Outlook

As a non-university research-institute, the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute can set and work on research topics at a high level on a continuous and interdisciplinary basis (alone and in cooperation). Likewise it has an informative, enlightening and discourse-stimulating public effect and assumes social responsibility. The aim of the research and educational projects is to increase knowledge and understanding and to combat anti-Semitism.

The focal points – epigraphy, digital human­ities, cooperation within the JRF and international mediation – will remain of great importance. Local and regional historical research projects on German-Jewish history will also focus on modern-day North Rhine-Westphalia increasingly. For the near future, we are planning epigraphic projects in those German “federal states” that are still “white spots” in the database: Berlin as the seat of the largest and most important community in Germany, Bremen with Bremerhaven and its special history as the hub of large-scale overseas emigrations, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania as the region in which most of the cemeteries have been levelled. It is thus particularly important for a culture of remembrance that the few traces left will be documented and rendered visible.

Jewish cultural heritage is an essential part of Europe’s common cultural heritage, as the European Council has emphasised in several resolutions, most recently in November 2019. Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute will continue to make its contribution to the documentation and preservation of this precious and vulnerable heritage so often affected by negligence and destruction.