So what is new?
It’s a year since we launched the Their Voices Live On — Jewish Life in Themar website, and a lot of traffic has crossed this digital bridge since then.
Top priorities were to ensure that the materials that prompted the website in the first place — Manfred Rosengarten’s Stadtplan and Photo Album — were online. The Photo Album, Themar, Thüringen: My Hometown, is now available in two versions. The one takes advantage of the bells and whistles of computer technology and the photographs, particularly the portraits of people, are enlarged to show almost every detail. The other version is a replica of Manfred’s layout and design.
The Rosengarten Stadtplan/City Map, 1936 is also available and a second major activity has been to use it as the springboard to describe in detail Themar in the 1920s and 1930s. We are trying to locate contemporary pictures wherever possible and then combine them with pictures and the stories of the people who lived in the houses and/or ran the businesses.
Understanding Themar of the late 1800s/early 1900s is being helped immeasurably by postcards/Ansichtskarten — in the picture below, for example, one can clearly see the Volksschule, which Manfred and other Jewish young people attended and which was destroyed in WWII.
