Margot Friedländer and Delphine Horvilleur receive the Prize for Understanding and Tolerance

The Prize for Understanding and Tolerance

Since 2002, the Jewish Museum Berlin has awarded the Prize for Under­standing and Tole­rance to individuals from the realms of culture, politics, and business who have rendered outstanding service to the promotion of human dignity, inter­national understanding, the inte­gration of minorities, and the co­existence of different religions and cultures. The prize, presented at a gala dinner, is awarded jointly by the JMB and the FRIENDS OF THE JMB.

Guests from the spheres of politics, business, culture, and the media

Guests include Iris Berben, actor; W. Michael Blumen­thal, founding director of the JMB; Otto Fricke, Member of the German Federal Parliament; Michel Friedman, journalist; Felix Klein, Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism; Monika Grütters, Member of the German Federal Parlia­ment and former Com­missioner for Culture and the Media; Gideon Joffe, president of the Jewish Community in Berlin; Sandra Maischberger, talk show host; Herta Müller, author; Annette Schavan, former Federal Minister, chair of the Hertie Foundation; Regine Sixt of the company Sixt SE; Friede Springer, publisher; Düzen Tekkal, author, founder and CEO HÁWAR.help e.V. & GermanDream GmbH; Ulrich Wickert, journalist and author; Mira Woldberg, Deputy Ambassador at the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Germany.

Prizewinner Margot Friedländer

Explaining the decision to award the prize to Margot Friedländer, the jury wrote: “As an eyewitness to history, Margot Friedländer has taken an active stand against hatred and exclusion for many years and with truly incredible energy despite her venerable age. We are deeply impressed that – in the country of the perpetrators – Margot Fried­länder has dedicated herself to the task of passing on her personal memories of Nazi oppression and perse­cution and of the Shoah, to keeping these painful memories alive, and that she constantly risks encounters with people who have either never heard of the Nazis’ monstrous crimes, downplay or deny the Holocaust, or were even participants in it. In 2023, she established the Margot Fried­länder Foundation to ensure that her work will continue in a future without living witnesses. Margot Friedländer stands up courageously for tolerance and humanity, freedom and democracy. Through her example, she challenges us to do the same and motivates us to confront anti­semitism and racis.”

Born to a Jewish German family in Berlin in 1921, deported to the concen­tration camp Theresienstadt in 1944, and liberated in May 1945, Margot Friedländer only narrowly escaped death through the Nazi tyranny. Her family tried to emigrate several times, but without success. Her father was killed in a death camp in 1942; her mother and brother were arrested in 1943 and murdered at Auschwitz. Aged twenty-one, Margot initially managed to go underground in Berlin, but in 1944 she too was arrested and was deported to Theresienstadt. She was the only member of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust. Her autobiography, Try to Make Your Life: A Jewish Girl Hiding in Berlin, appeared in German in 2008 and in English translation in 2014. At the age of eighty-eight, after more than six decades of exile in New York, she returned to her home city of Berlin and took German citizenship again. Even before moving back to Germany, she had begun the campaign for freedom, democracy, and humanity that she still continues today. 

Prizewinner Delphine Horvilleur

The jury wrote: “Del­phine Horvilleur has been working intensively for many years with Muslim and Christian intellectuals and religious leaders. At the heart of her work is dialogue between the religions, the quest for common ground, and the drive to overcome fears, exclusion, and prejudice. But Delphine Horvilleur’s engagement with these themes is never purely theoretical – it is also a practical task that she tackles every day in her pastoral and social work as a rabbi. She champions marginalized groups in society and brings together people with different religious orientations.”

Del­phine Horvilleur, born in Nancy in 1974, is a prominent figure in the field of Jewish culture and religion in France. Alongside her career as a writer, she is one of the rabbis of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France (JEM) in Paris. Several of her books have been translated into German and English, such as Anti-Semitism Revisited (2021), Living with Our Dead (2022), and a book on dialogue after 7 October published in German in 2024. Delphine Horvilleur is also a founder member of KeReM, the council of French-speaking liberal rabbis, and editor-in-chief of TENOU’A, an online journal of Jewish thought. Since 2018, she has led the workshop series Ateliers Tenoua – study and dialogue sessions held in Paris that bring together some 300 people every month. 

Prize­winners 2002–2023

Berthold Beitz, chair of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation board, and Heinrich von Pierer, former CEO of Siemens AG (2002); Otto Schily, Federal Minister of the Interior, and Friede Springer, publisher (2003); Michael Otto, entrepreneur, and former Federal President Johannes Rau (2004); Heinz Berg­gruen, collector and patron of the arts, and Otto Graf Lambsdorff, politician (2005); Daniel Barenboim, pianist and conductor, and BMW executive Helmut Panke (2006); former Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and historian Fritz Stern (2007); Roland Berger, business consultant, and Nobel laureate in literature Imre Kertész (2008); Franz Fehrenbach, Bosch manager, Christof Bosch, member of the Robert Bosch Foundation board, and Michael Verhoeven, film director (2009); Jan Philipp Reemtsma, literary scholar, and business executive Hubertus Erlen (2010); Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel (2011); Klaus Mangold, chair of the supervisory board of Roth­schild GmbH, and former Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker (2012); Berthold Leibinger, head of the TRUMPF group, and actor Iris Berben (2013); publisher Hubert Burda and Federal Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble (2014); W. Michael Blumenthal, founding director of the JMB (2015); writers Renate Lasker Harpprecht and Anita Lasker Wallfisch and business­man Hasso Plattner (2016); Joe Kaeser, CEO of Siemens AG, and former Federal President Joachim Gauck (2017); Susanne Klatten, entrepreneur, and David Gross­man, writer (2018); Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas and artist Anselm Kiefer (2019); former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Igor Levit, pianist (2020); Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Israelitische Kultus­gemeinde München und Oberbayern, and architect Daniel Libes­kind (2021); Herta Müller, Nobel laureate in literature, and Barrie Kosky, theater and opera director (2022); Corinne Michaela Flick, founder and chair of the CONVOCO! Foundation, and Wolfgang Ischinger, president of the Munich Security Conference Foun­dation Council (2023). 

Reporting and accreditation

If you wish to report on the event, please register by emailing presse@jmberlin.de by 12 noon on 13 November at the latest. You will receive a detailed schedule when we confirm your accreditation. Because of the strict security require­ments and limited space for media representatives, there will be personaliz­ed accreditation by the JMB press office. We regret that media represen­tatives without accredi­tation cannot be granted access on 16 November. 

Press images will be available for download with full acknowledg­ment from 12 noon on 18 November 2024 at https://www.jmberlin.de/en/press-images.