Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh Generations speaker offers a ‘Night of Hope and Hops’
Deborah Leuchter Stueber has two passions: telling the story of her parents who survived the Holocaust and craft beer.
Deborah Leuchter Stueber has two passions: telling the story of her parents who survived the Holocaust and craft beer.
Stueber’s father and mother weren’t yet teens in Austria and Germany when Adolf Hitler rose to power and they witnessed the horrors of Kristallnacht, as well as the Nazis’ arrest, detention and murder of most of the Jewish population. Her father, Kurt, joined the resistance, waging war against the German army. Both he and his wife-to-be, Edith, eventually made it to the United States and raised a family.
It is a compelling story and one Stueber has recounted in schools, libraries and churches — a familiar circuit for those discussing the Holocaust and the story of its survivors. Now she’s combining her two passions and bringing her family’s chronicle to craft beer breweries.
Pittsburgh, Stueber said, is home to a burgeoning craft brew scene, with more than 40 breweries in Allegheny County. She’s even the administrator of a Facebook group, Pittsburgh Beer Ladies, that has more than 3,000 members.
It was on a trip visiting Two Frays Brewery in Garfield that an idea struck Stueber. She approached the owner of the brewery and asked if she could speak there. Surprisingly, the owner agreed. The brewery, she said, had a series called “Thinkers and Drinkers.”
“He said, ‘You will be perfect,’” she remembered.
From there, the Blawnox resident traveled to East End Brewing Company’s Mount Lebanon Taproom.
She’ll next bring her parents’ story to Grist House Craft Brewing in Millvale on Tuesday, March 26, a day when the space is typically not open. She’s also lined up a talk at Acclamation Brewing in Verona in November as part of Holocaust Education Month.
Stueber’s passion for craft beer has helped her understand what locations make sense to visit.
Typically bars, or venues with rows of televisions, don’t work, she said.
“Some people have the wrong idea of what a brewery is,” she said, noting they don’t resemble the typical corner pub. Instead, they are for those, like her, who have an interest in trying locally brewed craft beer.
In fact, many local breweries offer more than the usual beer and conversation.
Like Two Frays Brewing and its “Thinker and Drinkers” series, Acclamation Brewing has a regular series of speakers.
If the connection between the Jewish community, breweries and the Holocaust seems odd, it shouldn’t.
Jews have had a long history of brewing beer — including helping to found Oktoberfest, the perennial celebration of all things hops, according to Tablet Magazine.
And while Jews were forbidden from brewing beer for centuries in Germany, in 1868 the country introduced its freedom-of-trade laws, giving equal status to the Jewish community. In the following years, Jews bought several breweries, updating and modernizing the industry.
It was Jakob von Hirsch, a protected Jew in Germany, who created the country’s first industrial brewery in 1836. It was eventually seized by the Nazis who used it for medical storage and as an air raid bunker.
Löwenbräu, one of Germany’s largest and most successful breweries was founded sometime in the 14th century, but it was when the company’s Jewish chairman, Moritz Guggenheimer, took advantage of the country’s new international railroad network and transport routes that it was transformed into Munich’s largest export brewery. Like all Jewish businesses, it was seized by the Germans during the Nazis’ reign.
The Jewish connection to brewing isn’t strictly found in Germany.
In 1935, Hermann Schülein fled to New York and became the director of Rheingold Brewery. At its peak, it had the distinction of being New York’s most popular beer and the official beer of the New York Mets.
Stueber said it wasn’t only brewing that connected the Jewish community to beer, noting that Jews invented decorated beer steins; in fact, some pre-Holocaust steins still exist with Stars of David painted on the side.
And there’s evidence that fermented beverages, a precursor to beer, were found in caves near Haifa dating back nearly 13,000 years.
“There’s a lot of connection to beer in Europe, which is pretty cool,” Stueber said.
Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh Operations Manager Christina Sahovey said that Stueber is a prolific speaker who has shared her story with thousands of people in libraries, schools, churches and synagogues. It’s been “pretty cool,” Sahovey said, to see Stueber recount her parents’ journey in breweries, which offer a more laid-back and relaxing atmosphere.
It also fulfills one of Sahovey’s often spoken mantras: “Meet people where they are.”
By talking in breweries, she said, Stueber helps to show the Holocaust Center does more than present what some consider “academic lectures.”
“While we keep the educational, respectful, informative aspects of the talks, Debbie deliveries a ‘Night of Hope and Hops,’ as she calls them,” Sahovey said.
It also brings the message outside of the typical neighborhoods used to seeing a Holocaust Center event.
“Just being able to get out into new communities and seeing new faces is always great,” Sahovey noted.
For Stueber, the ability to combine her two passions is a win-win that reaches an important demographic.
“I know that the younger demographic are the ones that don’t know that much about the Holocaust. There are surveys about that,” she said. “I think speaking at breweries reaches a young and different demographic.”
It’s not only the post-Holocaust generations who are gaining from the experience. When Stueber told her parents she was beginning these new talks, her father only had one question: “How do I get a case of beer?”
And more than simply telling the tale of her parents, Stueber also passes along a little Jewish tradition.
“I make a toast. I say, ‘In Hebrew, cheers is l’chaim, which means ‘to life,’ so please raise your glass and join me — l’chaim.” PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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