The West German postal system today issued a special postage stamp with the picture of Bertha Pappenheim, the Jewish social worker who just fifty years ago founded the Jewish Women’s League of Germany.
The blue stamp is of the 40-Pfennig denomination, the one needed for letters to other countries. It will be sold for face value plus a surcharge of 10 Pfennig as one of a series of welfare stamps, with the amount realized from the surcharges being turned over to charitable organizations. Among these is the Central Welfare Agency of Jews in Germany, whose share will run to one percent of the proceeds.
Bertha Pappenheim, whose profile as a young woman appears on the stamp, was born in Vienna almost a century ago and died in 1936 at Neu-Isenburg, near Frankfurt, where she had created a renowned home for Jewish girls. In the sphere of general social work, she took a leading part in the rehabilitation of delinquent girls and in combating the white-slave trade. Her main interest, however, was Jewish social and educational endeavor.
Soon after coming to Frankfurt in 1881, she founded the “Jewish Society for the Welfare of Women and Girls.” For a dozen years, she headed the Frankfurt Jewish girls’ orphanage and one of the first Jewish kindergartens. It was she who, in the summer of 1904, set up the German-wide “Jewish Women’s League,” and guided its destinies for a score of years. This is believed to be the first time a German stamp portrays someone whose principal claim to fame rests upon work for the Jewish community in a specifically Jewish context.
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