The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

Bar Mitzvah Presents Suitable for Emigration

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Arnold Friedmann - Emeritus Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst - vividly describes his Bar Mitzvah preparation in Germany in 1938, and explains why all of his Bar Mitzvah gifts were trunks or briefcases.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Arnold Friedmann.

This excerpt is in English.

Arnold Friedmann was born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1925. Arnold died in 2017.

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Other video highlights from this oral history

Kristallnacht: A Personal Account

4 min 4 sec

Judenstinker

56 sec

Going to School in Nuremberg, Germany in the 1930s

56 sec

Matzoh and Bread in the Bread Box

1 min

Running to Jewish High School in Germany in the Thirties

1 min 51 sec

"We Lost All Contact After We Left" The Fate of Relatives in Germany During World War Two

2 min 9 sec

A Kosher Home, Please?

1 min 4 sec

Renting a Garden in Nuremberg

1 min 3 sec

Assimilated German Jews

1 min 53 sec

Joining the British Army

1 min 24 sec

Refugee Life in Palestine

5 min 59 sec

German Jews Lived Together in Palestine

1 min 15 sec

Joining the Jewish Community in Palestine

1 min 42 sec

Destroying Ammunition in Cairo While in the British Army

1 min 53 sec

Joining the Fight for Israeli Independence

2 min 1 sec

Yiddish, A Plastic Language

2 min 39 sec

My Interest in Yiddish Goes Back to New York

1 min 9 sec

Being Jewish and Being American: Complementary Identities

1 min 43 sec

Hitler Made Me A More Proud Jew

58 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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