A town near town near Stuttgart, Germany, will soon hold a ceremony in which a square will be named after Rabbi Dr. Avraham Schweizer, the district rabbi who perished along with most of his family in the Holocaust.
The naming of the square after the rabbi was initiated by two gentile Germans who promoted the idea out of their appreciation for the rabbi and for the local Jewish culture.
Rabbi Avraham Schweizer served as the district rabbi for 22 years until 1936. He was highly regarded among both the Jews in the area as well as their gentile neighbors. Rabbi Schweizer also served as rabbi of the surrounding Jewish villages.
Barbara Staudacher and Heinz Hogerle, two gentiles from one of the villages which Rabbi Schweizer served, have made it their goal in the years since the end of the war to preserve the lost local Jewish culture.
The two, who moved from Stuttgart to the village of Rexingen in 1999, found a Jewish cemetery at the top of the hill near their home. This discovery led them to begin exploring the local Jewish culture. They published their research in books and other printed material, thus helping to preserve the historical record and helping former residents of Rexingen connect with their own families’ past.
Staudacher and Hogerle approached the mayor of the town of Horb, a town in the southwest of the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, where Rabbi Schweizer had served. They presented him with a request to name the square in front of the local synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht, after the rabbi. The city’s board of directors discussed the idea and approved the request. The official naming ceremony is scheduled for September 4 and will be attended by local residents, family members of the rabbi, and residents of Moshav Shavei Tzion in northern Israel, most of whom immigrated to Israel from that region of Germany.
Rabbi Schweizer’s great-nephew, Meir Schweizer, told Arutz Sheva on Thursday that not much is known about Rabbi Schweizer’s work since not much written material from the period before the war remains and no Jews live in the area today. He said, however, that through testimonies of local residents as well as of Jews who lived there and made aliyah to Israel, it was possible to learn of the great respect people had towards the rabbi.
Meir Schweizer also noted that the rabbi had great connections with the German government before the war and that these connections greatly assisted the communities he served.
Rabbi Schweizer received in 1917 the Charlottenkreuz (“Charlotte Cross”), a decoration awarded to all persons who had acquired particular merit either in the field or at home in the care of the wounded and ill, or in the general area of war-related care provision.
As for Barbara Staudacher and Heinz Hogerle, noted Meir Schweizer, the two of them have received the Obermayer German-Jewish History Awards, which are given annually to individuals who have made outstanding voluntary contributions toward preserving and recording the Jewish history, heritage, culture and/or remnants of local German communities.