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Obituary

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our longstanding member of the Board of Trustees and friend Heinz-Joachim Aris, who passed away in the night to Friday 24 March 2017 at the age of 82.

Heinz-Joachim Aris served as deputy member to the Board of Trustees of the Jewish Museum Berlin from 2007. He supported the work of the Jewish Museum Berlin with great commitment and profound understanding. We mourn for our companion, as wise as he was prudent, whose heartfelt friendship we shall sorely miss. Our deepest sympathy goes to his wife, his family, and all those who were close to him.

Professor Peter Schäfer
Director, Jewish Museum Berlin Foundation
On behalf of all the staff

Emanuel and Johanna Stern, ca. 1903; Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Alexander Summerville

Just over two years ago, I penned a blog text describing a Passover Haggada that I had purchased online. It caught my attention due to the lists of names written on the inside front and back covers of individuals who attended the Passover Seders over the course of seven years that were held in two residences in Berlin, both of which were in close proximity to the Jewish Museum Berlin. Research revealed a substantial amount of information about various persons named therein and my text concluded with the hope that contact might be established with descendants of some of those found in the lists.

At the end of March of this year, I flew to Stockholm to visit Alexander Summerville, the great grandson of Paul Aron, in whose home in the Hedemannstraße 13/14 Passover Seders took place in five of the years for which lists exist in the Haggada. → continue reading

The Tragic Fate of Shmuel Dancyger Z. L.

The family at the grave of Shmuel Dancyger; Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Morris Dancyger

During a visit to my hometown of Calgary Alberta, Canada in the summer of 2014, I had the opportunity to meet with Morris and Ann Dancyger, both child survivors of the Holocaust. Morris Dancyger was one of the very few children to have been liberated by the Russians at Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. In the iconic footage of the children displaying their tattooed arms, four year old Morris is in the center of the picture. Ann Dancyger and her mother had miraculously survived an execution in 1942 near the town of Ratno where she was born, and spent nearly three years thereafter in hiding. After a nearly two year trek to Germany following the end of the war, she was able to come to Calgary where relatives lived. I had not known the Dancygers while growing up in the city, and although I had much later read about the tragic fate of Morris Dancyger’s father Shmuel, I was completely unaware that his wife and children had settled in Calgary. → continue reading