Leo Baeck Institute - New York

06/20/2026

Henri Epstein (Polish-Jewish French, 1891- Auschwitz 1944) was born on this day.
Marseille, Streetwalkers, 1930, oil on canvas.
Epstein studied in Munich at the Academy of Fine Arts and then at Académie de la Grande Chaumiére in Paris. After WWI, he settled in Montparnasse and became friends with the famous artist of the School of Paris, including Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, and Jules Pascin. Their avant-garde art influenced Epstein’s work. In 1921, he presented his paintings at Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants which promoted new art and artists.
Epstein was a very prolific painter, and his art style was constantly changing. He was almost obsessed with his search for new forms of artistic expression, often through the exploration of the same motifs.
After the outbreak of WWII, being Jewish, he hid on the property of the farm near Eperon, which he purchased, but was found and arrested. Despite his wife’s and daughter’s effort to rescue him, in March 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz death camp were he was murdered.
Never forget.

06/19/2026

On the shores of a Bran­den­burg lake stands a house that weath­ers not only the tumul­tuous changes in sea­sons but also the tem­pes­tu­ous changes of occu­pants over the course of much of the 20th cen­tu­ry. In her nov­el,trans­lat­ed by Susan Bernof­sky, Jenny Erpen­beck (The Book of Words) con­ducts us on a jour­ney through the changes in the life of the house by weav­ing togeth­er the lives of its twelve dif­fer­ent inhab­i­tants, who range from the orig­i­nal occu­pants, a farmer and his four daugh­ters, to a name­less girl being hid­den from the N***s, a Red Army Offi­cer, and a rel­a­tive of the orig­i­nal occu­pants. She inter­spers­es each tale with the ongo­ing sto­ry of the house’s gar­den­er, who is the one con­stant occu­pant of the prop­er­ty. When he leaves, nev­er to be seen again, the last occu­pant comes to the house to close it up and pre­pare it for demo­li­tion. In the end, much like the lives of those who have lived in it, the house is torn down, piece by piece, and the land returns, ever so briefly, to the primeval for­est out of which it grew. Bernofsky’s trans­la­tion vivid­ly cap­tures the rhythm of Erpenbeck’s orig­i­nal and allows us to expe­ri­ence this stun­ning para­ble of change and brevi­ty in all its beau­ty and wonder.

A number of the characters, the original house owners included, are Jewish, and they lose their home to "Aryanization" once Hi**er takes power. The girl being hidden in the house later on is also Jewish.

The original German title, Heimsuchung, translates to "Visitation" but is also tied to biblical plagues or unexpected visitations (such as a visitation by God or spirits).

Much of the above review was published by the Jewish Book Council.

06/19/2026

Growing up in places where his family had no past, and met mostly with silence from his Holocaust-refugee grandparents, Michael Lowenthal longed to be from somewhere. Then he realized he was gay and felt displaced from his own displaced family. Place Envy—his first book of essays after five acclaimed books of fiction—chronicles his quest for orientation in the world: as an agnostic Jew, as a q***r traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth. Yearning for a q***r lineage, he obsesses about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then finds, in his grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy. He lives with a Pennsylvania Amish family; accompanies blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; plays jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and pursues a clarifying love affair in Brazil. Collectively, these essays recount Lowenthal’s many journeys of dislocation and relocation: to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.

A reading choice for LGBTQ+ Pride Month.

06/19/2026

Sebil Abu Nabbut : Well near Jaffa, 1903, by Hermann Struck. From the collections of the Leo Baeck Institute.

The sebil (public water fountain) Abu Nabbut was built by the Ottoman governor of Jaffa, Muhammad Abu Nabbut, around 1820. In Struck's time, it was a vital landmark for travelers and pilgrims making the journey from Jaffa to Jerusalem. It was also sometimes referred to by locals as the "Bird's Well" or "Tabitha's Well" due to its association with local folklore and biblical history - Tabitha in the New Testament was a disciple of Christ, who was resurrected from the dead by the Apostle Peter.

