Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Rolf Emmerich 

Laupheim, Baden Württemberg

Rolf Emmerich is a pioneer. Thirty years ago, when it was not exactly popular to dig up the Jewish past in Germany, he was already taking students on field trips to the Jewish cemetery of Laupheim, his home town in the former West German state of Baden Württemberg. It was there that Ann Dorzbach, born in the neighboring city of Ulm, first saw Emmerich.

She was visiting the grave of her grandparents, Anton and Lina Bergmann, when she ran across the schoolteacher leading a group of teenagers among the gravestones. “He successfully merged the sad history of the wiped out Jewish congregation into his lesson” about the beautifully carved stones, recalled nominator Dorzbach – who lives today in Louisville, KY. What Emmerich has done in the ensuing years to raise awareness about history can only be described as “a labor of love,” wrote nominator Sven Treitel of Tulsa, OK, whose grandfather, Leopold Treitel (1895–1923), was the last rabbi of Laupheim.

Emmerich, 73, a retired chemical engineer and schoolteacher, whose political engagement led to 33 years as an elected City Council representative, became interested in the history of the Holocaust while following the the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. As a young engineer, he worked for many years for Steiner-Hopfen GmbH in Laupheim, owned by a local Jewish family, the Steiners, with whom he became quite close. Even after he left the firm in 1971 and began his teaching career, they stayed in contact. “It is something very special,” he said.

Motivated by this friendship, coupled with curiosity and a passion for justice, Emmerich extensively researched Laupheim’s Jewish past. Jews were first permitted to settle there in 1724. For a while, the town boasted the largest Jewish community in Wuerttemberg (843 Jews out of a total population of 7000 in 1869).

In August 1942, the rich Jewish history of Laupheim came to an end with the deportation of its last 43 Jews to the Theresienstadt concentration camp outside Prague.

Emmerich traced the history of the community and found descendants all over the world. His numerous publications– many focusing on local Jewish figures and institutions – are available at the Leo Baeck Institute. In 1998 he co-founded a museum – in a villa once owned by the Steiner family – dedicated to the history of Christians and Jews: Museum zur Geschichte von Christen und Juden, where he also serves as a volunteer and guide, introducing visitors to such topics as “200 years of rabbis in Laupheim,” or the history of the Jewish cemetery. Emmerich has been on the museum’s advisory committee since 2010, when he stepped down from the City Council.

In the 1960s, Emmerich set about preserving rare, 1922 recordings of Jewish music featuring Cantor Emil Dworzan (1856-1931) and Simon L. Steiner on harmonium, made in the former synagogue. He had them transferred to tapes in a local radio station – then state of the art. The original shellac records are located in the Laupheim Museum, and a CD currently is in production. “If I accomplished nothing else, I would pat myself on the back for this,” he laughs.

Emmerich’s interest in synagogue music led him to another amazing discovery about 25 years ago. While conducting research in Hamburg, he stumbled upon sheet music from the 1850 Laupheim-born cantor/composer Moritz Henle. This discovery led to several years of research in private collections and in archives in the USA, Israel, Sweden and Switzerland. The resulting collection of Henle compositions was compiled as a CD and published in 1998 by the Laupheim Gesellschaft fuer Geschichte und Gedenken.

Then, in 2000, Emmerich organized a four-day music Festival in Laupheim to honor the cantor on what would have been Henle’s 150th birthday. A local choir performed his compositions in Hebrew, and the name of the street where Henle was born was formally changed to Moritz-Henle-Straße. Not only had musical compositions been rediscovered – more important, Emmerich also had helped Jews with roots in Laupheim to find long-lost relatives. “I had the pleasure of attending this splendid and emotional festival with 15 other newly found relatives from five different countries,” Dorzbach wrote. Among them were Barbara Henly Levy, her husband and daughter, of Somers, NY. Not only had Emmerich retrieved lost Jewish music, “but so much of our family history as well,” she wrote. For the first time, “cousins [met] who had hitherto been unaware of each others’ existence.”

Over the years, Emmerich has co-authored or contributed to several publications on local Jewish history, including a memorial book containing stories of local Jewish families that either emigrated or perished in the Holocaust. He helped preserve gravesites in the Jewish cemetery where Dorzbach first met him three decades ago, and he has inspired a younger generation of Germans to carry on such work.

Emmerich still visits the cemetery regularly, walking with visitors among the 900 stones dating back to 1700. “It is an unbelievable place of inspiration,” said Emmerich, who recently accompanied a father and son from the US on their first visit to the grave of an ancestor, buried in 1907. Says Emmerich, the work of remembrance is “important for the second generation, but in the meantime I think it is also important for me – it is an integral part of my life.”

Local citizens have been very supportive, Emmerich noted. there is no opposition. And some people could think that, for a small town, we give a lot of money for the museum. But such people are relatively restrained,” he noted.

Today, he is known as “the most involved and competent person about Jewish affairs in his city,” wrote nominator Yitzhak Steiner of Re’ut, Israel, who met Emmerich more than 50 years ago in his family’s company. “He has promoted the founding of institutions and associations, cared for the local archives and generated personal connections to the former members of that community.”

But perhaps his most profound contribution is in bringing together the children of former Laupheim Jews, and giving them a sense of their own past. Said Levy: “Mingling with the tears of sadness [are] those of gratitude.”