A TRIBUTE JOHANNES BRUNO INGE FRANKEN LARS MENK ERNST SCHÄLL WILFRIED WEINKE THE OBERMAYER GERMAN JEWISH HISTORY AWARDS PRESENTED TO

Transcription

1 A TRIBUTE THE OBERMAYER GERMAN JEWISH HISTORY AWARDS PRESENTED TO JOHANNES BRUNO INGE FRANKEN LARS MENK ERNST SCHÄLL WILFRIED WEINKE Abgeordnetenhaus, BERLIN JANUARY 25, 2007

2 DEALING WITH THE PAST The Obermayer German Jewish History Awards were established to pay tribute to Germans who have made outstanding voluntary contributions to preserving the memory of their local Jewish communities, including their history, culture, cemeteries, and synagogues. The awards are now recognized as the most significant honor these individuals can receive, especially since they come primarily from Jews who have a full appreciation of the horrors of the Hitler era. These awardees are prime examples of how Germany has dealt with its past. Today, the German government and people are quick to recognize the slippery slope from arrogance to bigotry, intolerance, hatred, repression, dehumanization and barbarity -- and are among the first to say, never again. Today, Germany can be an example for the whole world of how a terrible period in a country s history can continue to impact on the psyche of its inhabitants for future generations. OBERMAYER FOUNDATION, INC. 239 CHESTNUT STREET NEWTON, MASSACHUSETTS USA WEB: TEL:

3 ENRICHING THE FUTURE his year marks the seventh annual presentation of awards that were created to honor the past and enrich the future. German life was once filled with contributions made by Jewish scholars, writers and artists. Music, science, literature and architecture were often collaborative efforts that brought diverse talents together. The collective history of Germans and Jews was profoundly connected and served to benefit the world. The Nazi regime and its obliteration of the German Jewish community ended a long period of collaboration and mutual trust. However, many German citizens, ranging from academics to those working in business and professions, did not let go of their interest and commitment to Jewish history and culture. Many worked at great personal cost to preserve and reconstruct aspects of Jewish life, which had contributed to the cultural richness of their lives and the lives of their respective communities. These individuals have researched, reconstructed, written about and rebuilt an appreciation of Jewish culture that will enrich life today and in the future. Diverse individuals, without thought of reward, have helped raise awareness about a once vibrant community. Their ongoing efforts pay tribute to the importance of Jewish subject matter and its value to German society as a whole. Many volunteers have devoted years of effort to such projects, but few have been recognized or honored for their efforts. The German Jewish Community History Council and its cosponsors believe it is particularly important for Jews from other parts of the world to be aware of this ongoing work. The annual Obermayer German Jewish History Awards provide an opportunity for the Jewish community worldwide to acknowledge German citizens who have rekindled the spark of Jewish thought that once existed in Germany. The award winners have dedicated themselves to rebuilding destroyed institutions and ideals. Their achievements reflect a personal connection to Jewish history and a willingness to repair a small corner of the world. 1

4 Awardee JOHANNES BRUNO Speyer, Rheinland-Pfalz Nominated by Florence Covinsky, Scottsdale, AZ; and Gunther Katz, Encino, CA It s hard to know exactly what to call him: Teacher, Author, Activist, Historian, Journalist, Guide. Johannes Bruno is a mixture of all those things and when his friends and colleagues in Speyer started to simply use the name Juden Bruno, or Jewish Bruno, it was easy to see why they would describe a Christian in such a way. Since moving to this Rhineland city more than 30 years ago, the Italian-born Bruno has been central to the revival of its Jewish memory. From the books and articles he has written to the Holocaust memorial he promoted, and from his school lectures and city tours to his work restoring Germany s oldest and largest mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath, Bruno remains a vital presence reawakening Speyer residents to their past. The Jews were once a part of this town, and their history is part of its whole history, Bruno says, citing the long heritage of Jewish scholars, philosophers and merchants in Speyer that dates back nearly 1,000 years. They belong to it and I don t want history to be forgotten. I want to remind people how important the Jews were and what they achieved here, so that they feel