Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Elisabeth Quirbach and Hans Schulz 

Braunsbach, Baden-Württenberg

In 1997, when Elisabeth Quirbach and her husband, Hans Schulz, moved to the Baden-Württemberg town of Braunsbach, they were shocked to find the former Jewish school and rabbi’s house standing in ruins. “We saw that nobody did anything to remember the Jewish history of our village,” says Quirbach, “and we said, ‘That’s not right. It’s necessary to remember.’”

Upon learning that the town planned to tear the building down, Quirbach, a retired teacher and theologian, and Schulz, an economist, founded an association to save it that they called “Friends of the Rabbinatsmuseums Braunsbach”. The pair set to work investigating the town’s Jewish past, from its cemetery to its synagogue, and discovered an extensive influence left by the former Jewish community, which at one point numbered a third of the Braunsbach population. They then proposed building a museum on the grounds where the former school and rabbi’s house stood, which they envisioned as both a memorial and as an active cultural space to educate residents about the town’s once vibrant Jewish community.

But their job wasn’t an easy one. The couple met stiff resistance from citizens and local officials, and they took great pains to convince Braunsbach’s residents that their past deserved to be reopened—and that restoring the building was the right thing to do. Finally, in 2008, Quirbach and Schulz prevailed with the inauguration of the Rabbinatsmuseum Braunsbach, which today receives some 2,000 annual visitors and is a landmark feature of the town.

“It is important for the memory of our region—it is important that people today know there had once been a Jewish community here that lived in peace with other people,” says Schulz, and “that’s what we want to remain in [the public’s] memory: that this was our history, too.” As a scholar of religions, Quirbach had the even more focused goal of healing theological differences, “so that mankind will have more tolerance and respect for each other. We think that if you know the background of a person, then they cannot be your enemy and it cannot be that you will do anything to injure them, like the Nazis did. We want people, the youth particularly, to know about Jewish people’s history and their religion,” she says.

Born in Cologne in 1949, Quirbach studied German literature and theology before she became a high school teacher. Through her work she came into contact with Jewish history and her interest grew as she encountered members of the Jewish community in Cologne. By contrast, Schulz, born in 1945, became interested as a child in Germany’s Jewish legacy after learning that his father had been sent to prison during the war because he forbade his older sons from joining the Hitler Youth. “I didn’t understand for a long time about this period, [but] my interest in the history of Jews in Germany became greater and greater” with time, he says.

With the Rabbinatsmuseum Braunsbach, the couple found their calling. They established a website, www.rabbinatsmuseum-braunsbach.de, which contains photographs, archival information, Jewish history, and the cultural and exhibition schedule of the museum. The permanent exhibit, filled with images, writing and artifacts, describes the centuries-long story of Braunsbach’s Jews from 1600 to 1942. Through lectures, concerts, tours and educational programs for children, the museum explores diverse aspects of Jewish culture and religion. It also includes testimonials of Germans telling their experiences from Nazi times, as well as interviews that Quirbach and Schulz themselves conducted with descendants of Braunsbach’s former Jewish residents, now living in Israel.

One of those descendants, believed to be the last living Jew who was born in Braunsbach, requested that Quirbach and Schulz erect a memorial in the town to commemorate the Jews killed by the Nazis. Today, that memorial exists beside the rabbinatsmuseum—though as Schulz says, the couple again faced “a very big fight to install it.”

Historian Uri Kaufmann of Essen says that by their efforts Quirbach and Schulz are “contributing to social pluralism and tolerance throughout the Schwäbisch Hall region of Baden-Württemberg.” And Phyllis Hofman Waldmann, of New York, who discovered through Quirbach and Schulz that her great grandfather’s family originally came from Braunsbach, says the pair “gave of themselves with undeterred dedication to bring Jewish life to Braunsbach in 2008, 66 years after the Jews of Braunsbach were taken to death camps and annihilated.”

Another Braunsbach descendant, Mark Falk, of Hackensack, New Jersey, whose Jewish family roots in the village trace back to 1721, says the couple “reconstructed a historical narrative that might otherwise have been lost forever, and deserve credit for overcoming opposition and winning community support for their vision. By working with municipal authorities, by reaching out to supporters in the Braunsbach community and beyond, and by taking on the multiple roles of collector, restorer, curator, fund-raiser, preservationist, and even real estate manager, they were able to establish an institution that even its original critics can now look upon as a local treasure and a source of pride and value to the community.”

Quirbach’s two-volume book, Die Jüdische Gemeinde Braunsbach Katalog zur Dauerausstellung (The Braunsbach Jewish Community Permanent Exhibition Catalogue), accompanies the museum exhibit and also serves as a walking guide to help people decipher the town’s Jewish past, with information about the former synagogue, cemetery and houses where Braunsbach’s Jews once lived. For Quirbach, the important human connections she and her husband established with the descendants of Jews from Braunsbach lie at the core of their work. “Most interesting is that we can speak with people and help them find out about their relatives who once lived here,” she says.

Echoing her, adds Schulz, “What is most important to me is that Jewish people and German people understand each other. My motivation is to clarify to people their respect for the other.”