steinschneider studying

Leo Baeck Institute supports new research on German-Jewish culture and history through a number of programs aimed at Ph.D. candidates and academics working on topics related to the German-Jewish community in a variety of disciplines.

Because of the power-outage related closures and email disruptions at LBI following Hurricane Sandy, the November 2012 deadline for fellowship applications has been extended until November 14, 2012. Applications sent by email after October 28 may not have been received.  Please resubmit your application if you are in doubt as to whether it was received.

For questions about the fellowship programs, contact Dr. Frank Mecklenburg, Director of Research.

List of Fellowships

• David Baumgardt Memorial Fellowship – research grant for academics whose work is connected with the writings of Professor David Baumgardt or his scholarly interests, including Ethics, Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Modern Intellectual History of German-speaking Jewry

• Fred Grubel Fellowship – paid summer research internship for Ph.D. candidates working on topics related to German-Jewish refugees in 1930′s – 1940′s New York

• Fritz Halbers Fellowship – project support for Ph.D. candidates whose research is connected with the culture and history of German-speaking Jewry

DigiBaeck commits the institute to ongoing digitization of its archive.

Leo Baeck Institute to Livestream Free Event on October 16

New York – (October 16, 2012) – Leo Baeck Institute (LBI), the premiere research library and archive devoted exclusively to documenting the history of German-speaking Jewry, today launched DigiBaeck (www.lbi.org/digibaeck), a digital gateway to LBI’s archive. Leo Baeck Institute will provide free online access to the collection of primary source materials encompassing five centuries of Jewish life in Central Europe.

DigiBaeck already includes 3.5 million pages of material that ranges from the personal papers and photographs of luminaries like Albert Einstein and Moses Mendelssohn to letters, diaries, recipes, and other ephemera chronicling the lives of everyday people.  The collection, which will continue to grow, encompasses documents in German and over a dozen other languages, and many pieces in the collection include English translations.

“German-speaking Jews accomplished breakthroughs in so many fields – from science to medicine and art and architecture – so it is appropriate that this archive is the first to present itself in its entirety on the Internet,” said Carol Kahn Strauss, Executive Director of Leo Baeck Institute.  “Before the Nazi seizure of power, Jews in Germany probably had better opportunities for success than Jews anywhere else in the world.  As a new Jewish community once again flourishes in Germany, it is all the more important to ensure it also has broad access to this past.”

Leo Baeck Institute partnered with Internet Archive, non-profit digital library that offers permanent storage of and free public access to digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books.

“I founded the Internet Archive with a mission to provide free access to all printed materials in our libraries around the world through digital means,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive.  “I found a like-minded partner among the leadership of the Leo Baeck Institute who keenly understood that digital access is essential in fostering not simply the ease of scholarship, but a general heightened awareness of the culture that they have so painstakingly preserved for more than half a century.”

About Leo Baeck Institute

Leo Baeck Institute is a research library and archive that contains the most significant collection of source material relating to the history of German-speaking Jewry, from its origins to its tragic destruction by the Nazis and continuing to the present day.  Dating back almost 2,000 years, when Jews first settled along the Rhine, the Jewish communities of Germany, Austria, and other German-speaking areas of Europe had a history marked by individual as well as collective accomplishments. To appreciate the impact of German-speaking Jewry in modern times, one need only recall such names as Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka.

Founded in 1955, LBI was named for the rabbi who was the last leader of the Jewish community in Germany under the Nazis.  Rabbi Leo Baeck survived the concentration camp of Theresienstadt to become the first president of the Institute.  The Institute was set up with offices in New York, London and Jerusalem, with New York the site of the LBI library and archives.  Since the opening of the Jewish Museum Berlin, LBI also maintains a branch of its archives there.

This event took place at 9:30 AM EST on Tuesday, October 16, 2012