Why I built this archive

Over the past decade, travel through Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Turkey, Ukraine, Lithuania and Israel deepened my understanding of Jewish history and of how precarious Jewish life can be in societies that too readily turn against Jews. Around 2018, my father showed me a photograph album his mother had given him. Inside was what the family had preserved as its archive, including the letter Dolf wrote from Switzerland to his mother, Mutti, in Germany. My father and I could not read German, but we understood that the letter had been cherished. I asked a classmate to translate it. Suddenly we were inside the emotional world of my grandfather, great-aunt and great-grandmother at one of the most traumatic turning points of the twentieth century. From then on, I felt compelled to preserve the letter, recover the life that came before it and learn what had made its writing necessary.

The letter remains central to me because it is so deeply human. Dolf was not yet twenty-four, yet he sounds grounded, confident and determined to support his mother. I wish I had possessed those qualities so fully at his age. The line that stays with me is his insistence that outside Germany, “one is a person again.” At first, I understood it as a reflection on how losing money and status might return someone to a more natural state. Then I recognized what it said about how thoroughly my family and the Jewish people had been demonized and dehumanized. Its warning is not abstract to me in the present.

My father's Jewish work has always been central to my life. I grew up looking up to him, and I was not alone. He is and always has been a mensch. I was raised surrounded by Reform rabbis, who showed me what the best of liberal Judaism could ask of a person. Their example shaped how I understand the world, what I believe matters and the kind of impact I hope to leave.

I became a rabbi because I felt called and because I wanted to continue my father's work, and through him the values my grandfather carried into his new American life. This family history is one of several reasons I entered the rabbinate. The more I learn, the more I understand that my own life was far from inevitable. It is inexplicable and precious because Jewish life in the places my family came from was so thoroughly destroyed.

I hope students of the Holocaust and European Jewish history will use the documents preserved here. I also hope people who arrive without looking for this particular family will find a human story and leave with some of the pride I feel when I see the family photographs, the store and the letter. The archive takes these memories out of fleeting conversations and stories told over dinner and gives them a place to endure.