responsible for what s left over. Bruno himself learned about responsibility early on in life. Born in Rome in 1933, he remembers having contact with the Jewish families that lived in his apartment building particularly the family his mother saved by hiding them from the Germans in After an observant Catholic upbringing, Bruno felt drawn to history and religious studies. He moved in 1958 to Germany where he completed his education and started teaching high school. Then, years later, his focus on Judaism started to evolve: first as a hobby, after he read books like Heinrich Graetz s History of the Jews, then as a passion when he discovered the Speyer archives and immersed himself in its newspapers, documents and literature. Bruno spent decades in research and wrote articles for local papers before publishing his first book in 2000 a 300-page history called Schicksale Speyerer Juden 1800 bis 1980 (The Fate of Speyer s Jews, ). Four years later, his meticulous study of medieval Jewry appeared under the title, Die Weisen von Speyer oder Jüdische Gelehrte des Mittelalters an dera hiesigen Talmudschule (The Sages of Speyer or The Jewish Scholars of the Middle Ages at the Local Talmud School). I was amazed at the depth and breadth of [Bruno s] knowledge of Jewish history, Jewish customs and the synagogue service, Gunther Katz, a Speyer-born survivor of the Holocaust, said of the book, and commended Bruno for his tireless work to memorialize the contributions of the Jewish population of Speyer from ancient times to the present. Beyond his writing, Bruno is best known for leading tours and overseeing last year s restoration of the historic mikvah, which is the central feature of Jewish Speyer. He has guided thousands of foreigners underground in recent years to view the 12th century bathhouse; and in his tours of the city above ground, he shows visitors the shops once owned by Jews, the houses where they once lived, the ruins of the ancient synagogue and the cemetery. Not to mention that he leads them past the memorial he himself helped build and which he had to fight to have placed in its prominent position, across the street from the former synagogue honoring 71 Speyer Jews killed in the Holocaust. I m always looking forward to the tours, Bruno says. I like to talk to people, and I like them to ask questions. I try to explain that we come from the Jewish religion; that the Jews and Christians have common roots and that we belong together. Not surprisingly, his activities have been received with wide support. Mr. Bruno s work has been very important for the rediscovery of Jewish contributions to the city, says Matthias Nowak, a spokesman for the Speyer mayor s office who collaborated with Bruno on the mikvah restoration and other city projects. For a long time, Jewish achievements seemed almost forgotten in Speyer. Bruno dedicated himself to researching and making that history accessible. This is not to say that each of his plans has succeeded for example, his recent attempt and failure to get one of Speyer s streets named after a former Jewish teacher, shop owner and local personality named Betty Blum. Needless to say, Bruno s work is continuing. In addition to guiding tours and writing articles about Jewish events in the local press, he has now started to engage Speyer s Russian Jewish community which numbers about 300 to see about possibilities of building a new synagogue. But away from his social work and back in his study, Bruno has done something even more impressive: at 73, he has finished his third book, which is due out in 2007, entitled Das Mahnmal fur die Judischen Opfer der Naziverfolgung Chronik der Speyerer Gedenkstatte (The Memorial for the Jewish Victims of Nazi Persecution, : A Chronicle of the Speyer Memorial). In it, he has written a personal biography for every Speyer Jew who perished in the Holocaust and in doing so, recaptured one more piece of his adopted city s history. I don t want these people to be forgotten, Bruno says. I want to keep their memory alive so that everybody can remember what happened, so that it never happens again. 2

