A life dedicated to art and culture
Elisabeth Moses

Dr Elisabeth Moses worked at the Cologne Museum of Decorative Arts, now the Museum of Applied Arts, from 1920 and was later responsible for the Old Paintings Department at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum.

She was involved in the 1925 Jahrtausendausstellung (Cologne Millennium Exhibition) where, together with Dr Adolf Kober, historian and rabbi of the Jewish community in Cologne, she developed the section on ‘Jews and Judaism in the Rhineland’. Their aim was to show a largely non-Jewish audience the diversity of Rhineland Judaism. Elisabeth Moses herself and her mother were among those who loaned exhibits. When the National Socialists came to power, Elisabeth Moses’ career abruptly ended: she was dismissed from public service on anti-Semitic grounds and left Germany in 1934, finally reuniting with her family in San Francisco.