Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has appealed to citizens to never let up in remembering the Holocaust. “Jewish life in Germany is still threatened, even more so again,” said the Federal President at a ceremony to hand over the UNESCO World Heritage certificate for the so-called Schum sites in Rhineland-Palatinate. “Jews are defamed, insulted, threatened, even attacked.”
This is infinitely painful, unbearable and unacceptable, Steinmeier emphasized in front of around 150 guests in the New Synagogue in Mainz. “Jewish hostility must have no place in our country.”
Unesco World Heritage Site
The term Schum stands for the Rhineland-Palatinate cities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, which were centers of Jewish learning in the Middle Ages. The Judenhof in Speyer, the Worms synagogue district with the cemetery and the old Jewish cemetery in Mainz had already been declared the 50th UNESCO World Heritage Site in Germany in July 2021. Because of the pandemic, UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay handed over the certificate together with Steinmeier to Prime Minister Malu Dreyer (SPD).
Steinmeier emphasized that the rule of law must punish anti-Semitic crimes with the utmost severity. He appealed to citizens to resist any form of anti-Semitism. “All of us in the state, politics and society must work together to ensure that Jews can feel completely at home in Germany,” Steinmeier demanded. “Our responsibility knows no bounds.” This is “the lesson from our history”. Before the ceremony, Steinmeier visited the “Heiliger Sand” Jewish cemetery in Worms, as well as the synagogue district and the Rashi House with a vaulted cellar from the 12th/13th centuries. Century visited.
Memory must not fade
“In order to protect Jewish life now and in the future, we have to keep the memory of its history alive,” said Steinmeier. In doing so, ruptures and contradictions as well as light and dark sides must be taken into account. “We must never let up on remembering the Shoah,” emphasized Steinmeier. “We need lively places of remembrance to make it easier for young people in particular to understand what happened back then and how it could have happened.”
There is also a need for places of education and enlightenment, where the history of Jewish life can be experienced. “Places where knowledge and appreciation, tolerance and respect can grow.” Such places are the Schum sites. “That’s another reason why it’s very fortunate that it exists.” And that is also why it is so important that they are now world heritage. “The award sheds a bright light on the Jewish monuments and tombstones, making them visible far beyond Speyer, Worms and Mainz.”
Architectural monuments such as in Worms are reminiscent of the rich Jewish history in Germany, of a time when Judaism flourished in Germany and when Christians, Jews and people of other faiths lived together rather than side by side.
But they also reminded of the “dark sides of German history,” Steinmeier said. “Times in which Jews were discriminated against, persecuted and killed, up to and including National Socialist racial fanaticism after 1933”, when millions of Jews were murdered and Jewish life in Europe was almost completely wiped out.
