Manfred Erich Rosengarten

See S. Meen, https://judeninthemar.org/the-family-of-paul-berta-nee-schwab-rosen...

• Birth date in Ancestry.com. U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2014.
• Identified as son of Paul Rosengarten and Berta Schwab in Rosengarten Family records.
• Identified as husband of Eveline Berger in Rosengarten Family records.
• Identified as father of Andy and Linda Rosengarten in Rosengarten Family records.
• Death date/place in Ancestry.com. California, U.S., Death Index, 1940-1997 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2000.
• Stolpersteine were laid for Berta, Paul, Manfred, and Erich Rosengarten in Themar.

Manfred Rosengarten's Photo Album: https://judeninthemar.org/themar/manfreds-photo-album/

In 1983 Manfred Rosengarten, 62 years old and living in Martinez, California, decided to create a photo album for his children and grandchildren to show and tell them about Themar, Thüringen, his home town, which he had left nearly 50 years earlier. A few pictures had travelled with him and his family to Shanghai in 1939 and subsequently to California in 1947. But Manfred wanted more pictures of Themar for his album and when the sister of a California friend, who lived in Dresden, volunteered to go to Themar and take photographs, Manfred had his chance. In order to show exactly which photos he wanted, Manfred sat down one evening at 9.00 p.m. and worked through the night to 4 a.m. The resulting city map — of the Themar he had left in 1936 — was exact to the smallest detail. In due course, Manfred received the photographs and, as an extraordinary result of the picture-taking expedition, he reconnected with the non-Jewish school chums of his childhood — and received even more photographs and postcards for his album. As you will know if you have browsed through other parts of this website, it is the photo album and Manfred’s correspondence with his former schoolmates that prompted this project of reassembling of the Jewish community of Themar on the web.Manfred’s intent was to “try and recreate” — from memory — “the story of a little town, its people, its history, its Jews (as best I can), and even some of its geological and anthropological features. Throughout the story,” he wrote, “I will report about some Jews in connection with the pictures of their houses. He succeeded and the result is a quite singular document. The photographs, the postcards, and the commentary offer a fascinating glimpse of life in the small city Themar during Manfred’s time, when the Jewish community played a lively role. But the photographs taken in 1976 and 1983 also tell us much about how the city fared during the Communist era.

The presentation of the text and photographs here differs from Manfred’s original design, in order to make the content more accessible to a larger audience: for example, chapters have been created for each area of Themar as Manfred moves us through its streets, squares, and lanes. All the photographs now have numbers and captions, dates, and credit lines. All map sites are now numbered, and are referenced in the captions and the text. We have enhanced the size of the photographs, an aspect particularly welcome with the photographs of people. As well, information in the text, particularly about people, has been clarified and updated wherever possible, either with an in-text [xxx] or with an [Editor%E2%80%99s Note], and the sources are either provided in links or cited at the end. Manfred died in 1987, before the reunification of East & West Germany and before Google, Google Earth, etc., but I believe that Manfred would appreciate how technology is bringing his memories and stories to a larger audience.

The original photo album is part of the permanent collection of the Rosengarten Collection in the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre Archives, and is posted here with the permission of the Centre.