Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Brunhilde Stürmer

Niederzissen, Rhineland-Palatinate

In 1977, Brunhilde Stürmer began collecting old photographs of her village, Niederzissen; many historic houses there had been torn down, and she wanted to document how the town had once looked. But in the course of her research, she couldn’t find any photographs of the old synagogue, a building that had been converted into a smithy, then later into a workshop for farm machinery. Curious about the building, Stürmer wrote to New Yorker Richard Berger, the son of Niederzissen’s last Jewish community leader, Karl Berger; Karl died at Theresienstadt, and his home was bought by Stürmer’s relatives after the war. Richard survived the Holocaust with the Belgian underground. He responded by sending Stürmer five original photographs.

“I was moved to tears when he sent this letter,” Stürmer recalls. “He trusted me sending the few things he had recovered, and because it was so moving, I decided right then to collect information about the former Jewish inhabitants of Niederzissen. I wanted to know which families lived here and where they lived, so I started to collect stories. I began asking people in the village what they knew. Many told me stories about their former neighbors, but I didn’t know exactly what happened in the Nazi period and how systematically the Jews were killed. Then I saw the 1978 film series Holocaust, and that was the first time I realized what happened. I tried to get in contact with descendants of the survivors, and that was the beginning.”

In the four decades since, Stürmer has worked tirelessly to uncover the detailed family histories of the Jewish community of Niederzissen in the Ahrweiler region of Rhineland-Palatinate. In cooperation with Gerd Friedt from Munich, Stürmer translated Hebrew inscriptions on the gravestones of the town’s ancient Jewish cemetery into German. She created a map of all the people buried there and led tours for the descendants who returned to see their families’ resting places. She and Friedt later wrote a book about the cemetery, From Time Immemorial: The Jewish Cemetery in Niederzissen (Seit undenklichen Zeiten: Der Jüdische Friedhof in Niederzissen), published in 2012.

Stürmer also achieved another giant goal: leading a community group to purchase, renovate, and convert the town’s old synagogue into a flourishing exhibition space. Then, in November 2017, Stürmer published her most painstaking book, A Long Way: The History of the Jewish Families of the Niederzissen Synagogue Community in Brohl Valley (Ein langer Weg: Die Geschichte der jüdischen Familien der Synagogengemeinde Niederzissen im Brohltal) written in cooperation with Brigitte Decker and with financial support from the Former Synagogue Niederzissen association. It is an exhaustive work documenting more than 500 years of the region’s Jewish history, specifically chronicling every Jewish family that lived there from the 18th century through the early 1940s. “There are very interesting and moving stories in the book—stories that make you laugh, and stories where I think you can only cry,” Stürmer says. When it was published, 26 relatives of former Niederzissen Jews attended the presentation at the synagogue, coming from Mexico, the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, and Germany. Stürmer’s passionate, unyielding efforts to shed light on the town’s Jewish past enabled her to form deep connections with those descendants who saw their families’ legacies brought back to life.

Miguel and Betty Schwarz of San Pedro, Mexico—both descendants of Niederzissen Jews—say of Stürmer, “We felt her love and compassion through the accuracy of her research. We believe that her work in preserving and restoring the history of German Jewry is a very important accomplishment for Jewish people worldwide and imperative for the history of Germany.”

Born in 1943, Stürmer was less than a year old when her father, a soldier in the Wehrmacht, was killed on the Russian front. Her mother fell ill and died in 1948, and her aunt, who was tasked with raising her, died in 1950, so Stürmer grew up with her grandmother and another family. After finishing high school, she went to a vocational college (handelsschule) and worked as a bookkeeper; she married at 20 and had three children. In her youth, Stürmer knew little about Niederzissen’s Jewish community, which numbered more than 100 in the 1930s. It wasn’t until she started digging up the town’s past that she discovered her passion for preserving its Jewish history.

In the 1970s, she began to collect and organize many artifacts that had remained untouched for decades in the synagogue’s attic, including books, papers, photographs, textiles, and other religious objects. “Everything was preserved; all of the materials still remained, even the circumcision napkins,” Stürmer recalls. “It wasn’t only religious items, but also papers that were 200 and 300 years old with details about buying cattle, getting credit, Jewish wedding contracts—a rich variety of documents. It was a treasure.”

In 2007, Stürmer cofounded the Niederzissen Cultural and Local Heritage Society (“Kultur- und Heimat-Verein Niederzissen”), dedicated to preserving and restoring the town’s old synagogue, which had sat empty for many years. The society encouraged the town council to buy the building, which it ultimately did. In 2012, the society’s members invited the descendants of Niederzissen’s Jewish community to join them in opening the restored synagogue, and descendants from Israel and the United States came in response to the invitation. “The restoration and reconstruction of the Niederzissen synagogue was a remarkable achievement that is a testament to the level of commitment, perseverance, sensitivity, and absolutely unequaled competence of Frau Stürmer,” says Harold Levie of Amsterdam, whose grandmother, Mathilde Berger, was born in Niederzissen and survived the war in Holland.

Harvey Berger of San Diego, California, adds: “The only reason this synagogue exists today is because of Brunhilde Stürmer. The history of these Jewish families would have passed into the dust of time absent the incredible work Brunhilde has done. She has given life to my family, which had disappeared from German history.”

“When I was young,” Stürmer recalls, “I didn’t understand what had happened. It was therefore important for me to show this history and to memorialize it. I’m happy that, nowadays, a lot of school students come to our synagogue and they can see. History is often so abstract, it’s not so easy to get kids to feel it, but in our synagogue they have the biographies, the photographs, lots of memorabilia, and it’s easier for young people to imagine and to feel what happened—and what we lost when all the Jewish people were killed or forced to emigrate. It’s a part of our history, too, and that’s why it’s so important that people get to know it.”

Now in her mid-70s, Stürmer has no intention of slowing down. It especially matters, she adds, “that our youth, the children in school, know what happened and understand how fragile democracy is, so they take care that something like this doesn’t happen again. And this is where we want to help.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2018