1964-2025
Luisa Jaffé left us on February 25, 2025. In 2008, together with her and the Committee of Descendants, we organized the second Hohenems Reunion. The third followed in 2017. In doing so, she followed in the footsteps of her father Felix, who organized the first worldwide reunion of the descendants of Jewish families from Hohenems with the Jewish Museum in 1998. But with her own much different temperament.
Luisa moved us all deeply, her seriousness, her quiet humor and her resilience carried us all through the adventure of a cosmopolitan community of world citizens at these reunions.
Born in 1964 in Kenya, where her father worked as a geologist, she grew up in Geneva and eventually lived in Belgium, from where she organized congresses and communication for an international association of academics. In other words, she did what she gave to us, the Jewish Museum and the community of descendants: living out her talent for bringing people together without putting herself in the foreground. She needed resilience, because her father Felix was a strong personality who successfully passed on his Hohenems family heritage and demanded commitment, but did not necessarily appreciate dissent when opinions differed on what priorities should be set.
Her presence lives on in the Jewish Museum; in a video interview with Arno Gisinger, she describes, her many different passports in hand, what it means to be at home in many nations and cultures – and how the small town on the border could become something of a hinge between her various ties, as the child of a German-Austrian-Jewish father and a Christian-American mother. And she quoted Eva Grabherr: “Hohenems has become a place of generations.”
“I like this sentence because it encompasses everything. … So we already know a thousand descendants. They are now scattered all over the world and I would like to find a way for these people to continue to meet, learn things together and perhaps even begin to reflect together. Or maybe, but this is a bit selfish on my part, to be able to ask my personal questions: Who am I? What am I doing? Questions that basically everyone asks themselves. To turn Hohenems into a kind of mirror that might one day give me an answer, even if that is utopian. That’s what I want for the future.”
On February 25, Luisa’s brother Philip wrote to us: “Today, February 25, 2025, my young sister Luisa, barely 60 years old, decided to go, with clarity, in peace, courageous in the course of her illness.”
We are infinitely sad. Luisa was always present in our personal and museum life and will remain so. We will miss her when, hopefully in a few years’ time, we are once again able to welcome people from all over the world for whom Hohenems has become an anchor for their diverse identities and life issues.
In doing so, we will always remember Luisa.