On 1 October 2026, Lea Rosh will turn 90. As a journalist and the driving force behind the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, she championed the creation of a ‘visible symbol of acknowledgement of the crime’ and a prominent site commemorating the murdered Jews of Europe, and supported the project for decades.
In August 1988, Lea Rosh first publicly proposed the erection of a memorial in Berlin to the murdered Jews of Europe. Together with the historian Eberhard Jäckel, she published the first appeal from the citizens’ initiative ‘Perspektive Berlin’ in January 1989. This initiative gave rise to the Friends’ Association, of which Lea Rosh remains chair to this day.
It took more than ten years of arduous efforts before the German Bundestag passed a resolution on 25 June 1999 to dedicate a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of Berlin. On 10 May 2005, the memorial designed by Peter Eisenman, comprising the field of stelae and the information centre, was opened to the public.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the Holocaust Memorial in May 2025, Lea Rosh looked back on the project she had initiated: “Today […] I feel gratitude and also humility. I am simply glad that this memorial exists, because it is a symbol of our engagement with our history.” And she added: “But the most important thing for me remains that the victims are not forgotten, and that we remember them here.”
We would like to thank Lea Rosh for her perseverance in bringing the memory of those murdered to the heart of the German capital and, in doing so, to the attention of the international community. Her commitment also symbolises the responsibility to ensure that remembrance is firmly rooted in the present and made accessible to future generations.
We would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Lea Rosh on her 90th birthday!
