Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany

7. The Jewish Deaf in Germany

130 7 The Jewish Deaf in Germany BEFORE WORLD WAR II, the Israelite Institution for the Deaf of Germany at Berlin-Weissensee was a flourishing educational, cultural, and religious center. Approximately one thousand deaf German Jews attended the school.1 Except for a plaque mounted on the building, there is nothing to recall the life of this institution. At the time of my research, twenty-two former students were still alive and residing in Israel, the United States, and Germany. The Israelite Institution for the Deaf was founded by Markus Reich, a young Jewish man from Kolin, Bohemia. His life in deaf education began after he made the acquaintance of a deaf man who was educated, well brought up, and could speak. Reich determined that he wanted to “make complete, worthy, happy people of the deaf,” and so, in 1865 at the age of twenty-one, he went to Germany, where he hoped he “would learn everything that would qualify him as a teacher of the deaf.”2 Reich studied at the Jewish Teachers Training College in Berlin. The director of the college recognized Reich’s exceptional pedagogical gifts, promoted his studies, and exempted him from a year of training. He supported himself through work as a private tutor. From the little he earned, he saved money to procure books about the deaf and deafness. In the years 1870–1871 he worked and studied at the Royal Institution for the Deaf in Berlin, where he took his final examination as a teacher of the deaf and where he noticed that “very often children , especially Jewish children, were denied admission” to the school.3 Reich then conceived of a plan to establish a Jewish institution for deaf children. Reich’s inspiration for this effort came from two religious sources. First was the “special admonition to support the deaf within the Jewish community,” that the Chief Rabbi of London, S. Adler, had made in his 1864 tract The Morning and the Evening Sacrifice based on Isaiah 29.18: “Is it not a duty that falls to all of us to take up these children and to protect them on behalf of God, to educate them so that, as the prophet tells us, every day the deaf may hear the word of the book.”4 Second was a passage in the Talmud: “Only the ignorant are truly poor.”5 Reich turned his plan into a reality, founding in 1873 the Israelite Institution for the Deaf of Germany (Israelitische Taubstummenanstalt für Deutschland) in a small house in Fürstenwalde an der Spree. Now along with language training and school The Jewish Deaf in Germany 131 The plaque mounted on the building that was the Israelite Institution for the Deaf in Berlin-Weissensee. It reads, “From this building 146 deaf Jewish citizens were removed by fascist bandits in 1942 and murdered. In remembrance of the dead and as admonition to the living.” studies, he could “preserve and plant in the hearts of the Jewish deaf the religion of their forefathers.”6 The first years were difficult and filled with privations. Reich was poor, as were most of the twelve children entrusted to him. Following his marriage in 1879, his wife Emma and her sister Anna helped tirelessly in the education of the deaf children. Reich finally decided, in 1884 when facing another fiscal crisis, to form a support organization called “Friends of the Deaf” (Jedide Ilmim) for his institution. Well-to-do members of the Jewish community joined together and provided funding, enabling Reich to relocate his school to Weissensee near Berlin, in 1890. Reich could now “devote himself entirely to the mission of raising and educating his deaf children.”7 The institution continued to expand, and by 1911, he employed four male and two female teachers and had forty-five students. In the same year, work began on rebuilding the institution in Weissensee, supported by the association, which “already counted thousands of members 132 The Jewish Deaf in Germany The Israelite Institution for the Deaf of Germany, Berlin-Weissensee and had a representative in every locality” of Germany.8 However, Reich did not live to see the completion; he died on May 23, 1911. Reich’s death marked the loss of one of the great men in German deaf education. In a testimonial following his death, one of the school’s teachers wrote, “Reich had wholeheartedly entered the world...