Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

Titled "Healing in Hessen: Jewish Music Returns to a German Town," the concert of German Jewish classical and liturgical music is set for Wednesday, March 13, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. It is one of several Jewish Music Festival events presented by the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center.

Jewish genealogist Carol Davidson Baird, who will be speaking before the concert, has taken a key role in the restoration of the synagogue in Voehl, in the German state of Hessen. Her grandparents were married in the Voehl synagogue, where she and her husband renewed their own wedding vows at the site some 80 years later.

The synagogue was the focal point for the area's Jewish residents, who constituted almost 10 percent of the town's population before World War II. Like many of the Jews of Germany, Voehl's Jewish residents were extremely well-integrated into the town's professional community. That ended, along with the Jewish presence in Voehl, with Kristallnacht, the 1938 "night of broken glass." The year also marked the destruction of the synagogue.

In the ensuing decades, what remained of the synagogue was turned into a house, which Baird visited several times during the past two decades — although she never gained entry.

"The first time I went back was when I was a teenager in 1960," she recalled during a phone interview from her San Diego home. "That was a pretty turbulent time for Jews to visit because God forbid they should want their property back."

Although Baird wasn't seeking any compensation for family losses, (several members of her extended family died in the Holocaust), she did have an insatiable curiosity about her ancestors' German Jewish history. The 56-year-old genealogist acquired all the information she possibly could on her ancestors in Voehl, until an unsolicited e-mail she received in 1999 provided a huge breakthrough.

Karl Heinz Stadtler, whom Baird calls a "mensch beyond all mensches," wrote her that he was interested in resurrecting the synagogue to its rightful place as a center of Judaism. Stadtler, a non-Jewish schoolteacher in Voehl, was trying to gather funds in order to turn the synagogue into a Jewish cultural center. He'd gotten Baird's name from the town archivist, who noted that she had visited the synagogue.

Initially, Baird was skeptical — thinking it might be a prank. But after Stadtler showed her his research, along with his vision for what the cultural center could become, Baird jumped onboard the project.

Noting Stadtler wasn't winning any popularity contest by fund-raising for a Jewish cultural center in a town that hadn't had a single Jewish resident in more than half a century, Baird began to regard the teacher as a kindred spirit.

"I really began to fall in love with this man as a human being," she said. "I'm a product of the peace movement and flower generation, and firmly believe that living in the past can only keep the fires of hatred burning. Karl is of the same generation, and he didn't ask me to forgive or forget, just to participate.

"If the past isn't dealt with and acknowledged, then the hatred will eventually seep out somewhere."

Not everyone was enthralled with the idea, however. Baird's cousin Ursula Mildenberg had visceral reactions to the project — and little of it was pleasant. Mildenberg said "how dare she" embark on such a project, but she eventually accepted Baird's invitation to visit the synagogue she'd attended as a young girl.

Baird and her husband, accompanied on their trip to Voehl by one son and other family members, renewed their 30th-anniversary wedding vows in the synagogue where her grandparents had wed decades before. Members of the nonprofit foundation spearheading the restoration created a chuppah for the couple, and residents of Voehl sang "Hinei Ma Tov."

While her cousin Mildenberg alternately wept and showed the assembled German TV crew where she and other members of her family used to sit during services, Baird took endless pictures of the new cultural center — which is still in the process of construction.

Her photos provide a nice contrast to the only remaining picture of the old synagogue — a photo taken in 1933 by Baird's father, who was 12 years old at the time

"Everything has really come full circle," Baird said. "Hopefully the events in this one small town can be the seeds that sow healing elsewhere."

German violinist Matthias Erbe, American Cantor Stephen Saxon and Japanese pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi will perform at the San Francisco benefit.