Since 1999, the Obermayer Foundation, founded by the German-Jewish Obermayer family, has counted among its projects the Obermayer Award. Given annually to non-Jewish Germans, the award singles out those who have made outstanding voluntary contributions to preserve the Jewish history, culture, cemeteries and synagogue in their German communities.

This year, St. Louisan Kent Hirschfelder, a prominent voice in Holocaust remembrance, spearheaded the successful nomination – by nearly a dozen people on three continents – of partners Barbara Staudacher and Heinz Högerle.

Growing up, Högerle, now a publisher, said he knew no Jews and had no information about Judaism. Staudacher is a retired bookseller. Both are in their sixties. In 1999, they relocated some 34 miles southwest from their home in Stuttgart, Germany, to the considerably quieter town of Rexingen.

At the top of a hill near their Rexingen residence, the couple found not only a Jewish cemetery with some 1,000 gravestones, but a sudden awareness of the town as a once vibrant Jewish community.

One result was study, research and eventually, Högerle’s 424-page book. Its title, translated from German, is “Carved in Stone: Tracing the Past at the Rexingen Jewish Cemetery.” For children as young as second graders, the couple has prepared a workbook about the cemetery.

Pastries and talk

At a coffee klatch in New York hosted two years ago by former Rexingen resident Hannah Zerndorfer, now in her mid-nineties, Hirschfelder first heard about Staudacher and Högerle. The 14 or so other guests had emigrated or had families emigrate from Rexingen.

Hirschfelder, who had read of the once fairly large concentration of Rexingenites in New York, had contacted Zerndorfer. She invited the others.

Hirschfelder’s own family traces its Rexingen roots to the 1750s. Although his grandfather relocated to Munich, where he raised his family, Hirschfelder’s father would spend summers with his cousins in Rexingen, where Kent Hirschfelder has now visited three times.

While devouring their hostesss’ homemade linzer tortes and other pastries, one coffee-klatch guest mentioned the remarkable work of Rexingen residents Staudacher and Högerle. Others talked about the Obermayer Award.

Hirschfelder, who had heard neither of the couple nor, like many Americans, of the award, was mesmerized. In 1933, he subsequently learned, 262 Jews lived in Rexingen. Five years later, as Nazi persecution mounted, about 40 left as a group for Palestine. There, they helped establish the community of Shavei Zion, which still exists.

According to information later included in Staudacher and Högerle’s winning Obermayer nomination, for which Hirschfelder solicited input from Israel, America and Germany, a group of former Rexingen residents, all living in Israel, visited Rexingen in 2001. Staudacher and Högerle reciprocated the next year.

As a follow-up, the couple created a Shavei Zion exhibit in Rexingen and published a book tracing the centuries-long history of Rexingen’s Jewish community, up to the founding of Shavei Zion.

Tears flowed

When the exhibit opened in 2008 in Rexingen, 20 people with roots in the town, representing four generations, attended. So did 600 local citizens. Staudacher and Högerle then took the Israeli visitors to their families’ gravesites and ancestral homes. At the latter, when the couple displayed poster-size photos of the former inhabitants, “No eyes were left dry,” wrote Israel Shapiro, of Haifa, Israel, in his nomination of Staudacher and Högerle for an Obermayer Award.

A total of six non-Jewish Germans received 2011 Obermayers, presented, in the presence of Hirschfelder and many of the nominators, in the venerable Berlin Parliament.

As part of a fraternity that has now grown to some 55 honorees, this year’s winners were singled out, in part, for making films about what it means for Jews to grow old in exile, for moving piece by piece and restoring a onetime synagogue that had become an equipment shed, helping rename a German high school after a former Jewish resident and creating lasting memorials about the Jewish experience.

Staudacher and Högerle’s efforts continue. Their Shavei Zion exhibit has traveled across Germany and to Israel. Along with working on a new museum in a former Jewish prayer room in nearby Horb, Germany, they wrote a book about the once thriving cattle industry in Rexingen, have arranged summer exchange programs for German and Israeli students, and encourage German educators to teach Jewish history. Also, German students presently help care for Rexingen’s Jewish cemetery.

Hirschfelder, who for the sixth time is chairing the Yom HaShoah Committee here for Holocaust Remembrance Day (May 1 at Shaare Emeth Synagogue), takes an all-encompassing view.

For many years in Germany, as well as in the United States, he says, the Holocaust was a forbidden topic. “Sure, there’s still neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism in Germany,” he says. “But Germans of this generation are facing their history.” And Obermayer Awards herald their accomplishments.