Dortmund revives the story of its only Jewish mayor, who died in poverty after a successful career

(JTA) — When Adi Amit stood in front of Dortmund City Hall, addressing a gathering far from her home in Israel, she felt the eyes of her great-great-grandfather Paul Hirsch looking over her shoulder. Figuratively, that is.
On Nov. 30, the city of Dortmund unveiled a giant banner depicting Hirsch, who was mayor of the city from 1925 until 1933, when he retired due to ill health.
After the Nazi government denied him a pension because he was a Jew, Hirsch died in poverty in Berlin in 1940, at the age of 71. His wife Lucie took her own life in 1941 after receiving a deportation notice. Both are buried in Berlin’s Weissensee cemetery.
“Like many, Paul faced numerous challenges in his life simply because he was Jewish,” Amit, 24, told a crowd at the dedication. “But today, around 90 years [after the Nazis came to power], we stand here together in Germany to commemorate and acknowledge the man he was and the meaningful contributions he made.
“This is a point of light for me, especially given the terrible reality we have been experiencing since Oct. 7,” she added, referencing the Hamas terror attacks on Israel.
The banner will remain on display outside City Hall through January, and plans are reportedly under way to have a permanent tribute to Hirsch in the city.
Meanwhile, Dortmund Mayor Thomas Westphal has announced plans to name an annual prize after Hirsch and to invite family members back every year for the award ceremony.
The recent event was held during the 2023 European Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism, a project of the Tel Aviv-based Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM). The summit brought some 120 representatives from 60 cities across Europe to Dortmund from Nov. 29-Dec. 1 for panels and discussions on challenges and best practices. It also included a meeting with Natalie Sanandaji, a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre on Oct. 7.
It is the third such summit that CAM founder and CEO Sacha Roytman Dratwa has convened since 2019.
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, in 1933 there were 4,108 Jews living in Dortmund, which had a total population of 540,000. The city, in Germany’s Ruhr region, was known for its coal and steel industry and was heavily bombed during World War II. Today’s Jewish community in Dortmund numbers about 2,600, according to the latest statistics from the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Hirsch was born in 1868, and studied medicine and economics before launching his political career with the Social Democratic Party in Berlin. He climbed the ladder, serving as prime minister of the state of Prussia (an area now in Poland and Russia) from 1918-1920. Hirsch became known as the political architect of “Greater Berlin,” a conglomeration of the city’s many districts that formalized city boundaries. He was later wooed to do the same in Dortmund, achieving what was reportedly the second largest municipal regional transformation in Germany since Berlin.
Paul and Lucie’s daughters managed to flee Nazi Germany: Eva via England and South Africa to California; and Thea to Peru, where she married Max Kahn, a refugee from Cologne, and raised a family.
Last month, Thea and Max’s son, Leopoldo Kahn, flew in from San Diego with his wife Marilyn and other family members for the banner unveiling in Dortmund.
He told the crowd that day in Dortmund that his family was “living proof, that despite the efforts the antisemites make, we are here living in continuity.”
But complacency is dangerous, he added. “This meeting is a wakeup call that the mistakes of 1933 to 1939 are beginning to repeat themselves unfortunately worldwide, and we need to work to stop these attitudes and hatred.”
The connections to descendants of Hirsch came about a year ago, through Dortmund antisemitism activist Daniel Lörcher, who reached out to the Amit family in Israel because of his work to raise awareness about local Jewish history. He had heard about them through a friend of Adi Amit’s boyfriend Noam Bursztein.
Lörcher later met with Adi Amit’s grandfather, Leopoldo Kahn, during a special training session for the Borussia Dortmund soccer club at a Jewish school in San Diego.
Then, when CAM decided to hold its antisemitism summit in Dortmund, Lörcher suggested they “think about doing something special, to use the mayors summit to remember Paul Hirsch and his very special story for the first time.”
Dratwa said that the Dortmund Jewish community and Mayor Westphal all agreed this was “a great opportunity to educate, and create a positive impact about the past to create a better future.”