5 Awardee INGE FRANKEN Berlin Nominated by Carole Vogel, Lexington, MA After working for six years on a book about Jewish orphans in World War II, Inge Franken can explain what motivated her in a single breath. I did it for the survivors who gave me their life stories, she says. The daughter of a Nazi officer she never knew, Franken also suffered the consequences of the Holocaust. Her grandfather and her father, who was killed at the siege of Leningrad when she was two, were both big Nazi believers though it took Franken many years, and reading many of her father s wartime letters, to find this out. Instead, she recalls, she grew up with her mother and sister in a painful, stifled atmosphere of silence. Nobody [in my family] talked about the time before, she says. But I knew we belonged to them to the people who did terrible things. Now, since retiring as a Berlin school teacher 15 years ago, Franken devotes herself to helping fellow Germans from both the older and younger generations speak about, learn about and investigate their own pasts. You have a big stone on your back and when you can say Yes, my parents were the perpetrators, it becomes so much easier, says Franken, who in 1996 started arranging monthly discussions at One by One, an organization in Berlin that invites the relatives of Holocaust victims and perpetrators together to share experiences and stories. When we can cry together, we can laugh together. It s the best connection you can have: when you talk about the deepest thing you both belong to. If I didn t talk about this, it would be my guilt. But when I talk about it, the feelings of sadness and guilt belong to my parents. It was the same community center, in fact, where Franken organized those meetings that she discovered had once been a children s home from which dozens of Jewish orphans were deported, in 1942, to their deaths. Diving into research about the building s past, Franken tracked down rare Nazi-era pictures of the home s orphans taken by the Jewish photographer Abraham Pisarek; plumbed Jewish archives throughout the Berlin and Brandenburg regions; and corresponded with Holocaust survivors in Israel to piece together the stories of dozens of lives and deaths connected with the Kinderheim. In 2005, she published her findings in the book, Gegen das Vergessen: Erinnerungen an das Jüdische Kinderheim Fehrbelliner Strasse 92, Berlin Prenzlauer Berg (Against Forgetting: Memories of the Jewish Children s Home, Fehrbelliner Strasse 92 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg). Franken, though, is making a stronger impression on children these days not from writing, but from the energetic, One by One presentations she takes to dozens of schools around the country, mostly in the former East. Accompanied by one of a number of Jewish friends who play her counterpart in the victim-perpetrator dialogue, Franken has reached out to hundreds of German youths in a way that nobody ever did before. She talks to students about choices, says Carole Vogel, a descendent of Holocaust survivors who has participated in many of Franken s school presentations. [She tells them] to be wary of strong leaders, to be skeptical of popular viewpoints. She challenges children to make their own choices about what is right and wrong she makes kids think. Along the way in the eastern state of Brandenburg, for example some students and even teachers have shown resistance to Franken s work, accusing her of betraying her family s and her country s past. And those are the people, Franken says, she needs to reach the most. I like to go to the right-wing students because they need it. Maybe in one class, one child will become more open. she says. I try to make individual connections with the students, encouraging each one to speak. Our kids must know what happened in their families. If the crimes remain without anyone talking about them, that isn t a good ground to start their lives on. Franken began engaging publicly with questions about the Holocaust in 1986, when a Berlin local history museum asked her and her students to research the Jewish history of their neighborhood. Her class published an award-winning booklet called Traces, which identified buildings around the school that had been seized from Jewish owners and described where and how certain Jews hid to survive the war. Those stories shocked me and brought [the history] so much closer for me, recalls Franken who, in the 20 years since, hasn t slowed down. I admire Inge s courage, says Alexa Dvorson, an American journalist living in Berlin and a member of One by One, not only for having the perseverance to follow through her projects, but the inner courage it takes to delve into the feelings and prejudices that people who lived during the Nazi period grew up with, and often never consciously dealt with. More recently, Franken has been working with teenagers to install a series of Stolpersteine the brass-plated cobblestone memorials known as Stumbling Stones in the streets around the former Prenzlauer Berg children s home, which will commemorate Jewish individuals and families who once lived there and perished in the camps. Her priority, though, seems clear: to keep visiting schools and delivering her message to as many kids in Germany as possible. The most important thing I tell them is: Ask questions. Ask about your background. What did your parents do, your grandparents, what is your family s story? Most of them say, I don t know. So, I ask them, You have a grandfather? Try to talk with him. Try to find out. 3

