Chaja Goldstein

Jacob Merkelbach : Chaja Goldstein in the Netherlands (1930s)

Koen Limperg : Costume design for Chaja Goldstein (1933)

Chaja Ruchel Goldstein , in Germany until 1933 as Hanna Goldstein (born on July 2, 1908 in Rypin , Russian Empire , today Poland ; died on January 27, 1999 in Netanya , Israel ) was an international dancer and entertainer of Russian-Polish-Jewish Origin.

Live and act

The daughter of a Polish-Jewish couple, who grew up in a Jewish ghetto in what was then tsarist Russia near the German border, had lived with her family (two siblings) in Germany since she was eleven. In Berlin, she can be seen as a dancer under the name Hanna Goldstein from 1931 on a tiny Jewish stage on Kurfürstendamm, where she danced and performed Yiddish songs. In 1933 Chaja Goldstein fled to the Netherlands as a result of the National Socialist seizure of power , where she married in 1937 and participated with her art in the German-language emigrant cabaret 'Ping Pong' and Trudi Schoop's ballet troupe. The artist, who has been known as Chaja Goldstein since April 1933, was also seen on regular Dutch stages such as the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam (city theater) and the Kurhaus in Scheveningen.

During the German occupation of Holland Chaja Goldstein was arrested and the on December 30, 1942 Westerbork transit camp deported . There she performed as a cabaret artist, singer and dancer as part of Max Ehrlich's camp programs (“ Bunter Abend ”, summer 1943). As one of the few Westerbork prisoners, the Jew was not deported to any extermination camp in the East and was released again in the summer of 1943 because she was with an "Aryan" (the director and cameraman Theodor Johann Heinrich Güsten (1899–1978)) was married. Goldstein stayed a while in Amsterdam, where she gave her farewell performance at the Stadsschouwburg on May 12, 1948, before emigrating to the USA. In New York, however, she could hardly continue her career, fell ill and ended her artistic work around 1951. In 1973 she and her husband finally returned to the Netherlands temporarily. In August 1981 the now widowed Chaja Goldstein emigrated to her brother Eli in Israel. After his death in 1989 she fell more and more depressed. She died in Netanya at the age of 90 at the beginning of 1999.

literature

• Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 390.

Web links

• Chaja Goldstein , at resources.huygens.knaw.nl