Schopfloch, Bavaria

Nominated by Claude Frank, Grenoble, France; Nicole Ghenassia, Lyon, France; Jeanette Rosenberg, Middlesex, England; David Shapiro, Jerusalem, Israel; and Phil Urwin Smith, Surrey, England

It was her friend’s visit to the town, only a few years ago, which unexpectedly turned the social worker Angelika Brosig into a leader of her community overnight, striving to rediscover the Jewish past of Schopfloch.

“My friend wanted to see the Jewish cemetery,” Brosig recalls, “and when we went and saw the conditions there, she started to cry. She said ‘It’s terrible, the stones aren’t readable, the plants and trees are all overgrown.’ I was surprised because it seemed natural for a cemetery to decay. But she said, ‘No, it’s not good for the descendants,’ and this was my start.”

Brosig met with the former mayor and the Rotary Club of Schopfloch, but quickly realized that their commitment to “study” the cemetery did not include any physical attempt to restore it. So she went to work herself counting the stones. Brosig moved systematically, from row to row, documenting and photographing the worn inscriptions above each grave. She couldn’t read Hebrew, but with the help of the group Alemannia Judaica she was able to compile a list of some 250 Jews who had lived and died in the small Franconian town of Schopfloch, in northern Bavaria, and posted her findings on the Internet.

It was almost with a sense of urgency that she completed her task.

“I had no money to pay for experts; the cemetery was too big and it would have been too expensive,” she says. “Some people said, ‘She is not a specialist, how can she do this?’ but I thought, Why not? I had helpers around me, and it’s better to do something oneself than to wait for specialists who require a lot of money. I did not want to wait because [I knew] the stones would not be getting any better.”

After documenting the 500-year-old cemetery, Brosig started leading schools and church groups there on tours. She also began the Stepparents Project (known informally as “adopt-a-stone”) in which people pay, on average, 250 euros to clean, restore and repair a sandstone grave. It is a process that employs traditional stonemasons from the region; in 2008 they restored 19 stones, and at least 20 stones last year. The Rotary Club, which awarded Brosig its Milestone Award for her efforts, has also donated 2,000 euros to aid the effort.

Meanwhile, the website that Brosig created, www.judeninschopfloch.de, has grown significantly. People from around the world have contacted her, expressing excitement and gratitude at the opportunity to finally learn about their ancestors. Brosig has responded by putting together extensive family trees, gathering photographs and documents from the descendents of Schopfloch’s Jews, and continually adding to the online archive.

Brosig’s own curiosity—and her knowledge—about Jewish history in the area has, naturally, grown as well. “What interested me most was the time of Nazism—what happened here, why are the Jews gone, why is Jewish culture not here anymore? The more I asked, the more I saw what we were missing.”

Born in 1956 in Ansbach, 100km from Nürnberg, Brosig spent 16 years employed at a school for handicapped children in Baden-Württemberg. She later worked in a youth center. But from early on, she had always been interested in activism and peace work; she even intended at one point to move to Israel, although her job kept her at home.

In 2007, Brosig organized a memorial festival and hanged a sign outside a residence which formerly housed the town synagogue. Franconia was a famously anti-Semitic epicenter of pre-War Germany, and she felt it was time to dispel some of the myths the community still had about its history.

“The tourist brochures all say the region was Jewish friendly. But it’s not true. National Socialism was leading here. It was humiliating what they did to the Jews in the years leading up to the war,” she says. Certain incidents—like Kristallnacht, when the last 18 Jews of Schopfloch were hurried through the streets as the windows of their homes were smashed and the men beaten, and the newspaper headlines soon after in neighboring Dinkelsbühl which proudly stated, “Jewish free”—were moments that Brosig wants to keep in the public memory.

Rabbi David Shapiro, from Jerusalem, and Nicole Ghenassia, from Lyon, France, write that “Ms. Brosig has ensured that the Jewish community of this part of Germany will not be forgotten, neither by the residents of the area nor by the remaining descendants of the Jewish community there.”

At one point, while restoring the Schopfloch cemetery, Brosig discovered that two women had been buried without stones so she had two new ones erected. A Bavarian film studio came and documented her work.

Now, Brosig is in the process of producing a theater play which she wrote about two Jewish families, the Manfreds and the Sigreds, and their fates in Ansbach before and during the war. Acted by 15- and 16-year-old high school students, the performance is scheduled to premiere this summer.

“I have so much information [about the families] that it was easy for me to write it. And the youngsters are interested in the play,” she says.

“It is important for me to see what was in the past, to bring about a connection to that past. Because of my work at the cemetery, people now see and realize suddenly, ‘Oh, there are survivors and we can have contact with them.’ With the stones, they get their dignity back.”