This year’s Leon Zelman Prize for Dialog and Understanding is awarded to the historian Michaela Raggam-Blesch. With her many years of research and mediation work, she contributes significantly to raising public awareness of the Shoah and its consequences for the Jewish people. The prize will be presented at Vienna City Hall in the fall.
Through her oral history projects and research into the biographies of Jewish women, Raggam-Blesch gives a voice to the victims of the Shoah. In this way, she makes an important contribution to the dialog between the survivors of National Socialist persecution, their descendants, and present-day Austria.
Thus, as the jury justification for the Zelman prize goes, she creates “a public awareness of the Shoah and its consequences for the Jewish population. […] In her publications and within the scope of her curatorial activity for exhibitions, Raggam-Blesch makes it abundantly clear that the deprivation of rights, robbery, expulsion, and persecution of Viennese Jews took place in the heart of city under the eyes of the Viennese population. She refers to the big gaps that were caused by the destruction of Jewish life in the city and of society after 1945.”
The Leon Zelman Prize has been awarded since 2013 to people or initiatives that are actively committed to the memory of the Shoah in the spirit of Leon Zelman (1928-2007). But the prize also honors special civil society efforts, action against antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia. The prize is endowed with 5,000 euros and donated by the City of Vienna.
Source: APA / (OTS)
