Siddy Wronsky’s novel „Sand und Sterne“

TEI-Publisher Edition & Open Access Book Edition

You will soon find the TEI-Publisher with the digitized data here.

Suggested citation for TEI-Publisher edition: German Central Institute for Social Issues (Ed.). (2025). Siddy Wronsky’s novel „Sand and Stars“. Digital Edition. In: [TBA webpage link]

For Open Access to the Book Edition, click here.

Suggested citation for the book edition: Avnir, Y., Halpern, A., Lau, D., Pigorsch, S., & Wilke, B. (Eds.). (2025). Siddy Wronsky. Sand und Sterne – חול וכוכבים – Sand and Stars. Edition of the 1930’s Novel in the Context of Jewish History, Gender and Social Work. Nomos. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748940814

Project context

Siddy (Sidonie) Wronsky (Berlin, 1883 – Jerusalem, 1947) was an important social reformist and social worker. She embodies the strong link between German social work and Zionist ideas, as she was a major activist in both the German welfare system and later in the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine. Wronsky grew up in Berlin in a Jewish family of seven children; her father was of German descent while her mother was East European. She started her career as a special education teacher and later studied “mental hygiene”, a discipline which sought to fight poverty, crime and diseases using preventive and social measures (Halpern 2019, p. 1087).

Later, she was active in the bourgeois women’s movement, in particular in the Jewish women’s movement. Her activism in the area of support for people in need and in the development of coordinated welfare structures in Berlin in the first half of the 20th century, make her one of the most influential persons in terms of professionalization and academization of social work in Germany and Israel (Reinicke 2008). Siddy Wronsky was board member (since 1914), chairwoman (since 1918), and the first full-time manager (1923-1933) of the “Archiv für Wohlfahrtspflege” (archive for welfare work), which was renamed into “Deutsches Zentralinstitut für soziale Fragen (DZI)” (German Central Institute for Social Issues) in 1964. She was editor of the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Wohlfahrtspflege (German journal of welfare work), the predecessor of the journal Soziale Arbeit (Social Work), which is published by DZI and the Berlin Senate Department for Integration, Labour and Social Services. By the time she was forced to emigrate to Palestine in 1933, the archive had expanded under her direction into a documentary center of a nation-wide scope with an extensive collection of relevant literature and case studies (Toppe 2020). Siddy Wronsky took her knowledge and experience to Palestine where she was invited to build up the first school for social work in Jerusalem. She significantly contributed to the development of modern teaching and practice of social work in Palestine. Siddy Wronsky died on the 8th of December 1947 in Jerusalem only a few months before the foundation of the state of Israel.

The manuscript of the novel “Sand and Stars”
The main goal of the project is the digitization of Siddy Wronsky’s novel “Sand and Stars”. What is special about this work of literature is that it has not yet been published. The manuscript was found by Dr. Ayana Halpern in the course of scientific research activities in the Central Zionist Archives (CZA) in Jerusalem. Under the supervision of Prof. John Gal and Dr. Yehudit Avnir she there did research on the knowledge transfer from Jewish-German social workers to Palestine and on the development of social work in Mandatory Palestine.

“Sand and Stars” is not a scientific work but a piece of literature. The manuscript is presented in German (188 pages), English (109 pages), and Hebrew (84 pages). The text, whose time of creation is unclear, will now be made public for the first time. The story deals with four young Jews who are setting out with a group of Jewish orphans from Berlin to Eretz Israel in order to build up a future in the spirit of their Zionist vision. The novel is important from a historical point of view. So for instance it indirectly refers to Jewish welfare institutions in Berlin, such as the Berlin Jewish community’s children’s home Ahawah in Auguststraße, which Siddy Wronsky helped founding and running and whose building today still exists. Institutions in Israel that were established by immigrants from Germany, like for example the youth village Ben Shemen, are mentioned in the text, too. One of the main missions of the novel is to justify the practice of social work as an important tool in the effort to build the nation of Israel. This was very important to Wronsky due to the ambivalence regarding the image of social work in the Yishuv. Wronsky’s novel is an enthusiastic adherence to the main ethos of the nation’s salvation by Jews returning to toil the land. One of the major themes in the novel is the emphasis on the point that helping the needy and the poor is as important as building agriculture and industry.

The digitization project
The project objectives were:
1. Digitization and CC-BY-publication (Digital Edition and Book Edition) of the novel’s manuscript in three languages (German, English, Hebrew)
2. Exploration of the significance of the novel for the historiography of social work
3. Completion of the knowledge and sources on the history and development of DZI
4. Expansion of DZI expertise in terms of digitization of analogue sources

The project team:
Dr Ayana Halpern (Post-Doc, The Hebrew University of Jersusalem)
Dr Yehudit Avnir (Emerita, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Dr Dayana Lau (Alice Salomon Archive at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin)
Dr Stephanie Pigorsch (DZI, Berlin), project management
Grad. economist Burkhard Wilke (DZI, Berlin)

Cooperating institutions:
Central Zionist Archives
The special feature of the digitization project is that the manuscripts are located in Israel at the Central Zionist Archives (CZA). The CZA are the official archive of the institutions of the Zionist movement based in Jerusalem. The CZA were founded in 1919 in Berlin and after Hitler’s seizure of power was relocated to Jerusalem where it reopened in 1934. The archive accommodates a large amount of relevant resources and materials such as the personal archive of Theodor Herzl and several institutional archives. The preparation of usable scans of the German, English and Hebrew manuscripts will take place in the CZA due to historical and archival reasons.

Digital Humanities
The e-Lijah-Lab is a Digital Humanities laboratory at the Department of Jewish History and Bible Studies at the University of Haifa. The lab initiates and conducts various Digital Humanities projects in Jewish Studies and beyond, with special expertise in the areas of digital analysis of manuscripts, geo-temporal mapping of textual traditions and social historical archival data, crowdsourcing and citizen science. Dr. Sinai Rusinek, Dr. Eliezer Baumgarten, Gil Shalit, and colleagues were involved in the preparation of the edition.