Photo: Refugees line up outside the American consulate, 6 place Felix Baret in Marseilles. Before May 1941, Marseilles, France.
Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eric Saul.
Moses Ginsberg had a successful shop at 80 Wilmersdorferstrasse, on the trendiest shopping street in Berlin in the 1920s. However, in the 1930s, Jews were not allowed to own property or storefronts. By 1937, Moses no longer owned his store and received little pay for working there.
He spent all his free time trying to figure out how his family could leave Germany. He was told it would be easy to get an exit visa from Germany, but the difficulty would be in finding a country willing to accept immigrants. He needed to gather birth certificates, passports, and immunization records for his family.
He also had to secure an affidavit from his relatives in the United States. Affidavits of Support are documents that are secured from one’s family in the United States to ensure that the Ginsberg family in Berlin would not become a burden on the welfare system in the United States.
For the exit visa, he would need to present records about his business and personal life showing he paid his taxes and did not have any debts.
Translation:
Statement from December 28, 1938, from the Department of Finance, that businessman Moses Ginsberg and wife Chane who live at 31 Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse have no debts and are approved to emigrate from Germany (when a foreign country is willing to accept them).
Other details:
He was born on November 26, 1892, in Wisnitz, Poland. Stamped August 15, 1939 (his date of emigration).
