On 23 July 2021, reporter Rebecca Hillauer presented WerteInitiative on at least two ARD radio stations, namely BR and WDR. Our chairman Elio Adler had his say in the feature, as did co-founders and members of WerteInitiative. In it, Elio Adler and the author take a brief look back at the association’s history. In 2014 WerteInitiative came into being as a “loose alliance”, founded by Elio Adler and Lydia Bergida, which campaigned for safeguarding liberal democracy in Germany and, among other things, for a ban on the annual, antisemitic Al-Quds march.
Today, seven years later, WerteInitiative is an NGO with a three-member board and several staff. It works on many projects, including political policy recommendations, demonstrations, readings and panel discussions. Its board comments on political events in interviews and communicates with members of the Bundestag. The goal has always remained the same: combating hatred and thereby strengthening democracy.
The wave of migration in 2015 led to problems, in part because of antisemitic attitudes brought along with it. Latent antisemitism in Germany had been stimulated and had become socially acceptable again in some circles, according to Manuel Nyman. In the feature he says that ultimately this had led not only to a strengthening of the right “but also to a drifting of the civic centre to the right, which of course frightens me as a Jew just as much as the hatred of Jews that emanates from a radical Islam.”
The WDR version of the feature can be listened to here.