6 Awardee LARS MENK Berlin Nominated by Michael Bernet, New Rochelle, NY; and Gary Mokotoff, Bergenfield, NJ In his job as a letter courier, Lars Menk has to be careful not to let the names on the mail he is delivering distract him. Menk, after all, knows something about names. He compiled close to 13,000 of them for A Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames, an 800-page, scrupulously detailed reference book that took him nearly a decade to complete. And that is why today, when he stumbles across rare variants of Jewish names or names he s never even seen before, and which he thinks are on the verge of dying out Menk has been known to go home, research the names origins and contact the names owners to discuss their family heritage. A self-taught genealogist who at 19 became fascinated studying his own roots, Menk now probes what names mean and where they come from because he wants to help others like himself find out, in a historical and a spiritual sense, who they are. When I study someone else s ancestry I try to follow their family s thoughts and lives. I m interested in where they lived, what they were doing, why this person changed his location or his work, where his decisions came from, says Menk, who describes himself as a mystical person and who speaks with a rare, bravely open sensitivity. People want to know the facts [about their families] and that s what I give them. But the facts are only just the beginning. In the 2005 tome released by Avotaynu, the world s leading publisher of Jewish genealogical texts, Menk provides readers with what book reviewer Ralph Baer calls the most significant and useful genealogical reference book about German Jewry published to date. The book, which won honorable mention in the Reference Book category for the National Jewish Book Award, includes the etymological and geographical origins of thousands of Jewish names as they emerged within the boundaries of pre-world War I Germany (encompassing East Prussia, parts of the Baltics, Silesia and other regions). Readers can trace a family name back to the German city, town or village where it, or a variation of it, first appeared and the date when it appeared in some cases going back as far as the 14th century, but more frequently referring to the early 1800s when Jews were required to use surnames rather than family identification based only on their fathers first names. According to retired American engineer Edwin Taub Richard, who has been researching his relatives over the last 20 years: This dictionary is a superb source for finding the origin of your German families. Menk, however, had no idea he was embarking on a project of this scale when he drove in 1988 into the Hunsrück mountains of Rhineland-Pfalz, looking for clues about his cattle-dealing ancestors past. No one in his family had ever mentioned having Jewish roots on the contrary, Menk s grandfather joined the SA at 19 and became a Nazi. But in digging through his family archives, Menk discovered that a distant great-grandmother had been a Jew. The revelation stirred him deeply. I wanted to know where my roots were because that s what I m made of all those influences of the past that came together in my person, says Menk, who studied medicine for four years in Münster, though it was a career that didn t feel right and therefore he didn t finish. Jewish teachings and religion, on the other hand, had attracted Menk since childhood, and suddenly that branch of genealogy became a natural course for him to pursue. In studying my ancestors I tried to become like them, to think like they did, to know how they lived their lives and what their attitudes were. I wanted to find out who I was by looking at their influence. Soon, Menk was bringing that same intensity to bear on his investigations of hundreds, and later thousands, of German Jewish family names. Having moved to Berlin in 1984, he flirted with other university studies before turning to his passion, genealogy, in the 1990s. Menk taught himself to read Hebrew, tracked down obscure books on Judaica and, anytime he came across a name he didn t know, he researched it and followed the [family] line down. They were his years of apprenticeship, he recalls, as he combed the nation s archives and began constructing what would one day become the dictionary. I loved it, Menk, 45, says of his cross-country adventures. I took pictures. I collected