Eugene Gollomb

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Eugen Gollomb (born January 19, 1917 in Breslau ; † January 10, 1988 in Leipzig ) was chairman of the Israelite religious community in Leipzig from 1967 to 1988. Since 1978 he has been one of the initiators of the Christian-Jewish dialogue in Saxony.

Live and act

The son of the strictly religious Jewish couple David and Sarah Gollomb, née Neufeld, attended elementary and Jewish middle school and from 1930 to 1932 the rabbinical seminary in Lublin . Eugen Gollomb then worked in his parents' jersey company before serving in the Polish military for two years in 1936 . He married in 1938 and in the same year opened a bicycle shop in Wroclaw, where he worked until the outbreak of World War II .

In September 1939 Gollomb was drafted into the Polish army. However, after a few days he was taken prisoner by Germany , from which he was released in February 1940. In April 1940 Eugen Gollomb began his ordeal as a forced laborer through five different concentration camps before he was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1943 . From there he came to the mother camp in November 1943 , from which he was transferred to the Schwientochlowitz branch in early 1944 , where he remained until his successful escape in August 1944.

Eugen Gollomb then succeeded in joining a troop of Polish, Russian and Czech partisans who first fought against the German occupiers alongside the Polish national army and later with the Polish people's army . After the end of the war he was taken over by the 1st Polish Army, which commissioned him as a first lieutenant to monitor a section of the border on the Lusatian Neisse . Although Gollomb experienced many horrific things in the concentration camps and had lost 70 relatives - including his first wife and son - as victims of the Holocaust , he forbade the Polish soldiers to take revenge on the German civilian population. This led to serious conflicts with his subordinates, who eventually carried out an assassination attempt on him. Because of this, Gollomb was demobilized on May 26, 1946.

He then worked as a travel agent in Hirschberg . There he met 18-year-old Ingeborg Stahr, who, as a member of the German minority , was emigrated to Leipzig in December 1946, where he followed her in early 1947. They married that same year and had a daughter in 1949. Also in 1949, Eugen Gollomb began self-employed to set up a recruiting company that offered 17 types of services and gained a monopoly in Leipzig. He managed to organize the maintenance of the exhibition halls in Leipzig. In 1950 he received citizenship of the GDR , of which he was not proud, since he always saw himself as a Jew and identified himself neither as a Pole nor as a German.

As a result of the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, Eugen Gollomb returned to the Jewish faith he had lost in the Second World War . He joined the Israelite Religious Community in Leipzig, where he rose to the board in 1954 and was elected chairman in 1967. He held this office until his death in 1988. As a functionary he openly opposed the state-enacted hostility towards Israel in the GDR, for example in 1972 he refused to sign a resolution against the State of Israel. Eugen Gollomb also fought against the anti-Semitism of the SED functionaries hidden behind the facade of anti-Zionism. He never joined the SED and therefore often had to endure arbitrary state acts - such as the withdrawal of the status of a fighter against fascism - and was monitored for years by unofficial employees of the Ministry for State Security , who slandered him as a dangerous Zionist .

In 1977 he was allowed to visit Israel for the first time. At this point, Eugen Gollomb was no longer a healthy man. In 1961 doctors had diagnosed him with severe cancer, in 1968 he became an invalid, and in 1974 he had to quit his professional activity due to illness. Nevertheless, from 1978 until his death, the seriously ill man - together with the Protestant pastor Siegfried Theodor Arndt , the chairman of the working group “Church and Judaism” - campaigned for Christian-Jewish dialogue with the aim of reconciling Christians and Jews . Eugen Gollomb died on January 10, 1988 in Leipzig, followed by Aron Adlerstein (1913–2000) as chairman of the Israelite religious community in Leipzig.

“ He was one of the most pleasant figures of Judaism in the GDR, straightforward, incorruptible, a thoroughbred Jew. And to be a Jew meant to him to be a fighter. He wasn't just the center of his church, he was the church. "

- Obituary in the “Allgemeine Jewish Wochenzeitung”, Bonn, November 12, 1988

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut Eschwege : Strange among my own kind. Memories of a Dresden Jew. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-861-53023-6 , p. 166.
  2. ↑ Aron Adlerstein at leipzig-lexikon.de
personal data
SURNAME Gollomb, Eugene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chairman of the Israelite religious community in Leipzig
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH January 10, 1988
Place of death Leipzig