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| Holocaust victims reburied in Stuttgart
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Rabbi Avraham Schlesinger from Geneva meditating before the coffins
Photo: RCE
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The remains of 34 suspected Jewish Nazi-era slave labourers were reburied last Thursday after being found in a mass grave at an airport in the southern German city of Stuttgart.
The ceremony, held at the site of the mass grave, concluded weeks of debate between the German authorities and Jewish communities around Europe on what to do with the remains.
In mid-September, the grave was discovered by workers excavating for a drainage project just inside an American air-base used by the US military for transporting troops, cargo and VIPs.
Police investigators have said that, judging by the remains, the bodies were those of Jewish slave labourers sent to the Leinfeld-Echterdingen site from the Nazi Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in eastern France between November 1944 and February 1945.
Survivors forced to work at the site said at least 100 Jews died there of starvation and typhus. The bodies of 66 Jews who worked at Leinfelden-Echterdingen were found in a nearby forest in October 1945, shortly after the end of the war.
DNA dispute
German prosecutors from the Baden-Wuertemberg state planned to pursue DNA analysis on the remains for evidence while they were stored at a Stuttgart hospital.
But Jewish leaders around Europe opposed such examination because of the Jewish tradition which requires the body to be returned to earth, on the same spot where they were initially found, as untouched as possible.
Since the discovery of the remains until their reburial, the Brussels-based Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE) lobbied the German authorities to accelerate the bureaucratic process and to prevent genetic analysis to be executed on the skeletons.
In October the RCE met with German ambassador to the European Union, Wilhelm Schonfelder, and German ambassador to Belgium, Christoph Jessen, in this effort to facilitate the reburial.
“The German authorities showed understanding and compassion and it was with their efforts that the wishes of the Jewish organisations prevailed,” RCE’s Rabbi Levi Matusof told EJP.
Official ceremony
The reburial was organised by a delegation of 20 rabbis from RCE and other Jewish organisations.
About 500 people attended the reburial, the US military reported. The 34 Holocaust victims were put in separate pine coffins. Each coffin was numbered and reburied as close as possible to the place where it was found.
During the two hour-long ceremony, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Israel’s former Ashkenazi chief rabbi, reacted to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declarations calling the Holocaust a myth. “I have to invite him to Stuttgart today,” he told the crowd.
According to Menashe Burkis, head of the RCE’s Jewish cemeteries department, the ceremony was extremely emotional.
He recalled how moving was the moment when Marim Stern, 84, from Antwerp, a survivor of the Nazi camp and familiar with a number of reburied victims drop ’day’, read the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer in memory of the dead. “It was grave. At this moment I looked at him and I saw the hardships and horrors he saw then and I simply cried,” Burkis said.
“I only cried twice in my life. The first time was earlier this year in Auschwitz when I saw the crematoriums and today here in Stuttgart,” said Guenther Oettinger, chief of government of the state of Baden-Wuertemberg.
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