DThe President of the European Rabbinical Conference, Pinchas Goldschmidt, will receive the Charlemagne Prize 2024. The Jewish communities in Europe will be honored together with him, the board of directors of the International Charlemagne Prize in Aachen announced on Friday.
The award should send the message that Jewish life naturally belongs to Europe and that there should be no place for anti-Semitism in Europe. Since the terrorist attack on Israel by the radical Islamic Hamas on October 7, 2023, the number of anti-Semitic crimes has skyrocketed in many European countries.
According to the Charlemagne Prize Directorate, Goldschmidt always advocated that people from a wide variety of religious and cultural backgrounds should find their place in Europe. After training as a rabbi, Goldschmidt, who was born in Zurich in 1963, went first to Israel and then to the Soviet Union in order to rebuild Jewish life there after the end of communism.
Founded dialogue forum with Muslims
In 1993, Goldschmidt was elected Chief Rabbi of Moscow. After the Russian attack on Ukraine, he resisted calls to support the war and left Moscow in March 2022. Since 2011, he has been president of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), which moved from London to Munich last year relocated.
Goldschmidt's commitment to interreligious dialogue received particular attention. In 2015, he was co-founder of the European Muslim-Jewish Leadership Council (MJLC), which includes both Jewish and Muslim dignitaries. The Jewish-Christian dialogue also received important impulses from Goldschmidt, according to the Charlemagne Prize Directorate. He has been in direct contact with Pope Francis for years, most recently meeting with the head of the Catholic Church in November 2023 to discuss the current situation in the Middle East.
The “International Charlemagne Prize in Aachen” has been awarded since 1950 for special contributions to European unification. Citizens of Aachen donated the prize shortly after the Second World War at the suggestion of the entrepreneur Kurt Pfeiffer. The award is named after Emperor Charlemagne, whose Frankish Empire stretched across large parts of Western Europe in the early Middle Ages.
The first prize winner in 1950 was the founder of the Pan-European idea, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi. With the Italian Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi (1952), Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1954) and Sir Winston Churchill (1955), the prize gained great reputation in Europe within just a few years. Last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was honored.