German-Jewish Research Articles

Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War

Tim Grady, <i>A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War</i>

Un adversaire ou un modèle ? La France vue par les Juifs allemands pendant la guerre de 1870-1871

During the Franco-German war, it was not always easy for German Jews to justify their patriotic participation in the war. Fighting against France meant battling the first European nation that had emancipated the Jews and the example of which served to underline most of the claims German Jews were calling for in Germany. They could not deny that the civic and social status of their French coreligionists was much better than their own. Thus, French Jews, as well as those from other countries, often blamed their German coreligionists for, in fact, hindering their own goal of full emancipation. Some German Jewish authors stressed that emancipation had advanced a lot in Germany as well. In some instances they entered into a real competition with France, trying to show that the German way was the high road to emancipation. Others, however, referring to France, openly blamed Germany for its backwardness in matters of equality. Discussions of France and French Jews were always a tightrope walk for German Jews. If they paid too much tribute to France, they risked being described as friends with the enemy, which could cause just what they feared : doubts about their national loyalty.

Outlawing orality: Western Yiddish reflexes in German fiction

AbstractThis study analyses how fictional languages can be influenced by natural languages exemplified by the use of Yiddish. It shows how a fictional language can be a data source for research on historical development of Western Yiddish (WY) and its sociolinguistic situation. In contrast to the varieties of Eastern Yiddish (EY), which are still spoken today, Western Yiddish was given up during the complex acculturation process of West-Ashkenazic Jewry during the nineteenth century. As a language driven by a pejorative view of language variations and by growing antisemitism, Yiddish found its way into German fiction, where it is still used in contemporary fiction as a means of characterising Jewish figures. This article presents the main results of a corpus study on 53 of such fictional texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.The Yiddish examples in Yiddish script will be primarily quoted in their original form and then be transliterated following the YIVO romanisation system (cf. Weinreich 1968).It will be shown that reflexes of spoken WY can be found in these imitations of Yiddish. This data can be used as secondary evidence of WY structures. Furthermore, the data gives an impression of the intensity of the language contact situation between German and Yiddish. In addition it gives insights into mechanisms of how German Jews were excluded from the German ideal of aSprachnation.

The “Lived Time” of German Jews under the Nazi Regime

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe “Lived Time” of German Jews under the Nazi Regime*Guy MironGuy MironOpen University of Israel Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 90, Number 1March 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/695885 Views: 733Total views on this site © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Transnational intervention and its limits: the case of interwar Poland

ABSTRACTThis article reassesses the efforts by western Jews to rescue their imperilled European brethren in the years before and during the Second World War. It goes beyond the conventional question, “Could more have been done to rescue European Jewry?” Rather, the article explores what Jewish leaders learned about the global practice of philanthropic relief during the decades before the rise of European fascism and hyper-nationalism. It then asks how this accumulated knowledge may have informed their decisions once they understood the dangers faced by Jews in Germany, Poland, and Romania. This holistic analysis of actions taken by transnational leaders accounts for operational precedents, geo-politics, migration regimes, diaspora networks, organizational history, intra-communal relations, and economics and contemporary orientations toward aid. All these create a realistic reckoning of the strengths and limitations of Jewish transnationalism at the time, allowing us to transcend value-based judgements of this painful chapter in Jewish history.

‘Der vollkommene Pferdekenner’, 1764: Jewish Horse Traders in the Margraviate of Brandenburg-Ansbach and their Language at the Threshold of Modernity1

Der vollkommene Pferdekenner (‘The Complete Horse Connoisseur’) is a comprehensive equestrian guide that was published in 1764 by the southern German nobleman Baron Wolf Ehrenfried von Reitzenstein. In a Jewish context, it is interesting because of a language appendix consisting of thirty-six pages of Western Yiddish phrases and words, mainly of Hebrew origin, that were used by Jewish horse traders in the eighteenth century. This appendix includes a collection of five lively sample dialogues between Jewish horse traders. Through this appendix, non-Jewish customers and traders were provided with a tool to understand the trading language used by Jewish horse traders at that time. The language appendix of Der vollkommene Pferdekenner gives insights into the everyday life and socio-economic circumstances of German Jews in a rural setting in the Margraviate of Brandenburg-Ansbach in southern Germany in the eighteenth century. It provides glimpses into the world of horse-trading as a specific public space where paths between Jews and non-Jews crossed at the threshold of modernity in the rare absence of an anti-Jewish agenda.

