By Paul Shaviv
I often say that Jew hatred is in the mother’s milk of
European society. Every now and then an incident occurs reinforces that belief
for me. The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin
That said I have to admit that I have mixed emotions about the Germany of today. I have noticed a degree of soul searching among younger Germans. They have begun to ask questions about what their grandparents role was during the Holocaust. The more they become aware of how their grandparents dealt with it (whether through indifference to the slaughter or outright participation in it) the more horrified they become. In short, today’s Germany is not your father’s Germany (…to paraphrase an old Oldsmobile commercial).
Ironically I believe it is the liberal spirit of the times that has generated this reaction. A spirit of equality of all men that was absent from their grandparents whose Christian belief was that the Jews are eternally responsible for the death of their god. And that the Holocaust was some sort of Divine punishment for that. A view that is not shared by today’s young liberal European.
Paul Shaviv shares his own experiences in this regard on a recent trip to Germany. His words follow...
I am writing this in Jerusalem, having just arrived from a nine-day visit to Germany.
For the last three or four years my wife, Michelle, has been intensively researching her family history. She has been working with a researcher, and they have discovered mountains of material. Her parents came from the Hesse region, near Frankfurt. The family had roots stretching back centuries in the towns and villages of the region – Eschwege, Unsleben, Reichensachsen; in Frankfurt itself and in Darmstadt. Her father, Larry (Ludwig) Stein (this year is the centenary of his birth) escaped Germany; reached the USA, served in the US Army, earned a Purple Heart; and qualified as a civil engineer. In that capacity he oversaw the refurbishment of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty!
Our trip to Germany was to explore ‘roots’; and, particularly, to rededicate five matzevot in the Jewish cemetery of Unsleben. These had been desecrated during the Nazi period, and Michelle had arranged to have them restored.
I would like to record some of my overall impressions; the complete diary of the trip, fascinating as it is, is far too long for the blog.
We flew into Frankfurt from the USA, arriving early on Monday morning, and travelled directly to the town of Eschwege, about 200km (= 120m) north-east of Frankfurt. The trip is through rolling countryside all of the way; fields and thick German forests. And this was true throughout our journey; the places we visited were small, and isolated in the German countryside, typically anywhere from twenty to fifty kilometers from the next town or village. Every place had housed a small Jewish community for centuries… probably from a dozen to no more than a hundred families. We know that the rural Jewish communities in Germany (on which there is a rich literature) were sometimes only two or three families in a village. Contrary, perhaps, to our popular belief, their lives were very similar in many respects to the Christian villagers among whom they lived; their allegiance to Judaism was more an allegiance to custom than to halachah.
But this is my point: the rural setting brought home to me in a way I had never previously really appreciated how totally Jews were embedded in the very landscape of Germany. They were part of German life, barely separate from it. They were neither distinct nor necessarily even particularly visible.
When we think of the history of the Jews in Germany, we tend to concentrate on the Jews of the big cities, and even then on the Jews of the modern period. But Jews lived in Germany for a thousand years or more, and until the mid-nineteenth century at least half of them lived in rural Germany. (In a tiny cemetery hidden in the depths of the countryside, we visited the grave of Michelle’s earliest known relative, R’Dovid Pinchas Benedix, dating from 1732.) The peaceful, bucolic, small-scale settings of those rural Jews makes the horrors of Nazism even more stark.
The second strong overall impression that I gained on this trip was the extraordinary – quite extraordinary – devotion of many non-Jewish Germans to preserving Jewish sites in Germany. Dotted throughout Germany are dozens of old synagogues, cemeteries and houses of Jewish historical meaning which are cared for and preserved through the efforts of altruistic non-Jews. These people lobby local municipalities and States for funding. Equally, almost every village or town has one, or two, or three non-Jews who have devoted themselves to researching their local Jewish history. There are now hundreds of books (in German) of micro-studies in Jewish history. An excellent example is a wonderful lady in Frankfurt (whom we were privileged to meet), who discovered a collection of letters and papers behind a radiator in her apartment, hidden there by a couple before they were deported to Theresienstadt. She spent five years writing a comprehensive history of them and their extended family. Until close to the end of the project, she did not meet or have any contact with any descendants of the families she researched. We met a few individuals who have amassed amazing amounts of knowledge about the families and individuals who lived – and died – in their towns.
And before the comments fill with suggestions of “guilt” – it isn’t guilt. These individuals are all at least one generation removed from Nazism. It is “conscience” – which is something completely different. We came across “conscience” on many other occasions. A local Mayor told us that he was thankful to my late father-in-law for coming back with the US Army “and helping to give us back our freedom”. Although, obviously, the people we met were neither random nor necessarily typical – I felt nothing other than warmth and positive feeling towards Jews, in circumstances where they very rarely, if ever, had contact with Jews. (Most of the Jews in the smaller towns today are Russian or Polish immigrants). They seemed to genuinely feel the loss of local Jewish community. I also noticed that a large bookshop in Frankfurt had a significant display of books on Judaism, Jewish history and Israel; someone must be buying them.
Finally, I had one day’s ‘excursion’ to Michelstadt, south of Frankfurt. This was the home of the great, and decidedly untypical, Rabbi Seckel Leib Wormser (1768-1847), the Ba’al Shem of Michelstadt. His kever is a place of pilgrimage; some followers of this blog may have been there. (I was profoundly and unexpectedly moved.) There are traffic signs in the town directing to “Baal Schem”. He was famous, among other things, as an expert gardener(!), and has a now-rare pear named after him. In 2023, the UNESCO-sponsored Odenwald Eco-Park named the “Seckel Leib Wormser Birnbaum” (the ‘Seckel Leib Wormser Pear Tree’) as its “Heritage Fruit of the Year”, and is devoting determined efforts to revive the breed. I don’t think any Jewish organisation has paid the Ba’al Shem that much attention – or respect!
Germany is, and will always be, a very complex place for Jews to visit. I am not pretending otherwise. But from the comforting surrounding of Jerusalem, just sharing some thoughts!