Without looking at the chart, given his address in 1936, the spelling and the general impression of the letter, I doubt that he was ever wealthy. The Veedel was never wealthy, but always a melting pot.
Oh, BTW, in relation to the suggestion above that the name of the street would indicate a Jewish quarter: the street is named for the Benedictine’s Cloister of the Holy Maccabees.
Ernst Ries was literally living next door across the street to the Ursulinenschule, a catholic school for girls.
In the same house, at least in 1941, lived Margarete Rolef, born Silberstein, Carl/Karl Rolef,
and her daughter Margot Rolef, all deported to Riga on the 6th of December 1941. Karl reportedly died in April 1945 in Stutthof, nothing is known about the deaths of his family. They are remembered in Yad Vashem.
This gives you an impression how the street looked in 1915.
I support a two-state solution, but your comment is historically innacurate. He’s referring to what was then the British mandate over the region of Palestine (1922-1948), not an independent Palestinian nation-state. The British had supported the idea of making the region a Jewish homeland since 1917, and before then the region’s various owners/occupiers saw it as a colonial possession or, in the case of the Crusaders, as an adjunct to Christendom.
The only good thing about the holocaust is that we can learn to prevent it happening again … the methods used e.g. singling out the “other”.
There is a certain trend among the alt-right to paint “the Muslim” as raping savage (“rapefugee”). It bears a striking similarity to the way jews were portrayed in this letter and nazi propaganda in general.
Therefore papasans comment IMO wasn’t inappropriate… unless you think such things can’t happen elsewhere.
Theres that universalist view but then there is the hard cold reality that Jews have been singled out as a community for a very long time in Europe and elsewhere outside of wartime or active periods of conflict resulting in genocide. To universalize the experience like that trivializes the fact that the worldwide Jewish population has only recently reached near the numbers of pre-war Europe and thats using very generous counting methods which wouldn’t have held up back then.
Maybe similar if you squint real hard.
Elsewhere? I’ve personally had death threats for being a Jew not in Europe or the US. As before its happened to us and other groups elsewhere for a long long time. As I said before this is just some new version of Godwin going on. Exercising care and seeing the boogeyman under every rock are different things.
Even more bluntly, your common holocaust denier is also more often than not at the same time a person who is vocal about how he would love to exterminate some jews.
