Rachel Dror

Rachel Zipora Dror (née Lewin; ; 19 January 1921 – 14 December 2024) was a German Jewish teacher and Holocaust survivor. After returning from Israel to live in West Germany (for health reasons) in 1957, and more intensively since her retirement from teaching in 1986, she has come to wider prominence because of her engagement for Christian-Jewish-Islamic co-existence, and as an advocate for religious openness and mutual tolerance. She turned 100 on 19 January 2021.

Life Provenance and early years Rachel Lewin was born in the East Prussian capital, Königsberg on 19 January 1921. Chaim Hugo Lewin (1891–1944), her father, like his brother Hermann Zvi Lewin (1878–1976), had fought in the First World War, emerging from military service as a highly decorated former officer. Rachel grew up in a traditional Jewish family, albeit in a family that would at the time have been considered well integrated into German society more generally. She attended a government secondary school ("Lyzeum"), while also receiving a parallel religious education at a Jewish religious school.

Apprenticeship In 1935 she embarked on an apprenticeship for work as a seamstress. In March 1936 she concluded that the intensification of antisemitic legislation meant that she could expect no future in Germany. She joined a Zionist youth group: between May 1936 and November 1938 she lived in Hamburg where the focus of her life was on preparing for emigration to Palestine, which since 1920 had been administered, for most purposes, as though a component territory of the British Empire. The experience led Rachel Lewin to quit the "Klosterallee" group and move in with her mother's elder sister, Flora Rosenbaum, who taught at the Talmud Tora School in Hamburg's Grindel district. On 29 April 1939 the last legally sanctioned ship destined for "British" Palestine (till after the war broke out five months later) set sail for Haifa from Trieste. Rachel Lewin was on board.

It would be another seventeen years before she would find out what had happened to her parents. Avraham Lewin, her younger brother, was rescued and escaped in 1940 on the last Kindertransport. He survived for nearly ten years in England and then emigrated to become a founder member of the Kibbutz Lavi in northern Israel. There was no Kindertransport for her parents, who had belatedly applied for permission to emigrate to Palestine. But for British officials, to whom that Hugo and Erna Lewin were classified as Germans, there could be no question of their application to emigrate to "British" Palestine being considered. On her arrival in Haifa Rachel Lewin was therefore not completely alone, and for some time she lived with her Aunt Anna.

Israel The state of Israel was proclaimed during 1948, and in the same year Rachel Lewin joined the Israeli police service. Her responsibilities included road safety.

Rachel Lewin became Rachel Dror when she married in 1951. At the time when they met, her future husband was working as a transport engineer in the north of the country. She had wanted to relocate to England here her younger brother had spent the war years, but these were the Wirtschaftswunder years in West Germany, and she allowed herself to be persuaded by her husband, who as a young man had studied in Germany, that opportunities would be better in West Germany than in England. (Königsberg, where she had spent her truncated childhood, had been "ethnically cleansed" of its German-speaking population in 1944/45, and was now part of the Soviet Union.) Her first job in post-war Germany was in a bank. The little family lived briefly in Berlin and Frankfurt before eventually settling in Stuttgart. By the time she began to study for a new career, as a teacher, Rachel Dror was 46. That year, while attending a regional teachers' conference, she fell into conversation with Edgar Winckler who was an executive board member of the Stuttgart Society for Christian-Jewish collaboration ("...Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit" / CJZ). After discovering that, in a former life, Rachel Dror had worked as a policewoman in northern Israel, he commented that the CJZ board needed a woman. Shortly after that, she found herself co-opted onto the board of the Stuttgart Society for Christian-Jewish collaboration. Dror's personal Holocaust experience would, from now on, be harder to keep to herself. Not long afterwards she found herself participating with Heinz Lauber in a seminar at the CJZ regional headquarters. Heinz Lauber was a senior government official ("Leitender Regierungsdirektor") As they talked, he mentioned that he thought she should visit schools in the area in order to tell the children about her personal experiences of National Socialism in Germany. That evening a colleague who was aware of Lauber's suggestion called her and asked how she would feel about addressing 300 young people on the subject of her story, that of her parents and that of her brother. She agreed to think about it. Some days later, she delivered a three-hour talk to a large group of older school children while they sat and listened in complete silence. In her school visits she tried to encourage young people to stand up against violence and contempt for the individual.

Dror died on 14 December 2024, at the age of 103.