Hermann Simon (historian)
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Hermann Simon (born 1949) is a German historian who was for 27 years director of the Foundation "New Synagogue Berlin - Centrum Judaicum".
Hermann Simon was born in Berlin in 1949, the son of classical philologist and philosophy historian Marie Jalowicz-Simon and the judaist Heinrich Simon. Hermann Simon grew up in East Berlin. His family was a member of the Jewish Community East Berlin, which was very small because of the Holocaust and emigration in the postwar years. He studied History and Oriental Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, followed by graduate studies in Prague.
Career
From 1975 to 1988 he worked at the Numismatic Collection of the National Museums in Berlin. In 1988 he was involved in the first exhibition about Jewish life in East Berlin (shown in Ephraim Palace).
Since the establishment of the New Synagogue Berlin - Centrum Judaicum in the same year he had been its director. On 1 September 2015, he handed over the reins to his successor Anja Siegemund. In 2015 Simon was awarded the Order of Merit of Berlin.
In the Berlin community, he is next to Andreas Nachama as representatives of the "liberal wing".
