Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Hans-Peter Klein

Melsungen, Hesse

Shortly after he and his wife moved to the small north Hessen town of Gudensberg in 1986, Hans-Peter Klein was walking through the center when he spotted one building “in ruinous condition, with trees on the roof,” he recalls, “and this building was the synagogue.”

Klein, then 35, and nine other young people formed a group to discuss restoring the structure—which had served previously as a bakery storage space—and returning it to use. Many of the town’s residents, wary to reopen the past, opposed the plan. But after years of applying pressure, Klein’s group finally convinced the town council to buy and renovate the building. The 1843 synagogue reopened in 1995 and today it houses a youth music school, a Red Cross office—and thanks to Klein, a permanent exhibition about the former Jewish community in Gudensberg.

“It was very important not to give up,” says Klein, a researcher, writer, historian and high school teacher who felt always provoked by questions of “what happened to the Jews who left—what were their experiences abroad, what did they do after immigration, what will happen when the generation born in Germany dies?” By way of his own response, Klein dedicated himself to preserving the memory and history of Jews across Nordhessen—the same region, he explains in amazement, where Germany’s largest rural Jewish community exists today.

“When we got involved in the research, no one could imagine there would be a new Jewish community in this area again,” says Klein, referring to Emet veSchalom (Truth and Peace), the 80-person, largely Russian Jewish community that began in Gudensberg and is now based around nearby Felsberg.

Born in 1951 in the Rhineland-Palatinate town of Bad Kreuznach, Klein studied history, politics and German language and literature in Mainz and later Marburg. At the time, the history of Nordhessen’s Jewish communities remained largely forgotten, says Klein, and his experience restoring the synagogue inspired him to dig deeper into the town’s archives, and to start asking older residents what they remembered of their former Jewish neighbors.

Soon he was contacting the descendants of Jews who had emigrated from the region and “this for me was the most important point: to make contact to these people,” especially to the younger generation, he says. In the decades since, Klein has written numerous articles uncovering Jewish history across the region. He founded and manages a website, Juden in Nordhessen (www.jinh.site50.net), which preserves family histories along with genealogies and has received some 20,000 visitors.

Klein has helped establish Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, in Gudensberg and his current town of Melsungen, as well as cities like Leipzig and Kassel, which recently installed 18 stones. He also worked to install a memorial plaque where a synagogue once stood in Riede, a town close to Gudensberg, honoring the Jewish community that once lived there. In addition, Klein also allocated a specific day per week for over a decade guiding residents, students and visitors through the nearby Breitenau memorial, a 12th century monastery at Guxhagen that the Nazis converted into a concentration camp for Jews.

Meanwhile, Klein has dedicated tireless interest and energy to the children, grandchildren and other descendants of Nordhessen’s Jews who have returned to search for their past. Thanks to his painstaking research from gravestones to archives, many relatives have been able to discover and appreciate how their families used to live. For example, Mark Gordon of Maplewood, New Jersey, made several visits to Nordhessen during which Klein accompanied him to archives, ancestral towns and cemeteries, exercising “the patience of a saint…spending hours in a single Jewish cemetery searching to locate disintegrating
family gravestones.” For Dennis Aaron of Skokie, Illinois, Klein not only transcribed a dozen letters that Aaron’s grandmother sent to his mother before perishing in the war, but he built a 10-generation family tree of Aaron’s wife’s family, and led Aaron on a 10-day tour through 15 towns, 12 Jewish cemeteries and five archives in western Germany— in addition to installing a Stolperstein for Aaron’s family in the town of Borken.

“Memory is the key to forgiveness,” says Klein, whose deep commitment stems from the knowledge that “for Jewish people in other countries it is very important to know that their history, their life, is not forgotten in Germany.” As a high school teacher, Klein says, it was important for him to go beyond “the classroom with the book—it’s better to show people the places where the history took place, and to have a chance to speak with the young people.”

To that end, Klein has led students and teachers on literally dozens of tours and seminars at Auschwitz, where they have met Jewish survivors and also importantly, says Klein, connected with their eastern Polish neighbors. “No one who came back from the seminar said they shouldn’t have gone to Poland,” says Klein. “Many of them said, ‘Auschwitz changed my mind.’”

As a member of the German organization “Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie” (Against Forgetting – For Democracy), Klein sees himself within the larger network of researchers who are striving to keep the memory of Germany’s Jews alive. “To be busy with Jewish history is a never-ending story,” he says. “It takes a lot of time, but every research I do is interesting [because] I can find connections between people and families that weren’t known before.” Klein’s family is also involved in his passion for recovering the Jewish past. His wife has helped maintain connections with relatives of Nordhessen’s Jews, while the eldest of Klein’s three sons, at the age of 19 accompanied him on a trip to Israel and later said “it was the most important trip he had ever taken.”

In the end, says Klein, it’s the relationships that keep him going. “The most important and moving thing is to get to know people and have friendships with them,” he says, “not only researching history, but also for the present and future.”