[Map]

		B1 INDEX
		City Museum
		7th and I Sts NW
		Sixth & I Historic Synagogue
		Greater New Hope Baptist Church
		819-821 7th St
		Goethe-Institut Washington
		7th and H Sts.
		Calvary Baptist Church

ENTERING HINZWEILER, JANUARY 2001

In 1917, thinking back to his childhood in Hinzweiler, Simon Wolf made the following remarks:

On a summer day in 1845, in the little town where I was born in the Rhenish provinces, the postman brought a letter which was written in the United States by an uncle of mine . . . Among other things which the letter contained, there was a picture of George Washington, and a translation of the Declaration of Independence in German. The feeling that overcame me in looking at the one, and reading the other, is as vivid and distinct today as it was then, more than seventy years ago, and day and night from that time until I had the pleasure and good fortune of accompanying my sainted grandparents to this country, the thought was "what a wonderful man George Washington must have been, and what a fairyland it must be, where all men are born free and equal." And thus, when on the 19th day of July, 1848, I landed in New York, an immigrant boy, I was to all intents and purposes an American, and during these seventy years, I have never departed from that lofty conception of duty to American citizenship that had been formed in the land of my birth.

"Judaism-Patriotism-Fraternalism," a response at a banquet given in Baltimore on January 16, 1917, at the convention of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, to the toast "America," reprinted in Selected Addresses and Papers of Simon Wolf, Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1926, p. 281.

In 1914, Simon Wolf published his reminiscences and included this passage about returning to Hinzweiler in 1881 on his way to Cairo where he had been appointed Consul and Agent Diplomatique to Egypt by President Garfield:

I sailed from New York on July 9th [1881] on the steamer "Oder," a tugboat compared with the great ships that now sail the Atlantic. But I had a delightful trip, genial company and arrived at Southampton on the evening of the 19th. . . . . From [Trouville] I went to Paris; from Paris to Lyons, France, where I was the guest of our Consul, Benjamin F. Peixotto. After a pleasant stay with these good and intellectual friends, Mr. Peixotto accompanied me on a trip to Germany, as I desired to visit my old home in the Rheinish Provinces. We got there entirely unknown; I saw the house in which I was born, and where my sainted grandparents and parents had lived; visited the cemetery, for that was the only place in a which a trace of the former Jewish residents remained, and a peculiar feeling came over me as I stood near the crumbling stones, moss-covered, with their lettering almost indistinct, when I remembered the days of my childhood, and the standing of the Jews in Germany then and now. I bore with me the parchment issued by our State Department, having the signature of the President and Secretary of state, and I realized what a contrast between Germany and the United States, as to the status of the Jew.

There was not one of my early companions left, except a schoolmate, a married woman, who said to those who surrounded us that she always knew I would be something great, for I was the best scholar in school. I had brought with me a bag of small coins to distribute among the children, and within a radius of a half a mile there were three or four villages, and it seemed to me that when I started to distribute the coins it rained not only money, but children. We left the dear old home of Hinzweiler on our way back, but the mayor of the town, and a choir of the various churches followed us very closely, halted us at Offenbach where a serenade was tendered, speeches made, and many a bumper drunk to the health and happiness of all concerned. It was a memorable scene which I can never forget.

Some of the Personal Reminiscences at Home and Abroad. Washington, 1914, p. 10.