Erna Stein-Blumenthal

Erna Stein-Blumenthal (without photographer, without year)

Erna Stein-Blumenthal (born as Erna Stein November 23, 1903 in Emden ; died June 5, 1983 in Kfar Jedida , Emek Chefer ) was a German-Israeli art historian .

Life

Erna Stein studied art history in Breslau, among other places, and received her doctorate there with a dissertation on baroque columns. She wrote articles for the Thieme-Becker artist lexicon and for the first volume of the real lexicon on German art history, which appeared in 1937 .

In 1930 she became the assistant to Karl Schwarz , who was supposed to bring together the scattered and disorganized collections of the Berlin Jewish Community in a museum. The Jewish Museum (collection of the Jewish Community in Berlin) was opened on January 24, 1933, shortly before the handover of power to the National Socialists and the beginning of open political and racist terror.

Schwarz went to Palestine in May 1933 to set up the art museum in Tel Aviv . Stein-Blumenthal took over the management of the museum in Berlin, the art historian Irmgard Schüler was hired as an assistant and librarian , Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein became a freelancer. In 1935 Stein-Blumenthal handed over the management of the museum to Franz Landsberger and emigrated to Palestine with his husband and two children.

Stein-Blumenthal wrote art reviews for newspapers in Israel.

Fonts (selection)

• with Karl Schwarz: Guide through the Jewish Museum: Collections of the Jewish Community in Berlin . 1935
• The legend of Joseph in watercolored drawings by an unknown Russian Jew of the Biedermeier period: With the associated scriptures in the German translation by Martin Buber , Franz Rosenzweig . Introduction Erna Stein. Berlin: Schocken, 1935
• The Sonnenfeld Collection in Tel Aviv . In: Weltkunst 31, 1961, 3, p. 5

literature

• Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . KG Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 351.
• Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism. Part 2: L – Z. KG Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 659-660.
• Tobias Metzler: Collecting Community. The Berlin Jewish Museums as Narrators Between Past and Present . In: Richard I. Cohen (Ed.): Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, pp. 55-79.
• Erna Stein-Blumenthal . In: AJR-Informations August 1983, p. 7 ( digitized version ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Erna Stein-Blumenthal in the bibliographic database WorldCat , unordered holdings
• Inka Bertz: The first Jewish Museum in Berlin , Jewish Museum Berlin