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Dortmund’s only Jewish mayor died in poverty after a successful career. The city is reviving his story.
BERLIN (JTA) — When Adi Amit stood in front of Dortmund City Hall, addressing a gathering far from her home in Israel, she felt the eyes of her great-great-grandfather Paul Hirsch looking over her shoulder. Figuratively, that is.
On Nov. 30, the city of Dortmund unveiled a giant banner depicting Hirsch, who was mayor of the city from 1925 until 1933, when he retired due to ill health.
After the Nazi government denied him a pension because he was a Jew, Hirsch died in poverty in Berlin in 1940, at the age of 71. His wife Lucie took her own life in 1941 after receiving a deportation notice. Both are buried in Berlin’s Weissensee cemetery.
“Like many, Paul faced numerous challenges in his life simply because he was Jewish,” Amit, 24, told a crowd at the dedication. “But today, around 90 years [after the Nazis came to power], we stand here together in Germany to commemorate and acknowledge the man he was and the meaningful contributions he made.
“This is a point of light for me, especially given the terrible reality we have been experiencing since Oct. 7,” she added, referencing the Hamas terror attacks on Israel.
The banner will remain on display outside City Hall through January, and plans are reportedly under way to have a permanent tribute to Hirsch in the city.
“I just spoke, and I felt like he was looking at me,” Amit told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “In some way I felt like I was connected to him, especially in this moment. And I don’t think I would have had any other chance to feel that connected to him otherwise.”
Meanwhile, Dortmund Mayor Thomas Westphal has announced plans to name an annual prize after Hirsch and to invite family members back every year for the award ceremony. There are no details yet about what the prize would recognize.
The recent event was held during the 2023 European Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism, a project of the Tel Aviv-based Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM). The summit brought some 120 representatives from 60 cities across Europe to Dortmund from Nov. 29-Dec. 1 for panels and discussions on challenges and best practices. It also included a meeting with Natalie Sanandaji, a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre on Oct. 7.
It is the third such summit that CAM founder and CEO Sacha Roytman Dratwa has convened since 2019. The first partnership, with Frankfurt, was digital and organized during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, a live event was held in Athens, and this year saw gatherings in Dortmund and in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
“When we started working with the city of Dortmund, we didn’t know about the story of Paul Hirsch,” Dratwa said in a telephone interview from Israel. “As a part of the preparation, we started learning about the city and researching online.”
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, in 1933 there were 4,108 Jews living in Dortmund, which had a total population of 540,000. The city, in Germany’s Ruhr region, was known for its coal and steel industry and was heavily bombed during World War II. Today’s Jewish community in Dortmund numbers about 2,600, according to the latest statistics from the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Hirsch was born in 1868, and he studied medicine and economics before launching his political career with the Social Democratic Party in Berlin. He climbed the ladder, serving as prime minister of the state of Prussia (an area now in Poland and Russia) from 1918-1920. Hirsch became known as the political architect of “Greater Berlin,” a conglomeration of the city’s many districts that formalized city boundaries. He was later wooed to do the same in Dortmund, achieving what was reportedly the second largest municipal regional transformation in Germany since Berlin.
Yet his story is little known. A short biography by Renate Karnowsky takes up a chapter in a 1984 book in German about Prussian history, and there are stumbling block memorials and a plaque on the house where he and Lucie lived in Berlin.
Paul and Lucie’s daughters managed to flee Nazi Germany: Eva via England and South Africa to California; and Thea to Peru, where she married Max Kahn, a refugee from Cologne, and raised a family.
Last month, Thea and Max’s son, Leopoldo Kahn, flew in from San Diego with his wife Marilyn and other family members for the banner unveiling in Dortmund.
“You can’t imagine the sensation I had when I saw that cover come down and we saw the picture there,” Kahn told JTA in a phone interview. “My feelings were that finally something was being done for my grandfather.”
Kahn, a retired businessman who moved from Peru to the United States 35 years ago, said he learned a lot about his grandparents from his aunt Eva. “And later on I read about him quite a bit. And he was quite a man.”
