Landecker Fund Gives Hebrew U. $13 Million Grant

The Berlin-based Alfred Landecker Foundation has awarded a $13 million grant to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for “academic initiatives that focus on the causes and consequences of the Holocaust, promote studies on human rights, minority protection, the rule of law, and reparations for historical wrongs and injustices.” The funds are earmarked for three primary projects: The Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Legal Thought and Practice; the Landecker-Benjamin B. Ferencz Chair in the Study of Protection of Minorities and Vulnerable Groups; and the Alfred Landecker Digital Humanities Lab. It will also provide additional funding for the university’s Minerva Center for Human Rights. “This donation is a cornerstone grant to build on the lessons learned from the collapse of democratic institutions in the 1930s – the emergence and proliferation of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, the decline in minority rights protection, the subsequent World War and the Holocaust committed in its shadow as an ultimate crime against humanity, committed against the Jewish people,” the foundation and the university said on Wednesday in a joint statement. The Landecker Foundation, recently renamed in honor of a German Jewish man who perished in the Holocaust, is funded by members of Germany’s Reimann family, who note that they are the descendants of industrialists who, as members of the Nazi party, employed slave laborers during World War II.