Images from Jewish Berlin

Frank has written below about our trip to Germany. For both of us is was a profound experience to be in Berlin. We had an excellent tour guide.

The German government has financed many memorials around the city. They periodically have sent out requests for proposals to artists to design these memorials, and then they have chosen one of the proposals to fund. The memorials are exceptionally moving artistic expressions and in their own way, beautiful.

Here are three. I never know exactly where the pictures will appear on the blog, or in what order. But one of the pictures shows a large room in the city hall of a district in Berlin where many Jews once lived. Someone found a letter in one of the houses and realized that Jews had lived there, and he took it upon himself to investigate more about the lives of the Jews who had been neighbors. This room contains hundreds of descriptions of families who once lived in the neighborhood.

Another picture is of "stumbling stones" -- brass plaques embedded in the cobblestones with the names of Jewish individuals who lived there and what happened to them. There are hundreds of these little plaques.

The third picture is from inside the Holocaust Memorial that Frank described. This memorial is quite overwhelming -- it takes up an entire square block in the middle of the city.

We both are so pleased that we made the trip and the impact will be with us for a long time to come.