GERMANY-DOCTORATE 102-year-old German woman becomes oldest person to receive a doctorate

Record ID: 150793

  • Title: GERMANY-DOCTORATE 102-year-old German woman becomes oldest person to receive a doctorate
  • Date: 9th June 2015
  • Summary: ***WARNING CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** PHOTOGRAPHERS SYLLM-RAPOPORT BEING INTERVIEWED (SOUNDBITE)(German) DOCTOR INGEBORG SYLLM-RAPOPORT SAYING: "Honestly, I'm happy it's over. (Reporter asking: Was it exciting?) Yes of course." CLOSE OF DIPLOMA (SOUNDBITE)(German) DOCTOR INGEBORG SYLLM-RAPOPORT SAYING: "I deserve to quit now." (SOUNDBITE)(German) UWE KOCH-GROMUS, DEAN O
  • Embargoed: 24th June 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Germany
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVAEICBUPN3CRYDVAWKNHDXG9UXC
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: One-hundred-and-two-year-old Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport received her doctorate at a ceremony on Tuesday (June 9), 77 years after finishing her dissertation on diphtheria in 1938.
    As a Jew she was not allowed to sit the final oral exam, under Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic race laws at the time, and could therefore not receive her diploma.
    Last year the paediatrician's son approached Hamburg University asking them if they would consider giving her the degree.
    The university agreed on the condition she sit the oral examination.
    Syllm-Rapoport spent months studying developments in the field of diphtheria and subsequently passed the examination, thereby becoming the world's oldest to receive a doctoral degree.
    "Honestly, I'm happy it's over," she said after the ceremony, adding "I deserve to quit now".
    Dean of Medicine, Uwe Koch-Gromus, who awarded Syllm-Rapoport the degree was impressed.
    "That was undoubtedly a very ambitious, very disciplined person, but personally a tremendously modest woman. Open-minded and alert which I found very, very pleasant. Not a woman whose fate, which was hard, had embittered her, but radiated an incredible amount of warmth," he said.
    Before World War Two, Syllm-Rapoport emigrated to the United States where she qualified as a paediatrician before moving back to Germany in 1950.
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