User:Martha Forsyth/Sandbox

 My sub-pages

Work BELOW the double line.

Ilse Stanley: Preliminary collection o' info, links, etc
New refs: 1927 TYPED LETTER SIGNED [TLS] BY FAMED GERMAN CANTOR INTRODUCING THE YOUNG SOON TO BE RENOWN GERMAN RABBI AND EXPRESSIONIST PAINTER FREDERICK SOLOMON Magnus Davidsohn
 * In the night of 9th to 10th November 1938 seven synagogues burned in Berlin, including the house of worship on the Fasanenstrasse. Magnus Davidson, the chief cantor at the time, remembered later: “I stood there until 5 o’clock in the morning, that’s when the fire-brigades left, the fire burnt out and I said Kaddish”
 * Description of an item for sale on ABEbooks.com:

Bookseller: M Benjamin Katz FineBooksRareManuscripts (Toronto, ON, Canada) Bookseller Rating:

Quantity Available: 1

Book Description: BERLIN GERMANY, 1927. Book Condition: Very Good+. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. On offer is an original typed letter signed [TLS] dated 1927 in German by Magnus Davidsohn, chief cantor of the Fasanenstrasse synagogue from its opening in 1912 until its closing by the Nazis in 1936 being a letter of introduction for Frederick Solomon, the German Expressionist artist/Rabbi. The letter begins by saying that Solomon has received a comprehensive and good-quality education as a choirmaster. "He owns a nobly and elegantly sounding baritone voice." Davidsohn, a trained opera singer, played the part of King Heinrich in Gustav Mahler's 1899 production of Lohengrin (see pp. 172-4 of Gustav Mahler Vienna: The Years of Challenge, by Henry-Louis de la Grange (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). After leaving Berlin in 1939, he helped found Belsize Square Synagogue in London. Davidsohn and his wife were close friends with the parents of Ernst vom Rath, whose assassination in Paris precipitated Kristallnacht . Directly after vom Rath's murder, Davidsohn and his wife visited the parents of vom Rath, who assured him that they did not blame the Jews of Germany (Anthony Grenville: 'Listening to Refugee Voices: The Association of Jewish Refugees Information and Research on the Refugees from Hitler in Britain', in Refugees from the Third Reich in Britain, Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, volume 4). Magnus Davidsohn's daughter, Ilse Stanley, saved hundreds of Jews from concentration camps, and was the author of the book The Unforgotten (Beacon Press, 1957), a memoir of Weimar Germany and the Nazi years. She was also featured on an episode of the American television program "This is Your Life", where she was reunited with her father. TLS, 1927, 1p. [German]. VG. German Language. Bookseller Inventory # OMV580

here but it will be gone

See Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, might be other good leads there.

Questions
(seeking answers!)


 * Ilse's birth date ✅
 * Ilse's full name at birth? Where does the "F." come from?  Per the hand-written note on the ship passenger record: "Friederike".  The record also adds "Eleazar" as (a middle name?) for Manfred.)  ✅?
 * mother's name?
 * Grauen Mond? Any more about her 5 theatres in Berlin??  In America?

Things to add to article
"'I attended many lectures of Johannes Itten, not only on breath technique, but on phrenology, philosophy, and the ethics of religion.'" "'I did not realize then that those very practical lectures set the basis for my thinking and outliok on life. They gave me, after a hard struggle in self-diagnosis and self-education, the discipline to accept, unconditionally, the self-imposed order: Loving all; hating none in spite of all.'"
 * Johannes Itten, and Mazdaznan (investigate further, pp. 29-31)
 * 1932 marriage, birth of son
 * life after leaving Germany

New leads & info (after putting article up)

 * http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=936&pageid=23&pagename=Arts (accessed 2 December 2008)



The Shards of Kristallnacht

An Excerpt from: 48 Hours of Kristallnacht: Night of Destruction/Dawn of the Holocaust; The Lyons Press, 256 pages, 2008.

Some of the most vivid descriptions come from Berliners who witnessed the destruction of the largest synagogue in Berlin, the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, as well other temples in the capital. Firefighters stood and watched the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue burn. The reader of the synagogue, a man named Davidsohn, pleaded with the captain of the fire fighters to put out the fire. ‘Turn on the hoses,’ he cried to the fire chief, who stood dumbly watching the spectacle with his men. ‘Get out of here. You’ll get yourself killed,’ the captain snarled. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help. We’ve come to protect the neighboring buildings.’ ‘For the love of God, let me at least bring out the sacred objects.’
 * Have full quote in Ilse folder in T'bird. [Is this taken from Ilse's book??? NO, not exactly, though it seems to describe - as if her father did it not her - what Ilse describes on p. 130.  Perhaps contact author??]


