Elija Boßler
Elija Boßler OCD , birth name Elisabeth Boßler , (* 1943 in Paderborn ) is a German Carmelite woman , writer and photographer in the Karmel Heilig Blut in Dachau .
Life
After a commercial apprenticeship and work as a directrice in Munich, Elisabeth Boßler entered the Karmel Heilig Blut in Dachau in February 1966, where she took the religious name Elijah to dress in August of the same year .
The Carmel, founded in 1964 by Carmelites from the Carmel St. Joseph in Bonn-Pützchen, had only existed for two years at that time. The founding priority, Sr. Maria-Theresia of the Crucified Love, wanted to build a place of atonement and reconciliation in a place of violence and horror.
Sr. Elijah became known to a larger group of people through her photographic work since the mid-1980s, which partly deals with the lives of the Carmelites and partly with the survivors of concentration camps. In the Dachau concentration camp, these included survivors of the so-called “ priestly block ” and the resistance, as well as the writer and painter Max Mannheimer , with whom she had a long-standing friendship. From the works of Sr. Elijas, exhibitions on the life and work of St. Teresa von Avila (on the 400th anniversary of her death in 1981/82) and in 2015 (on her 500th birthday) as well as the special exhibition Capturing Survival in 2013 at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. This showed around 100 black and white portraits of survivors of the concentration camps, which were created in Dachau over a period of around 20 years.
From 1982 to 1984 Sister Elijah lived with some of her fellow sisters in Berlin to help establish the new founding of the Carmel Regina Martyrum through the sisters of the Carmel Holy Blood; At the time of the establishment in 1984, Sr. Elija returned to the Dachau Carmel. In addition to working in the in-house workshops, Sr. Elija also provides spiritual guidance.
From 2007 to 2010, at the request of Friedrich Cardinal Wetter, she headed the convent of the Franciscan convent in Reutberg near Bad Tölz as superior, as the convent did not have a suitable sister for the office, and was therefore from convent life and the provisions on the cloister of Carmel for this time delivered.
Publications
- Traces of light in the monastery garden , Echter, 1990
- Carmel: way into interiors. Insights into the life and spirituality of Discalced Carmelites (with Veronika Elisabeth Schmitt OCD), Echter, 1994
- Basic course in Ingnatian spirituality with works by Maxfallen (illustrations), EOS Verlag, 1992
- Against forgetting (with Monika Huber and Klaus Kinold), 2008
- Stay where others go - live where others died (with Sr. Johanna Kuric OCD), in: Ordenskorrespondenz 54 (2013) , pp. 327–338
Movies
- Dachauer Dialoge - Max Mannheimer in conversation with Sr. Elija Boßler , recorded in October 2015 in the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial and in the Karmel Heilig Blut, clips on Youtube Director: Marina Maisel, Michael Bernstein on behalf of the Bavarian Memorials Foundation
Web links
- Photo portraits by Elija Bossler , Comité International de Dachau
- The nun who saved a monastery , Münchner Merkur, March 23, 2011
Individual evidence
- ↑ https://www.orden.de/aktuelles/meldung/?tx_ignews_newsdetail%5Bnews%5D=1840&tx_ignews_newsdetail%5Baction%5D=show&tx_ignews_newsdetail%5Bcontroller%5D=News&cHash=0745f18c053116f865ca
- ↑ https://www.orden.de/aktuelles/meldung/?tx_ignews_newsdetail%5Bnews%5D=776&tx_ignews_newsdetail%5Baction%5D=show&tx_ignews_newsdetail%5Bcontroller%5D=News&cHash=877077fbbcf50223bd7251251
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bossler, Elija |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Boßler, Elisabeth (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German Discalced Carmelite, photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1943 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paderborn |