Hanukkah chandelier from the Posner family
| Hanukkah chandelier from the Posner family |
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| unknown manufacturer , |
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Yad Vashem , Jerusalem
Link to the picture |
The Hanukkah chandelier of the Posner family is a Hanukkia from the family of the last Kiel rabbi before the Shoah , Arthur Posner . In addition, The Hanukkah candlestick of the Posner family in Kiel is the title of one of Posner's wife Rachel to HanukkahPhotos of this candlestick taken in 1932. The Hanukkia and the photo were given to the Yad Vashem Memorial by the children of the Posner family on permanent loan. The photo of Hanukkah against the backdrop of a building with a swastika flag garnered worldwide attention decades after the Shoah. Rachel Posner's two lines on the back of the photo contributed to this, with which she countered the National Socialist will to annihilate with her confidence in the eternal existence of Judaism.
Posner family and their Hanukkah candlestick
Arthur Posner was the last rabbi of the Jewish community in the Goethestrasse synagogue from 1924 to June 1933 . In 1925 he married the foreign language correspondent Rosi Rachel Posner. The Posner family lived in Kiel from 1926, most recently in an apartment in Sophienblatt 60. Diagonally opposite were the offices of the Kiel district leadership of the NSDAP . Walter Behrens had been NSDAP district leader since July 1, 1932who was Lord Mayor of Kiel from March 1933 to May 1945. In July and November the NSDAP achieved its best results in Germany in the constituency of Schleswig-Holstein. On August 3, 1932, an explosives attack was carried out on the Kiel synagogue. The Hanukkah festival of 1932 coincided with the Christian Christmas and ended on New Year's Eve of the year.
In addition to his work as a rabbi and religious scholar, Posner vigorously opposed the growing anti-Semitism in publications and speeches. One example is his dispute with Pastor Uhlhorn from Eckernförde , in which the Osnabrück Bishop Wilhelm Berning was also involved. Even after the Goethestrasse synagogue and the Karstadt department store in Kiel had become the target of bomb attacks, Posner took a public position. While at the end of 1932 many Jews in Kiel drew the curtains before they put the Hanukkia in the window according to the custom, the Posners showed the chandelier visible in the window facing the street.
The Hanukkia
According to their daughter Schulamith, the Posner family bought their Hanukkah after the wedding, i.e. in 1925 or later. The chandelier is made entirely of brass, its narrow shaft stands on a five-tiered round plinth . Approximately in the middle of the shaft, the lowest and outer pair of eight upwardly directed arches made of twisted brass strands are attached, each of which has one of the light holders arranged side by side in a row at its end. Between the third and fourth pair of arches, the “servant” (Hebrew for shamash ) is attached to the front of the candlestick , a smaller light holder for the ninth candle to light the other. There is a on the tip of the Hanukkiah shaftStar of David towering above the candle holders.
The photo
| The Hanukkah chandelier from the Posner family in Kiel |
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| Rachel Posner , 1932 |
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Yad Vashem , Jerusalem
Link to the picture |
| The Hanukkah chandelier from the Posner family in Kiel (back) |
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| Rachel Posner , 1932 |
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Link to the picture |
On the eighth day of Hanukkah in 5693, December 31, 1932, Rachel Posner photographed the family's Hanukkah chandelier on the window sill in the Kiel apartment. In the background, the building of the NSDAP district leadership was slightly out of focus and was flagged with a large swastika flag. Rachel Posner wrote the lines on the back of the postcard-sized print
Chanukkah
5692
(1932)
“Judah wreck”
the flag speaks -
“Judah lives forever!”
Replies the light.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the photo and its story were published in numerous Israeli, German and international media. The story of the photo was embellished to a considerable extent, which contradict each other in many details and often do not agree with verifiable facts. The Flensburg historian Gerhard Paul has dealt in detail with the photo and its history and described its "journalistic-historical marketing".
