Opening Ceremony Commemoration of 70 years of the Luxembourg Agreement with Rabbi of Berlin

Today, the opening event for 70 years of the Luxembourg Agreement took place at the Jewish Museum Berlin. The audience included numerous invited guests, including Holocaust survivors and numerous representatives from politics and society, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Vice Chancellor, Finance Minister Christian Lindner, Special Adviser on Holocaust Issues at US Department of State Stuart Eisenstat and Rabbi of Berlin and Director of Chabad Berlin Yehuda Teichtal.

In his speech to the audience, Minister Lindner said that at some point there would be no more surviving witnesses and it would be all the more important to keep the culture of remembrance alive.

Following the event, he added to Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal that not only the past deserves respect, but also the Jewish future in Germany. “We must strengthen Jewish life in Germany. And I stand by that!”

With the end of World War II, the surviving European Jews could not and did not want to simply return to their homeland and their old lives. Most of them lost not only families but also their homes and possessions in the course of the expropriations.

Seventy years ago, in September 1952, seven years after the Holocaust, the Federal Republic of Germany, the State of Israel and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany sat down to negotiate how to alleviate the hardships of survivors through material reparations.