documents. I was fascinated. I m lucky to live in Germany where all this information is available. Menk did his most in-depth research, ironically, during the five years he worked as a security guard for the Berlin Chamber of Commerce. As someone skilled on the Internet, he made use of his slow job hours by logging onto jewishgen.org and other sites; on his off-days, likewise, he stayed buried among his literature and notes at the State Library, devoting 24/7 to the project. Menk credits his wife, a nurse from Kazakhstan, for helping keep him afloat psychologically and economically. Indeed, Menk never accepted any money for the private family research that people contacted him to do, which is why he still refers to himself as an amateur, citing that amateur comes from amare, to love, because I love it. I was afraid that if it became something I did for money, I would lose my love for the research; that the money would kill my enthusiasm, Menk says. I forget everything around me when I m in a special project. My reality. My work. My family. I just concentrate on [the work] as if it were my own family. 4

7 Awardee ERNST SCHÄLL Laupheim, Baden-Württemberg Nominated by George Arnstein, Washington, DC; Ernest Bergmann, State College, PA; Ann Dorzback, Lousville, KY; Fred Einstein, West Orange, NJ; Hans Hirsch, Bethesda, MD; and Sven Treitel, Tulsa, OK Every day except on Sundays, for more than 20 years, Ernst Schäll, a retired mechanic, would wake up, step out his door and go to the Jewish Cemetery in Laupheim where his workshop, filled with tools and the crumbling parts of tombstones, awaited him. There he would set to work, grinding and drilling, repairing and rebuilding, sculpting each stone with 30 to 70 hours of labor before he replanted it on the grave where it belonged. According to those who watched and sometimes participated with him, Schäll brought more than technical skill and an artist s instinct to his voluntary work restoring graves. He brought, above all, the will to remember and to make sure others don t forget the story of Laupheim s Jews. He always inspired younger people to work with him. He understood how to motivate them: not through speaking but through showing, through his work, says Rolf Emmerich, an engineer and long-time associate of Schäll s. Ernst learned the art and techniques all by himself. He gave his work a professional character and he helped raise people s consciousness in Laupheim. It may have been Schäll s own consciousness, haunted by what he d witnessed as a child during World War II, that drove him in these last decades to preserve Jewish memory. The descendent of tailors from Laupheim, a small city 100 km southeast of Stuttgart, Schäll remembers the close ties his father had with Jewish clients and friends before the war and also, when he was 14, the day those Jewish families vanished before his eyes. I can remember the deportation, he recalls. They brought them to the station. They put them on the trains. Then they took them away. I saw it all. It was a terrible experience. Today, I still see this in my mind. Schäll, who turns 80 in March, started a family and worked as a mechanic for 30 years before he turned his attention to rescuing Laupheim s Jewish past. In the early 1980s around the same time that he began visiting the dilapidated Jewish cemetery and, through books and practice, taught himself to restore gravestones Schäll engaged in research and co-authored a 600-page book with genealogist John Bergmann called Der gute Ort. Die Geschichte des Laupheimer jüdischen Friedhofs im Wandel der Zeit (The Good Place: The History of Laupheim s Jewish Cemetery in Changing Times), published in Following his retirement, Schäll used funds provided to him by former Laupheim Jewish families in America and elsewhere to buy machinery and continue restoring graves in the 244-year-old cemetery, where he rebuilt on average eight tombstones per year. However, his work didn t stop there. He wrote dozens of articles and ultimately a book, entitled Friedrich Adler: Leben und Werk (Friedrich Adler: Life and Work), about the renowned Laupheim artist and designer who was killed at Auschwitz in Schäll also helped found the Museum für Christen und Juden (Museum of Christians and Jews) in 2000 and, volunteering still further energy, mounted a memorial plaque at the entrance to the Jewish cemetery to commemorate the 100 Jews of Laupheim, each one by name, who perished in the Holocaust. After receiving the Bundesverdienstkreuz for outstanding public service in 1988, Schäll won another official honor, the Stauffer Medal, in But maybe more meaningful to him than the prizes has been the praise from families that Schäll