Frowald Gil Hüttenmeister

Frowald Gil Hüttenmeister was born in Remscheid, Germany. After learning Greek and Latin at secondary school in Cologne, he was given a choice to study French or Hebrew in high school: he chose Hebrew. While working at a Jewish summer camp near Frankfurt, he met Israelis and began to actually speak the language. However, it wasn't until 1958, when his Hebrew teacher invited him on a family visit to Israel, that Hüttenmeister discovered what would become his passion and career trajectory. He studied at universities in Germany and Austria and returned to Jerusalem in 1960 on a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship at Hebrew University. In 1970, he received his doctorate in Semitic studies from Saarland University. He worked as a lecturer in Jewish Studies for four decades at the Universities of Tübingen, Duisburg, Wuppertal, Paris, and Haifa. He combined his career in Jewish scholarship with community activism. Dr. Hüttenmeister dedicated 14 years to working on ancient synagogues in Israel, collecting archaeological material and reading rabbinical literature to produce the 750-page book Die antiken Synagogen, Lehrhäuser und Sitze des Sanhedrin in Israel (The Ancient Synagogues, Houses of Learning and Residences of the Sanhedrin in Israel). It was published along with the Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients (TAVO Atlas of the Middle East), which included 300 separate maps chronicling the region's history. He has translated documents, letters, and archives from German into Hebrew, further enlarging Israel's body of knowledge on German Jewry. In addition, he has published extensive research and documentation on Jewish cemeteries and served in the 1990s as Commissioner for the Inventory of Jewish Graves as part of the Landesdenkmalamt (Rural Memorial Project) in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Since his retirement from academia in 2008, Dr. Hüttenmeister has traveled through Poland, the Czech Republic and the former East Germany, giving lectures and documenting Jewish cemeteries. He is the father of Nathanja Hüttenmeister, a scholar at the Institute of German Jewish History in Essen.