Jeremiah 17:10 “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”
102-year-old Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport is now a doctor.
Eight decades after she should have earned that honor.
In 1938, she was denied the change to defend her doctoral thesis by the Nazis. Her crime? She was part-Jewish. Now, the University of Hamburg has given the neonatologist a doctorate after she passed an oral exam.
“After almost 80 years, it was possible to restore some extent of justice,” Burkhard Goeke, the medical director of the university’s hospital, said in his speech. “We cannot undo injustices that have been committed, but our insights into the past shape our perspective for the future.”
Syllm-Rapaport said that she did it for more than herself, but for all those who suffered injustice at the hands of the Nazis.
“For me personally, the degree didn’t mean anything, but to support the great goal of coming to terms with history — I wanted to be part of that,” Syllm-Rapoport told German public television station NDR.
Uwe Koch-Gromus, the university’s dean of the medical faculty, was asked about her oral exam on the subject of diptheria, the subject of her original doctoral thesis.
“She was brilliant, and not only for her age,” he said. “We were impressed with her intellectual alertness, and left speechless by her expertise — also with regard to modern medicine.”
Taking her grades into account, she was graduated magna cum laude.
