Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Helmut Gabeli

Haigerloch, Baden-Württemberg

The lawyer Helmut Gabeli moved to the small Swabian town of Haigerloch, on the edge of the Black Forest, when his wife was hired there as a teacher in 1968. Shortly after, the couple discovered that the town market where they bought their food was once a synagogue, and they instantly stopped shopping there.

“My wife and I said ‘No, we will not buy there in the future,’” Gabeli remembers. “I had respect for the Jewish religion. My moral standards told me it was not possible to buy from a building where the Jews once prayed.”

Twenty years later, on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Gabeli helped form the Gesprächkreis Ehemaliger Synagogue Haigerloch (Discussion Circle for the Former Haigerloch Synagogue). Today, thanks to his decades of impassioned work researching, writing, giving lectures and leading tours, that synagogue is a preserved regional monument and museum which is helping educate Haigerloch’s future generations about its lost Jewish community.

It is also a place where the descendants of Haigerloch’s Jews have returned from across the earth and, with gratitude, have been able to rediscover their pasts.

“The most important thing for me, I [initially] thought, would be the restoration of the synagogue. Some years later, I realized it was the contact with the people, the Jews from all over the world, whether they have their roots in Haigerloch or not. That contact is so important for me that I would work day and night for it. That’s my life,” Gabeli says.

Born in 1944 to ethnic Germans living in a small village outside of Budapest (his father was a farmer, his mother came from a family of miners), Gabeli was raised Roman Catholic and grew up surrounded by stories from the war. His mother had worked as a housemaid for a Jewish factory owner in the Hungarian capital and witnessed the deportation of the city’s Jews; once, as Jews were being marched in the heat to the train station, his mother brought them water but the Hungarian police made her throw it on the ground.

The family moved to Vienna after the war, then westward to the Black Forest region in Baden-Württemberg. After two years of service in the German army, where he became an officer, Gabeli studied history and law at Tübingen University and established himself as a lawyer. But, as he says, “history was always my great love.”

“If you have a general interest in Jewish history and the history of Nazism, it is only a question of time before the two trains meet,” he says. “The question of why millions of people followed Hitler has occupied me most of my life, and still does today. I knew a little about this period of German history and I knew, of course, what the Germans did with the Jews. [But] it was my interest in one local town where a Jewish community had once existed that motivated me.”

Gabeli has written many articles and books on the subject of Haigerloch’s Jews: from a fascinating history of Jewish cattledealers to stories of its wartime deportations; a chronicle of each of its Jewish residents from 1933 to 1945; a century-long history of Jewish schooling; and a biography of Haigerloch’s last teacher and religious leader, Gustave Spier. Gabeli has helped countless families locate the graves of their ancestors in Haigerloch’s Jewish cemetery, given lectures on Jewish history at Tübingen University, and led some 400 guided tours through the town.

His most visible legacy, however, results from a decade of effort to preserve, purchase, and finally convert the old Haigerloch synagogue into a museum. In 1999, as the vice-chairman of the 10-person Gesprächkreis, Gabeli succeeded in helping raise 200,000 deutschmarks, or 80% of the cost of the building.

“We approached the mayor and said, ‘Here is 200,000 deutschmarks, please supply the missing 50,000 and buy this building as a public service for the town,’” Gabeli recalls. The mayor agreed, although many local residents had reservations about the project at first. “They said, ‘Hang a curtain over it. It’s so long ago, it interests nobody,’ and we said, ‘No, it has to interest Germans.’ When we restored and made an exhibition in the synagogue, people slowly formed another opinion. They respected us and said it was right what we did.”

“Helmut’s leadership and tireless efforts to restore the Haigerloch synagogue have had, and continue to have, a profound effect upon every descendant of Jewish Haigerlochers that visits, and upon all the residents of Haigerloch, particularly the young,” says Marv Strasburg of Seattle and a descendent of Haigerloch Jews. “The synagogue-museum and the memorial plaque [with the names of all Jews deported from Haigerloch] say ‘We care; we deeply regret; we respect; we remember; we honor.’”

Gabeli’s research of Jewish history spans from the middle ages to World War II—with a special focus on the little known story of Jewish soldiers’ participation in the German army. He also helps teenage students working toward their graduation by assisting in their research of Jewish life. “It’s very important for me to work with the young people,” he says. “Young people should understand the history, and they should also see in which ways people handle this history. For example, me: I am a man who studies things about a time that will never return. You can reach young people who have a certain empathy about all this.”

Gabeli acknowledges the great distance Germany has come—and Baden Württenberg especially—in being able to speak about the crimes of the past. He says he is heartened, when neo-Nazis demonstrate, to see a majority of German citizens, from all political parties and professions, oppose them in their attempt to gain any kind of power.

But, he cautions, “I’m not so sure whether it would all be the same if we had very bad times. Men without work, in a bad economic situation—that’s a question, and I’m not 100 percent certain that it would never happen again. Therefore we have to take care every day. We have to care at all times.”