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War

Orphan Monster Spy by Matt Killeen

Reviewed by: Orphan Monster Spy by Matt Killeen Deborah Stevenson, Editor Killeen, Matt Orphan Monster Spy. Viking, 2018 [368p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-451-47873-3 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-451-47874-0 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 9-12 It’s 1939, fifteen-year-old Sarah is a Jew in Germany, and she’s all alone since her mother was shot. A couple of chance encounters and reciprocal kindnesses connect her with a cool and well-heeled gentleman who calls himself Herr Haller, who takes Sarah in. Haller—really Jeremy Floyd, a British captain atoning for arms profiteering during the Spanish Civil War—is a spy, and he sees in canny, duplicitous Sarah, who looks like her Aryan father, a chance at getting information about developing Nazi weaponry. To this end Sarah, renamed Ursula Haller and passed off as Herr Haller’s niece, is sent to a high-caste yet horrible boarding school where she’s to befriend Elsa Schäfer, the daughter of a Nazi scientist. The boarding school is torture, sometimes literally, in its own right, so Sarah is thrilled when she finally receives an invitation to the Schäfers’ for Christmas and can do some proper spying—but is she the hunter or the hunted? This is a delectable sprawling action-adventure with generous pulpy touches ranging from the sadistic boarding school to the multifariously nefarious Nazis. At the center is relentless little Sarah, [End Page 294] who in her straitened childhood (often depicted in flashback) learned languages and drama from her alcoholic actress mother and gained focus and nimbleness from creative gymnastics practice that was essentially parkour. While she’s a little too gifted at times for plausibility, she’s terrifically appealing in her reliance on being underestimated, her natural stealth, and her implacability. Readers not yet ready for Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds will find this gritty and satisfying, and they’ll be pleased at the hint that Sarah may return for more adventure. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion by Leonard Barkan

