About the archive
A family archive built from evidence and return
The Reichenbach Family Archive is a descendant-led research and preservation project centered on Halberstadt, Wernigerode and the generations that rebuilt life abroad.
The archive begins with a private family collection and checks it against municipal records, memorial databases, libraries, museums and scholarship. A visitor can read the story, then open the object record, transcription, translation and source beside it.
Method
The archive protects living people, keeps conflicts visible, and labels edited or AI-assisted images wherever they appear.
The project is led by Rabbi Daniel Dolph Reichenbach, a descendant and namesake. The work is larger than a family tree. It asks what the family had before 1933, how commercial and civic lives were dismantled, what refugees carried with them, and how later generations rebuilt Jewish life through family, education, congregations, camp, Israel and memory.
About the research
A readable story. A complete record.
Living people are protected. Conflicting evidence is preserved. AI-assisted and edited images are clearly identified; neither is presented as a historical original or used in place of evidence.
The public story uses concise human captions while every object remains connected to its archive reference, full description, source, credit, rights information, treatment history and uncertainty.
- Historical originals and master scans remain distinct from web derivatives and AI-assisted presentation copies.
- Family accounts remain attributed to their speakers and are not silently converted into documentary fact.
- Transcriptions and translations remain available as selectable text beside the photographed documents.
- Conflicting evidence and unresolved questions stay in the complete record rather than being edited away for narrative neatness.
With gratitude to Halberstadt
The museum that helped descendants meet the family’s Halberstadt history
The Berend Lehmann Museum for Jewish History and Culture and the Stiftung Moses Mendelssohn Akademie Halberstadt have spent decades preserving and interpreting the Jewish history of the city.
Their work with records, objects, historic places and the memories of former Jewish residents and their descendants made it possible for the Reichenbach family to encounter its own history as part of the larger history of Jewish Halberstadt.
We are especially grateful to Dr. Jutta Dick, who directed the Moses Mendelssohn Akademie Halberstadt and its Berend Lehmann Museum from 1995 until her retirement in 2022 and remains a member of the foundation’s board. Her work has helped descendants return to Halberstadt, find surviving traces of family life and carry those stories forward.
The Reichenbach Family Archive is an independent descendant-led project. This acknowledgement records gratitude for the museum’s work; it does not imply institutional sponsorship or endorsement.
Return and recognition · 28 May 2022
A place in Halberstadt’s Golden Book
At a Rathaus reception, descendants of the city’s former Jewish residents were welcomed as guests of Halberstadt and invited to add their names to the city’s ceremonial record.
This photograph shows Rabbi Daniel Dolph Reichenbach writing in the Golden Book. The date printed on the page is 28 May 2022. A contemporary report recorded that roughly sixty descendants had travelled from the United States, Australia and Israel. Mayor Daniel Szarata and Saxony-Anhalt’s cultural state secretary Sebastian Putz received the group before conversations, presentations and a walk to the Berend Lehmann Museum.
The entry joins civic recognition to return: a descendant of a family expelled from German public life writes the family name into the official book of its city.