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January 22, 2024 Top Legal News of the Week

ABA Holocaust exhibit coincides with Midyear in Louisville

For the first time, the ABA traveling exhibit, “Lawyers Without Rights: Jewish Lawyers in Germany Under the Third Reich,” will overlap in the same city as the ABA Midyear Meeting, which will be in Louisville, Kentucky, from Jan. 31-Feb. 5.

The ABA's "Lawyers Without Rights" exhibit opened Jan. 15 at the Trager Family Jewish Community Center of Louisville.

The ABA's "Lawyers Without Rights" exhibit opened Jan. 15 at the Trager Family Jewish Community Center of Louisville.

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The exhibit, a joint effort of the American Bar Association and the German Federal Bar, known as BRAK, opened on Jan. 15 at the Trager Family Jewish Community Center of Louisville. The exhibit, which depicts the fate of Jewish lawyers and jurists in Nazi Germany, has traveled to more than 70 venues in North America since 2012, including Mexico City and Toronto.

From 1919 to 1933 during the democratic Weimer Republic, Jews made up less than one percent of Germany’s population, but the proportion of Jewish lawyers in Germany hovered between 25% and 30%. In Berlin, Germany’s capital city, almost half the lawyers were Jewish.

The purge of Jewish lawyers and jurists starting in 1933 by the Nazis was met with silence from most of the non-Jewish German lawyers and marks one of the first steps in the campaign by Adolf Hitler to undermine the rule of law and to systematically rid Germany of Jews. The effort led to the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews across Europe.

The Lawyers Without Rights exhibit is free to the public, including Midyear Meeting attendees. Also, on Feb. 1 from 5:30-7 p.m., the Trager center is hosting a discussion featuring 92-year-old Holocaust survivor John Rosenberg. At age 7, Rosenberg was a first-hand witness to the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” on Nov. 9-10, 1938, when Nazi officials attacked German Jews and ransacked their homes, synagogues, businesses and other institutions.

Rosenberg, who has garnered numerous ABA awards, later settled in the Carolinas with his family and earned an undergraduate degree from Duke University and a law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During the 1960s, he worked on civil rights matters in the U.S. Justice Department. In 1970, he founded the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund in eastern Kentucky and is still active there today.

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