He told the crowd that day in Dortmund that his family was “living proof, that despite the efforts the antisemites make, we are here living in continuity.”
But complacency is dangerous, he added. “This meeting is a wakeup call that the mistakes of 1933 to 1939 are beginning to repeat themselves unfortunately worldwide, and we need to work to stop these attitudes and hatred.”
The connections to descendants of Hirsch came about a year ago, through Dortmund antisemitism activist Daniel Lörcher, who at the time was head of corporate responsibility at the Borussia Dortmund professional sports club. He has since founded What Matters, a consulting firm for projects addressing antisemitism, racism and other forms of discrimination.
Lörcher had reached out to the Amit family in Israel because of his work to raise awareness about local Jewish history. He had heard about them through a friend of Adi Amit’s boyfriend Noam Bursztein.
“He asked me if I was willing to meet him, because the team is really interested in Jewish heritage,” Adi Amit recalled. Last spring, Lörcher met with Amit, her mother and Bursztein.
“Of course, I heard the name before, but I hadn’t thought about the family,” Lörcher recalled in a phone interview. “I was really surprised. And then things went very fast.”
Lörcher later met with Adi Amit’s grandfather, Leopoldo Kahn, during a special training session for the Borussia Dortmund soccer club at a Jewish school in San Diego.
Then, when CAM decided to hold its antisemitism summit in Dortmund, Lörcher suggested they “think about doing something special, to use the mayors summit to remember Paul Hirsch and his very special story for the first time.”
As the kicker, they commissioned German urban artist Mister Oreo 39, aka Julian Schimanski, to create the larger-than-life portrait, under the words: “Who is Paul Hirsch?”
Dratwa said that the Dortmund Jewish community and Mayor Westphal all agreed this was “a great opportunity to educate, and create a positive impact about the past, to create a better future.”
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The post Dortmund’s only Jewish mayor died in poverty after a successful career. The city is reviving his story. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran Turns to Internal Crackdown in Wake of 12-Day War With Israel
People walk near a mural of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, amid the Iran-Israel conflict, in Tehran, Iran, June 23, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iranian authorities are pivoting from a ceasefire with Israel to intensify an internal security crackdown across the country with mass arrests, executions, and military deployments, particularly in the restive Kurdish region, officials and activists said.
Within days of Israel‘s airstrikes beginning on June 13, Iranian security forces started a campaign of widespread arrests accompanied by an intensified street presence based around checkpoints, the officials and activists said.
Some in Israel and exiled opposition groups had hoped the military campaign, which targeted Revolutionary Guards and internal security forces as well as nuclear sites, would spark a mass uprising and the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
While Reuters has spoken to numerous Iranians angry at the government for policies they believed had led to the Israeli attack, there has been no sign yet of any significant protests against the authorities.
However, one senior Iranian security official and two other senior officials briefed on internal security issues said the authorities were focused on the threat of possible internal unrest, particularly in Kurdish areas.
Revolutionary Guard and Basij paramilitary units were put on alert and internal security was now the primary focus, said the senior security official.
The official said authorities were worried about Israeli agents, ethnic separatists, and the People’s Mujahideen Organization, an exiled opposition group that has previously staged attacks inside Iran.
Activists within the country are lying low.
“We are being extremely cautious right now because there’s a real concern the regime might use this situation as a pretext,” said a rights activist in Tehran who was jailed during mass protests in 2022.
The activist said he knew dozens of people who had been summoned by authorities and either arrested or warned against any expressions of dissent.
Iranian rights group HRNA said on Monday it had recorded arrests of 705 people on political or security charges since the start of the war.
Many of those arrested have been accused of spying for Israel, HRNA said. Iranian state media reported three were executed on Tuesday in Urmia, near the Turkish border, and the Iranian-Kurdish rights group Hengaw said they were all Kurdish.
Iran’s Foreign and Interior Ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
CHECKPOINTS AND SEARCHES
One of the officials briefed on security said troops had been deployed to the borders of Pakistan, Iraq, and Azerbaijan to stop infiltration by what the official called terrorists. The other official briefed on security acknowledged that hundreds had been arrested.
