Friday, January 30, 2004
GERMANY
Work keeping records of Jews is recognized
A German archivist is recognized for decades of work reassembling
the historical record of Jews in Hamburg.
BY JOHN BURGESS
Washington Post Service
BERLIN - Sallyann Sack recalls the rainy day in 2000 she spent on the Hamburg waterfront, hoping to find clues to the voyage her grandmother had begun there a century earlier.
The rooming houses where the 16-year-old Jewish girl might have stayed before traveling alone to America had disappeared; so had most of the administrative buildings of the time.
But then her guide said, ``Sally, I cannot show you the boarding house where your grandmother stayed when she was waiting to board the ship, but I can promise you that she walked along this street.
'STATE ARCHIVE
With those words, Sack said, she felt suddenly and profoundly the presence of her forebear. The gift came courtesy of Juergen Sielemann, a courtly German who at his desk at the Hamburg State Archive has made it his business for more than 30 years to organize and publicize the historical record of Jews in Hamburg.
On his own time, he helps people such as Sack, of Bethesda, Md., who come to conduct searches on a more personal scale.
YEARLY AWARD
This week, Sielemann stood before the German Parliament here and accepted an Obermayer German Jewish History Award for his efforts. The award is presented each year to five non-Jewish Germans who have made outstanding contributions to the reassembling of the German Jewish record, shattered more than half a century ago.
'I have been personally touched'' by the history of Hamburg's Jews, Sielemann said in an interview this week. ``It upsets me. I feel I have to do something, and I feel I'm not doing enough.
GENEALOGY EXPERT
Sielemann is something of a star in the world of Jewish genealogy. A regular at conferences in the United States, Britain and Israel, he is renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge -- he knows the street numbers of those lost boarding houses, for example. He founded Germany's only Jewish genealogical society.
The awards were given Tuesday, the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, which Germany has adopted as an official day of remembrance of the victims of Nazism. In Parliament, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, his Cabinet and legislators listened reverently to an address by Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who became president of the European Parliament.
COUNTRY'S HISTORY
Through such events, Germans learn their country's history. Some prefer to forget it; others invest their time and money in making sure no one will. Tuesday's recipients of the prize, administered by the Massachusetts-based Obermayer Foundation, also included a doctor who has restored a Jewish cemetery, recovering old headstones that had been used for steps in nearby houses, and another doctor who helped save a former Jewish community center from demolition.
As Sielemann tells it, he stumbled into his life work. Born in 1944, just south of Hamburg, he has no personal memories of the prewar community or the war. As a 20-year-old with a general interest in history, he was hired by the Hamburg State Archive in 1966 and three years later took over the Jewish files.
As he made his way through the stacks of papers, Sielemann said, he became fascinated with the centuries-long Jewish presence in Hamburg.
In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power, there were about 24,000 people in the city observing three strands of Judaism.
But for years, he felt as if he were laboring alone on an island. In Germany until the late 1970s, he said, ``there was really no interest, there was no discussion, there was nothing on the subject of the Holocaust and Jewish history. Silence. . . . So that meant that the younger generation had to learn not from the elder generation but by themselves.''
© 2004 The Miami Herald and wire service sources