I feel honored and thrilled to be here today for such an important occasion. I am pleased to recognize in the audience the President of the Parliament, Walter Momper, the former President of the Parliament, Reinhard Führer, and a number of other dignitaries, including (Jewish Community representative) and principal speaker, Diedre Berger, who is the Director of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee. Also, I would like to thank several other people in the audience who have made major contributions to this evening's event. Lothar Funke, the director of the Parliament's Protokoll office, who has organized this event and the reception which will follow; Betty Solbjor, our U.S. Coordinator, who has made all of the other arrangements; Michael Levitin, who has prepared all the profiles in the booklet, Heike Kähler, who provided the German translation in the booklet; and finally, Ernest Kallmann, who edited the German translations.

This occasion provides me an opportunity to represent Jews throughout the world in saying thank you to today's recipients for all you have done and to demonstrate our appreciation through these awards. The idea for these awards arose ten years ago during a trip I took through your country to discover my roots. In every community visited, there were marvelous, caring individuals who had devoted significant parts of their lives to uncovering and preserving their local Jewish history.

In Hardheim, I was given a diskette with the names and complete information about over 90 of my relatives who lived there in the 19th century and was shown many of their houses. In Archshofen, I obtained a 200-page book on the history of the Jews of that community. That village of less than 1,000 people never had more than 130 Jews, and in 1930, only 28 remained. In Fuerth, I visited the old Jewish cemetery where my ancestors were buried with the woman who had reconstructed it. I had been there in 1984 and found that all of the recovered tombstones were piled on top of each other nowhere near the gravesites. Through photos, plot plans, learning Hebrew, and very extensive genealogical research, she was able to replace the tombstones on the appropriate gravesites. She also prepared a comprehensive book memorializing the Holocaust victims from Fuerth using stories from friends and relatives and archival information. In Augsburg, I was given a copy of the marriage contract of my great grandparents and was shown the houses where they and their parents had lived over 200 years ago. Later in Creglingen, I was able to identify where my ancestors lived 11 generations ago (that is almost 400 years back) as a result of a resident searching through tax records, property transfers, and wills. With the help of the community, the house at that location was converted into a Jewish museum.

When I returned to the United States after that genealogical trip, I mentioned my experience to many other Jews of German descent. Almost all of us had had similar experiences throughout your country. Furthermore, no one would accept money for any specific work that we would request; their position was that Jews had already paid too much. I felt that the tremendous amount of commitment and dedication of these individuals deserved appropriate recognition.

This is the seventh year in which we have been giving these awards in Berlin, and it is a good time to review the past. The awards have been a great source of personal satisfaction, and additionally, as a result of my connections and experience with Germans, I feel that I have a good understanding of many German views and values. However, in many respects, I am a typical American in that my familiarity with other languages is insufficient for me to address you in German, and I am also a typical Jew in the strong connections I have with my roots which are here in Germany. A lot has gone on in this country since my four grandparents left from different locations and in different years in the 19th century. At that time, Germans were considered among the most cultured, highly educated and enlightened people in the world, but it only took one charismatic but unprincipled leader to get his followers to take the country down a horrible path from which they are still trying to recover emotionally after more than 60 years.

At the end of today, we will have given awards to 39 people. When we started in the year 2000, we were afraid that we had found all the best, and the future work to be honored would drop off in quality and significance. This has not happened! Every year, we are surprised to learn about many new individuals who have done exceptional work and who had never come to our attention before. On the other hand, the one thing that has changed is that in the first year, by chance, every single nominator was a survivor; now, some of them are, but not all. The kinds of people who have received these awards demonstrate great diversity in geographical location, the nature of their contributions, their personal characteristics, their age, and what motivated them to devote so much of their time to these efforts.
For example, awardees have included:

• a stonemason from Berlin who, on his own, repaired desecrated tombstones at the Weisensee cemetery
• a retired president of the Central Bank of Rheinland-Pfalz who raised the funds and organized the reconstruction of an important synagogue in a city in Mainz, where Jews had lived for more than 1000 years
• an artist from Cologne who had the original idea and then has prepared and installed all of the Stolpersteine, which are placed in front of houses of Jews who perished
• a Ph.D. economist and psychologist who started a youth educational center adjacent to an old synagogue that he had restored in Mecklenburg
• an artist from Munich who intentionally provokes people to be keenly aware of their National Socialist legacy
• a retired editor of the Augsburg Allgemeine, who had written a large number of books and articles on the history of Jews of that region
• a teacher from Rheinland-Pfalz who has inspired his students for more than 25 years to research, record and publish the Jewish histories on local communities
• a former mayor of Ichenhausen, Bavaria who had the synagogue rebuilt and used for concerts, exhibits and lectures on Jewish subjects.
• and finally, I am personally pleased to say that the woman from Fuerth who inspired me to give these awards was herself a recipient, as a result of separate submissions by four nominators who I did not even know.
  Each has a different story, and each has done remarkable things, sometimes in the face of community resistance and sometimes with wholehearted support.

