In the organizer's words:

Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936), born in Vienna to a respected Jewish merchant family, was a woman of many talents and interests. The fact that she is only known to many as the patient Anna O. from Sigmund Freud's "Studies on Hysteria" does not do justice to her life and work. She was not only a pioneer of social work, but also campaigned for women's rights, especially the right to education. She gave speeches, founded aid organizations, wrote fairy tales and essays and founded the Jewish Women's Association together with Sidonie Werner and Henriette May in 1904. On November 25, 1907, it opened the "Isenburg" home in Neu-Isenburg for socially uprooted Jewish girls, unmarried pregnant women and single mothers with their children. The initiator and director of the facility was Bertha Pappenheim. She made the home a place of refuge, education and training for Jewish women and children. She ran the institution until her death in 1936, when it was dissolved under National Socialist rule in 1942.

Anna Heldt is the director of the Bertha Pappenheim Seminar and Memorial Center

A joint event by the Gerhart Hauptmann House Foundation and the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation Düsseldorf e.V. and Düsseldorf contributions "Respect and Courage" as part of the "100 Heads of Democracy" project of the Federal President Theodor Heuss House Foundation.