Branches. Between Times – Still Intertwined.
The Branches of a Jewish Family’s Lives: How a Stolperstein (stumbling stone) in East Leipzig is making waves around the world…
The history of people is always also the history of a country. Consequently, to understand our own history, we must also always know about the history of our country. The stories of Sofie Schneider and her family’s lives, like ours, are part of this.
The necessity of confrontation, as well as current antisemitism, led to the Women’s Cultural Center Leipzig initiating the laying of a Stolperstein for Sofie Schneider – a Jewish painter from Leipzig – in 2013. On 16 July 2013, the Stolperstein in memory of Sophie was laid.
Despite intensive research into Sofie Schneider’s life, the results were very incomplete in 2013. Eight years later, in March 2020, Sofie Schneider’s great-great-grandniece sent an email from South Africa to thank the Frauenkultur Leipzig for laying the Stolperstein in honor of her great-great-grand aunt.
I am sorry that I cannot communicate in German. I am a South African Jewish woman who visited Leipzig last year on my way to a conference in Hamburg. I discovered the Jewish records office (Israelitische Religionsgemeinde zu Leipzig) and they helped me find information about my great great aunt Sora Sophie Schneider who was an artist in Leipzig until she died in the holocaust. I visited her apartment Eisenbahnstr. 97. I looked for a Stopelsteine there but couldnt find it.
I wanted to organise one and just found out that your organisation did organise one for her in 2011. I want to thank you profoundly for remembering her and doing that. I also need help trying to find out if any of her art survived. I cannot find anything online but realise that not being able to speak German is a huge problem in searching online. I have two pieces of her art (a drawing and an etching) and my mother has one drawing. Can you possibly help in finding out if any of her art remains in Leipzig or in Germany?
Best
Ruth Morgan
This simple contact was the beginning of an extensive research project about her Jewish family. A family that has branches across the entire world.
Making Sofie Schneider’s life, her work, and her Jewish family’s history in Leipzig public gives us the chance to never forget, meet with and reconnect Sophie’s large family, of getting to know each other; and understand Leipzig’s history better
In the first documents we found in the archives – the name Sora Sofie Schneider was written. That is why the first name Sora can also be read on the stone. Only through contact with the family in 2020 did we learn that Sora was never the name of Sofie Schneider.
Sora was the vaguely legible variant of Sara in an archival document. On 17 August 1938, the Nazi regime forced German Jews to adopt stigmatising middle names: Men had to use “Israel” as their middle name, women “Sara”. This was another humiliating step on the path to disenfranchisement. The “Second Regulation for the Implementation of the Law on the Change of Family Names and First Names” was enforced, supplemented one day later by the “Guidelines on the Use of First Names”. Consequently, the forced first name is no longer mentioned on this website.
This website is a way to trace moments in the (life) journeys of Sofie Schneider and her family – with stories gathered by her siblings, their children and grandchildren… about their life and work in Leipzig, about their involuntary journeys away from this city. A piece of the congregational life of the Brody Synagogue in Keilstraße emerges. And for the first time, Sophie Schneider’s “rediscovered” artistic works will be shown publicly.
The work on this website is kindly supported by Esther Jonas-Märtin, Rabbi, M.A., M.A., Chairperson Beth Etz Chaim. Lehrhaus-Gemeinschaft-Teilhabe e.V.