What we do

What we do

The ZURÜCKGEBEN Foundation is the only foundation in Germany that explicitly supports Jewish women in the arts and sciences. It was founded in 1994, and the first grants were awarded one year later. Since then, ZURÜCKGEBEN has provided financial support to well over half a million euros for around 180 projects by Jewish women.

The support is provided in the knowledge that the work opportunities and livelihoods of Jews were destroyed during National Socialism. Even after the Shoa, many Jews in Germany sat on “packed suitcases” because a Jewish future here no longer seemed conceivable. Since the 1990s, however, and also thanks to immigration from countries such as the former Soviet Union and Israel, an increasingly self-confident generation of Jewish descendants has grown up who consciously live in Germany, tie in with an almost destroyed Jewish culture and rebuild Jewish life in many facets. The Foundation would like to demonstrate and support the contribution that Jewish women are once again making to culture and society in Germany. This seems all the more important to us against the background of current developments in our society, in which half of young people no longer know what Auschwitz stands for, in which politicians of one party describe National Socialism as a “bird scat of history” and synagogues and Jewish people are once again being attacked.

Scholarships from the Foundation have been and are being awarded to Jewish women of all ages and very different backgrounds living in Germany – filmmakers, visual and multimedia artists, dancers and choreographers, authors, musicians, cultural and social scientists, historians, economists and physicists. It is a quasi-individual sponsorship of the descendants of the collectively aggrieved, which in many cases represents a first-time public appreciation of the work of the grantees. They are given the opportunity to be seen and heard, but also to pass on their own and collective memory(s). Our scholarships are awarded once a year. Announcement and application period can be found here.