Kurt Neuwald

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Memorial plaque for Kurt Neuwald on the place named after him in Gelsenkirchen

Kurt Neuwald (born November 23, 1906 in Gelsenkirchen ; died February 6, 2001 there ) was a Gelsenkirchen entrepreneur and co-founder and chairman of the regional association of Jewish communities in Westphalia-Lippe , a founding member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and long-time chairman of nach The Jewish community in Gelsenkirchen built up during the Holocaust with his help .

Life

origin

Kurt Neuwald came from a Jewish family established in Gelsenkirchen. His grandfather, Isaak Neuwald, ran a pawn shop in the city and founded the future family business in 1880, a specialty bedding shop at Arminstrasse 15 in Gelsenkirchen's old town . Leopold Neuwald, Kurt's father, was born in 1877. He served as a soldier in the First World War and took over the textile business as the sole owner after the death of his grandfather in February 1923. Mother Martha Heimann's family came from Hamm in Westphalia.

Kurt, who had two older siblings and a younger brother, did a commercial apprenticeship after attending the municipal high school in Bulmke and then joined his parents' company as managing director, of which he later became a co-owner. Before 1933, the company was the only bed shop in Gelsenkirchen and had around 30 employees and branches in Essen and Wattenscheid .

Chase time

After the seizure of power of the Nazis , the economic survival of the family has been gradually destroyed by the boycott called the business and the employees pressed not to work for the Jewish company. Kurt's parents did not want to emigrate and the family, which had no relatives abroad, hoped in vain that things would improve. During the pogrom night in November 1938 , the business was devastated and had to be given up afterwards. The family had to sell their house and other property below their value and the house was converted into a so-called Jewish house, into which other Jewish families were forcibly assigned. In the years that followed, the sons did hardly any paid forced labor in the Ruhr mining industry or on civil engineering sites .

On March 7, 1939, Kurt Neuwald married Rosa Stern, who came from Essen .

On January 27, 1942, Neuwald and his family were deported to the Riga Ghetto with the first of the three large deportations of Jews from Gelsenkirchen . There he worked for a while for the army vehicle park and, according to his own reports, met a former employee from his father's shop, who had meanwhile become an SS man and one opportunity brought him potatoes to the warehouse. After the ghetto was dissolved, he was sent to various concentration camps and was liberated in 1945 from a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp near a munitions factory in Magdeburg . Together with his brother Ernst, he managed to hide in the last three days before the arrival of the Americans , with which both of them avoided the death march , which killed many fellow prisoners.

Of the 26 abducted family members, 24 were murdered, including his wife. Apart from Kurt Neuwald, only the youngest brother Ernst survived the Holocaust.

Reconstruction, functions and commitment

New building from the 1960s, in which the main business of the Neuwald company was located.

Kurt Neuwald returned to his hometown in April 1945 and was one of the 60 or so surviving returnees of what were formerly over 1600 Gelsenkirchen Jews. A group from this group, including his brother Ernst, founded a Jewish aid committee in 1945, which successfully sought support from Gelsenkirchen Jews who had emigrated from the USA. On January 27, 1946, Kurt Neuwald was one of the three founders of the State Association of the Jewish Communities of Westphalia-Lippe, of which he has been a member since then. As a co-founder of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, he was elected to the board of directors, of which he was a member until 1994, when the institution was relocated to Düsseldorf . Within a few years, the Gelsenkirchen Aid Committee emerged into the Gelsenkirchen Jewish Community, which was recognized as a public corporation in 1953 and which Kurt Neuwald took over as the successor to the founding chairman Robert Jessel for almost four decades from 1956. In 1958 the first prayer house of the community was inaugurated on the ground floor of a private house in Von-der-Recke-Straße. From 1963 to 1994 Neuwald was chairman of the state association of Westphalia-Lippe and then became its honorary chairman .

On August 31, 1947 he married Cornelia Basch (1921–1969), a Romanian-Hungarian Jew who had been imprisoned as a forced laborer in the Gelsenberg camp at the hydrogenation plant in Gelsenkirchen-Horst , and together with her they built the bed shop that was his family's ancestral Headquarters in Arminstrasse open again. The couple had two daughters in 1948 and 1959. In 1962 the business moved to a larger new building two houses down at Arminstrasse 11. After the death of his second wife on January 5, 1969, Kurt Neuwald withdrew from the "Betten Neuwald" company and leased the business. Since that time he has been involved in supporting children's cancer charities in Israel .

