Alexander Ginsburg (General Secretary)

Alexander Ginsburg (born June 22, 1915 in Dvinsk , Russian Empire ; died January 5, 1996 in Cologne ) was a German lawyer and a functionary of the Jewish community.

Life

Ginsburg came from a Hasidic family and graduated from Riga University in 1940 with a law degree. He was a leading member of Betar , the Zionist revisionist movement in Latvia . After the German invasion he was a prisoner in the Riga ghetto from 1941 to 1943 and then until 1945 in the Kaiserwald concentration camps in the urban area of ​​Riga, Stutthof near Danzig and Buchenwald . His father, brother and many relatives were murdered by the SS . In 1946, Ginsburg fled to the West from the Soviet zone in Germany . From 1948 to 1973 he was entrusted in the public service of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with questions of reparation for Nazi injustice. From 1960 to 1988 he was an honorary board member at the head of the Cologne synagogue community and made a name for himself in national and international Jewish committees. From 1973 to 1988 he was the full-time general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany . The focus of his work was the strengthening of Jewish educational institutions and youth and cultural work as well as the completion of material compensation for Jewish individuals and institutions by the Federal Government. In 1988, after the death of the chairman of the Central Council, Werner Nachmann , it turned out that he had embezzled interest income from reparation money that had not been spent until then . Jewish community officials suspected Ginsburg of complicity in the irregularities and forced him to resign. Despite corresponding informal efforts on the part of the Central Council, the Karlsruhe public prosecutor's office investigating the deceased Nachmann saw no reason to investigate Ginsburg.

Grave of Alexander Ginsburg

Alexander Ginsburg was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Cologne-Bocklemünd .

Honors

Ginsburg was awarded the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia on September 18, 1986 .

literature

• Hans Jakob Ginsburg: The lifesaver. About Alexander Ginsburg. In: Oeming, Manfred and Liss, Hanna, Jews in the Federal Republic of Germany - Documentations and Analyzes (= Trumah , Volume 14), Heidelberg 2005 ISBN 3-8253-1561-4 , pp. 13–36.

Web links

• Synagogue Community Cologne / June 2005 (PDF; 967 kB), p. 24

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Press releases of the SPD: 1958 - 1998
2. ^ Library of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation
3. ↑ cf. Ginsburg, Lebensretter, p. 57
4. ↑ cf. Ginsburg, Lebensretter, p. 62
5. ↑ Merit holders since 1986. State Chancellery of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, accessed on March 11, 2017 .