Reviewed by: Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion by Leonard Barkan Kerry Wallach (bio) Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion By Leonard Barkan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 191 pp. Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion seems to be directed at an insider community of Jews who care about Jewish history, especially those considering a trip to Germany. The book's meandering look at Berlin is broader and more nuanced than a travel guide, with close attention to how Jews of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood their own relationships to Jewishness. Still, it remains unclear who beyond a small subset of travelers will be interested in Leonard Barkan's writing on Berlin. That the author is not an expert in either German or Jewish Studies has both merits and drawbacks. As a professor of comparative literature, art and archaeology, classics, and English, Barkan has written a type of memoir for a general audience that scholars in German or Jewish Studies might not venture or desire to write. The first two chapters use a cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg and a neighborhood in Schöneberg as windows into specific eras of history. Chapters 3 through 5 present Barkan's own "special Jewish pantheon" of Berlin Jews: salon hostess Rahel Varnhagen, art collector James Simon, and writer Walter Benjamin, whose legacies are intertwined with the history, people, and places of Berlin. Barkan concludes with a brief discussion of Holocaust memorialization and tourism, with a few poignant pages on Jewish daily life in Nazi Germany. One highlight throughout is the book's emphasis on architecture and works of art. Some of the most interesting questions raised by Berlin for Jews deal with the absence and presence, hiddenness and visibility, of Jews and Jewishness. As Barkan explains in the prologue, like many German Jews, he once had a relationship to Jewishness that was complicated by deep ambivalence and a quest for upward mobility. Indeed, this book constitutes a self-proclaimed "therapeutic" quest to parse both [End Page 92] personal and broader cultural ambivalence by means of strolls through Berlin, historical anecdotes, and self-critical humor. This takes different forms, for example: examining combinations of German and Hebrew on various gravestones; combing texts for the term Jew and its synonyms and euphemisms; and marveling over the Jewish address books published in Berlin in 1929/30 and 1931 and positing their relevance for understanding minority positions more broadly. Taken together, the book's uneven methods of analysis do not offer a balanced or convincing narrative. The discussion of places in the first two chapters is surprisingly illuminating and enjoyable. Even someone who is very familiar with Berlin and its Jewish sites will discover new details about individuals and families in the first chapter on the Schönhauser Allee cemetery. Barkan notes, however, that he does not provide a "convenient itinerary" for viewing the various graves discussed; those in search of specific gravesites may want to purchase the cemetery's extensive guide for six euros. (For a more straightforward and comprehensive itinerary of Jewish sites in Berlin, try Bill Rebiger's Jewish Berlin, which also covers the Schönhauser Allee cemetery.) Chapter 2 concentrates on the former residents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, of the Bayerisches Viertel (Bavarian Quarter) to postulate a "School of Schöneberg" in the vein of Raphael's Renaissance fresco The School of Athens. This chapter in particular calls attention to the fascinating architecture of this neighborhood while drawing on the author's knowledge of classical architecture. In contrast to the first two geographically oriented chapters, chapters 3 through 5 proceed more or less chronologically. The eloquent chapters on Rahel Varnhagen and Walter Benjamin could serve as engaging introductions to their biographies and writings for anyone with little knowledge of these relatively well-known figures. The fourth chapter on philanthropic art collector James Simon is the most original and insightful, thanks in part to the author's art historical expertise and perhaps also because little English-language scholarship exists on Simon. Vivid close readings of portraits and objects from Simon's collection, including the famous Nefertiti bust, make this chapter especially instructive. Here readers have...

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady

Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History eds. by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup

Reviewed by: Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History eds. by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup Jay Geller Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History. Edited by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup. New York: Berghahn, 2017. Pp. xi + 327. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1785335532. Leading German historians Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup collect seventeen contributions that demonstrate how attention to multiple spatial perspectives ("epistemological category … analytical approach … subject of historical analysis") on [End Page 654] historical processes and interactions among individuals and institutions can generate new insights into the history of a minority, specifically of Jews in German lands, and their interactions with the majority population (1). The editors organize the contributions under three rubrics to highlight different possibilities for thinking how spaces and boundaries condition the ways historical actors and institutions engage one another: imaginations (focusing on memory and representation), transformations (emergences, shifts, and dissolutions), and "practices of spacing or doing space" (contesting, appropriating, and negotiating) (1). More generally, the chapters explore "the dual nature of space" (2)—as a fixed form that shapes identities and experience and as open, fluid, contingent, performative—that is often indexed by the distinction between place and space. Often mediating this distinction is the notion of "boundary"; rather than emphasizing its function as a separation determining inside from outside, the chapters attend to boundaries as sites of contact—e.g., as thresholds (Joachim Schlör)—of contestation, negotiation, and interchange. They also attend to the temporal dimension of space, e.g., how the day of the week (Saturday vs. Sunday) changes the Jewish/non-Jewish identification of a space (Alexandra Binnenkade). One risk, however, of expanding the understanding of space beyond the constraints of topography or fantasies of territory is the use of "space" as an empty trope for trope's sake (Anthony D. Kauders, Ofer Ashkenazi). Though claims that a people has an essential tie to a specific territory are a hallmark of all modern European nationalisms, their consequences have perhaps been most profound in the case of German nationalism, especially in relation to Jewish lives in German lands: from Jewish emancipation caught between the territorial-bounded notion of Volk and a nonlocative notion of citizen (Lässig and Rürup) to "resettlement to the East." Perceptions of Jews have also been prominently marked in spatial terms by both non-Jewish and Jewish Germans. On the one hand, Jews were identified as foreigners, not native to German Raum. This alienation from the land had a material aspect well into the nineteenth century, with ubiquitous rules restricting Jewish land ownership and regulating Jewish residency; hence, non-Jews determined whether and how the synagogue, a generally recognized Jewish space, could be constituted. On the other hand, the Jews had a collective spatial identity tied to diaspora and/or exile, as well as marked by expulsion and emigration. In the aftermath of World War II, Jewish extraterritorial identification became institutionalized with the designation of DP, displaced person (Anna Holian). Another factor that makes a new spatial focus on German Jewish history pertinent is how the normative spatial representation of German Christian and Jewish lives since premodern times—communities living apart, except when the former violently intruded upon the latter—has lately undergone extensive revision. A number of essays depict the far greater interaction and mutual influence that took place across overlapping spaces. Further, the recognition of the meaning of a space depends [End Page 655] on who is speaking—what a Jewish space is for Jews (and even heterogeneous views within Jewish populations: orthodox vs. reform, assimilationist vs. Zionist) as opposed to non-Jews. The motives for identifying spaces as "Jewish" are varied: commercial exploitation, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, nostalgia, mourning, recompense, revisionist, mediating rupture and continuity (Nils Roemer). Another aspect of the recent historiography of space, the determination of "sites of memory" (lieux de mémoire), has a special valence given the contemporary emergence of such sites where Jewish populations are all but nonexistent as a consequence of German history (perhaps why this collection ends with a chapter on virtual Jewish spaces in Poland by Ruth Ellen Gruber). Several contributions focus on the contested identifications of seemingly...

