Obermayer German Jewish History Award

“I always wanted to learn more, to do more.”

Elisabeth Böhrer

Sondheim vor der Rhön, Bavaria

Her house, Elisabeth Böhrer confesses, is a mess. “In every room of my house I have papers; it looks like a professor’s house. I can’t even have visitors because I have only one room where people can sit down.” In truth, she wouldn’t have it any other way. The story of why begins nearly three decades ago, when her home was much neater.

In 1991, while working as a tour guide in Schweinfurt, in Lower Franconia, Böhrer was tasked with leading dozens of Jewish former residents through the town during its 1,200-year anniversary celebration week. She hurriedly read up on local Jewish history, gathering information to prepare for the visit. “But what was great was when the people actually came and I got to know them,” she recalls. “[I] found them all so kind and interesting. It was my first contact with Jewish people, and from this moment I had a connection with them. It was personal for me. Without meeting the actual Jewish citizens, the whole thing would not have started.”

The “whole thing” sparked by those initial encounters is what became her life’s work as a passionate, meticulous—and self-taught— historian and researcher dedicated to preserving the history of rural Jews in Lower Franconia and documenting Jewish lives for future generations. Those stacks of paper in her home constitute an extensive archive of Jewish lives and Jewish history, both before the Holocaust and extending back centuries.

Gripped by the moving family stories and experiences, Böhrer took it upon herself to travel to New York the following year and meet some of the descendants of Schweinfurt’s Jews. From there she cultivated relationships and correspondences with the relatives and began building their family trees. “I developed everything step by step, through direct contact. I always wanted to learn more, to do more,” she says. Böhrer relentlessly pursued her research, obtaining old newspaper articles and collecting all the data she could find about prewar Schweinfurt, where 363 Jews lived until 1933. She invited numerous descendants to visit the town, led them to their families’ former homes, and guided them through Schweinfurt’s 19th century Jewish cemetery. It had been left largely undisturbed during the Nazi years, but hardly anything was known about it. Böhrer decided to change that.

“The gravestone inscriptions were often hard to decipher, and since the cemetery [had] people of all religions, I had to go through all the burials from 1874 onward to find out which ones were Jewish and which ones weren’t,” Böhrer says. “It was a labyrinth to figure out who was buried under each gravestone, but it was very important for me to be able to show the descendants the graves of their ancestors.” In 2009, after five years of meticulous research and writing, Böhrer published a book about the Schweinfurt Jewish cemetery, where she managed to recover information about more than 300 graves. That information is available today on the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry.

She didn’t stop there. Böhrer wanted to know everything she could find out about the former Jewish residents of Schweinfurt, so she immersed herself in archives, both locally in Franconia and in Munich. Her research was complicated, she says, by the fact that 200 years ago Jewish people in the region didn’t use family names, only the names of their fathers, and therefore the names changed with every generation. Only in 1811, when the Bavarian government ordered priests from the village to record Jewish birth, marriage, and death dates, did clear family details become available. But none of this slowed Böhrer, who wrote to the Federal Archives and made it he mission to track down the names and learn the fates of the 1,500 Jews who had inhabited Franconia between 1933 and 1945.

Böhrer meanwhile dedicated herself to helping Jewish families navigate the complex restitution process. “My Jewish friends said they never received money for their relatives’ houses. The restitution process for them was difficult,” she says. When Böhrer brought up the topic with the owners of homes where Jewish families once lived, they often answered, “We had to pay twice for our house, once when we bought it and once after the restitution process.” She would tell them, “Yes, you had to pay twice…because the first time you paid far too little.”

Born in 1953, Böhrer grew up in the nearby spa town of Bad Kissingen, where her father owned a bakery. Her mother told her stories about the terrible suffering of Jews under the Nazis, but otherwise she knew little about her region’s Jewish past. The oldest of four siblings, Böhrer went to work for the local district administration office after finishing middle school, then moved to Würzburg to complete her job training as an administrative assistant. In her late 20s she married and had two sons before moving to Schweinfurt, where she became a tour guide and encountered her passion to research and recover the Jewish past.

In the years since, Böhrer has uncovered fascinating legacies of Jews from the Schweinfurt region who have had global impact. One was Joseph Sachs, whose son Samuel became the famous American investment banker, giving his name to the Goldman Sachs company. Joseph Sachs came from a nearby village, and she was able to locate the place of his family’s burial. Through her tenacious research, Böhrer also discovered that the grandfather and great-grandfather of Charlotte Knobloch, the former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, came from a village close to Schweinfurt, and she compiled their family tree. Another family tree she constructed was that of Elizabeth Steinberger of Chapel Hill, N.C, whose uncle, Jack Steinberger, won the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics and whose grandfather, Ludwig Steinberger, was the cantor of Bad Kissingen synagogue from 1892 to 1937.

“I was very honored to make a family tree for a person who was a Nobel Prize winner,” says Böhrer, who first made contact with Jack Steinberger’s cousin, Hilde, at the 1991 town anniversary and later succeeded in tracing the family tree back to 1755. “The family had already tried intensively to find their family roots, but they hadn’t been able to get the information. I discovered their family tree was written wrong on the Internet concerning where Jack’s grandmother had died, and I found out where their grandmother was buried. I knew where to look for it.”

Böhrer’s skill won raves from Elizabeth Steinberger. “Elisabeth is the oracle concerning German-Jewish history in Bad Kissingen and its environs. Anything she doesn’t know is probably not documented,” Steinberger says. “She is a veteran archivist, exceedingly skilled at locating and deciphering genealogical documents. Such experienced skill, razor-sharp precision, and dedicated diligence deeply deserve our respect and gratitude. Her exhaustive efforts and unfailing kindness have helped to heal the decades-old breach between Germany and its former Jewish citizens.”

In recent years, Böhrer has written numerous articles for the annual regional yearbook (Heimatjahrbuch). She has given lectures about and tours, for example, in a small, historically Jewish village five miles west of Schweinfurt, named Obbach, about which she also wrote contributions for a chronicle. With a dogged eye for detail, she has spotted mistakes about family histories in the local newspapers and demanded they be corrected. Driven to turn over every stone necessary to reveal and reassemble the past, Böhrer remains steadfast in her work.

“A lot of people don’t understand why I do this. They don’t protest, but they cannot understand,” she says. “I think I have to do it, I must do it. There is so much.” Yes, her house is full of papers, but it’s well worth the tradeoff. “When young people ask me what happened, I can tell them. I think most people don’t really know how it was in Germany. I feel that the work is important for the Jewish people who lost their homeland, and I see how thankful they are when I can show them the houses and the history. The work goes on. It’s an ongoing process that continues.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2019