History and Commemoration

In Historical Workshops, the Active Museum and its volunteers, together with a new generation of academics research specific aspects of Wiesbaden’s Jewish history.

One of the Active Museum’s main concerns is to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust by their name. The Active Museum sees to it that “Stumbling Stones” are installed in the pavement in front of the houses where the victims last lived, their names engraved on copper plates.
On the site of Wiesbadens’s Main Synagogue, destroyed in 1938, the Active Museum has installed panels with Commemoration Leaflets about former Jewish residents. Through intensive research the Active Museum obtained information about their lives and was able to discover the family history of those Holocaust victims who had been previously anonymous. Residents of Wiesbaden have volunteered to become godparents of the “Stumbling Stones” and the Commemoration Leaflets.

The Active Museum organizes regular walks which follow the traces of Jewish life throughout the city and the nearby area. They recall the history of buildings, shops and stores, and visit cemeteries.

A data bank was developed together with the Municipal Archives on all the Jews of Wiesbaden murdered during the Third Reich. The names of the Holocaust victims will appear on a Commemoration Site which the Active Museum expects to be established in the near future on the site of the former Main Synagogue.

“Make Tombstones Speak” is the title of a project which deciphered the inscriptions in one of the city’s oldest Jewish cemeteries. These inscriptions provide a multifaceted portrait of everyday Jewish life in the 19th century.