This evening's awardees have also done remarkable things.

• Johannes Bruno is a true renaissance man who has been a vital presence to reawakening residents of his town to the past contributions of Jews. Bruno worked to help restore Germany's oldest mikvah, (Jewish ritual bath); he has written many articles and three books related to the thousand years of Jewish life in Speyer. The last one due out in 2007 is called The Memorial for the Jewish Victims of Nazi Persecution..
• Inge Franken is a retired school teacher and daughter of a Nazi officer who has devoted her energies to helping young people understand the choices they must make and the importance of maintaining fundamental values in the presence of charismatic leaders and peer pressure. She speaks extensively and wrote a book on the fate of each child in a Berlin Jewish orphanage
• Lars Menk is a well educated man who chose to be a letter carrier so that he could focus his energies on the etymology and geographical origin of German Jewish names. The world's leading publisher on Jewish genealogy recently put out his definitive work, "A Dictionary of German Jewish Surnames", incorporating over 13,000 surnames in 800 pages. Menk is dedicated to helping others like himself find out, in a historical and spiritual sense, who they are.
• Ernst Schaell is a retired mechanic who volunteers in the Jewish Cemetery in Laupheim to repair and rebuild tombstones to make sure others do not forget the story of Laupheim's Jews. He also has written dozens of articles and a beautiful book about a renowned Laupheim artists and designer who was killed in Auschwitz in 1942.
• Wilfried Weinke dedicates his work as an historian to confront the young, mainstream German public with memories of the Holocaust in ways that bring the country's former Jewish legacy to life. Weinke works to rescue the names of forgotten German Jewish artists and intellectuals from the past and lectures throughout the world to see that no story gets forgotten.

Full profiles are provided in the booklets that each of you has received.

There are also many other Germans who are trying to deal with their country's past in positive, constructive ways. The process by which awardees are chosen starts when we announce the availability of the awards to media throughout the world, and nominators provide extensive submissions. The jury always has a very difficult job in selecting the five best candidates from the submissions. We have five of the members of the jury with us here today. In addition to Mr. Momper and myself, we have in the audience [ask to stand up when I call their names] Sara Nachama, Ernest Kallmann, and Ernst Cramer. Their backgrounds are also described in the booklet you have received.

Because most awardees will not accept payment for their work, this event provides nominators, who usually have family connections to a specific community, with the opportunity to recognize outstanding contributions made by the winners. We have with us here today ten nominators for this year's awards, who have specially come here for this event. As I call their names, I would like them to stand up as well. Please hold your applause until the end.

• George Arnstein from Washington, DC
• Marvin and Florence Covinsky from Scottsdale, Arizona
• Lucille Eichengreen from Oakland, California]
• Pit Goldschmidt from Hamburg
• David and Johanna Neumann from Silver Spring, Maryland
• Mathew Weiner and Dorette Flach-Bauml from Jerusalem, Israel
• Carole Vogel from Lexington, Massachusetts

Just as significant as the acts of these unique individuals is the overall awareness of Germans today of how easy it is to move in a few short years from a country with rich tradition as a world leader in culture, science, education, philosophy, and the rule of law to a country that was guilty of barbaric and inhumane treatment of other people. All it took was a charismatic and despotic leader who took the country down the slippery slope from arrogance to bigotry, intolerance, hatred, repression, persecution, dehumanization, and barbarity. Germans are quick to recognize these dangerous signs, and try to nip them in the bud. Today, Germany can set 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, but it can end up as a country that can be proud of its values. We all sometimes see abridgment of human rights in our own back yard and among our own people, and we must denounce it in the strongest way we know how. Throughout the world, each of us must decide what we consider moral and ethical and not let ourselves be swayed by charismatic leaders, media distortions, or group psychology, but not force our own views on others. This is the most important thing for all of us to learn from the past.

Back