Qualla: Dejudaization Institute Memorial

Dejudaization Institute Memorial: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Axel Hindemith, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 6 May 1939, eleven German Protestant regional churches founded an institute in Eisenach with a plainly stated purpose: to remove Judaism from Christianity. Its full name was the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Everyone shortened it to the Entjudungsinstitut, the Dejudaization Institute. It worked for six years out of offices at Bornstrasse 11, the Thuringian church's former seminary. Eighty years to the day after the founding, the successor churches of those eleven put up a memorial two hundred and forty metres down the hill, admitting in writing what they had done.

Image: Axel Hindemith | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dejudaization Institute Memorial: What the Institute Was For

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Whgler, CC BY 4.0. The mission was never coded. In the churches' own words, later inscribed on the memorial, the institute existed to obliterate the Jewish roots of Christianity, to delete every positive reference to the people of Israel and to Judaism from Holy Scripture, and to bring Protestant t...

Image: Whgler | CC BY 4.0

Dejudaization Institute Memorial: The People This Was Done To

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ErichanderElbe, CC BY-SA 4.0. The memorial's inner plate does not soften anything. The institute's staff, it says, perverted the word and spirit of the Gospel in the name of voelkisch theological scholarship, stirred up hatred against Judaism, and worked for the exclusion of Christians with Jewish ancestry fr...

Image: ErichanderElbe | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dejudaization Institute Memorial: Fifty Years of Almost

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Scarth, CC BY-SA 2.0. Attempts to mark the place began in the early 1990s and kept stalling. A plaque on Bornstrasse 11 was proposed more than once and never got beyond planning. The breakthrough came sideways, out of an exhibition. In March 2018, while preparing a show on the institute at the Lutherh...

Image: Robert Scarth | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dejudaization Institute Memorial: A Fork in the Road

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Giorno2, CC BY 4.0. The chosen spot is a place where the road divides, and the designers used it. The memorial carries four words from the Darmstadt Statement, the Protestant confession of guilt issued in 1947: Wir sind in die Irre gegangen. We went astray. Marc Pethran of the Leipzig agency KOCMOC....

Image: Giorno2 | CC BY 4.0

Dejudaization Institute Memorial: Eighty Years to the Day

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. Six representatives of the regional churches unveiled the memorial on 6 May 2019. Eight successor bodies had commissioned it: the Evangelical Church in Central Germany, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Northern Germany, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saxony, the Evangelical...

Image: A.Savin | FAL