Iran’s mostly Sunni Muslim Kurdish and Baluch minorities have long been a source of opposition to the Islamic Republic, chafing against rule from the Persian-speaking, Shi’ite government in Tehran.
The three main Iranian Kurdish separatist factions based in Iraqi Kurdistan said some of their activists and fighters had been arrested and described widespread military and security movements by Iranian authorities.
Ribaz Khalili from the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI) said Revolutionary Guards units had deployed in schools in Iran’s Kurdish provinces within three days of Israel‘s strikes beginning and gone house-to-house for suspects and arms.
The Guards had taken protective measures too, evacuating an industrial zone near their barracks and closing major roads for their own use in bringing reinforcements to Kermanshah and Sanandaj, two major cities in the Kurdish region.
A cadre from the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), who gave her nom de guerre of Fatma Ahmed, said the party had counted more than 500 opposition members being detained in Kurdish provinces since the airstrikes began.
Ahmed and an official from the Kurdish Komala party, who spoke on condition of anonymity, both described checkpoints being set up across Kurdish areas with physical searches of people as well as checks of their phones and documents.
The post Iran Turns to Internal Crackdown in Wake of 12-Day War With Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Declares Iran-Israel Ceasefire a ‘Victory for Everybody’
US President Donald Trump speaks at a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (not pictured), at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, June 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
US President Donald Trump hailed the swift end to war between Iran and Israel and said Washington would likely seek a commitment from Tehran to end its nuclear ambitions at talks with Iranian officials next week.
Trump said his decision to join Israel’s attacks by targeting Iranian nuclear sites with huge bunker-busting bombs had ended the war, calling it “a victory for everybody.”
“It was very severe. It was obliteration,” he said, shrugging off an initial assessment by the US Defense Intelligence Agency that Iran‘s path to building a nuclear weapon may have been set back only by months.
Speaking in The Hague where he attended a NATO summit on Wednesday, he said he did not see Iran getting involved again in developing nuclear weapons. Tehran has always denied decades of accusations by Western leaders that it is seeking nuclear arms.
“We’re going to talk to them next week, with Iran. We may sign an agreement. I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary,” Trump said.
Anxious Iranians and Israelis sought to resume normal life after the most intense confrontation ever between the two foes.
Israel’s nuclear agency assessed the strikes had “set back Iran‘s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.” The White House also circulated the Israeli assessment, although Trump said he was not relying on Israeli intelligence.
He said he was confident Tehran would pursue a diplomatic path towards reconciliation.
“I’ll tell you, the last thing they want to do is enrich anything right now. They want to recover,” he said.
If Iran tried to rebuild its nuclear program, “We won’t let that happen. Number one, militarily we won’t,” he said, adding that he thought “we’ll end up having something of a relationship with Iran” to resolve the issue.
The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, dismissed what he called the “hourglass approach” of assessing damage to Iran‘s nuclear program in terms of months needed to rebuild as besides the point for an issue that needed a long-term solution.
“In any case, the technological knowledge is there, and the industrial capacity is there. That, no one can deny. So, we need to work together with them,” he said. His priority was returning international inspectors to Iranian nuclear sites, which he said was the only way to find out precisely what state they were in.
Israel’s bombing campaign, launched with a surprise attack on June 13, wiped out the top echelon of Iran‘s military leadership and killed leading nuclear scientists. Iran responded with missiles that pierced Israel’s defenses in significant numbers for the first time.
Iranian authorities said 627 people were killed and nearly 5,000 injured in Iran, where the extent of the damage could not be independently confirmed because of tight restrictions on media. Twenty-eight people were killed in Israel.
Israel claimed to have achieved its goals of destroying Iran‘s nuclear sites and missiles.
Trump said both sides were exhausted but the conflict could restart.
Israel’s demonstration that it could target Iran‘s senior leadership seemingly at will poses perhaps the biggest challenge yet for Iran‘s clerical rulers, at a critical juncture when they must find a successor for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, now 86 and in power for 36 years.
President Masoud Pezeshkian, a relative moderate elected last year in a challenge to years of dominance by hardliners, said it could result in reform.