touched directly with his work. It comes not only from a deep seated sense of justice but also from a heartfelt sense of obligation, says Ann Dorzback, a native of nearby Ulm who now lives in Kentucky. Ernst Schäll felt our pain, our sorrow, our loss, our hurt and recognized our needs as we had to leave our ancestors behind. While Schäll acknowledges that Laupheim residents have generally shown approval of his work, he is also aware of the minority that remains opposed to so much sifting through the past. There are naturally still some people that don t want to know their history and [even some] who still, unfortunately, think in the National Socialist way, he says. His response to them: Germany needs to remember. We can never forget what happened at that time. The pain was so terrible for people that the memory must always stay with us. It s a very important job. Schäll stopped fixing tombstones after he suffered a stroke in August of Then, last May, he lost his wife to cancer. These days he relies heavily on his daughter to help him and the idea that he will return to the drills and chisels in his workshop is a distant one. But Schäll prepared for this day, having trained an assistant who has already taken over the job of restoring, stone by stone, Laupheim s Jewish graves. The cemetery was in very bad condition when I started on my initiative to repair the stones, Schäll recalls. Now, looking back over his decades of grinding and sanding and remodeling stone, he knows he did more than help recuperate the memory of Jews in Laupheim. He also fulfilled that part in himself that refused, at all costs, to forget. I have seen my work through, he says. The most important thing is that it awakened people s memory. 5

8 Awardee WILFRIED WEINKE Hamburg Nominated by Lucille Eichengreen, Oakland, CA; Pit Goldschmidt, Hamburg, Germany; Frank Meir Loewenberg, Efrat, Israel; J. Joseph Lowenberg, Wynnewood, PA; Mark Lissauer, Elwood, Australia; Dalo Michaelis, Rechowot, Israel; Johanna Neumann, Silver Spring, MD; George and Ilse Sakheim, Gwynedd, PA; Israel; Eva Spangenthal, Houghton, South Africa; Charlotte Stenham, London, England; and Mathew Weiner & Dorette Flach-Bauml, Jerusalem The two aims driving Wilfried Weinke s work as a historian are, on the one hand, to confront a young, mainstream German public with the Holocaust in ways that bring the country s former Jewish legacy to life, and, on the other hand, to rescue the names of forgotten German Jewish artists and intellectuals from the past. As J. Joseph Lowenberg, the grandson of the early 20th century poet Jakob Loewenberg, said, Without Weinke s efforts, I doubt that my grandfather s literary reputation would receive any recognition in Germany today. I try to write as a journalist and as a historian so that ordinary people can understand what I m saying in a language and in a style that interests people to learn more, says Weinke, whose essays and articles have appeared in Aufbau, Tribüne and Antiquariat, and whose talks on anti-semitism fill school lecture halls throughout Germany. Jewish history and those biographies connected to our history about emigration, about exile, about deportation weren t taught in school. They were a neglected part of our history. [My work] is an offer to an unknown public, saying, If you re interested in history, if you don t want National Socialism or the violation of human rights to happen again, you can learn by reading or listening to this lecture or going to this exhibition. Weinke, who was born in 1955 in the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein, grew passionate for German Jewish literature as a teenager partly in reaction to his family s silence about the Holocaust. My father was a soldier in a tank. My uncle was a member of the SS, he remembers. When I was 14 I started getting curious and thinking in political terms. I asked my parents, What have you done, what was your responsibility [in the war]? It was when they slammed the door on his questions and his teachers refused to speak that Weinke rebelled. He wrote his high school thesis about Jewish ghetto life; then, after earning a literature degree from Hamburg University, he abandoned his teaching career in favor of full-time research and writing about Hamburg s Jewish past. In 1986, Weinke worked with the Hamburg History Museum to produce Ehemals in Hamburg zu Hause: Jüdisches Leben am Grindel (Formerly at Home in Hamburg: Jewish Life on the Grindel), an exhibit about the city s former Jewish quarter that astonished local residents, he recalls. The show traveled to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and in 1991 Weinke used the material to write a book. He