Josef Schuster (President of the Central Council)

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Josef Schuster (born March 20, 1954 in Haifa , Israel ) is a German internist and has been President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (ZdJ) since November 2014 . Schuster is also Vice President of the World Jewish Congress and the European Jewish Congress .

origin

The Josef Schusters family has been based in Lower Franconia since the mid-16th century at the latest . Schuster is the son of the businessman and association official David Schuster . David and his father, the merchant Julius Schuster, ran the Centralhotel in Bad Brückenau . This was confiscated by the local NSDAP in 1933 . In 1937 Julius and David were arrested and imprisoned in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. After they were released and ordered to leave Germany , they emigrated to Palestine , where David worked as an employee of a construction company. Josef Schuster's mother Anita Susanna Grünpeter was born on November 14, 1914 in Laurahütte in Upper Silesia . Her mother, born Hedwig Kosderlitz on June 26, 1884, and her father Fritz Grünpeter, born on October 18, 1876, lived in Gleiwitz until 1942 and were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp . Anita Susanna Grünpeter and David Schuster married in 1953. After Josef Schuster was born in 1954, the family moved to Germany in 1956.

Medical profession

Schuster put the Abitur at the X-Gymnasium Würzburg off ended in Wurzburg also a study of human medicine , was graduated and completed his residency training at the Julius Hospital . He has been running his own practice for internal medicine since 1988 and is an emergency doctor . He is also involved as a doctor with the German Red Cross and in the water rescue service . Schuster is also a member of the Bioethics Commission of the Bavarian State Government and the Central Ethics Commission of the German Medical Association . In order to have more time for his work as Central Council President, Schuster handed over his Würzburg practice to a successor on June 30, 2020 after more than 32 years. However, he continues his emergency medical service in the region - one night every two weeks.

Functions in Jewish associations and political positions

Josef Schuster next to Charlotte Knobloch ; far left Nuremberg's Lord Mayor Ulrich Maly at the ceremony for the 50th anniversary of German-Israeli diplomatic relations on May 17, 2015 in the historic town hall in Nuremberg

In 1998 Schuster was elected chairman of the Jewish community in Würzburg , an office that his father had already held from 1958 to 1996. In 2002 he was elected President of the Bavarian State Association of Israelite Religious Communities and in 2010 as Vice President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. At the end of October 2014, the ZdJ announced that Dieter Graumann would resign as President after a four-year term and that Schuster would be his successor. Graumann supported Schuster's candidacy, who was elected president on November 30th.

In February 2015, after the attacks in Paris and Copenhagen , Schuster emphasized that he currently saw “no reason why Jews should leave Germany”. Jewish life in Germany is still possible. Chancellor Angela Merkel had previously shown her gratitude for Jewish life in Germany. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called on Jews living in Europe to emigrate.

In the debate about the high number of refugees and asylum seekers , Schuster spoke out in favor of upper limits as a necessity in November 2015: “Sooner or later we will not get around upper limits”; he justified this with the increasing difficulty of “communicating our values”. He wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel: “Many of the refugees are fleeing the terror of the Islamic State and want to live in peace and freedom, but at the same time they come from cultures in which hatred of Jews and intolerance are an integral part. Don't just think of the Jews, think of the equality of women and men or the treatment of homosexuals . ”In a clarifying statement, with which Schuster responded to the criticism of various politicians of his demand, he avoided the word upper limit. At the same time, Schuster described it as pure calculation when right-wing populist circles place the problem of anti-Semitism primarily in refugees.

In April 2018, Schuster saw the "trust in statements by high dignitaries of the Catholic Church shaken". The reason was the ordination of a man in the diocese of Eichstätt (who had already been ordained a deacon there a year earlier), who had to leave the Würzburg seminary in 2013 because of anti-Semitic and racist statements. Above all, Schuster criticized the fact that this decision had not included the same ecclesiastical commission that had confirmed the candidate's lack of maturity for the priesthood in 2013.

In August 2018, Schuster criticized the AfD's stance on the memory of the Holocaust and accused the party leadership of a lack of clear distancing from the Thuringian parliamentary group leader Björn Höcke , who had called for a 180-degree turn in the German culture of remembrance. Schuster asked the question "to what extent [the AfD leadership] stands on the ground of German democracy". The end of the same month introduced Schuster said: ". For electoral success is the AFD any means, even if this means the dignity of the victims of National Socialism is trampled apparently" was prompted by the persistent failure of a guided tour of the concentration camp memorial Sachsenhausen by five to six People from a group of 17 visitors who had been invited by the AfD parliamentary group leader Alice Weidel at the expense of the Federal Press Office from their constituency on Lake Constance. The Brandenburg Memorials Foundation observed "manifestly right-wing and historical revisionist attitudes and argumentation strategies" among the disruptors from the AfD visitor group , and the existence of gas chambers was also called into question. Schuster said that AfD top politicians had put the Nazi era into perspective several times in their statements and aimed at “winning such citizens as supporters, like those in the visitor group”. According to Schuster, the AfD's policy is "to create a social climate in which minorities mistrust and defend themselves".