What Does Jewish Praying Book from the World War Tell: after the Publication by Rabbi Dr. Sali Levy

This paper presents an article by Rabbi Dr. S. Levi published in 1921 in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums about French Jewish army rabbis and Jewish praying books from World War One distributed among Jewish soldiers in French Army. Levi served himself as an Army Rabbi in German army. He used his own experience to highlight the most interesting and significant features of French approach toward Jewish military service in time of war. This article of Rabbi Levi serves as an example of continuation of the pre-war GermanJewish self-identification as both culturally German and religiously Jewish. However, it also presented an interesting depiction of the technical details about French Army praying book. In contrast to German Jewry, their French counterparts published praying book under the auspices of the Chief Rabbi of France and distributed in with the help of his office. Levi pointed out that these praying books reflect in their content the original war time religiosity, which was still important to reconstruct and to reflect about in the after war epoch. The Great Rabbi of France gave his sanctions for the publishing the Prayer for the War Time and Prayer for France, both prayers bore his name and originated in the years 1914-1915. Dr. Levi justly saw in the figure of the Great Rabbi a central authority for the Jews in the French uniform. The French praying book was designated not only for the French Jews of European origin who mostly had had Alsace and Lorraine roots, but also for the Sephardic Jews from the French colonies in North Africa (Morocco and Algiers). Because of this fact, this praying book was different in its content from both German Jewish praying books. It provided two versions of the Hebrew texts in accordance to Ashkenazi and Sephardic rites. Both versions, the Ashkenazi (and the German one as Dr. Levi called it) and the Sephardic were printed together. Dr. Levi thought that it was necessary to highlight the differences between these two Jewish rites. He found that there elements in general were of great importance whereas his Ashkenazi German readers would find it confusing to differentiate between ritual nuances with their Sephardic co-religionists, namely in the conducting the death-, burial- and mourning praying ceremonies. In accordance to the articles published in the Monatsschrift Jewish experiences during the First World War were positively evaluated by their German co-religionists.

