A new central archive was opened in Heidelberg on Tuesday to document Jewish life in Germany after 1945.
“The Central Archives hold a treasure, the memory of the Jewish communities,” said Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Science Minister Theresia Bauer (Greens) took part in the ceremony for the green-black state government of Baden-Württemberg.
"I am glad that there is now a modern archive for documenting Jewish life in Germany, in which the archival material can be safely stored and also digitized," said Bauer of the FAZ The new location in the Landfried complex near the Heidelberg Bahnhofs is well chosen because Jewish life in Germany is "visible" in a lively quarter.
Rudiger Soldt
Political correspondent in Baden-Württemberg.
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The archive was founded in 1987 after the then Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU), at a commemoration ceremony for the liberation of the concentration camps, had promised to support the project that the Central Council had been asking for for years.
In the past few decades, the archive material was partly housed in the building of the University for Jewish Studies and partly in a satellite warehouse in the small town of Eppelheim.
2355 running meters of files accommodated
The archival materials are documents that have been handed in by the Jewish communities, as well as the estates of Jewish writers, scientists, artists and private individuals. The archive contains reports from survivors of the Holocaust, death certificates, books from private libraries, letters from Jewish soldiers from the First World War, files on the state of health of Holocaust survivors in the years after 1945, reports from the board of directors of Jewish communities and files from Jewish student associations, the headquarters Welfare office and of course the Central Council. The legacies of authors and writers such as Joseph Wulf and Barbara Honigmann can also be found in the Heidelberg archive, which is housed in a former tobacco factory.
The archive is financed with funds from the Federal Ministry of the Interior and administered by the Central Council.
At the opening, Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) was represented at short notice by State Secretary Anne Katrin Bohle.
The collection will be helpful to all historians researching Jewish life in the Federal Republic of Germany in the first post-war years.
There are currently 15 employees working in the archive; 2355 running meters of files are stored there.
The director of the archive, Ittai Joseph Tamari, said on Tuesday that the facility was "the memory of Jewish existence" in Germany.
"How it was possible to develop Jewish life in Germany from nothing again - that is reflected in the inventory of this institution."
From 1905 to 1938, the Jewish communities delivered their documents to the general archive of German Jews, the National Socialists confiscated the files and primarily used the personal data for "parentage research" and for persecuting Jewish citizens. For example, the Reichssippenamt in Berlin collected the highly sensitive family status files from the disbanded general archive. Parts of the archive ended up in Russia, the United States and France as a result of the war.