An exhibit on Jewish life in Berlin in a display case in front of the Tiergarten Townhall in central Berlin was destroyed in the early morning hours of Sunday. According to the sponsoring organisation, Sie waren Nachbarn, the perpetrator first threw a rock through one side of the display case and then set the exhibit on fire.
Sie waren Nachbarn or ‘They Were Our Neighbours’ documents the fates of Jewish residents of Berlin’s centrally-located Moabit neighbourhood under the Third Reich. The Tiergarten Townhall exhibit was devoted to Jewish employees of Moabit Hospital. Photos published on the website of the association show the damage to the exhibit.
The accompanying text notes that the exhibit, which was first installed at the beginning of November, had already been the target of smaller acts of vandalism: “Evidently the mere words ‘Jewish Moabit’ [on stickers and a banner in the exhibit] were already an affront to certain people.”
A panel added to the exhibit and still visible in the photos (see above) explains further:
The exhibit on Moabit Hospital and the terror against the Jewish people working there had barely opened and it was already attacked.
‘Jewish Moabit’ stickers on the glass panes were ripped off, probably by antisemites.
We have replaced them, since we will not let ourselves be intimidated.
The police are reportedly investigating the incident.
The Jewish fates documented in the exhibit include that of Lydia Rabinowitsch‐Kempner, who was Head of the Department of Bacteriology at Moabit Hospital until being forced into retirement in 1934 after the Nazis came to power. She would die one year later. As a young woman, she had worked as an assistant to the German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch. The German public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute, is named after the latter.
Rabinowitsch‐Kempner’s son, Robert Kempner, a lawyer, managed to emigrate to the United States shortly before his mother’s death. He would return to Germany after the Second World War as an assistant U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
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