The Leo Baeck Institute to Present North American Premiere of Neta Pulvermacher's THE ARCHIVE

The Leo Baeck Institute, a research library and archive focused on the history of German-speaking Jews, will present the New York Premiere of The Archive by choreographer and performer Neta Pulvermacher who returns to New York after more than a decade in Israel. The Archive is Pulvermacher’s funny and deeply moving investigation of her German-Jewish family history. Performances take place February 24–26, 2025 at the Center for Jewish History. 

When the last person who remembers is gone, whole worlds disappear. Forever. Israeli/American artist Neta Pulvermacher sets her riveting one woman show, The Archive, inside this perforated post-memory landscape. In this multi-layered work, she constructs a jarring and deeply personal journey that follows the traces to Frankfurt and Berlin - once her family’s home.

Inside a room with a table, three chairs, and an old violin, Pulvermacher sifts through documents, old pictures, and personal artifacts. She dances, sings, and tells stories, conjuring up fragmented narratives, voices, and characters that connect briefly, only to fade away into oblivion. Through research and memory, she combines real and imagined sites and events, blurring the lines between past and present and battling the gradual disappearance of memories.

For a moment, this pursuit materializes in the Great Hall of NYC’s Center for Jewish History, a place of remembrance itself. As Pulvermacher navigates this layered landscape, she invites the audience to join her “at work” in her family’s archive as she deconstructs and reconstructs a lost world.

In advance of the 8pm performance, audiences are invited beginning at 7:30pm to peruse Pulvermacher’s “archive” – the documents, photographs, letters, and family artifacts that she discovered when her parents, Leopold Pulvermacher and Frieda Fleischer, passed away.

The Archive was originally commissioned as a site-specific quartet that premiered in July 2023 at the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem. Following the October 7th Hamas attack, two original performers, Avigail Karby and Itamar Galina, were immediately drafted into the IDF active reserve duty. Pulvermacher did not want to replace them with new dancers. With their encouragement and at the invitation of KFW’s Stiftung in Frankfurt she reimagined The Archive as a solo, premiering the new version in Frankfurt (March 2024) and in Tel Aviv (June 2024). The Archive will tour Israel and Europe in 2025.

“In the past few years, after both of my parents passed away, I have become increasingly obsessed with the Holocaust and with my German-Jewish family history,” said Pulvermacher. “I began incessantly perusing old pictures, diplomas, hand-written letters, German army decorations from WWI, the Frankfurt family tree dating back to 1690 and other documents and personal artifacts. However, the inevitable passing of the last living links to my family’s past in Berlin and Frankfurt raise deep questions about the ephemerality of memory, identity, history and experience. When I visited Berlin and Frankfurt in 2022, I found myself wandering the streets and city squares following the paths where my family once walked. I brought with me a red leather-bound folder that my paternal grandmother, Matilde Pulvermacher Rosolio, carried with her when the family escaped Germany in 1933. Deciphering locations and addresses from the documents and letters in the folder, I visited past homes, schools, train stations, gardens, archives, memorial sites and cemeteries in an effort to situate these “memory-deprived” documents in a lived experience in Berlin and Frankfurt and to listen to ghosts and spirits of long gone relatives that might still hover above.”

Three performances of The Archive will take place on February 24, 25 & 26, 2025 at Center for Jewish History, located at 15 W. 16th Street in Manhattan. Doors open at 7:30 PM for an “Abendbrot” reception and viewing of artifacts. The performance begins at 8:00 PM. A discussion with Neta Pulvermacher will follow each performance.