Dear readers and dear friends of Medaon,

Although good reasons exist for a national focus of research in Jewish Studies and Jewish History, we can nevertheless observe an equally legitimate trend of transnationalization. Medaon is taking up this development and would like to welcome two new editorial members: David Jünger (Sussex / Rostock) and Katrin Steffen (Sussex), as the new editorial team for “transnational Jewish History”, have set themselves the goal to broaden the understanding of German-Jewish History in transnational perspective and to at the same time offer a discussion forum for the possibilities and limits of such an approach.

We are happy to announce a special occurence happening with this issue: We proudly registered the 500th author in our editorial system. That is, of course, a much smaller number than the 1700 years of Jewish life in Germany, but, still, we would like to take the opportunity to thank all our authors for their valuable contributions over the years. And we are looking forward to the next 500!

Coming back to the present, we are happy to present another focal issue with this fall edition of Medaon. It is devoted to the topic “Jewish migration after 1945”. Our guest editor Karen Körber from the Hamburg Institute of the History of German Jews acquired a row of very interesting contributions on Jewish migratory movements from the end of World War II until the present – amongst which are histories of flight and expulsion as well as of hopes for a better future. A detailed introduction into this focal point as well as the corresponding contributions can be found in the introductory section.

An article outside of our focal point also deals with the immediate postwar era: Susanne Urban shows how Jews tried to contact their families through the International Red Cross or tried to find out anything about their whereabouts. There is also a reviewed article in education section. Here, Björn Siegel investigates how the podcast has developed as a medium in the historical sciences and which potentials it holds for Jewish History.

Furthermore, there is a contribution by Frank Ohlhoff on the audio-walk “Shalom Freiburg” in the education section and miscellanea by Kim Dresel on crowdsourcing in the utilization of the Arolsen Archive. Magdalena Waligórska and Alexander Friedman reveal the relevance of the archival documents in the Polish Department for Public Safety using the example of the Jewish partisan and operative Aleksander Kuc. In the biographies of important Jewish women section, Hannah Lotte Lund writes about Rahel Levin Vernhagen; in our film studies section “Einblendungen”, the authors deal with the topic of “places”; and our review section, of course, sheds light on recent literature.

We thank all the reviewers for their support in making this issue. Steffen Schröter of text plus form, Cathleen Bürgelt, Casey Sutcliffe and Phillip Roth corrected and translated the texts with usual diligence – we owe them our sincere gratitude.

The editors of Medaon, November 2021.