Myra Warhaftig, our friend and founder of the Association for Research on the Lives and Works of German-speaking Jewish Architects, died on March 4th, 2008. We have lost one of the righteous, whose ceaseless engagement fostered valuable interconnections and whose energy inspired us.

On March 4, 2008, the Israeli architect and architectural historian Myra Warhaftig died in Berlin. After studies in architecture at the Technion in Haifa, she went to Paris, where she worked in the office of Candilis, Josic and Woods on the "Rostlaube" for the Free University Berlin, and then to Berlin, where she turned her attention also to academic and publishing endeavours. Her research at the Technical University Berlin on "The Apartment as an Obstacle to Emancipation" was not only a theme of the women's movement and the critique of functionalism, but also represented one of the rare contributions to quality floor plans in modern residential construction. She was able to realize such housing in 1992, in the frequently cited Kreuzberg "Block 2", erected as part of the Neubau-IBA [International Building Exhibition - New Buildings].

Myra Warhaftig's great lifetime achievement was the cultural restitution of the life and work of more than 500 German-speaking Jewish architects who, after 1933, were forced by the National Socialists to relinquish their professions and leave their country, were persecuted, deported and murdered. Myra Warhaftig devoted the last decades of her life to this peerless work, organizing international exhibitions, lecturing, and writing expert appraisals. And she published two standard works - receiving for many years only a chilly public [and professional] response, working against frequently obscure objections, and seldom enjoying the necessary material backing. Through her tremendous commitment and her accurate research and wide-ranging contacts, an architectural inheritance that was jeopardized by forgetting and repression could be preserved; the fundamental value of the oeuvres of these architects for the building culture of the West and the creation and transformation of Modern architecture was, at core, secured. The realization of the exhibition on this subject, definitely planned for the Jewish Museum Berlin, will now certainly be more difficult – nonetheless it remains the true legacy of this delicate and at the same time unbelievably strong woman.

Günter Schlusche