The black-and-white photograph shows the façade of the administrative building of the Jewish Congregation in Hamburg (JGH) at Rothenbaumchaussee 38. An unknown photographer took the picture diagonally from the front yard, so that the neighboring building on the left is also visible. In the center of the picture, an approximately two-meter-long Israeli flag is flying on a flagpole that extends from a balcony on the second floor of the building towards the street. According to the note on the back of the photo, it was taken on May 14, 1949, the first anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel.

Harry Goldstein, the first chairman of the Jewish Congregation in Hamburg founded in 1945, sent the picture to Carl Heinz Rosner, who was born in Hamburg in 1929 and had been temporarily under Goldstein’s guardianship after his parents fled Germany. Rosner had survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he had been deported in June 1944, and had emigrated to Sweden after the war and then to Israel in 1948. Today he lives in the USA. The photo is part of his document collection, which is in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.