Turning German Jews into Jewish Greeks: Philanthropy and Acculturation in the Jewish Greek System’s Student Refugee Programs, 1936–1940

Turning German Jews into Jewish Greeks: Philanthropy and Acculturation in the Jewish Greek System’s Student Refugee Programs, 1936–1940

Индивидуальный террор в антигитлеровском сопротивлении немецких евреев

Индивидуальный террор в антигитлеровском сопротивлении немецких евреев

The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy by Steven P. Remy

Reviewed by: The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy by Steven P. Remy David A. Messenger (bio) The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy. By Steven P. Remy. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 342. $29.95 cloth) Steven P. Remy's account of the 1946 war crimes trial of the seventy-four former members of the Waffen SS accused of killing hundreds of American prisoners of war in the vicinity of Malmedy, Belgium, in December 1944, is much more than an account of post-war justice. The Malmedy case was one of the most infamous and significant crimes against American soldiers in the Second World War. As Remy argues, however, what happened after the trial was just as significant, for when accusations of American torture and psychological stressing of German prisoners to get forced confessions emerged, it shaped the memory of the massacre for years to come, among scholars as well as others. Remy's goal is to discount these stories and re-establish the trial—and the crime—as legitimate. More importantly, in the view of this reviewer, is his effort to interpret the accusations and their longevity as part of a larger effort by Germans and Americans to recast Nazi criminals as welcome allies in the Cold War era. Remy evenly divides his book into two parts, the first of the investigation and trial itself and the second concerning the post-trial charges that the United Sates tortured the defendants in order to gain false confessions. Extensive use of war crimes records in American archives, as well as memoirs of participants, allows Remy to detail the investigations as well as the trial. In particular, his study of the prison environment at Schwäbisch Hall allows him to convincingly reject the torture accusations. Post-trial reviews of the verdicts were standard practice, and the initial review accepted the twenty-five death sentences and thirteen other convictions be approved, and thirty-four others confirmed but with reduced sentences (p. 144). The American lawyer who defended the Germans, Willis Everett, charged that the Germans had been tortured to get confessions—Everett had developed an intense disdain for the entire war crimes process, in particular for the role of American [End Page 565] and German émigré Jews in carrying out the prosecutions, which Remy concludes was part of Everett's "conspiratorial anti-Semitism that underpinned his view of a corrupt American occupation" (p. 131). Press coverage in both the United States and Germany of the torture charge grew, an effort Remy quite rightly views as part of the larger effort of Waffen SS veterans to recast themselves as soldiers in the heat of battle, and not part of a criminal organization to wage terror, as the rest of the SS was generally seen during the post-war trials (p. 167). American critics of the trials latched on to this larger German campaign, as did German clergy, who were extremely active. By 1949, a subcommittee of the Senate's Armed Services Committee held hearings in Washington, D.C. and Munich, Germany, involving freshman Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who agreed from the start that the accusations of American torture were true, and who actively pursued the argument that German Jews involved on the American side were vengeful (p. 232). All of this forced American General Lucius Clay in Germany to only carry out death sentences if unquestionable and corroborated evidence existed in any given case. By 1957, every one of the men convicted in the Malmedy case, including those with death sentences, was free. In Germany, the case was seen simply as an example of victor's justice and the abandonment of denazification, championed by the West German government of Konrad Adenauer throughout the 1950s, was justified. The active role of Waffen SS men in helping politicize war crimes trials—not just in the Malmedy case—was hugely significant, especially after 1949 (p. 261). Remy's important book shows us the extent to which these efforts shaped and altered justice in the aftermath of war. [End Page 566] David A. Messenger DAVID A. MESSENGER is professor and chair in the Department of History at the University of South Alabama...

Документы Третьего рейха по Эвианской конференции 1938 г.: попустительство мировых держав юдофобской политике нацистов

