To round off the first year of the project on microfilming the bequests of Jewish emigrants, which is part of the Leo Baeck Programme, the German branch of the archive of the Leo Baeck Institute is holding a symposium on Tuesday, 17 October 2006 at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

 

Drawing on the life stories of German rabbis, three distinct themes have been selected. Michael Meyer, International President of the Leo Baeck Institute, will speak on the intellectual resistance of German rabbis Leo Baeck and Joachim Prinz under National Socialism. Carsten Wilke, compiler of the Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbiner (biographical handbook of rabbis), will speak about sourcing information on the history of the rabbinate in the 19^th century. And Margit Schad, who wrote the first biography of the Berlin rabbi Michael Sachs, is planning to talk about German-Jewish sermons on the subject of the First World War.

 

Thanks to the EUR 300,000 in financial support provided by the Remembrance and Future Fund, the Leo Baeck Institute has made great strides towards its goal of transferring the complete contents of the American archive to microfilm and making these resources available in its Berlin branch. In the three-year programme, several of the Institute’s collections have been selected for microfilming as part of a three-phase plan. The first phase, in which the bequests of German rabbis were compiled, is now complete. The rabbis in question included Emil Schorsch from Hanover, Siegmund Salfeld from Mainz and Leo Baeck, after whom the international research centre and the funding programme of the Remembrance and Future Fund are named.

 

Through the Leo Baeck Programme, the Foundation and its partners are promoting research into and awareness of the intellectual and cultural heritage of German-language Judaism.

 

The German branch of the archive held at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York was opened five years ago at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Since then, more than 1,000 researchers, students and interested citizens from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, Great Britain, Israel and the USA have visited the museum’s reading room and worked with the microfilm materials. The archive is constantly growing and has become a well-known and much used research facility. Originally comprising 1,200 microfilms, the archive can now boast a collection of 2,100 items.

 

The Remembrance and Future Fund is part of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”. To date, the Foundation has made payments amounting to EUR 4.3 billion to over 1.6 million former forced labourers in almost 100 countries for injustices suffered at the hands of the National Socialist regime. After the payments to former forced labourers and other victims of National Socialism have been made, the Fund will remain in existence as a grant-giving foundation. The capital reserves of the Fund, some EUR 358 million, were made available in equal amounts by the German Industry Foundation Initiative and the German Government. Around EUR 7 million in revenues generated each year by the Fund’s capital is used to promote international programmes and projects that build bridges of understanding to Central and Eastern Europe, Israel and the USA. This is how the Fund is assuming responsibility for a future founded on democracy, human rights and understanding between peoples.

 

 

When: 17 October, 2-5 p.m.

Where: Jewish Museum Berlin, Eric F. Ross Gallery, Libeskind Building, ground floor, Lindenstrsse 9-14, 10969 Berlin

 

Aubrey Pomerance, Director of the branch of the archive of the Leo Baeck Institute at the Jewish Museum in Berlin

Dr. Frank Mecklenburg, Chief Archivist and Director of Research, Leo Baeck Institute, New York

Prof. Dr. Michael A. Meyer, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati: Jewish intellectual resistance under National Socialism. Rabbis Leo Baeck and Joachim Prinz

Dr. Carsten Wilke, Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History, Duisburg: Documents for reverence and administration: source materials on the history of the rabbinate in the 19^th century

Dr. Margit Schad, Institutum Judaicum at the Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen: German-Jewish sermons on the theme of the First World War. Max Dienemann and Moritz Gudemann

 

 

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