Shlomo Lewin

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Rabbi Shlomo Levin (autumn 1978)

Shlomo Lewin or Levin (born May 13, 1911 in Jerusalem ; died December 19, 1980 in Erlangen ) was a German publisher and rabbi . He was a representative of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation and an active anti-fascist . The neo-Nazi Uwe Behrendt , a member of the right-wing extremist military sports group Hoffmann (WSG), murdered Lewin and his partner Frida Poeschke in their home in Erlangen for anti-Semitic motives.

Life

Shlomo Lewin was born in Jerusalem as the son of Rabbi David Lewin and grew up in Germany. During the First World War , his father served as a field rabbi in the German army . He died of a war wound. After his death, his mother moved to Breslau with her children . Lewin attended secondary school there and then studied religious education in Breslau and Cologne . After graduating, he worked as a religion teacher in the Saar region and in the Jewish communities of Homburg and Waldmohr .

In 1933 Lewin married Lilly Hirsch, a daughter of the Homburg city councilor Leo Hirsch. In 1935 the National Socialists closed the local Jewish school. Lewin was briefly taken into protective custody and fled to Alsace . In order to be able to exercise the teaching post in France, he studied two semesters at the Sorbonne in Paris . At the end of 1938 he moved to the British Mandate Palestine . From the Second World War he joined the British Army in Palestine. After the war he fought in a unit of the Hagana until 1948 for the establishment of the state of Israel. He then co-founded the Geological Institute in Jerusalem and later headed the light industry department in the Israel Ministry of Commerce .

In 1960 Lewin returned to Germany and founded the Judaica publishing house Ner Tamid ("Eternal Light") with Hans Lamm , who headed the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Munich and Upper Bavaria . After moving to Frankfurt am Main , he managed the publishing house alone. In 1964 he moved to Erlangen and became chairman of the Israelite Religious Community in Nuremberg . There he met Frida Poeschke, the widow of the former Lord Mayor of Erlangen, Michael Poeschke . She became his partner, who supported him with the publishing work and, as a Protestant Christian, worked with him for the Judeo-Christian dialoguecommitted. From 1975 until his death in 1980 Lewin led the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Franconia . In it he campaigned for reconciliation between Jews and Christians and campaigned for understanding for Judaism . Since 1978 he has organized the annual “ Week of Fraternity ” in Erlangen.

In 1976 he received the Federal Republic of Germany's Cross of Merit 1st Class for his services to Jewish life in Germany. In 1977 Lewin participated as rabbi of the Nuremberg religious community in the anti-fascist action alliance , which had been founded against a planned meeting of Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis in Nuremberg. On August 6, 1977, the day of that meeting, Lewin gave the main speech at an alliance protest rally in Nuremberg. In it he warned urgently against right-wing extremism in the Federal Republic of Germany and called for broad social solidarity against it.

assassination

On December 19, 1980, a Friday around 7:00 p.m., the neo-Nazi Uwe Behrendt shot Shlomo Lewin and Frida Poeschke in their house at Ebrardstrasse 20 in Erlangen. He shot her torso three times each and then executed those who had fallen to the ground with a targeted headshot . He left a pair of sunglasses at the crime scene that had been made in Heroldsberg , the former residence of the neo-Nazi Karl-Heinz Hoffmann . However, the investigators looked for the perpetrator or perpetrators for five months in the vicinity of the victim Lewin. At the beginning, they passed on alleged inconsistencies in his biography to the media. On December 22, 1980, the Nürnberger Nachrichten claimed without any evidence that Lewin had turned out to be “personal adjutantDajans ”issued. There are rumors that he was a "sideline" employee of the Israeli secret service Mossad . On December 23, the Nürnberger Zeitung claimed that an unnamed former Mossad agent had denied Lewin's work as an agent, and suggested a felicitous murder by agents . The author also referred to Israeli newspaper articles that Lewin called "impostors" and thus in turn followed the French newspaper Le Monde . The German police had told her that Lewin had passed himself off as Dajan's adjutant in the 1973 Yom Kippur War . In fact, Lewin only got involved in the Palestine WarParticipated in 1948 and never mentioned the Yom Kippur War biographically. No media report referred to Lewin's public appearance against neo-Nazis, namely the WSG, from which the perpetrator came. The chief public prosecutor in charge of the investigation, Rudolf Brunner, referred to Lewin's allegedly “colorful résumé” and had his cellar searched, as it was assumed that he had “collected or kept compromising material” there in order to blackmail other Jews. Brunner hoped that this would provide “valuable information about the possible group of perpetrators”. It turned out, however, that Lewin had used his archive exclusively for the operation of his publishing house.

