Fight against anti-Semitism: Federal Cross of Merit for the Berlin educator Derviş Hızarcı – Knowledge

Has three hours Dervish Hizarci discussed Germany and being German with a member of the right-wing extremist AfD wing over coffee. Against the web of blood and soil and the racist errors of his interlocutor, the expert on anti-Semitism campaigned calmly, but with a clear edge, for an open migration society.

Even if he may have hardly achieved anything, and understand anyone who does not speak properly, he does not consider it a mistake. One shouldn’t confuse the path with the goal, says sawmill in conversation with the Tagesspiegel. Perhaps he could have sown a seed that at some point would let the other grow out of his false consciousness.

“It is always too early to judge people, to take away the chance to develop themselves.” sawmill made a principle. A friendly togetherness in society is essential for him.

For a culture of remembrance that doesn’t exclude anyone

The 38-year-old son of Anatolian parents took up the fight against anti-Semitism as early as the noughties and campaigned for a culture of remembrance that does not exclude anyone. Now the educator, who comes from Neukölln, was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on December 3rd for his “engagement in the immigration society”.

After September 11, 2001, he became aware that anti-Semitism, like the anti-Muslim racism that has met it since childhood, is a core social problem. At that time the devout Muslim sawmill experienced a lot of enmity and distrust from the white German majority society. “Mosques, which for me were places of security, suddenly got a dubious reputation.” Sacred spaces, for him connoted with religious celebrations and ethical values, were suddenly under the general suspicion of being breeding grounds for terror.

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At the same time he was confronted with anti-Semitic conspiracy stories in the school context. “Sometimes I had the feeling that some Muslim kids had projected the suspicion that was imposed on them onto the Jews as an abstraction,” says sawmill. He himself noticed how idiotic it is to compensate for the wrong image of one population group with wrong images of other population groups.

A tireless networker on all fronts

“I grew up in a multicultural house, my neighbors were Greek, Polish, German, Jewish and ex-Yugoslavian.” Even if he comes from a family that in today’s jargon could be described as uneducated, his parents taught him absolute tolerance .

After school, he begins teaching in Berlin and Magdeburg, does his legal clerkship at a secondary school in Lichtenberg and becomes a teacher at a community school in Kreuzberg. He began to deal with Judaism and German-Jewish history, and worked for several years in the education department of the Jewish Museum Berlin.

Name friends and acquaintances sawmill a tireless networker who is constantly on the move on all fronts. In 2011 he becomes a member of the supervisory board of the Turkish community in Berlin, maintains a lively dialogue with its Jewish counterpart and establishes contacts with the Israeli embassy. “For example, we invited people from the embassy to the festival of the breaking of the fast,” says sawmill.

With his students he organizes trips to Turkey and Israel, brings Turkish and Israeli diplomats together for film evenings and discussion forums. One volunteer gives the next sawmill joins the Kreuzberg Initiative against Antisemitism (KIgA), which under his leadership has advanced from a neighborhood association to a key player in the prevention of discrimination.

The most important thing is your companions

“The nice thing about the KIgA is that it refuses to oppose the exonerating projection of anti-Semitism onto Muslims, which I myself have encountered in many German-Germans, but at the same time does not hide the fact that anti-Semitism is a problem in some Muslim communities.” He said goodbye retired from school work and became the anti-discrimination officer of the Berlin Senate in 2019.

But after a year it stops again. “I had hardly any resources or structures, my hands were basically tied,” says sawmill. The fight against hatred of Jews, however, remains his profession. At a recent lecture in Cambridge on Muslim-Jewish alliances, has Dervish Hizarci explains that the companions are even more important than the route and destination.