Sally Bein and his children: The Israelite Educational Institution in Beelitz

The event “Sally Bein and His Children” on February 16 at the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin has to be postponed due to illness. A new date will be announced shortly. Tickets that have already been booked are no longer valid.

In October 1908, the Israelite Educational Institution for Mentally Handicapped Children opened in Beelitz, Brandenburg. Initiated by the Jewish Community Association in Berlin and the Bnai Brith Lodge, the institution offered children with disabilities aged six to fourteen a ten-grade education.

Sally Bein, born in 1881 in Inowraclaw in the province of Posen, was the director of the home. Although the trained elementary school and deaf and hard-of-hearing teacher had the opportunity to leave Germany in the late 1930s, he decided to stay with the children in Beelitz. In June 1942, he was deported to Sobibor with his wife, his younger daughter, and the children and teachers who remained at the institution, where they were murdered.

The only known photographic record of the Israelite Educational Institution is a photo album belonging to teacher Arthur Feiner, who worked there from 1930 to 1933 and managed to flee to Shanghai in 1940.

This album was recently donated to the Jewish Museum Berlin. To mark the occasion, Aubrey Pomerance, head of the JMB archive, invites you to a discussion about Sally Bein, Arthur Feiner, the Israelite Educational Institution, and Jewish curative education in Germany. The film Die Kinder von Sally Bein (The Children of Sally Bein, directed by Dan Wolman) will be shown afterwards.

Podiumsgäste:

• Dagmar Drovs, donor of the album, author on curative education in German Judaism
• Ronny Dotan and Tatjana Ruge, reseachers and authors on the history of the Israelite Educational Institution
• Sieglind Ellger-Rüttgart, Professor Emeritus of General Rehabilitation Education
• Dan Wolman, director of Die Kinder von Sally Bein (The Children of Sally Bein)