The act and its course are more reminiscent of Chicago or Mexico City than of tranquil Zurich: On June 7, 2001, the almost 70-year-old Rabbi Abraham Grünbaum from Bnei Brak was shot on the street on the way to evening prayer on Hallwylplatz. The Shoah survivor is privately in Zurich.
Residents in the Aussersihl quarter, where the majority of the Orthodox parishioners live, will later testify that they heard two gunshots and saw a man run away. A short time later a suspect is arrested, but soon released because he has an alibi. There are no direct witnesses.
robbery The murdered man had a briefcase with around 1,000 francs, so attempted robbery and murder will soon be ruled out. So was it an anti-Semitic act? Did the NSU, which was active at the time, possibly even leave its mark on Switzerland? Or is there another motive? Despite intensive investigations, the police are groping in the dark. Even an appeal on the television program Aktenzeichen XY… unsolved does not provide any useful information.
This has not changed even 20 years later. A perpetrator could not be identified to this day. An act remains in the dark, which seems all the more appalling when you look at the life of the victim: In 1930 Abraham Grünbaum was born in a small Polish town. He and his brother survived in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia. Their parents were murdered by the Nazis in Poland.
After the Shoah, Abraham Grünbaum found himself in the DP camp in Zeilsheim near Frankfurt, where he was already devoting himself to religious studies. In 1952 he came to Israel and studied in the yeshiva von Ponovitz in Bnei Brak, received the Smicha and founded the Kollel Mordechai. To keep it alive, he later often flies to Antwerp, London, Paris or even Zurich. He collects for his institute, but also for needy families in Jerusalem.
mission “He never indulged in anything private, he was only driven by his mission to collect money for the needy,” his son Jakob told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung a few months after the violent death of his father. For example, Abraham Grünbaum was in Paris several times a year, “but he was never at the Eiffel Tower, he would only have considered it a waste of time.”
Jacob is also the one of the sons who will fly to Zurich after the murder to identify the father’s body and return to Israel with the dead.
On June 7th, the 20th anniversary of Rabbi Grünbaum’s death, a memorial ceremony will take place at the crime scene in Zurich.
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