Josef Schuster

Origins and early life

Josef Schuster was born in Haifa on 20 March 1954, the son of David Schuster, a Jewish merchant from Lower Franconia, where the family had lived since at least the sixteenth century, and of Anita Grünpeter, from Upper Silesia. In 1937 the Nazis had imprisoned his father and grandfather in Dachau and Buchenwald and released them only on condition that they leave Germany, and his mother's parents were murdered at Auschwitz; in 1956 his parents brought him back to Lower Franconia.

He grew up in Würzburg, studied medicine at its university with a doctoral thesis on infant mortality among Jewish and non-Jewish newborns, and from 1988 to 2020 ran his own practice there as a specialist in internal medicine.

Work and career

Alongside his practice he worked for many years as a volunteer emergency physician with the Bavarian section of the German Red Cross. In 1998 he became chairman of the Jewish community of Würzburg and Lower Franconia, a post his father had held from 1958 to 1996, and in 2002 president of the association of Jewish communities in Bavaria.

Recognition

He joined the presidium of the Central Council of Jews in Germany in 1999, was its vice-president from 2010 to 2014, and on 30 November 2014 was elected its president, an honorary post to which he was re-elected for four years on 27 November 2022. He is also vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and of the European Jewish Congress, and since 2020 has been a member of the German Ethics Council. In 2023 the Jerusalem Post named him among its five Jewish Community Guardians, at number 47 on its list of the fifty most influential Jews, for his part in integrating thousands of Ukrainian Jewish refugees into communities across Germany.