At the end of April 2018, Schuster said at a rally in Berlin on the occasion of an anti-Semitic attack in the Prenzlauer Berg district that Jews in Germany are confronted with anti-Semitism every day and called for an end to tolerance for those who oppose the constitutionally established rules of the game. He added: “We have settled in far too comfortably in Germany. A bit of anti-Semitism, a bit of racism , a bit of hostility to Islam - isn't it all that bad? Yes, it is bad. That's why I demand 100 percent respect. "

On November 25, 2018, Schuster was unanimously re-elected as president by the council meeting of the Central Council of Jews in Germany in Frankfurt am Main.

In December 2019, Schuster said that he saw “a very significant deficit in the judiciary” in the prosecution of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany. Sometimes one seems to be looking for "downright mitigating reasons". In school, Jews should not only be reduced to the Holocaust , but it is important to “convey values ​​and knowledge about Judaism”, since “Jews have lived in Germany for 1,700 years and are part of German culture”. Schuster drew a parallel to climate change with regard to the need to strive for awareness-raising in society in the fight against anti-Semitism: Even in the “Vor Greta-Thunberg times”, the topic of climate change was not on the agenda as it is today. With regard to Jews who join the AfD , since this party positions itself against Muslims, Schuster said: “The enemy of my enemy is by no means my friend. And I refuse to generally see Muslims as enemies of Jews. "

Fonts

Awards

literature

  • Caroline Mayer: "I wish normality for the Jewish communities in Germany", in: KVB-Forum , No. 11, 2012, pp. 26-27, online ( memento of December 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (2 pages pdf )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ President. Central Council of Jews, accessed March 10, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Schuster, David, in: Reiner Strätz: Biographisches Handbuch Würzburger Juden 1900-1945 , p. 527, digitized version ( Memento from June 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Memorial sheet for Hedwig Grünpeter, b. Kosderlitz, Yad Vashem, digitized
  4. ↑ Memorial sheet for Fritz Grünpeter, Yad Vashem, digitized
  5. ^ Roland Röhrich, Winfried Stadtmüller: Annual report 1971/72. Röntgen-Gymnasium Würzburg, Würzburg 1972, p. 39.
  6. ^ President . In: Central Council of Jews . November 18, 2017 ( Zentralratderjuden.de [accessed January 15, 2018]).
  7. ↑ Central Council President Schuster withdraws from his practice www.aerztezeitung.de, June 17, 2020
  8. ↑ Josef Schuster closes his medical practice in Würzburg www.br.de, June 25, 2020
  9. ↑ Change at the top: Graumann withdraws from the Central Council of Jews , Spiegel Online , October 31, 2014
  10. ↑ Central Council of Jews receives new president , Zeit Online , November 30, 2014. Accessed November 30, 2014.
  11. ^ Anti-Semitic acts in Europe. "Fear not a reason for emigration" ( Memento from February 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Tagesschau.de, accessed on February 17, 2015
  12. ↑ welt.de , accessed on Nov. 25, 2015
  13. ^ Matthias Meisner: Central Council of Jews calls for upper limits. www.tagesspiegel.de, November 24, 2015
  14. ↑ Oliver Cyrus: Austria also needs representatives for anti-Semitism. diepresse.com, January 31, 2018
  15. ↑ Dietrich Mittler: Central Council criticizes ordination of a priest. www.sueddeutsche.de, April 20, 2018
  16. ↑ Central Council of Jews criticizes the AfD's attitude towards the Holocaust. www.spiegel.de, August 20, 2018
  17. ↑ Alexander Fröhlich, Matthias Meisner: After a scandal in the concentration camp memorial: "For electoral success the AfD is apparently every means right" www.tagesspiegel.de, August 31, 2018
  18. ↑ Josef Schuster: Jews and Muslims have to talk to each other. www.sueddeutsche.de, May 31, 2019
  19. ↑ Demos against anti-Semitism: "The Jews in Germany have had enough" www.tagesschau.de, April 26, 2018
  20. ^ Josef Schuster re-elected as President of the Central Council Tagesspiegel.de, November 25, 2018
  21. ↑ Josef Schuster: "The judiciary has poor eyesight in the right eye." Www.zeit.de, December 13, 2019
  22. ^ Community day: Josef Schuster emphasizes connection to Germany. www.juedische-Allgemeine, December 19, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Schuster, Josef
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schuster, Josef Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German internist and association official
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Haifa , Israel