In the Central Council of Jews in Germany he was finance director from 1969 to 1982 and from 1973 to 1976 he was co-editor of the Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung . Neuwald was considered a financial expert and an accurate administrator. Until 1989 he was the head of the Jewish Community Fund in Northwest Germany. In all of his functions, Kurt Neuwald campaigned for reconciliation between the Jewish and non-Jewish population. In Gelsenkirchen, in the last few years of his community leadership, he made particular efforts to integrate the numerous Jewish emigrants from the former Soviet Union, who have increasingly settled in the city since 1990 and who have a strong influence on the Jewish community today.

personality

A year before his death, he celebrated his granddaughter's batmizvah . It had been his dearest wish to see her again. In contrast to many Jewish returnees, Kurt Neuwald had never 'sat on packed suitcases' according to the testimonies of those around him. He was determined from the start to stay in his homeland and has always taken the position: "Hitler should not get justice in retrospect by making Germany 'Jew-free'."

“Like hardly any other community functionary, the thin, thin man from the Ruhr area gave the post-war community of Gelsenkirchen and the post-war Jewish community a face” ( Jüdische Allgemeine ).

Honors

Kurt Neuwald in 1994 on his 88th birthday in the presence of a long friend of his, former North Rhine-Westphalian Minister President Johannes Rau to the honorary citizen of the city of Gelsenkirchen appointed. On March 17, 1999 he received the Federal Cross of Merit with a star . Neuwald had already been awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, in 1958, received the Grand Cross of Merit of the award in 1978 and the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1986 .

Commemoration, inheritance, miscellaneous

Posthumous honors

On July 7, 2005, Mayor Frank Baranowski inaugurated a memorial plaque for Kurt Neuwald on Kurt-Neuwald-Platz in Gelsenkirchen, which was also named after him and is within sight of the family's former business on Arminstraße. In autumn 2011, the community hall of the new Gelsenkirchen synagogue, which was inaugurated in 2007, was named after Kurt Neuwald.

Estate and family

After his father Leopold Neuwald, who was murdered in 1944, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the pogrom night on November 9, 1988, a square in the city center of Gelsenkirchen near the music theater was named.

On the 100th birthday of Kurt Neuwald in 2006, his daughters handed over his estate to the Gelsenkirchen Institute for City History ( city ​​archive ) for safekeeping and scientific analysis.

His daughter Judith Neuwald-Tasbach was elected chairwoman of the Gelsenkirchen Jewish community in May 2007.

Web links

Literature and Sources

  • Inventory of the estate of Kurt Neuwald at the Institute for City History / City Archives Gelsenkirchen: Estate Kurt Neuwald (inventory Na 56) ( Memento from March 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 260 kB), edited by Annett Fercho (with a short biography in the introduction ), Gelsenkirchen 2007.
  • Stefan Goch: Jewish life - persecution - murder - survival: Former Jewish citizens of Gelsenkirchen remember (series of publications materials of the Institute for City History, Volume 8). Klartext Verlag, Essen 2004, pp. 98-101 (contains a short biography and personal memories of Kurt Neuwald).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Information board of the city of Gelsenkirchen at the New Synagogue (2007).
  2. ^ Andreas Jordan: Unforgotten - Leo Gompertz, Jewish activist (1887-1968). Online publication, Gelsenkirchen April 2010.
  3. ↑ Anke Klapsing-Reich: Jewish communities in Westphalia (PDF; 783 kB) (series of publications by the Jewish Museum Westphalia , issue 3), Dorsten 2007, pp. 16-18.
  4. ↑ Susanne Abeck: Diversity shapes. There would be no Ruhr area without immigration. In: Metropole Ruhr ( RVR ), issue 2/2006 ( Memento from August 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 5.4 MB), pp. 6–10 (here: p. 9).
  5. ^ Heide Sobotka: Kurt Neuwald: Forever role model. Memories on the hundredth birthday of Kurt Neuwald. Appreciation in the Jüdische Allgemeine from November 23, 2006, accessed on September 2, 2016.
  6. ↑ Johannes Rau: Laudation for Paul Spiegel at the award of the Heinrich Albertz Peace Prize , speech by the Federal President, given in Berlin on June 13, 2001; Retrieved from the website of the Office of the Federal President on August 27, 2016.
  7. ↑ Inauguration of the memorial plaque for Kurt Neuwald ( memento from August 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) , message on the website of the city of Gelsenkirchen from July 7, 2005 (with the text of the speech given by Mayor Frank Baranowski on the same day), accessed on 27 August 2016.
  8. ^ Ludger Breitbach (Institute for City History / City Archives Gelsenkirchen): Historical traces on site - Gelsenkirchen under National Socialism. Klartext Verlag, Essen 1998, p. 60.
  9. ↑ Patricia König-Stach: Back to the hearts of people. Report in the WAZ from January 28, 2008; Zlatan Alihodzic: »Living Jewish Culture« Interview with Judith Neuwald-Tasbach about the new synagogue in the Jüdische Allgemeine from October 15, 2009; both accessed on August 28, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Neuwald, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chairman of the regional association of Jewish communities in Westphalia-Lippe
DATE OF BIRTH November 23, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Gelsenkirchen
DATE OF DEATH February 6, 2001
Place of death Gelsenkirchen