The year of admission
Rachel Posner has noted the year 5692 of the Jewish calendar on the back of the print and below that in brackets the year 1932 of the Gregorian calendar . These details do not match. The discrepancy was discussed extensively in publications on the Internet, and the authenticity of the photo was also called into question. The 25th day of the month of Kislev , on the eve of which the first candle of Hanukkah is lit, was December 5, 1931 in 5692. It was not until the Jewish year 5693 that the 25th Kislev fell on December 24, 1932 Year data can be caused by a wrong counting of the Jewish calendar years in northern Germany. So in theYearbook for the Jewish communities of Schleswig-Holstein and the Hanseatic cities and the state community of Oldenburg in year 5692 (1931/1932) published a calendar of holidays and fasting days in 5692 , which for Hanukkah in 5692 is actually the date 24 to 5693 December 31, 1932. The incorrect information matches Rachel Posner's inscription on the back of the photo. The following edition of the yearbook, for the Jewish calendar year 5693 (1932–1933), gives the correct Gregorian years 1932 and 1933 for the Hanukkah feasts 5693 and 5694. Gerhard Paul mentions 1931 as the year the photo was taken.
Location of the candlestick and photo
The Posner family emigrated to Belgium in June 1933 and to Jerusalem the following year . After Rachel Posner's death in 1982, the candlestick and the original of the photo with the inscription on the back passed into the possession of her daughter Schulamith Mansbach. First the Hanukkah was in the house of a Posner grandson in Bet Shemesh , then it was given to his son, a great grandson of Rachel Posner. The candlestick and the original photo were later loaned to the Yad Vashem Memorial . There they are exhibited with other objects, the individual fates of the Shoahclarify. Every year at Hanukkah, the candlestick is returned to the descendants of the Posner family for family celebrations. After the party he will come back to the exhibition.
Copies of the photo are in the Kiel City Archives and in the Picture Agency for Art, Culture and History of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. In the 1970s in Kiel, a six by nine centimeter negative was made from the original print that the descendants of the Posner family had provided. A large-format print was shown in an exhibition in the Stadtmuseum Kiel without information on the author or the history of the photo . Numerous other prints were made at institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the Jewish Museum in New York City , the memorialYad Vashem in Jerusalem and distributed to private individuals. A print was brought to the Preußischer Kulturbesitz picture archive in Berlin, where it was also copied many times. From Berlin, prints went to the Imperial War Museum in London, the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the Jewish Museum Berlin .
reception
Rachel Posner's photo was published repeatedly towards the end of the 20th century, with the date of the photo being moved to 1938 or another point in time after 1933 in order to provide a powerful representation of the Jewish will to assert themselves. The subsequent users regularly ignored the fact that such a recording was hardly possible in the pogrom mood of the late 1930s. Without a correct historical classification, the photo was often used to illustrate texts on the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust.
The photo was also shown in the US documentary Kindertransport - Into a Foreign World from 2000 and in the book of the same name for the film. In the German-language book edition it was the frontispiece , with the caption “'Greater German Reich', end of the 1930s”. It was not taken into account that the photo bears no relation to the Kindertransport or the situation of Jews in Germany at the end of the 1930s. The production company, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Entertainment, had secured the right to distribute the image worldwide and in all media for ten years. This is how the photo ended up on the Internet, where there was no reference to the place and time of the photo or to the author.
In the run-up to the publication of the anthology Menora und Hakenkreuz edited by Gerhard Paul and Miriam Gillis-Carlebach in 1998 . On the history of the Jews in and from Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck and Altona. In 1918-1998 , on the title of which the photo is shown, intensive research was carried out into the origin and author of the photo. Not only could the numerous prints be traced back to the negative in the Kiel city archive, but the owners of the original in Israel could also be found.
The Flensburg historian Gerhard Paul criticized the handling of the photo harshly. On the way from the city archive of Kiel to the picture archive of Prussian cultural property, the picture has changed from a historical source to a commodity. In order to increase the market value, traces of use were erased and new prints were made that “suggest originality and first-time use”.
literature
- Gerhard Paul : "... 'Judah lives forever!' replies the light ”. The story of a photo and that of its journalistic and historical marketing . In: Gerhard Paul: Landunter. Schleswig-Holstein and the swastika . Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster 2001, ISBN 3-89691-507-X , pp. 40–47.
