Less than 20 years after the Shoah, the American-Jewish photographer Leonard Freed (1929–2006) travelled through West Germany for a period of several months. He wanted to use his camera to capture how German Jews lived in the early 1960s in order to push back against Germans’ ignorance of the invisible Jewish minority in their midst. He took photographs in several Jewish communities, particularly in the regions around Frankfurt and Düsseldorf.

Fifty-two of Freed’s photographs were published in 1965 under the title Deutsche Juden heute (German Jews Today) and accompanied by essays. The focus was on the Jewish community and the relationship between Jews and Germans. Jewish life is fragile; at the time, there were only a few small communities whose existence was disputed both inside and outside Germany. These topics were also discussed in two publications that appeared in 1963 and 1964: in an edition of the news magazine Der Spiegel with the headline ‘Jews in Germany’, and in a volume edited by Hermann Kesten titled Ich lebe nicht in der Bundesrepublik (I don’t live in the Federal Republic). The question of whether it’s possible to live as a Jew in Germany remains a subject of debate to this day.

All 52 photographs in Leonard Freed’s series are part of the museum collection and were purchased from the photographer’s widow, Brigitte Freed. They are exhibited here in their entirety for the first time.