Exchange at the University of Haifa on Scholarship, Archive and Museum
At the end of October, the DAAD-funded Haifa Center for German and European Studies (HCGES) hosted an international conference entitled ‘Between Continuity and Transformation: German-Speaking Jews in Palestine and Israel’. The conference brought together scholars from various disciplines and generations for a fruitful exchange on the history of German-speaking immigration to British Mandatory Palestine, their role in the State of Israel, and their relations with post-war German society. The Yekkes Archive, now housed at the HCGES, is providing new impetus for research, which was discussed in a roundtable in which Dr. Kim Wünschmann participated.
The Yekkes Archive was originally founded in Nahariya in 1971 as part of the ‘Museum of German Jewry’ by Yisrael Shiloni, a Yekke born in Berlin. Its mission was to preserve the history of this community and its contribution to the establishment of the State of Israel. In the 1990s, with the support of Stef Wertheimer, the archive and museum found a new home in the Tefen Industrial Park in northern Israel before moving to Haifa.
The conference took place on the occasion of the reopening of the Tefen ‘Yekkes Museum’ at the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa. A separate wing of the museum now showcases the history, cultural heritage, and relevance of German-speaking Jewish immigration for the present and the future.
The exhibition features a wide range of documents and objects that primarily depict everyday life in families who were expelled from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other areas and sought to build a new life in Palestine/Israel after Nazi persecution. The archive and museum aim to stimulate and promote new research on the history of German-speaking Jewry. The Yekkes Archive is integrated into the curriculum of the Haifa Center for German and European Studies, a Yekkes Lecture Series is planned, as well as an annual Yekke Day, which is intended to bridge past and present and foster connections between the Yekkes community and academia.