Hermann Struck was born Chaim Aaron ben David in 1876 in Germany. He is best known as a master etcher, lithographer and early Zionist. He studied for five years at the Berlin Academy and in 1908 wrote Die Kunst des Radierens (The Art of Etching), while mentoring artists such as Marc Chagall, Max Liebermann and Lesser Ury. His art was included in an exhibition at the Fifth Zionist Congress and he helped establish the religious Zionist movement called Mizrachi. Struck was an Orthodox Jew but believed that culture and religion could thrive cooperatively in Israel. He immigrated to Haifa where he created an artistic community and participated in the development of the Tel Aviv Museum and the Bezalel art school in Jerusalem. He died in 1944.

06/19/2026

Eric Kisch’s ninth birthday party with friends in Hong Kong on the way to Australia from Shanghai in 1946. Eric is fourth from the left holding the toy pistol. From the website of the American-German Historical Institute, in their article Records of Shanghai: One Man’s Quest to Validate Memories of a Family’s Refugee Past. You can find the entire article in the comment section.

06/19/2026

Following our recent General Meeting, we want to welcome new members to our association: The Belarusian-Jewish Cultural Heritage Center and the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv became Associate Members of the AEJM; the Berend Lehmann Museum in Halberstadt, Germany, and the Jewish Museum "Fausto Levi" in Soragna, Italy, are now full members. We also congratulate the Estonian Jewish Museum on its transition to full membership in the AEJM.

With 70 member institutions throughout Europe, AEJM represents the largest network of Jewish museums. Initially, AEJM primarily focused on connecting museum directors. Today, the association has evolved into an inclusive network that engages professionals across various museum roles, with a focus on the fields of curation, education, and communication.

06/18/2026

06/18/2026

Two Cossacks in a photograph taken from the Bernhard Bardach albums at the Leo Baeck Institute. Probably around 1915 in either Galicia or Volhynia. The fact this photograph was taken by Bardach, an Austrian Jew serving as a military doctor on the Eastern Front, implies these two men have been captured as prisoners of war from the Russian forces.

The Cossacks were a group of predominantly East Slavic-speaking people who became known as members of self-governing, semi-military communities, predominantly located in Southern Russia and in South-Eastern Ukraine. They inhabited sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper, Don, Terek, and Ural river basins and played an important role in the historical and cultural development of Ukraine. Because of their military tradition, Cossack forces played an important role in Russia's wars of the 18th–20th centuries.

06/18/2026

HANNAH KRONER – Dancing as a Way of Life

From Berlin to New York, Hannah Kroner’s life was a testament to resilience, creativity, and the power of dance.

In 1939, 19-year-old Hannah Kroner fled her hometown of Berlin with her parents, seeking refuge in New York. She left behind everything she had known. With each passing minute on the ship that carried them to safety from a darkening Europe, the family became increasingly aware of the uncertainty that awaited them in the New World. Her father felt anxious about the future, her mother looked ahead with confidence and hope for a life in freedom. Hannah later wrote: “I, of course, was very excited about our future, and being a trained dancer, saw myself already as another Eleanor Powell in the movies!” Her optimism would eventually be proven right—though no one could have known it at the time.

Born in 1920, Hannah grew up in Berlin, where her love for dance flourished despite the darkening shadow of N**i Germany. In 1939 she fled with her parents to New York—leaving behind her best friend and adopted sister, Susanne, who tragically did not survive the Holocaust.

Once in the U.S., Hannah’s passion for dance became her lifeline. She co-founded the dynamic duo The Corley Sisters, dazzled audiences across the East Coast, and later established the Hannah Kroner School of Dancing in Queens, inspiring generations of dancers for over 60 years.

📸 Hannah Kroner Collection, AR 25823. LBI Archives

06/17/2026

A painting of a Chorten (called Stupa in Tibet) from the region of Leh, India, in 1928. Painted by the artist Lene Schneider-Kainer, during a two-year sojourn in Asia. She was originally an artist from Berlin, and you can learn more about her life in the comment section.

The chorten or stupa is an architectural form found throughout the Buddhist world. It originated as a hemispheric funerary mound in South Asia. After the Buddha died, his remains were cremated and his relics distributed among his followers, to be enshrined in multiple chortens / stupas. The location of these chortens / stupas became important pilgrimage sites for Buddhists. The relief carvings on these monuments illustrate events from the life of the Buddha.

From the collections of the Leo Baeck Institute.