Gersch Tsvi [Zvi] Sofer

Gersch Tsvi (Zvi) SOFER, born on January 28^th, 1911 in Jałtuszków/Russia [Yaltushkiw|Ялтушків/Ukraine] (entitled residency ("heimatberechtigt") for Tel-Aviv/Palestine [Israel], citizenship 1938: Palestine), half-orphaned since the age of six, came from modest circumstances and grew up with his grandmother, later attending high school in Brody, Galicia, where he successfully passed the school-leaving examination (Matura) in 1929. He then joined the fourth aliyah (1924-1939) and moved to Palestine in 1929, where he worked in brickworks and workshops, being very musical played the violin very well but also gave concerts and led youth and school orchestras.

In 1935 he moved to Vienna to study, lived in Vienna's 8^th district, Lederergasse 18/10, and from the fall term of 1936/37 he studied art history and musicology for two years at the Philosophical School of the University of Vienna. He was last enrolled in the 2^nd year of his studies in the spring term of 1938, but also studied violoncello and conducting at the Music Conservatory and reform pedagogy at the Pedagogical Institute of the Municipality of Vienna.

Under National Socialism, after the Anschluss, he was forced to abandon his studies for racist reasons and to leave the University of Vienna as well as the Conservatory.

He had to flee Vienna and was able to emigrate back to Palestine in 1938, and lived and worked as an art and singing pedagogue in Haifa, publishing music pedagogical writings and running a small music store. He was also involved in the preservation of Jewish history and folklore (e.g. archive of Jewish folk tales and objects at the Ethnological Museum in Haifa, now the University of Haifa), collected and conducted his own field research (e.g. "Passover Festival of the Samaritans in Nablus"), and published on folkloric and ethnological topics. In the course of international research and lecture tours, the opportunity arose in Kiel/Germany in 1959 to conduct a folkloristic dissertation study on narrative research, thus thematically refocusing the studies he was forced to interrupt in Vienna in 1938. He therefore moved from Haifa to Kiel, later to Göttingen, where he received his doctorate in 1965, and worked as a research assistant at the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum (IJD) at the University of Münster from 1966.

Zvi Sofer taught, carried out edition projects, and was involved in the preservation or reconstruction of the shrinking Jewish communities in northwestern Germany. He also served as cantor of the Jewish community of Münster from 1976-1980, organized synagogue tours, adult education courses, exhibitions and Yiddish concerts in the course of Jewish-Christian dialogue, wrote a Jewish cookbook and produced two records with synagogal music and popular Yiddish stories by Leib Peretz.
In the autumn of 1977 he was awarded the Cross of Merit with Ribbon.

He died in Münster on January 25^th, 1980, leaving behind an extensive but disorganized Judaica collection of ceremonial and everyday objects, drawings, books, manuscripts, textiles, audio documents, etc., which was acquired by the Jewish Department of the Berlin Museum in 1981 and formed the basis of the present Jewish Museum Berlin (opened in 2001) (after earlier plans in Cologne and Essen had failed).

Lit: Archive of the University of Vienna/enrollment forms ("Nationale") 1936-1938; obituary in the Westfälische Nachrichten on January 26/27^th, 1980; POSCH/INGRISCH/DRESSEL 2008, 477; Anna-Carolin AUGUSTIN, Zvi Sofer. A Collector and His Collection (2019) | www.jmberlin.de/en/node/6035.

Herbert Posch