Mag. Dr. Ruth Kaufmann

Mag. Dr. Ruth Kaufmann is the president of the Holocaust- and Tolerance Center “Haus der Namen”, which she founded in 2015. She studied medicine, psychology and educational sciences at the Karl-Franzens University Graz and has been working since 1992 as a psychotherapist and international teacher in transactional analysis psychotherapy and as an individual psychological addiction counselor in her own office.

Already in the year 1979, after returning from a long stay in a kibbutz in Israel, she began to fight anti-Semitism, including on Austrian TV. During her studies, she was a member of the "RAN-Film" for youth film productions and media education at Austrian schools.
Then she worked as an addiction counselor at the addiction councelling center Graz (BAS) and focused on addiction prevention work at Styrian schools. She also created the concept for the addiction prevention center in Styria.

From 2010 to 2016, she also led the Jewish community in Graz, as the first woman in this positiion. In 2010 she published her first book "Erste Hilfe für Pubertierende”, a guide for teenagers and their parents.

This was followed by the two books "Journey into the Unknown - Bertl's Diary" and "In the Net of the Ant Spider - Adele's Diary".
After these two books, the exhibition "Bertl & Adele, two children in the Holocaust" was created by the artist Uwe Kohlhammer for the Holocaust- and Tolerance Center "Haus der Namen”. The concept of this exhibition is to teach the Holocaust according to the latest pedagogical findings in the school and extracurricular field, as well as the promotion of tolerance and intercultural communication.

In the book "Holocaust Education" in collaboration with other authors she  explains how the Holocaust needs to be tought, to initiate an educational process in the sense of a transformation process to find empathy and tolerance.
 Ruth Kaufmann is married, has two grown-up sons and four grandchildren.