published a second book based on his 2003 exhibition which drew 25,000 Hamburg and Frankfurt visitors exploring the lives and works of four Jewish photographers from Hamburg, called Verdrängt, vertrieben, aber nicht vergessen: Die Fotografen Emil Bieber, Max Halberstadt, Erich Kastan und Kurt Schallenberg (Displaced, Expelled but not Forgotten: The Photographers Emil Bieber, Max Halberstadt, Erich Kastan and Kurt Schallenberg). Motivating Weinke is a strong feeling of justice and of wanting to set wrongs right, [by giving] a posthumous voice to intellectuals who perished, says Mark Lissauer, a descendent of Hamburg Jews who Weinke contacted for his research on the Grindel. Indeed, for Weinke it s not just about producing an exhibit or writing a book but about making personal contact with the people, and their descendents, whose work he is uncovering. And then it s about bringing those individual stories to life in the museum, and on the page. My Jewish friends like to joke with me, You are verjudet, You ve become too Jewish, Weinke says. The way he sees it, though, It s responsibility, it s curiosity and it s my training as a teacher [that pushes me]. There is so much material, so many people waiting to be interviewed and to have their biographies told, so many books unpublished. Despite the odds, Weinke, who has lectured in London, Zurich and South Africa, is doing what he can to see that no story gets forgotten. In the case of Holocaust survivor and U.S. resident Lucille Eichengreen, for example, Weinke and his wife Ursula Wamser arranged the translation and publication of her three books in Germany not to mention organized a speaking tour for her at schools across Germany. Finally, though, it is Weinke s own research and writing that drives him. In December of 2006, he published an expanded version of the Grindel book under a new title, Eine Verschwundene Welt (A Disappeared World). More current is the biography he is completing and the first-ever exhibition he is preparing on Heinz Liepman, a Hamburg journalist and author from the 1920s who fiercely criticized the Nazis, fled to America and returned after the war to write about the Auschwitz trials. Yet how is it that Weinke is able to engage young Germans in these people and events of long ago? By making their histories personal and by using the tools of a creative historian. We can talk about six million Jewish deaths, but you have to convey to people what it meant to be a 13-year-old Jewish student in the Grindel you have to make this connection and explain history to the generation today. This is my profession, says Weinke, combining archive documents, photos, interviews, and [survivors ] written words to produce an essay, an article, an exhibition or a book. This is the most wonderful work I could do. 6

9 BOARD MEMBERS AND JURY German Jewish Community History Council The jury is composed of seven prominent individuals who have taken a keen understanding and appreciation of the contributions Jews have made to Germany and an awareness of what non- Jewish Germans have done to preserve that memory. Each year, the international media is made aware of the availability of these awards and the formal nomination procedure, and the jury selects the five most worthy nominees for awards. In the first year, every nominator happened to be a Jewish survivor. Most nominators find these awards to be the best way to demonstrate their personal appreciation for outstanding work done in the community where their Jewish ancestors once lived. ERNST CRAMER is chairman of the Axel Springer Foundation. Born in Augsburg in 1913, he managed after a stay at Buchenwald concentration camp to immigrate to the United States in He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and later with the American Military Government in Germany. Since 1958, he has been in top management and journalist positions at the Axel Springer Publishing Group, the largest European news enterprise. KAREN FRANKLIN is director of the Judaica Museum in Riverdale, N.Y., and director of the Family Research Program at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City. She is former president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies and past chair of the Council of American Jewish Museums. Mrs. Franklin currently serves on the board of the American Association of Museums (AAM), the first director of a Jewish museum to be elected to this position. She also serves on the AAM Ethics Committee. WERNER LOVAL was born in Bamberg and at 13 escaped to England with the Kindertransport. He then lived in Ecuador and the United States before immigrating to Israel in Until 1966, he served in the Israeli diplomatic