Colleagues across continents
A teacher from Frankfurt connects with a colleague in the United States
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“We would like to meet people over there with whom we can also discuss our plans—not our personal plans but the Jewish-social ones. After all, the situation of Jewish youth is getting more serious from day to day, and we feel obligated to seize all possibilities that we see over there.”
Frankfurt am Main/Bonn
Having barely begun his career as a teacher at the Goethe-Gymnasium in Frankfurt/Main, Hans Epstein lost his job shortly after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. After a brief intermezzo as a teacher at the famous “Philanthropin” in Frankfurt/Main, a progressive Jewish school with the motto “For Enlightenment and Humanity”, he became a co-founder of the “Anlernwerkstatt”, which prepared Jewish youngsters for emigration to the US. The mathematician Otto Toeplitz, a passionate educator who had lost his position at the University of Bonn in 1935, was now teaching children and organizing the emigration of students to the United States. In this letter, Epstein asks Toeplitz for a letter of recommendation and for contacts in the United States that might be useful for his endeavors.
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SOURCE
Institution:
Leo Baeck Institute – New York | Berlin
Collection:
Hans Epstein Collection, AR 6362
Original:
Box 1, folder I.13
