Hirschfelder spearheads nominations for award to Germans who preserved Jewish history
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
by Susan Fadem

Kent Kirschfelder, center, flanked by award winners Barbara Staudacher and Heinz Högerle

Since 1999, the Obermayer Foundation, founded by the German-Jewish Obermayer family, has counted among its projects the Obermayer Award. Given annually to non-Jewish Germans, the award singles out those who have made outstanding voluntary contributions to preserve the Jewish history, culture, cemeteries and synagogue in their German communities.

This year, St. Louisan Kent Hirschfelder, a prominent voice in Holocaust remembrance, spearheaded the successful nomination - by nearly a dozen people on three continents - of partners Barbara Staudacher and Heinz Högerle.
Growing up, Högerle, now a publisher, said he knew no Jews and had no information about Judaism. Staudacher is a retired bookseller. Both are in their sixties. In 1999, they relocated some 34 miles southwest from their home in Stuttgart, Germany, to the considerably quieter town of Rexingen.

At the top of a hill near their Rexingen residence, the couple found not only a Jewish cemetery with some 1,000 gravestones, but a sudden awareness of the town as a once vibrant Jewish community.

One result was study, research and eventually, Högerle's 424-page book. Its title, translated from German, is "Carved in Stone: Tracing the Past at the Rexingen Jewish Cemetery." For children as young as second graders, the couple has prepared a workbook about the cemetery.

Pastries and talk

At a coffee klatch in New York hosted two years ago by former Rexingen resident Hannah Zerndorfer, now in her mid-nineties, Hirschfelder first heard about Staudacher and Högerle. The 14 or so other guests had emigrated or had families emigrate from Rexingen.

Hirschfelder, who had read of the once fairly large concentration of Rexingenites in New York, had contacted Zerndorfer. She invited the others.

Hirschfelder's own family traces its Rexingen roots to the 1750s. Although his grandfather relocated to Munich, where he raised his family, Hirschfelder's father would spend summers with his cousins in Rexingen, where Kent Hirschfelder has now visited three times.

While devouring their hostesss' homemade linzer tortes and other pastries, one coffee-klatch guest mentioned the remarkable work of Rexingen residents Staudacher and Högerle. Others talked about the Obermayer Award.
Hirschfelder, who had heard neither of the couple nor, like many Americans, of the award, was mesmerized. In 1933, he subsequently learned, 262 Jews lived in Rexingen. Five years later, as Nazi persecution mounted, about 40 left as a group for Palestine. There, they helped establish the community of Shavei Zion, which still exists.