Immediately after his murder, the police and media discredited Lewin, steered the investigation in the wrong direction and damaged social solidarity with the Jewish victim of a right-wing extremist murder. It was not until May 1981 that the investigators asked the manufacturer of the sunglasses about buyers and found that they had belonged to Hoffmann's friend Franziska Birkmann. By then, Behrendt had left Germany and could no longer be asked about the motives for the crime, accomplices and the selection of victims. As a result, Hoffmann was not involved in the murder. the judgment followed his own statements. After the Nuremberg Regional Court acquitted Hoffmann of complicity and established Behrendt as the sole perpetrator, Hans-Wolfgang Sternsdorff commented in the magazine Der SpiegelHow these “deficiencies in the investigation” prevented the investigation of the motives for the crime: “It appears as if the investigators in this murder case were blinded. For months the police were not looking for the Lewin murderer in the spectrum from the far right, but among members of the Jewish community. "

After this crime, the establishment of the Israelite religious community in Erlangen failed to materialize. To date, the offense has not been fully clarified, among other things because the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution refuses to release files, since inspection of these documents would endanger “the well-being of the Federal Republic of Germany”.

The lawyer Ronen Steinke compared the investigative methods and priorities of the authorities at the time with the "terrible treatment of the investigators with the victims of the neo-Nazi gang" National Socialist Underground (NSU). In both cases, the investigators suspected above all the victims and their surroundings and portrayed the murdered as people "who had been overtaken by their alleged dark secrets". In Nuremberg in particular, where three of the NSU murders took place, the authorities, he concluded, could have drawn the right lessons and conclusions from the Lewin case.

Commemoration

Street sign at the Lewin-Poeschke facility in Erlangen

On December 15, 2010, a green area at the Erlangen town hall, near the crime scene, was renamed Lewin-Poeschke-Anlage to commemorate the double murder. Nothing at the Erlangen school reminds of the former teacher.

The inscription on Lewin's tombstone in Haifa reads: “This is where our dear Rabbi Shlomo Salman Lewin, son of Rabbi David Eliahu, rests, murdered by the hands of villains. God will avenge his blood ”.

Audios

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Greetings from the Lord Mayor in memory of Shlomo Lewin and Frida Poeschke, murdered on December 19, 1980 in Erlangen. City of Erlangen, December 19, 2010
  2. ↑ a b Christine Maack: An honor would be appropriate. Saarbrücker Zeitung, February 6, 2014
  3. ↑ Ulrich Chaussy: The Oktoberfest attack and the double murder of Erlangen , Berlin 2020, pp. 269–271
  4. ↑ a b Ulrich Chaussy: The Oktoberfest attack and the double murder of Erlangen , Berlin 2020, pp. 253-257; Ronen Steinke: Terror against Jews. How anti-Semitic violence grows and the state fails. 2nd edition, Berlin Verlag, Berlin / Munich 2020, p. 11 f.
  5. ↑ Ronen Steinke: Terror against Jews. How anti-Semitic violence grows and the state fails. 2nd edition, Berlin Verlag, Berlin / Munich 2020, p. 11 f.
  6. ↑ Hans-Wolfgang Sternsdorff: "Boss, I shot the chairman". Der Spiegel, November 9, 1984
  7. ^ Matthias Quent, Jan Rathje: From the Turner Diaries via Breivik to the NSU: Anti-Semitism and right-wing terrorism. In: Samuel Salzborn (Ed.): Anti-Semitism since 9/11. Events, debates, controversies. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2019, ISBN 978-3-8487-5417-5 , p. 165
  8. ↑ Ronen Steinke: Terror against Jews , Berlin / Munich 2020, p. 12 f.
  9. ^ A b Egbert M. Reinhold: Lewin-Poeschke-Anlage reminds of murder victims. Erlanger Nachrichten , December 15, 2010
personal data
SURNAME Lewin, Shlomo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Levin, Shlomo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher, rabbi
DATE OF BIRTH May 13, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Jerusalem
DATE OF DEATH December 19, 1980
Place of death gain