The year 2018 is the 80th anniversary of the international conference on refugees held on July 5-16, 1938 in a French town of ?vian. Despite great significance of the refugee problem in the modern world, the history of the ?vian conference remains on the periphery of historical science. There are no studies of the topic in Russian scholarship; the Western historiography on the conniving indifference of the world powers towards Nazi anti-Semitic policies, which resulted in the Holocaust, is scarce. The object of this study is the 1938 international ?vian conference on refugees and its reflection in sources and scholarship. The subject of the study is previously unpublished German documents on the ?vian conference stored in the fond of the ‘Chief Directorate for Imperial Security’ in the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA). The purpose of the article is to give a new interpretation of the role of Germany in the ?vian conference drawing on German documents on the ?vian conference from the fonds of the RGVA and to show the historical significance of the conference for the Nazis’ turn towards the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The tasks of the article are to use traditional methods of historical research to study new German sources on the topic of the study. The documents have been translated in Russian in order to put them into source and literary context and to provide their scientific interpretation. For the first time in Russian historiography, the article notes that at the ?vian conference the German Jews submitted a memorandum with a 4-year plan of emigration of 200,000 Jews from Germany, but their action-oriented proposals were buried in platitudes. The conference participants’ speeches demonstrated the unwillingness of the majority of countries to open their borders to refugees from the Third Reich. The study concludes that the failure of the ?vian conference opened the door to the Holocaust. The significance of the study is due not just to the 80th anniversary of the ?vian conference, but also to the urgency of the refugee problem in Europe and worldwide.

The Increasing Reliance on Ritual Handbooks in Pre–Print Era Ashkenaz

Handbooks devoted to a single area of ritual practice figure prominently among the works produced by German Jews from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth. These handbooks include minhagim books intended primarily as liturgical guides for cantors and manuals for other types of communal functionaries, such as scribes and ritual slaughterers. Historians typically associate minhagim books with the post–Black Death period and the desire to provide guidance during a time of decline for German Jewry. Similarly, the flourishing of halakhic manuals is considered a fourteenth-century phenomenon, a result of the rabbinate’s professionalization. However, these explanations are insufficient since both genres emerged earlier. This article links the production of ritual handbooks to two trends: geographic mobility and a more text-oriented culture. Between the thirteenth century and the fifteenth, major changes in German Jewish settlement patterns disrupted the transmission of ritual practice and led to a need for practical guides. The proliferation of ritual handbooks was also related to the increase in Ashkenazic society—as in medieval Europe generally—in the production of written texts. These texts included liturgical genres and practical halakhic works, some of which served as sources for the handbooks. However, the handbooks tend to be more accessible than their predecessors and to include more practical details. The proliferation of late medieval ritual handbooks demonstrates that changes typically associated with the advent of print, including a growing reliance on written sources for practical information and a move toward the standardization of ritual practice, began to emerge in earlier centuries.

Ordinary Crime and the Persecution of Jewish Germans in Deportation-Era Berlin

Ordinary Crime and the Persecution of Jewish Germans in Deportation-Era Berlin

Without a Home: German Jews as Displaced Persons in Post-War Germany

Without a Home: German Jews as Displaced Persons in Post-War Germany

‘Secure in the Two-Dimensional World’: The Filmbühne and Jewish Audiences in the Third Reich, 1938–1941

ABSTRACTThis article presents the first in-depth study of the impact the Filmbühne (film stage) had in the lives of German Jews living under the systematic oppression of the Nazi regime. The Filmbühne was an extension of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a Jewish organization which offered cultural activities exclusively for Jews in the Third Reich between 1933 and 1941. The Filmbühne opened in December 1938 and provided Jews in Berlin an opportunity to view films, an activity which had been forbidden to them in the previous month. This article presents a first thorough reconstruction of the Filmbühne itself, including who attended the film screenings, what was shown, the cinema’s function within the larger Kulturbund organization and why the Nazi authorities allowed it to exist. It then considers the different ways the Filmbühne affected German Jews’ daily lives as seen through letters and diaries. The final section shows how film reviews in the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, the only surviving Jewish newspaper at the time, enabled members of the Jewish community to circumvent Nazi censorship concerning Kristallnacht. This study discusses the variety of ways that the Filmbühne affected the lives of German Jews, most notably by providing audiences a way to cope with reality, connecting the Jewish community with the larger German culture, from which its members were completely segregated in other areas of their lives, and serving as a valuable communication tool which sent messages of validation and encouragement to the Jewish community. Focusing on this largely overlooked organization offers a new perspective on Jewish life in Nazi Germany during the period of time after Kristallnacht and before the deportations.