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    Artist

  • Unknown Artist

    • Title

  • Wimpel for Max Horn

  • Physical Description

    1 textile : ink or paint on linen fabric ; 115 in x 7.5 in

  • Date

    1897

  • Summary

    The wimpel features blue and pink ink or paint on linen fabric, and it includes several illustrated decorative motifs (including Judaica, a deer, sheaves of wheat, and floral elements).

  • Subject

    Judaica; Torah binders

  • Medium

    Ceremonial textiles; Torah ornaments

  • Accession Number

  • URL

Biographical/Historical Information

Archival collection, the Edith Horn Family Papers, 1938-2000, are kept at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives under call number 2015.573.1. The biographical notes for the wimple owners mostly came from the USHMM archival collection finding aid. https://collections.ushmm.org/findingaids/2015.573.1_01_fnd_en.pdf

Max Horn was born on Feburary 7, 1897. His parents were Benjamin and Elifriede (née Schreiber) Horn, originally of Vorst, Germany. The family was involved in agriculture, and in particular, had businesses related to cattle trading as well as a butcher shop. Max had three brothers: Karl, Josef, and Paul. At a young age, Max Horn (born 7 February 1897) left Vorst for Cologne, where he pursued his career as a cattle trader. Max married Henriette (Hilde) Leiser, and the couple had one daughter, Edith (born 26 February 1926). Following the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, Max was arrested and imprisoned at Dachau for a month, before being released on 8 December 1938. Upon his return to Cologne, the family made preparations to emigrate. Edith was initially sent by her parents to the Netherlands, where she was placed in a children’s home until April 1939, when her parents joined her and the family departed Europe from the port of Antwerp, headed for Cuba. As it turned out, their ship was the last one on which Jewish refugees from Europe were allowed to land in Cuba, with the next ship that followed them being the SS St. Louis, which was turned away. The Horns stayed in Cuba until December 1939, when they were allowed to immigrate to the United States, first settling in Miami, and then New York, before eventually moving to Seattle in 1940, where they joined their cousins, Hilde and Otto Guthman. Max resumed his career as a cattle trader, although his work was interrupted for one year following the American entry into World War II, when he was classified as an enemy alien and not permitted to travel beyond a five- mile radius of his home.

Wimpels date back to the Jews of Germany, particularly Southern Germany. After a boy's brith mila the mother would clean the cloth used as a swaddling cloth, cut it into segments of equal length and sew them together. It was then painted or embroidered with the infant's Hebrew name, date of birth, and the traditional blessing, "May God raise him to a life of Torah, marriage and good deeds." The wimpel would be presented to the synagogue as a Torah binder and be used on the boy's bar mitzva, thus turning it into a concrete, as well as symbolic, link between his confirmation of entering the covenant and his traditional coming of age.

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Citation

Unknown Artist: Wimpel for Max Horn, Leo Baeck Institute, 2024.195b.