Recha Sternbuch

Recha Sternbuch (née Rottenberg; 1905–1971) was a Swiss Orthodox Jewish woman who was a major Holocaust-era Jewish rescuer.

Biography Origins Born in Wadowice, near Kraków, Poland in 1905, Recha Sternbuch moved to St. Gallen in 1928 with her husband, Yitzchak Sternbuch, a businessman in Montreux, Switzerland. Moving to St. Gallen, her husband's hometown, was a culture shock for Recha, who had grown up in a religious community and was unprepared for the small community of Swiss Jews who were more liberal than the community she had been raised in.

There was no opportunity for formal religious education in her community and no Jewish schools for young girls in Belgium, so she attended public school, where she learned French. At home with her family she spoke German. Her home was a meeting place for community scholars and she informally continued to learn from these events where her father would interpret the midrash. As a teenager, she even participated in some discussions herself, to the surprise of visitors, who often traveled a long way to seek her father's council.

After a Jewish leader in Switzerland informed on them, Recha Sternbuch was arrested and jailed and she lost her fetus. Grüninger lost his job and pension for his help to Jews and was later helped by the Sternbuchs.

After her release from prison Recha Sternbuch continued her activism largely alone, and arranged rescue of over 2,000 Jews. At great risk she smuggled forged Swiss visas to many Jews across the German and Austrian borders. (Although travel on Shabbat is forbidden in Judaism, this is not so in cases of Pikuach Nefesh (Hebrew: פיקוח נפש, literally 'endangerment of life') in which case nearly all Jewish laws are overridden.) Wallace claims that the role of Sternbuch's father as chief Orthodox rabbi of Antwerp gave Sternbuch important access to major foreign officials. Sternbuch and her husband, Isaac Sternbuch, obtained support from former fascist Swiss President Jean-Marie Musy. According to Wallace, they were able to successfully make Himmler think that Germany should stop killing Jews at Auschwitz, in order to achieve a separate peace with the West, and to get their support to fight Stalin.

Historians had already noted that in late 1944, Himmler had ordered all extermination efforts to cease at Auschwitz; they had assumed this was due to the approach of Soviet troops. Wallace's book cites historical evidence to assert a new finding that Himmler gave this order due to Sternbuch's negotiations.

Some historians and researchers have questioned some of Wallace's findings, and cite other groups who were also negotiating with Himmler, around that time.