Unpacking Donations
Behind the Scenes at the Archives
Family collections are invaluable for the Jewish Museum Berlin. Such collections teach us about family history and life stories and make German-Jewish history tangible and personal. But how do family collections actually reach the museum?
This January, when a courier service arrived at the museum with thirteen boxes, our Archive staff was ecstatic – and the excitement rose as each new parcel was opened. The boxes contained gifts from twenty-four people whom Aubrey Pomerance had visited during a two-week trip to California. What mementos, what treasures would we unwrap? What stories would we find beneath these objects?
For many years, the Museum's Archive Director has been in close contact with German-Jewish émigrés, Holocaust survivors, and their descendants around the world. These relationships are very important to the museum. Not only do families bequeath generous gifts to the museum, but they also share with us much of the knowledge about their history preserved in family tradition. This is an important requirement for us to add donated material to our collections.
Unwrapping gifts and donations is something all Archive staff members look forward to – and we are especially delighted about an object that closes a gap, complements or continues a story from our existing collections, or is simply unusual and surprising. Watch us unwrap!
Behind the Scenes at the Archives
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With gloves at the ready, Aubrey Pomerance opens the first box. Its precious contents have been carefully packed to protect the cargo en route.
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It contains materials from the collection of the Friedmann family, donated by Walter Friedman, who immigrated to the US with his parents in 1939. The documents, objects, and photos encompass three generations and more than a century. Here, you can see a notarized certificate in German from the state of New York, dated 1881.
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The gift also includes documents, sheet music, and photographs by the Chief Cantor of Berlin, Aron Friedmann (1855–1936), a very welcome addition to our holdings on cantors and liturgical music.
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The Friedmann Family Collection also includes many songs and poems written for special family occasions, such as weddings, during the second half of the nineteenth century.
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One eye-catcher is the length of silk with a poem for the 1865 wedding of Gustav Friedmann and Anna Stoller (epithalamium, on the left side of the image).
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Taking extreme care, we unwrapped a Passover Seder plate – a unique specimen. It was made in Shanghai by Hermann Meyer, who was training there to become a metalworker. We received it from Hermann Meyer’s widow Trude Meyer, who had already donated a larger collection of items from her husband’s estate seven years earlier.
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Hermann Meyer took the seder plate with him in 1948, when he relocated to the US. It was used there for decades of Passovers.
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The center of the plate depicts the pyramids and baby Moses being placed in the Nile. The figurative engraving is surrounded by the three Hebrew words Pessach (referring to the Pessach offering), matzah (unleavened bread), and marror (bitter herbs), which are the holiday’s most important symbols and traditional elements of the seder meal. The font matches one by Hermann Meyer’s former art teacher from Hamburg, Kallman Rothschild (1891–1973), who also crafted a Seder plate that is now in the museum’s collection.
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Under several layers of tissue paper, we find a photo album from Salia Würzburg, one of the very first student fraternities to welcome Jews. The album was donated by Peter Michaels, whose grandfather had brought it into exile together with other photographs from fraternity life.
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We’re overjoyed. For many years, the Jewish Museum Berlin has been making efforts to build a collection on Jewish fraternities and already possesses several extraordinary artifacts.
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Cautiously, archivist Ulrike Neuwirth examines the images from Peter Michael’s gift. Sometimes we find connections to other donors and family collections, “old friends” in the photos whose lives crossed paths.
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Once all the objects, photos, and certificates have been unwrapped and inspected, the collections are catalogued and described in great detail and a finding aid is created for each gift. For the families, all materials are photographed and digitized – as a memento and a thank you.
With gloves at the ready, Aubrey Pomerance opens the first box. Its precious contents have been carefully packed to protect the cargo en route.
It contains materials from the collection of the Friedmann family, donated by Walter Friedman, who immigrated to the US with his parents in 1939. The documents, objects, and photos encompass three generations and more than a century. Here, you can see a notarized certificate in German from the state of New York, dated 1881.
The gift also includes documents, sheet music, and photographs by the Chief Cantor of Berlin, Aron Friedmann (1855–1936), a very welcome addition to our holdings on cantors and liturgical music.
The Friedmann Family Collection also includes many songs and poems written for special family occasions, such as weddings, during the second half of the nineteenth century.
One eye-catcher is the length of silk with a poem for the 1865 wedding of Gustav Friedmann and Anna Stoller (epithalamium, on the left side of the image).
Taking extreme care, we unwrapped a Passover Seder plate – a unique specimen. It was made in Shanghai by Hermann Meyer, who was training there to become a metalworker. We received it from Hermann Meyer’s widow Trude Meyer, who had already donated a larger collection of items from her husband’s estate seven years earlier.
Hermann Meyer took the seder plate with him in 1948, when he relocated to the US. It was used there for decades of Passovers.
The center of the plate depicts the pyramids and baby Moses being placed in the Nile. The figurative engraving is surrounded by the three Hebrew words Pessach (referring to the Pessach offering), matzah (unleavened bread), and marror (bitter herbs), which are the holiday’s most important symbols and traditional elements of the seder meal. The font matches one by Hermann Meyer’s former art teacher from Hamburg, Kallman Rothschild (1891–1973), who also crafted a Seder plate that is now in the museum’s collection.
Under several layers of tissue paper, we find a photo album from Salia Würzburg, one of the very first student fraternities to welcome Jews. The album was donated by Peter Michaels, whose grandfather had brought it into exile together with other photographs from fraternity life.
We’re overjoyed. For many years, the Jewish Museum Berlin has been making efforts to build a collection on Jewish fraternities and already possesses several extraordinary artifacts.
Cautiously, archivist Ulrike Neuwirth examines the images from Peter Michael’s gift. Sometimes we find connections to other donors and family collections, “old friends” in the photos whose lives crossed paths.
This photo series was produced in 2018 as a supplement to issue 18 of the print edition of the JMB Journal.
