From Hamburg to Jerusalem and (not) back. Former Hamburg residents in Israel and their associations

In October 1984, a letter from Jerusalem reached the Hamburg city administration: its four signatories informed that they had founded the Association of Former Jewish Hamburg Citizens in order to actively participate in the planned exhibition on the city's Jewish history. They wrote from Israel, where they had fled from the Nazis 50 years earlier. They were not the only ones to form a German-speaking associations of former residents (also known as Landsmannschaft). However, the Hamburg association was a special case, as a second group the Association of Former Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck Residents in Israel , existed until their merger in 1992, which was based in Tel Aviv. The extensive source material allows to reconstruct the work of the associations. These records and documents are kept in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, with which the protagonists were closely associated and where the founding letter can also be found.