Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Helmut Urbschat and Manfred Kluge

Vlotho, North Rhine-Westphalia

As a high school teacher who decades ago found himself "aghast that the girls and boys hardly knew anything" about their town's Jewish history, Helmut Urbschat wrote a letter to his local newspaper, organized a meeting and, in 1965, founded the Mendel Grundmann Society with the aim of restoring Jewish memory to Vlotho, a community of 20,000 on the Weser River in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Alas, the organization dissolved in a few short years. Some of its members died. Urbschat himself took a new teaching job in the Ruhr district. And it looked, he recalls, as if "we wouldn't get on our feet again."

Nearly 20 years later, Manfred Kluge, a fellow teacher-and more importantly, a talented researcher, writer and administrator-came along to help do just that. It was November of 1988, the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and Kluge collaborated with Urbschat in organizing what they called "Jewish Week." They unveiled a commemorative stone at the place where the Vlotho Synagogue had been destroyed; released a co-authored book entitled Sie waren Bürger unserer Stadt: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Juden in Vlotho (They Were Citizens of our City: Historic Contributions of Vlotho's Jews); and welcomed back 21 descendants of Jews from Vlotho whose presence, from points across the globe, marked the rebirth of the Mendel Grundmann Society. Their dedicated, symbiotic relationship has been steadily bringing Vlotho's Jewish heritage back to life since.

"We've been an excellent team," says Urbschat, 75, a multilingual religious scholar who has studied at universities in Germany and Toronto, held political posts in Vlotho, and is the voice-and vision-of the Society. By contrast, Kluge takes charge of most of the work behind the scenes, pouring through archives and overseeing the lengthy research projects that have resulted in a wave of books and exhibitions about Vlotho's Jewish past. "We complement each other's talents: one person's weakness is the other one's strength," Urbschat adds, and in the end, "the history is our common field."

Neither man, in fact, arrived directly at an interest in Jewish history. For the polyglot historian Kluge, 68, it was about choosing to specialize in a field that excited him the more than any other. "My hobby is writing about regional history. I've written about communist history, school history, Christian stories from the 11th century-it's all interesting," he says. "But what's especially interesting to me is the Jewish history."

Urbschat, on the other hand-whose father, a Protestant minister, died as a Russian prisoner of war in 1945-was marked by several boyhood experiences, like the time he watched a transport train filled with Jews leaving Frankfurt for the east, and his intriguing exchange with an elderly Jewish man with whom he once shared a hospital room. Finally, though, it was the ignorance—and resistance—that Urbschat confronted years later in his high school students which galvanized his work. "Most of the people [in Vlotho] felt shame for the Nazi years and just didn't want to talk about what had been going on. The organization was founded to fill that gap," he says.

The Mendel Grundmann Society was named in honor of the 19th century Jewish industrialist who gave charitably to Vlotho's poor, factory-employed families. One of the stirring local Jewish histories it unearthed involves U.S. immigrant Stephen H. Loeb and the shoebox of letters his parents wrote to him from Vlotho on the eve of World War II, before their deportation and deaths near Riga. In 2003, Kluge wrote text and culled excerpts from the more than 500 pages of letters provided by Loeb's widow, Betty, to publish Wir wollen weiter leben (We Want to Keep Living), a book that has since been dramatized and "performed" in popular readings attended throughout the region.

Perhaps the strongest visual reminder of Vlotho's Jewish past are the 41 Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stones, that Urbschat and Kluge had recently installed, commemorating the town's Jews who perished in the Holocaust. In conjunction with the stones, they mined the regional archives and obtained data from Yad Vashem in Israel to produce detailed biographies of every victim, which will be published as a book later this year. 

"Their knowledge of these people is so extensive as to make one think that they actually knew them," says Susan Alterman of Jacksonville, Florida, whose father survived Buchenwald and who herself returned to Vlotho for the installation of eight stumbling stones dedicated to her relatives. "We hope that with these actions we have reached many people who didn't know about the Jewish history here and now can think about it," says Urbschat. "With the stumbling stones, our Jews have returned symbolically to the center of the town."

As a result of Urbschat's and Kluge's work, local schools have steadily incorporated more Jewish history into their curriculum. But not everyone is supportive. A volatile neo-Nazi group in Vlotho known as Collegium Humanum is "right under our noses," Urbschat says. Which is why continuing the Society's activism-and organizing protests like one in 2005, in which 800 people marched against the extreme right-continues to be so important.'

What is crucial, says Urbschat, is that "the Jewish theme, above all, is not forgotten, and is talked about."

"We're thankful to give people in Vlotho the opportunity to think about it."