Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Elmar Ittenbach

Thalfang, Rhineland-Palatinate

As a teacher leading religious lessons at a high school in Thalfang, which serves students from 20 villages in the Hunsrück region of Rhineland Palatinate, Elmar Ittenbach often worked with the Bible. “Both the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures, and when the topic of Judaism came up I talked about the situation in Thalfang, where many Jews had lived before the war, and we would look around for houses that belonged to Jewish families in those times,” he says. “I was really interested in the history of the region and specifically the Jewish history.”

During the 19th century, one-fifth of Thalfang’s residents were Jewish—the highest percentage in the whole Hunsrück region—and the more Ittenbach learned about the Jewish legacy in his “special village,” the deeper his interest grew. In 2009, he founded a small working group called “Jewish Life in Thalfang,” with the goal to collect money and install Stolpersteine recognizing the town’s former Jewish residents. In the beginning, Ittenbach recalls, his commitments to the group were limited, but his passion soon drove him to lead the restoration of Thalfang’s Jewish history.

“I said I would write an article of 10 pages or so for the regional yearbook. Then people thought it would be better to make a brochure of 50 pages,” he says, and “in the end, I wrote a book of 230 pages. I tried to collect as many photos and stories as possible about the victims of the Shoah in order to present them as human beings. On our journey to Israel I was able to hand over 12 memorial essays to Yad Vashem about persons who had been completely unknown until then.”

The result was Jüdisches Leben in Thalfang, (Jewish Life In Thalfang) a history chronicling 250 years of development in the town’s Jewish community until its destruction in the Holocaust. Published in 2011 through the Emil-Frank- Institut, which is affiliated with University of Trier, the book recalled fascinating stories of former Thalfang residents like Simon Scheuer, who served in Napoleon’s army, the painter Max Lazarus, and many other local inhabitants.

Ittenbach didn’t stop there. He next plunged into research investigating the life of Rabbi Samuel Hirsch, who was born in 1815 in Thalfang, attended yeshiva in Mainz, became a renowned Talmudic scholar, and went on to play an instrumental role shaping Reform Judaism in the U.S. and Europe. “I was very interested in him, his philosophy, his life, and the more I worked on Hirsch, the more I found out that he was an extraordinary person with a powerful message of tolerance for Christians and Jews,”says Ittenbach. “Hirsch’s vision of Judaism is a vision of all religions, [imbued] with ideas of freedom, of humanity, of tolerance and love.”

Ittenbach succeeded in completing his second book, “Samuel Hirsch: Rabbi, Philosopher, Reformer,” which was published last year in both German and English. He also presented a plan to name the local primary school “Samuel Hirsch Elementary School,” though officials turned down the idea. Instead, Ittenbach worked to have a square in Thalfang renamed Samuel-Hirsch-Platz—featuring a stainless steel obelisk memorial that Ittenbach himself designed, which will be installed in the square next year.

Born and raised in nearby Trier, a Rhineland city that once had one of the most active Jewish communities in Germany (the most famous Jew from Trier was Karl Marx), Ittenbach admits he “didn’t know a lot about Jewish history as a young person. I knew that the old synagogue was destroyed in 1938, and the new one opened in the 1950s. But I didn’t have any contact with Jewish people. When I was a child I knew of one Jewish family named Susskind that had a shoe shop, but that’s all I knew about Jewish life.”

All of that changed after Ittenbach earned his teaching degree in Koblenz and moved in 1971 with his wife to Thalfang, where he taught music, history, religion, German and English. What began as his gradual self-education about the region’s Jewish history turned into a passion that led Ittenbach to help restore tombstones in the town’s centuriesold Jewish cemetery, install Stolpersteine outside the homes of Thalfang’s former Jewish residents, and create a memorial plaque on the grounds of the former synagogue, which was torn down in the 1950s and turned into a family residence. Since retiring in 2007, Ittenbach has worked tirelessly to research, write and publish dozens of articles in scholarly journals and regional yearbooks that further explore the legacy of Jewish culture in Thalfang. He has also lectured at schools, organized readings, facilitated student presentations and led tours through sites of Jewish interest in Thalfang. Additionally, he helped build the Thalfang website on Alemannia Judaica, covering the region’s Jewish communities of Talling, Dhronecken, Berglicht and Deuselbach. His future goal is to install an informational board at the Jewish cemetery that explains the history and inscriptions on the tombstones, “a memorial to the Jewish community saying we should never forget them.

By preserving and so thoroughly documenting local Jewish culture and history, Ittenbach has “enriched our understanding of this town, memorializing not only those who perished, but also the important contribution of the Jewish people to the social and economic life in the region,” says Evan Wolfson, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, whose ancestor, Egelchen Samuel, was born in Thalfang in the late 18th century. “At his core, Elmar Ittenbach is not just a genealogist, and not just a historian, but a teacher and lover of all humanity.”

Steven Simon of New York City, whose grandparents Markus and Hermina Simon were deported by the Nazis to their deaths, and who are now memorialized with Stolpersteine placed outside their former home, praises Ittenbach’s “relentless ambition to help us learn about Thalfang and its neighboring towns, their Jewish inhabitants and the fate of their Jewish community members. I would not have known all the details of [my grandparents’] life, and their ultimate fate, without Mr. Ittenbach’s research.” And Wendy Werner, of Maale Adumim, Israel, whose family dates back to 1730 in the town, says “Ittenbach’s goal has been to bridge the gap between Jews and Gentiles, teaching about the importance of tolerance and coexistence for all people.”

The message of coexistence is no less poignant today amid Europe’s refugee crisis, says Ittenbach. “It’s very important to be tolerant, to stand against fundamentalism and terror, and to bring people to think about these ideas. Jews were part of our society for a long time—they were of great importance and had great impact on German culture—and this ought to be known to more people. This work must be done: we must remember all the people who were citizens of Thalfang.”