A new online portal provides access to thousands upon thousands of files from former Jewish communities in Bavaria. It is a miracle of history that this irreplaceable material escaped destruction.
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Hans Kratzer, Regensburg
It’s not as if the global financial company Goldman Sachs, which is based in New York, is immediately associated with Bavaria. And yet Marcus Goldman, the founder of the business, was born in Lower Franconia. Born 200 years ago in Trappstadt (Rhön-Grabfeld district), Goldman emigrated to the USA in the revolutionary year of 1848, where his ascent soon began. The situation is similar with Löb (Levi) Strauss, born in 1829 in Buttenheim near Bamberg, who also emigrated to America in 1847, sold hard-wearing pants to the gold diggers there and went down in history as the inventor of jeans. This series of famous Bavarian emigrants of the Jewish faith could be continued for a long time. Of course, the energy of those people often only unfolded in distant America. There, the Jewish emigrants were finally able to free themselves from the restrictive laws in their homeland. It is amazing, but little known, how many American-based global corporations have Franconian-Jewish roots.