 * "The Kaiser dedicated the new Fasanenstrasse Synagogue in Berlin" - Perspectives on Gustav Mahler by Jeremy Barham, Ashgate Publishing (June 30, 2005), ISBN-10: 0754607097; ISBN-13: 978-0754607090 (p. 180) [saw this in Google Book search, [] 12/2/08. ✅

living witnesses to Kristallnacht (Fasanenstr.):

 * Gary Phillips, born in 1922, track him down? See http://www.religiousintelligence.com/news/?NewsID=3274 - I wrote asking for contact info.
 * The reply, 12/4/08:
 * Dear Mrs Forsyth, Thank you for your e-mail. The event you refer to was hosted by the United Nations, and they would be your best point of contact. Their e-mail address is:
 * 
 * Haven't decided whether to pursue further or not (12/29/08).


 * Fred Stein, Australia
 * The Invisible Wall, by W. Michael Blumenthal, books.google.com

Info Jason has found (in diaries, etc.):

 * Ilse's birth date "Her diary entry of March 11, 1930 begins with "My 24th birthday!". So that means her birthday was March 11, 1906." ✅
 * Magnus's death date & place: "Magnus Davidsohn died August 21, 1958 in Dusseldorf, Germany." (This info belongs on Magnus's page, not hers.) ✅
 * "From 1950-1952, she was the director-producer of the Rockville Centre Playhouse in Nassau County, Long Island. I have lots of press clips about it - but nothing on the internet, unfortunately." See below, NY Times article I haven't got all of yet.
 * See e-mail of 12/30/08, "More info" (includes some material from a 1953(?) resume).
 * Jason, small album of photos discovered Dec. 2008

Misc

 * Not esp. useful, maybe, but good to find: Actor Pat Hingle dies at age 84: "His first performances off-Broadway were for Ilse Stanley’s theater in Long Island around 1950."

Material not used yet (or: Incompletely used)

 * See http://www.thegavel.net/2015.html for summarized info, not much else appears to be avl. on the web. (But this needs verification...I'm on the trail!)
 * ✅(partially)[October 2011 - I've added a ref to this, also to her burial (found info on http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=25341869).


 * http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jasoncs/family.html
 * http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/%7Ejasoncs/fatherphotos.html link
 * http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/12/multiculturalis.html
 * http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/guest_bloggers_marcus_and_jason_stanley/:

Kristallnacht (J. Stanley)

Today is the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. My grandmother was living across the street from the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, where her father was chief cantor. Her life was intertwined with that synagogue, which she called her "house". I've posted her account of its destruction on Kristallnacht here.

Posted by Jason Stanley on November 09, 2008 at 09:25 AM in Blog Posts by Jason Stanley | Permalink

"Autobiography of 'everything that remains unforgotten in my first life'. A prominent actress in Germany before WWII, Ilse duped the Nazis during the war years by walking into concentration camps with forged papers. She walked out of the camps with some 400 prisoners. After fleeing Germany Ilse produced plays in New York, moved to Boston's Back Bay, and eventually fell in love with New Hampshire, running auctions in Gilmanton."
 * Description of The Unforgotten by a bookseller (I'm asking him where he got this from [07:00, 12 November 2008 (UTC)], but I now believe it's from the http://www.thegavel.net/2015.html page; the quote ['everything...'] is from her dedication in the book):


 * http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~alcalz/aufbau/Freepages (some info copied into a T'bird file; do Trial membership when I'm ready) - actually, this link doesn't work anymore, but 11/18/08 I have two weeks to play around on http://www.ancestry.com

 The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), September 9th, 2004 Manfred Stanley September 7, 2004 After 13 years of humor and courage living with Parkinson's Disease and a brave 9-month battle with cancer, Manfred "Manny" Stanley of Syracuse, died on September 7, 2004. Manny was a Syracuse University Professor Emeritus of Sociology. Born in Berlin, Germany on November 19, 1932, Manny came to the United States as a refugee from Nazi Germany When he was seven years old. His experience as a refugee was always present in his scholarship, teaching and writing. Manny tried to understand how societies can collapse into evil or support rich understandings of huma...
 * http://www.bookrags.com/highbeam/stanleyobit-20040909-hb/
 * (may not need to use this, but if I do....)

