The Landjuden of Euskirchen: The Sibilla Schneider Photographic Collection

Sibilla Schneider was a descendant of the Juelich family that lived in and around the small town of Euskirchen, Germany, which is located about sixty kilometres from the town of Juelich. She and her family  belonged to the social group of landjuden, or “country Jews”, which flourished throughout Europe from the Alsace to Slovakia until their lifestyle disappeared in the Shoah. In this online exhibition, you can view nearly three dozen fine (mostly studio) photographs of the Schneider-Juelich-Heumann families from Euskirchen, and learn a bit about their family history.

To view the exhibition, please click here.   

The Displaced Persons Camps Post-World War II

The Museum is now preparing many new online exhibitions for the coming year. The topic of one of these exhibitions will be many of the D.P. (Displaced Persons) camps that sprouted in Europe after the end of World War II, which housed thousands of refugees, survivors of the Holocaust.

The Museum wishes all who are fans and followers of the Museum to consider contributing material to any of the forthcoming exhibitions (watch for the announcement of new 2011 exhibitions coming soon.)

If you have any family photos that were taken in any of the D.P. camps, as well as any written accounts of life there or audio or video interviews of same, please consider sending copies to the Museum for inclusion in this forthcoming exhibition.

Already the Museum has filled one "wall" of this exhibition room with nearly forty photographs taken from the memorial album produced for the D.P. camp in Hof, Germany. As the Museum of Family History is a virtual (Internet-only) Museum, the walls will always have room for material that may be of interest to other Museum "visitors."

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, Steven Lasky, at steve@museumoffamilyhistory.com .

Letters from Leipzig

Within the six years preceding the start of World War II, a non-Jewish German woman named Ilse Gerngrofs wrote four letters to a Jewish friend in New Zealand. The Museum presents these to you now so that they may serve as an example of the anti-Semitic sentiments that existed in Germany before and after Hitler came into power.

You will most likely feel offended as I do by her remarks, but nevertheless it will give you some insight into the mind of many who lived in Germany during these pre-war years.
The link is www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/as-letters-leipzig.htm .

The Jew in Europe, 1937

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. From that point to the beginning of World War II, life for the Jew in Europe became increasingly difficult, especially for the Jews of Germany.

Each European country affected by Hitler's views on the Jewish people and the anti-Semitism that continued to grow manifested this anti-Semitism in different ways. Actions were taken and laws were passed that were meant to restrict and isolate the Jew in such a way as to make any kind of 'normal' life impossible.

This article, presented to the public by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in late October 1937 in successive editions, came from Associated Press reports from three locations: Warsaw, Vienna and Berlin. Each of these three reports gives the reader an idea of what the Jewish citizen in Europe was forced to deal with during the nearly two years up to the Second World War.

The article can be found at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/as-jews-in-europe.htm.