Web links
- The Chanukkah chandelier from the Posner family in Kiel on the Yad Vashem website(with pictures of the Hanukkah and the Posner family);
- Evelyn Bartolmai: Hanukkah. About the festival of miracles . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur , article from December 3, 2010;
- Judith Neschma Klein: When the Festival of Lights and Christmas coincided . In: faz.net , December 26, 2017.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Gerhard Paul: The opposing symbols . In: Gerhard Paul: Landunter , pp. 38–39.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Gerhard Paul : "... 'Judah lives forever!' replies the light ”. The story of a photo and that of its journalistic and historical marketing . In: Gerhard Paul: Landunter , pp. 40–47.
- ↑ a b Arthur Posner : "The Jewish Danger". Open letter to Pastor Uhlhorn-Eckernförde from Rabbi Dr. Arthur Posner-Kiel . In: Central-Verein-Zeitung , Volume 10, Issue 15, April 10, 1931, p. 184, digitized
- ↑ Collection of Rabbi Dr. Akiva Posner - P 40 , Findbuch der Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) (PDF, 193 KB), accessed on October 26, 2020;
- ↑ Arthur Posner: Pastor Uhlhorn names his sources . In: Central-Verein-Zeitung , 10th year, issue 23, June 5, 1931, p. 287, digitized
- ↑ Arthur Posner: A declaration by Pastor Uhlhorn . In: Central-Verein-Zeitung , 10th year, issue 25, June 19, 1931, p. 315, digitized
- ↑ Misc . In: Der Israelit , Volume 73, Issue 33, August 11, 1932, page 7, digitized .
- ^ Arthur Posner: The synagogue is desecrated - the church is silent . In: The Truth , Issue 35, August 26, 1932, page 4, digitized .
- ↑ a b c Evelyn Bartolmai: Hanukkah. About the festival of miracles . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur , article from December 3, 2010, accessed on October 26, 2020.
- ↑ a b Time travel: The photo of the Hanukkah candlestick , Schleswig-Holstein Magazin from December 21, 2014, accessed on October 26, 2020
- ↑ a b Judith Neschma Klein: When the festival of lights and Christmas coincided . In: faz.net , December 26, 2017, accessed October 26, 2020.
- ^ A b Daniella J. Greenbaum: Lighting Hanukkah Candles Under the Swastika's Shadow . In: The New York Times , December 12, 2017, accessed October 26, 2020.
- ↑ a b Gerhard Paul: Traces. Photographs on Jewish life in Schleswig-Holstein 1900–1950 . In: Rainer Hering (Ed.): The "Reichskristallnacht" in Schleswig-Holstein. The November pogrom in a historical context (= publications of the Schleswig-Holstein State Archives, Volume 109). Hamburg University Press, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-943423-30-3 , pp. 53-70, digitized .
- ↑ Dan MacGuill: Does a PhotoShow a Menorah Displayed in Defiance of Nazism? . In: Snopes.com , December 24, 2019, accessed October 26, 2020.
- ↑ Weekly calendar, in Der Israelit , Volume 72, Issue 49, December 3, 1931, page 8, digitized .
- ↑ Weekly calendar, in Der Israelit , Volume 73, Issue 52, December 22, 1932, page 3, digitized .
- ↑ Anonymous: Feast days and fasting days in 5692 . In: Yearbook for the Jewish communities of Schleswig-Holstein and the Hanseatic cities and the state community of Oldenburg , year 5692 (1931/1932), p. III, digitized .
- ↑ Anonymous: Holidays and fasting days in 5693/5694 . In: Yearbook for the Jewish communities of Schleswig-Holstein and the Hanseatic cities and the state community of Oldenburg , year 5693 (1932/1933), p. 126, digitized .