Resilient Wedding Gifts

Name of Exhibit: Resilient Wedding Gifts

Submitted by: Muriel Korngold Wexler

Date of Origin: 1930s

Origin of Object: France

Description: Six objects that my parents carried and kept as they hid in various places throughout France such as Strasbourg and Lyon. This included two sterling purses, a coin purse, a makeup compact, a silver container, and a lipstick holder. These items were gifted to my mother when she married my father.

The purse with the green jewel and the makeup compact were gifts from my maternal grandmother. She came from a very old Jewish Alsatian French family that lived in Strasbourg and stayed in France, hiding throughout the Holocaust.

The other sterling purse was a gift from my paternal grandmother. My paternal grandparents were from a very old Jewish German family that lived in Nuremberg and then left Germany for Lima, Peru, before Kristallnacht in 1938.

My mother and father met in Strasbourg, France. At the time, my father was the manager of a French bank, and my mother worked for him. They got married in Nuremberg, Germany, around 1929. They remained in Nuremberg until the early fall of 1933 and then moved back to Strasbourg where they stayed until the Nazis invaded in June 1940 and annexed Alsace-Lorraine into the Third Reich. Consequently, my parents moved south to Lyon and stayed there until the end of the war. They eventually settled in Canada in 1969.

Voyage to Ottawa: My parents brought these objects when they came to Canada in the fall of 1969. They passed these items down to me.