Family Legacy

Like many of their generation, my parents, Hinna and David Stahl, experienced an incredible odyssey living through the extraordinary changes and dislocations that marked the 20th century. They lived through two major wars, the Great Depression of the twenties and thirties, the violent upheavals of the German Weimar Republic and felt the impact of that indescribably terrible period we call the Holocaust losing many family members.

My father was a graduate of both the yeshiva and classical gymnasium. My mother graduated from a lyceum for girls. World War I disrupted their lives and their hopes of continuing their education. My father became a prisoner of war and my mother with her family suffered the privations of the war in Germany. After my father returned, they were married and established a successful business in Spandau, a suburb of Berlin. They left Germany for America with me, their young son, in 1935-36 because of their experience with an increasingly virulent anti-Semitism that included confrontations with Nazi storm troopers. On one occasion, my mother was severely beaten by Brown Shirts. In America, they began their lives anew in a country still in Depression.

My parents were contrasts. My mother was warm and lively, always engaged with people. My father was dignified, calm and a scholar throughout his life. They transmitted to me, with my family, their ethical values and profound sense of history and culture both Jewish and secular. Those who met them always remembered them. Friends who grew up with me continued to visit and learn from them over the years. This lectureship was established in my parent’s name because my memory of them is inseparable from their commitment to ethical values.

--Dr. Theodore Stahl