“This war and the empathy that it fostered between the people and officials is an opportunity to change the outlook of management and the behavior of officials so that they can create unity,” he said in a statement carried by state media.
Still, Iran‘s authorities moved swiftly to demonstrate their control. The judiciary announced the execution of three men on Wednesday convicted of collaborating with Israel’s Mossad spy agency and smuggling equipment used in an assassination. Iran had arrested 700 people accused of ties with Israel during the conflict, the state-affiliated Nournews reported.
During the war, both Netanyahu and Trump publicly suggested that it could end with the toppling of Iran‘s entire system of clerical rule, established in its 1979 revolution.
But after the ceasefire, Trump said he did not want to see “regime change” in Iran, which he said would bring chaos at a time when he wanted the situation to settle down.
The post Trump Declares Iran-Israel Ceasefire a ‘Victory for Everybody’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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UN Nuclear Chief Says It’s Possible Iran’s Highly Enriched Uranium ‘Is There’
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi arrives on the opening day of the agency’s quarterly Board of Governors meeting at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Nov. 20, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
There is a chance that much of Iran’s highly enriched uranium survived Israeli and US attacks because it may have been moved by Tehran soon after the first strikes, UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said on Wednesday.
Israel repeatedly struck Iranian nuclear facilities during its 12-day war with Tehran, and US forces bombed Iran’s underground nuclear facilities at the weekend, but the extent of the damage to its stocks of enriched uranium is unclear.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Grossi said earlier this week that Iran had informed the IAEA on June 13 – the first day of Israeli strikes – that it would take “special measures” to protect its nuclear materials and equipment.
“They did not get into details as to what that meant but clearly that was the implicit meaning of that, so we can imagine that this material is there,” Grossi told a press conference on Wednesday with members of the Austrian government.
“So, for that, to confirm, for the whole situation, evaluation, we need to return [IAEA inspectors to Iran’s nuclear facilities].”
He said ensuring the resumption of IAEA inspections was his top priority as none had taken place since the bombing began although Iran’s parliament approved moves on Wednesday to suspend such inspections.
The IAEA needs to determine how much remains of Iran’s stock of uranium enriched to up to 60 percent purity – a level that is close to the roughly 90 percent of weapons grade.
Uranium enrichment has both civilian and military applications. Iran has always denied seeking nuclear weapons and says its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes.
The IAEA says no other country has enriched to such a high level without producing nuclear weapons, and Western powers say there is no civil justification for it.
‘HOURGLASS APPROACH’
The last quarterly IAEA report on May 31 indicated that Iran had, according to an IAEA yardstick, enough uranium enriched to up to 60 percent purity for nine nuclear weapons if enriched further. It has enough for more bombs at lower enrichment levels such as 20 percent and 5 percent, the report showed.
A preliminary US intelligence assessment determined that the US strikes at the weekend set back Tehran’s program by only a matter of months, meaning Iran could restart its nuclear program in that time, three sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
“This hourglass approach is something I do not like … It’s in the eye of the beholder,” Grossi said.
“When you look at the … reconstruction of the infrastructure, it’s not impossible. First, there has been some that survived the attacks, and then this is work that Iran knows how to do. It would take some time.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Tuesday that Tehran’s view on the nuclear program and the non-proliferation regime would now “witness changes, but it is not possible to say in what direction.”
Iran’s parliament approved a bill on Wednesday on suspending cooperation with the IAEA and stipulating that any future IAEA inspection would need approval by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. The bill still requires approval by Iran’s unelected Guardian Council to become law.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf was quoted by state media as saying the IAEA “has put its international credibility up for sale” and that Iran would accelerate its civilian nuclear program.
“This would be, of course, very regrettable,” Grossi said of Iran’s threat to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
“I hope this is not the case. I don’t think this would help anybody, starting with Iran. This would lead to isolation and all sorts of problems and, why not, perhaps, if not the unravelling a very, very, very serious erosion in the NPT structure,” he said.
The post UN Nuclear Chief Says It’s Possible Iran’s Highly Enriched Uranium ‘Is There’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.