Ossip Klarwein: an Architect’s Journey from Berlin to Jerusalem, talk by Jacqueline Hénard, 9/30/25 скачать в хорошем качестве

Ossip Klarwein: an Architect’s Journey from Berlin to Jerusalem, talk by Jacqueline Hénard, 9/30/25

Ossip (also: Joseph) Klarwein was born in 1893 in Warsaw. Due to pogroms in the collapsing Russian Empire, he emigrated with his parents and siblings to Hesse in 1905. Klarwein became an architect, with professional focuses in Berlin and Hamburg. In 1924, he married Martha Elsa Kumme, a Protestant opera singer. They had a son, Matthias. In 1933, Klarwein emigrated to British Mandate Palestine. There, he initially designed buildings—some of them city landmarks—for private clients and the British administration. After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, he built a successful career both as a city planner for Jerusalem and as an independent architect. Klarwein played a key role in designing the government quarter, the university campuses Mount Scopus and Givat Ram, and the Hadassah Organization’s hospital centers in Jerusalem. He also authored several innovative structures: • Mount of Remembrance with Theodor Herzl’s tomb • The first commercial center in Haifa (Beit HaKranot) • The first swimming pool and cinema in Nahariya • The major grain silo at Haifa Port (Dagon Silo) • The first central train station in Tel Aviv (Savidor Station) The crowning achievement of his architectural career was the construction of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, inaugurated in 1966. In 1957, the competition jury unanimously chose Klarwein’s design. In 1970, Klarwein passed away in Jerusalem. His estate is widely scattered across archives and among his family: 2.5 linear meters of documents are held in the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, and a dozen moving boxes containing letters, photo albums, drawings, business records, and personal items are held by his descendants in Israel, Spain, and France. These have now been evaluated for the first time as part of this project. Until now, there has been no academic study or exhibition about Klarwein in either Germany or Israel. Jacqueline Hénard was born in West-Berlin during the cold war, studied in Montpellier, Cambridge, and Paris, and graduated from the Sorbonne with a thesis in contemporary history and international relations. Following a year as a volunteer with an NGO in rural Indonesia, she joined the editorial staff of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was appointed the FAZ’s Eastern Europe correspondent in 1987, during which time she also covered the transformation of the former East Germany. In 1997, Jacqueline moved to Paris, where she worked first as a correspondent for Die Zeit and later ran the European program of the public radio France Culture. In parallel, she continued to pursue her academic interests — teaching at Sciences Po Paris, doing research, and publishing a number of books on European history and culture in French and German. In 2022, Jacqueline started research about the largely forgotten architect Ossip Klarwein, which led to a book publication and an exhibition currently on view in Berlin. This is the Ossip Klarwein Project Website: https://klarwein.org/en/. This event is part of the online series "Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression" organized by The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art in New York. You can find other presentations on our YouTube channel @fritzaschersociety.org. #OssipKlarwein #JosefKlarwein #JosephKlarwein #architecture #architect #expressionistarchitect #Knesset