There are many museum directors, heads of archives, curators etc. But there are not too many Mentsches. According to the Kabbalah, in each generation the world is born by three dozen lamed vavniks – Mentsches. Carol Kahn Strauss is one of them.
Combine the ability to make the impossible happen, dedication to systematic and meticulous work, a good measure of determination and chutzpah – and you have Carol Kahn Strauss.
Petite but strong of will and quick of mind, Carol, as everybody calls her, certainly knows what she wants – and how to get it. She has to.
Her job description: director of the largest and most important Jewish-German archive, communicator, gifted fundraiser. She’s a builder of bridges between the past and the present, between New York and Berlin.
Her parents fled Hitler’s Germany. German was spoken at the new home in New York. To this day, Carol loves switching from one language to the other. Fashionable spectacles can’t hide her lively dark eyes sparkling with wit and irony. Personally modest, always immaculately turned out, Carol represents the natural elegance, the grace and perfect manners of a bygone era. But wait – there is a temperament lurking beneath. There is a spontaneity and practical mindedness to Carol which never fails to wow those talking to and working with her.
Carol does not shy away from a challenge. In that way, she has helped to restore part of the German memory by bringing the Leo Baeck Archive to Berlin. This was no easy task when resentments against Germany were strong, almost overpowering. Why give the Germans back what they had brutally driven out? But Carol did not relent. Close to one million memorabilia from the Leo Baeck Institute can be seen on microfilm at Berlin’s Jewish Museum. There is more to come.
The Leo Baeck Salon is an institution in Berlin, where the avant-garde meets the past. Students of the Berlin University of the Arts are asked to connect the memoirs and lives of Jewish emigrants by using present day artistic expression. The presentation of their work – be it at the Jewish Museum or in a storage hall – is always graciously hosted by Carol.
She knows how to cultivate individual friendships in the age of Facebook. And Carol loves to help – spontaneously, discreetly, in a no-frills, hands-on way. Carol – just a Mentsch.