Location: Germany

Zahor – Remember

They began life as Heinz and Manfred, growing up in the village of Hoffenheim, not far from Heidelberg. But history, wearing a brown shirt, descended upon them, and within a few years, Heinz was calling himself Menachem and was starting life over in Israel, and Manfred became Fred when he moved to America.

The story of their wartime survival and the fate of their parents is what we tell in this story—and how they made the decision to return to Hoffenheim for a visit.

Our film is narrated in three versions – in German, in Hebrew and in English – by Ilay Elmkies, an 18-year-old Israeli soccer player enrolled in the TSG Hoffenheim Youth Academy.

A Study Guide for Zahor – created by our German Centropa teachers Michael Heitz (Albert-Schweitzer-Schule Sinsheim) and Alan Götz (Hartmanni-Gymnasium Eppingen) – can be downloaded here.

Rosa Rosenstein: Living with History

The story of a Berlin-born Jewish woman who lived through the turbulent times of Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, all while growing up, falling in love and starting a family. With charming snapshots of holidays, kindergartens and Purim parties, Rosa shows us how integrated, assimilated Jewish families lived in Germany then.

In 1939, a few weeks after the war had started, her Hungarian husband Michi insisted on fleeing to Budapest, where he felt they would be safe. They weren’t. Both Michi and Rosa were arrested and put in a camp, and Michi perished in a forced labor brigade. Rosa survived by hiding in Budapest — but not until she sent her two daughters off to Palestine and saw them safe.

After the war, Rosa married a Viennese Jewish man, Alfred Rosenstein, and started another family in Vienna. Her son Georg moved to Israel, where he began a family of his own and lived for a long time before finally moving back to Austria. Rosa Rosenstein lived until she was ninety-eight years old, and died in 2005.