The Obermayer German Jewish History Awards, funded by Boston philanthropist, are in their ninth year.
The awards recognize non-Jewish Germans' efforts to keep alive their nation's Jewish cultural past, and the recipients are nominated by Jews living outside of Germany.
The awards were presented January 27, at Abgeordnetenhaus, home of the Berlin Parliament.
To read the complete text for each honoree, click on the link next to each name.
Hans-Dieter Arntz’s passion for Jewish history began in 1978 on the 40th
anniversary of Kristallnacht, “when nobody spoke about that, nobody knew
anything about that, and as a teacher at gymnasium I wanted to teach my pupils
especially about that part of history nobody wanted to talk about.” It was the
same year the television series “Holocaust” appeared sparking a nationwide
discussion about Germany’s past, and Arntz took it upon himself to delve into
the regional archives. He uncovered never-before seen documents and managed to track down old Jewish survivors of Euskirchen, his city of 50,000 just west of
Bonn. When his frst speech and slideshow drew a crowd of 200 fascinated locals,
he knew, “that was the beginning.” ...
Klaus Dietermann (
English)
It was once a synagogue destroyed in Kristallnacht, later a bunker, that is, a bomb shelter where hundreds of Germans hid and prayed from 1941 to 1945, and then it became a city storage site. Today, the Active South Westphalian Museum (Aktives Museum Südwestfalen) commemorating the Jewish history of Siegen is something of a small miracle—one that owes itself to the educator’s instinct of Klaus Dietermann. ...
As a young theology student preparing to become a Protestant minister, Michael Dorhs did the unexpected: he helped establish a department of Jewish history in his hometown museum of Hofgeismar, to “preserve the German Jewish heritage of our region.” “We didn’t have anything, maybe 20 books” at first, Dohrs recalls. So he placed announcements in newspapers like Aufbau in New York and Israel Nachrichten in Tel Aviv, asking Holocaust survivors and the descendents of Jews from the North Hessen region to contact him and tell their stories. ...
Bernhard Gelderblom (
English)
In 1985, gymnasium school teacher Bernhard Gelderblom made a life-changing
discovery when he stepped into the Jewish cemetery in his hometown, Hameln. “It
was a big place and an absolutely forgotten place, overcrowded with green,” he
recalls. “It fascinated me. That was the entrance for me.” ...
Ernst and Brigitte Klein (
English)
In 1985, on the occasion of Volkmarsen’s 850th anniversary, Ernst Klein helped research his town’s rich Jewish legacy and was angered when just two of 500 pages in the new Volkmarsen history were dedicated to recounting that past.
So he and his wife Brigitte organized a group of a half dozen citizens interested in “making our own research into the Jewish history, and with this work came the idea that we must rediscover where the people who came from here went to [after the war] and tell their stories.” ...
For more on the Obermayer Awards, click
here.
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