Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Frowald Gil Hüttenmeister

Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg

After learning Greek and Latin at secondary school in Cologne, Frowald Gil Hüttenmeister was given a choice to study French or Hebrew in high school: he chose Hebrew. Then, while working as a youth leader at a Jewish summer camp near Frankfurt, he met Israelis and began to speak the language. But it wasn’t until 1958, when his Hebrew teacher invited him on a family visit to Israel, that Hüttenmeister discovered what would become his passion and life trajectory.

Instead of staying for two weeks as planned, “I spent nearly two months there because I was overwhelmed by the country and the people,” he recalls. At the time, it was difficult to find Judaism and Jewish history programs in Germany, so Hüttenmeister returned to Jerusalem in 1960 on a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship to Hebrew University. He later completed a doctoral degree in Semitic Studies at Saarbrucken University, and in the half century since, Hüttenmeister, now 75, has rescued synagogues, written books and articles, contributed to the Central Archive for Research on the History of Jews in Germany, and become a leading expert on Jewish cemeteries stretching from Ukraine to Bohemia to Alsace.

His formal academic work remained distinct from the unceasing, voluntary research that Hüttenmeister conducted through the years. Nonetheless, as a Jewish Studies lecturer for four decades at universities ranging from Tübingen and Duisberg to Paris and Haifa, Hüttenmeister was able to seamlessly blend his professional career in Jewish scholarship with a passion for community activism rarely seen in academia. In perhaps his crowning professional achievement, Hüttenmeister dedicated 14 years “working on ancient synagogues in Israel, collecting all archaeological material and reading all rabbinical literature” to produce the 750-page book “Die antiken Synagogen, Lehrhäuser und Sitze des Sanhedrin in Israel“ (The Ancient Synagogues, Houses of Learning and Residences of the Sanhedrin in Israel). This book was published along with the “Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients“ (TAVO – Atlas of the Middle East), which includes 300 separate maps chronicling the region’s history, “from the creation of the world until today,” he says.

While his meticulous research has directly helped the descendants of German and European Jews know their families’ histories, Hüttenmeister’s tireless documentation and analyses of cemetery inscriptions has strengthened a global understanding of Judaism itself. He has collected and donated some 2,750 records on four cemeteries to the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry, or JOWBR. And in the area of Baden-Württemberg, Hüttenmeister helped save half a dozen synagogues—like the Hechingen Synagogue, which the mayor of the town wanted to demolish but which Hüttenmeister succeeded in preserving in 1979 by raising funds to buy and restore it. Confident about the skills he has honed to track down people’s ancestry, “if it’s in southwestern Germany,” he says, “usually I can help them.”

About four decades ago, Hüttenmeister started documenting and deciphering inscriptions and restoring Jewish cemeteries across Europe, from Ukraine and Poland to then-Czechoslovakia, Germany and the Alsace region of France. When he leads his students to Jewish cemeteries, he asks them to find special symbols on the gravestones, which they then discuss as a group. Hüttenmeister is currently writing a book, due out in 2014, about his efforts to restore and document more than a dozen Jewish cemeteries on the German-Czech border. “It is very important to connect our two countries, because it’s our common history,” he says.

In the early 1990s, Hüttenmeister served as Commissioner for the Inventory of Jewish Graves as part of the Landesdenkmalamt (Rural Memorial Project) Baden-Württemberg. What he says has been especially meaningful to him, beyond his scholarly and inscriptive work, are the connections he has made to living Jewish individuals. “I was eager to try to decipher the Hebrew inscriptions,” he recalls, and at the same time, “I met so many people who I could help, and with whom I became very good friends, and that gave me the impetus to continue this work.”

“His exacting research and documentation of Jewish cemeteries has been used by countless German Jews,” says author Emily Rose of Naples, Florida. In the words of Strasbourg University Professor Freddy Raphael: “Being able to read the sometimes difficult language of old tombs, Hüttenmeister brings to life people who had fallen into oblivion.” And Haim Weinstein from Israel says, “It was Gil’s heartfelt, gracious expertise and readiness to help which revived the lost memories of the last years and days of my family during the Holocaust.”

Hüttenmeister has voluntarily translated documents, letters and archives from German into Hebrew, further enlarging Israel’s body of knowledge on German Jewry. In addition, he has collected, catalogued and created exhibitions using torn prayer books and broken ceremonial objects known as guenisot, which were found hidden beneath the roofs of synagogues. Hüttenmeister’s daughter, one of his three children, works at the Institute of German Jewish History in Essen and has also spent several years in Israel. Hüttenmeister says he is heartened to see so many young Germans today working to clean and restore Jewish cemeteries while learning about the Jewish past in school. “I think Jewish history has more books in Germany than in any other country in the world, because it’s part of our history,” he says, recalling that when he was a student in the 1940s, history classes stopped at WWI.

Still, Hüttenmeister sees the risk of current xenophobic trends growing in Germany, which makes his work teaching about Jewish history all the more important. “I try to show [students] where and how to learn, and how to meet people, how to contact them—and not to believe everything they hear from others,” he says.

Retired since 2008, Hüttenmeister remains as active as ever. In the fall of 2013 he traveled for two weeks through Poland, the Czech Republic and the former East Germany giving lectures and documenting Jewish cemeteries. Looking ahead, he has no plan of slowing down. “My head is still working, my legs too. I hope to continue this work for many years,” he says. “It’s endless. I won’t finish in this life.”