service in the United States and Latin America. He is a founder and director of Israel s largest real estate brokerage company; former president of Har-El, Israel s first Reform Synagogue; and a governor both of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and of B nai Brith World Centre. In 1999, he was named an Honorary Citizen of Jerusalem. He is a frequent visitor to Germany. ERNEST KALLMANN has been writing family histories within a broader historical perspective, especially with the Cercle de Genealogie Juive, Paris. He was born in Mainz, escaped to France in 1933, and has lived there since (except ), primarily as a telecommunications and computer management consultant. WALTER MOMPER, President of the House of Representatives of Berlin and historian, was advised and supported by Lothar Funke. Walter Momper has been active in city politics and was Governing Mayor of Berlin when the wall came down in Funke has been head of the protocol department in the House of Representatives since SARA NACHAMA was raised in Israel, moved to Berlin over 25 years ago, and has worked for German national TV program SFB (Channel 3) and ZFD (Channel 2) editing documentary films. From 1992 to 1999, she organized as a volunteer the annual Berlin Jewish Cultural Festival (Juedischen Kulturtage). From 2001 to 2003, Mrs. Nachama was the executive founding director of the Berlin branch of Touro College (NY); in October 2003, she became Dean of Administration of Touro College Berlin and remains its executive director. Since 2005 she is a vice president of Touro College. ARTHUR OBERMAYER is a high-tech entrepreneur in the Boston area who has been involved in many philanthropic activities. He is an officer and board member of the American Jewish Historical Society, chaired the Genealogical Task Force of the Center for Jewish History, started a Jewish museum in his ancestral German town of Creglingen, was on the board of the Internet genealogy supersite JewishGen, and initiated its German component. 7

10 SPONSORS GERMAN JEWISH COMMUNITY HISTORY COUNCIL. The organization operates under Obermayer Foundation, Inc., which has sponsored and directed projects in various parts of the world. In Germany, it has also provided the seed funding and continuing support for the Creglingen Jewish Museum. In the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, it produced about 20 popular television programs on market economics. In Israel-related activities, it has focused on a variety of projects related to achieving peace with its neighbors. In the U.S., it supports programs related to economic justice and provides strategic internet advice and support to nonprofit organizations. For more information, go to OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF BERLIN. President Walter Momper sponsors these awards. For many years, the Parliament has been commemorating the German Holocaust Memorial Day of January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The decision was made in the year 2000 to have this event as its principal observance. GERMAN JEWISH SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP OF JEWISHGEN. This is an internet-based organization with almost 1400 daily participants who are involved in German-Jewish genealogy. It has been operating since 1998 through its discussion group and web site at /gersig. PREVIOUS AWARD WINNERS Past award winners originate from almost all the states, and from both urban and rural Germany. Ranging in age from their 30s to their 80s, they come from such diverse professions as bankers and stonemasons, artists and physicians, teachers and mayors. What they have in common is a love of history, a great curiosity for what was, and a dedication to social justice. All are committed to confrontation with their German past. Most have devoted years of volunteer work to such projects, but few have been recognized for their efforts. The aim of the Obermayer German Jewish History Awards is to honor these unsung heroes. Hans-Eberhard Berkemann Lothar Bembenek & Dorothee Lottmann-Kaeseler Gisela Blume Günter Boll Gisela Bunge Irene Corbach Heinrich Dittmar Olaf Ditzel Klaus-Dieter Ehmke GUNTER DEMNIG JOHANN FLEISCHMANN Joachim Hahn GUENTER HEIDT ROLF HOFMANN Gerhard Jochem & Susanne Rieger KURT-WILLI JULIUS & KARL-HEINZ STADTLER Ottmar Kagerer Cordula Kappner WOLFRAM KASTNER Monica Kingreen ROBERT KRAIS ROBERT KREIBIG Josef Motschmann HEINRICH NUHN Carla & Erika Pick Gernot Römer Moritz Schmid Heinrich Schreiner JÜrgen Sielemann Ilse VOGEL Christiane Walesch-Schneller Profiles: Michael Levitin Translator: Heike Kähler Editors: Ernst Kallmann, Betty Solbjor Other Content: Nancy Korman, Arthur Obermayer 8