New passport photos

With the enactment of the Nuremberg ‘Racial Laws’ in 1935, discrimination against the Jewish population reached a new level of intensity. The Nazi state forced their expulsion through systematic humiliation. Many people attempted to flee with the help of relatives abroad. To do so, they needed travel documents and recent passport photographs.

The Kowalewsky family, who lived at 12 König-Johann-Straße (now Tschaikowskistraße), also knew that they would no longer be tolerated in Germany.

Abraham (born 1888) came to Leipzig from Ukraine in 1918 to study at the university. The following year, he returned to Ukraine and married his fiancée Esther Wischnewsky (born 1891). They moved to Leipzig in 1920. After completing his studies, Abraham opened a hosiery shop in the city center. Their daughter Sophie was born in Leipzig in 1926. In the meantime, they had been stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship by decree of the newly founded Soviet Union, as they had emigrated. When the NSDAP came to power in 1933, they were henceforth considered stateless. During the November pogroms of 1938, a friend hid the family. Abraham was thus able to avoid arrest and imprisonment in Buchenwald concentration camp. On November 20 1938, the three-member Kowalewsky family fled to Rotterdam. From there, they emigrated to the USA. Sophie studied history in Cleveland and eventually worked as a librarian at Harvard. There she met her future husband, Sidney Black, whom she married in 1955. In 1997, she recounted her family’s story in a film interview with the USC Shoah Foundation.