(quote from the text): Louis and Grete Rosenzweig of Kassel were two of the many German Jews caught unawares by the political landscape's rapid deterioration under Adolf Hitler as "changes which nobody ever had anticipated came about".97 The Rosenzweigs had always considered themselves "German citizens in the first place, Jews by religion" and had "just as many close non-Jewish friends [as] Jewish ones".98 [footnote text:] footnote 98, p. 33: Grete Rosenzweig was not alone in feeling fully "German" as a Jew living in Germany. Ilse Davidsohn Stanley- daughter of the chief kantor of Berlin's Fasanenstraße temple- once said that her people seemed rooted "endlessly deep in German soil, language, art and German thinking" and that they felt so German that they considered themselves to be like the legendary oak "and one couldn't simply say to a German oak, "As of today you are no longer a German oak! Pull your roots out of the earth and go away!'" (Stanley, 1964, p. 83). ([...] unendlich tief in deutscher Erde, Sprache, Kunst und deutschen Denken verwurzelt... Und man konnte doch einer deutschen Eiche nicht einfach sagen: "Von heute an bist du nicht mehr eine deutsche Eiche! Zieh deine Wurzeln aus dieser Erde und geh fort!'
 * http://deposit.d-nb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?idn=986156272&dok_var=d1&dok_ext=pdf&filename=986156272.pdf Creating 'New Americans': WWII-Era European Refugees' Formation of American Identities. DISSERTATION zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor der Philosophie (Dr. phil.); Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften der Philosophischen Fakultät I der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; vorgelegt von Michael Luick-Thrams aus Mason City, Iowa, U.S.A.  Präsident: Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Hans Meyer; Dekan: Prof. Dr. Ludolf Herbst; 1. Prof. Dr. Ludolf Herbst; 2. Prof. Dr. Hartmut Kaelble. Tag der Disputation: 2. Juli 1997.

 'ENSEMBLE' THEATRE; No Interference Beneficial Features
 * from the NYTimes archive - but you have to pay to see the whole thing, I'm going to try my library - this is undoubtedly about her "Centre Playhouse" theatre in Rockville Centre:

By HENRY HEWES

February 4, 1951, Sunday

Section: Arts & Leisure, Page 82, 836 words

ONLY 33 minutes from Broadway competition, Rockville Centre, Long Island, would seem to be, theatrically speaking, barren ground. Yet a year-round professional (though non-Equity) theatre has been operating there since July with a variety of bills ranging from an adaptation of Tolstoy's "The Living Corpse," to "The Voice of the Turtle," the current attraction...

--and IT became my Home: Die Assimilation und Integration der Deutsch-jüdischen Hitlerflüchtlinge in New York und Toronto by Geneviève Susemihl,Published by LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2004;ISBN 3825880354, 9783825880354; 382 pages
 * http://books.google.com/books?id=gwdc9fpBvccC&pg=PA50&vq=%22Ilse+Davidsohn%22&source=gbs_search_r&cad=1_1
 * Kathryn tells me that it says, "And she was, like Ilse Davidson, the daughter of a head cantor of a Berlin synagogue..." — but I'm a bit suspicious still, because the quote that follows (see file in my Ilse S. folder) IS Ilse's — I wonder if "Sie" is not 'She' but 'It (ref. to a feminine noun)'". 04:56, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Updates to make when I put the page up

 * Put a link on Individuals and groups assisting Jews during the Holocaust. (Can't figure out if it's appropriate or not???  They seem to list only non-Jews.  I put a question on the talk page but haven't gotten anyone's attention yet.) 01:07, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Magnus Davidsohn ✅; also Fasanenstrasse Synagogue ✅
 * Announce new articles ✅

Interesting possible models (Biography pages)

 * Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Barack Obama (biographical pages)
 * Interesting reference style that combines "References" and "Bibliography" so the page-refs can be precise! The Mary Shelley page uses the same style.

Most Extraordinarily Useful Tool!!!

 * Reference Generator makes all kinds of refs, using correct template! (How do they do it?!)
 * More tools available at Citing sources