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JEWISH HERITAGE EUROPE
An Online Resource Centre
GERMANY NEWS PAGE
Jewish Berlin - Yesterday and Today (28 August 2008)
Discovering Jewish Germany in London (29 November 2007)
Soviet information contributes to updated Wannsee exhibition (23 August 2006)
Access Granted to Nazi Archive (23 July 2006)
Klezmer Exhibition in Frankfurt (11 June 2006)
Holocaust survivor buried at her German home (10 June 2006)
By Sharman Kadish
Brandenburg Gate
Photo © Sharman Kadish 2008
‘I wouldn’t choose it as a holiday destination, but I’d encourage people to come if they want to’.
This is how Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis of Finchley Synagogue summed up our recent visit to Berlin, a first time visit to the German capital for most of us.
The trip was something of a first for both organisers and participants – most of whom are Jewish. It was the brainchild of Joanne Lappin, Sales Manager of the German National Tourist Office in London. As far as she is aware, Joanne is the only Jew working for any of the 29 German Tourist Offices around the world. She spends most of her time promoting Germany as a holiday destination to British tour operators and their clients. She leads trade delegations on average six times a year, taking them all over the country, from Berlin to Bavaria. Not a job, it would seem, for a nice Jewish girl from St John’s Wood who studied European languages at university.
Knowing very well that inhibitions about setting foot on German soil are still strong amongst British Jews, especially of a certain age, Joanne, on her own initiative, tailored a tour specifically with us in mind.
Rabbi Mirvis and myself were amongst a group of twenty British Jews, comprising community leaders, educators, tour operators and journalists, who were invited to join this summer’s pilot trip, sponsored by Berlin Tourism, Lufthansa Airlines, and three kosher restaurants. The programme was put together - it took a year to organise - by Joanne in conjunction with Milk & Honey Tours, a Berlin-based company that specialises in Jewish cultural tours to Berlin and other European capitals. Milk & Honey Tours was founded in the early 2000s by two enterprising Jewish women in their forties; Miriam Daur and Noa Lerner were both born in post-war Germany and both are active members of today’s 11-12,000 strong Berlin Jewish community.
It is estimated that some 120,000 – 130,000 Jews are currently living in Germany, with perhaps 25,000 making their home in the reunited and invented federal capital. The majority arrived from the Soviet Union after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall in 1989-1990. Having lived under Communism for seventy years, few have any background in Judaism, Jewish history, heritage or culture. The percentage of these people who are halachically Jewish according to the traditional definition (i.e. born of a Jewish mother) is hotly disputed.
Another significant element in reconstituted ‘German’ Jewry consists of ‘ex-pat’ Israelis, who for a variety of personal reasons - love or money, artistic freedom or self-expression - have wound up in Germany. A high proportion of these mainly secular Jews, like the Israeli ‘Diaspora’ everywhere, remain aloof from the organised Jewish community. In Germany they can do things that they could not do back home in Tel Aviv, such as talk to Palestinians, 20,000 – 30,000 of whom have also created for themselves a Diaspora in Berlin. In addition, some 200,000 Turkish Muslims and their children live in Berlin, which is now the largest Turkish city outside Istanbul.
Only a tiny proportion of contemporary ‘German’ Jewry can claim to be true Yekkes – descendants of the Jews of Ashkenaz whose ancestors lived - intermittently - on German soil for upwards of one thousand years. Some are children of Displaced Persons who survived the Holocaust and were stranded in Germany in the chaotic aftermath of 1945. Others hail from families who returned from the Emigration of the 1930s, from Britain, France, Switzerland or America. We met a few of these ‘real’ German Jews during our trip, such as Hartmut Bomhoff, editor of the upmarket Jüdische Zeitung – perhaps the German equivalent of HaAretz – and Dr Jochen Palenker, Treasurer of the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin - the official Jewish community of Berlin. He can trace his ancestry back to seventeenth century Dutch Sephardim and is related to many of the ‘big’ Berlin Jewish families of the pre-war era.
Thus today’s ‘German’ Jewry is a motley crew. On our visit we met quite a cross-section: from Chabad to Liberal, native and immigrant. Inevitably, this diversity is reflected in the plethora of organisations purporting to serve the community - and the internal conflicts that have arisen between them. There are at least eight synagogues of differing persuasions. We were guests of the ‘official’ community who treated us to a delicious kosher buffet at the Gemeindehaus, Berlin’s Jewish Community Centre on Fasanenstrasse - whilst regaling us with speeches underlining their representative role. The Gemeinde has revived its historic function that dates back to nineteenth century Prussia, as an umbrella for the disparate strands of German Jewry vis-à-vis both State and Federal governments. But unlike their predecessors, today’s Gemeinde has taken on this role on an entirely voluntary basis. The Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland) and the local Gemeinden based in the main centres: - Frankfurt, Cologne, Dresden, Munich and Berlin (the largest), are well-funded by the State from restitution monies and compensation claims.
Yet, a number of other organisations have come on the scene, all competing for the same clièntele. Berlin as a city excels in duplication, not surprising given that between 1945 and 1989 it was divided into four Sectors: American, British, French and Russian. There are no fewer than three airports. Institutions cut off for years in Soviet-controlled East Berlin (which covered the whole of the historic city centre), were mirrored in equivalents established in ‘free’ West Berlin. The Freie Universität was founded in the West because the old Humboldt University, still known as the Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität when the infamous Nazi Book-burning took place across the road on Bebelplatz (formerly Opernplatz) and when Albert Einstein fled from his teaching post, was marooned on the wrong side of the Wall (1961).
Likewise the Jewish community was split into East and West and its institutions remain two-centred. The Gemeinde, several synagogues and kosher restaurants are clustered near the south-west corner of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s green lung which was once the King of Prussia’s hunting park. Before the Second World War, well-to-do Jews, bankers, department store owners, doctors, professors and solicitors lived in the leafy western suburbs, in smart apartment buildings in Charlottenberg or imposing villas in the forest of Grünewald. These people were the equivalent of London’s ‘West End’ Jews, affluent and often highly assimilated. On the other side of town lived the Ostjuden – the ‘East End’ Jews, many of whom had migrated from Poland in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and congregated in the old Jewish neighbourhood of Spandauer Vorstadt – later on lumped together by the Nazis with the neighbouring red light district of Scheunenviertel - ‘the barn quarter’.
Oranienburgerstrasse Synagogue
Photo © Sharman Kadish 2008
Here are to be found the most historic landmarks of Berlin Jewry, the Oranienburgerstrasse Tempel or Neue Synagoge (1866) and the oldest Jewish cemetery, on Grosse Hamburgerstrasse (in use 1672-1827, desecrated and plundered in 1942-5), where Moses Mendelssohn, ‘father’ of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, is buried. The magnificent gilded dome of the New Synagogue, reputedly modelled by Protestant architect Eduard Knoblauch on the Brighton Pavilion, dominates the neighbourhood. This dome, the twin turrets and Moorish style interior, were hugely influential in promoting the fashion for ‘Orientalism’ in synagogue architecture all over Europe, and beyond, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Damaged during Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938) and destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II, restoration of the remaining street façade and vestibules was begun by the East German Government in 1988 – a year before the Wall came down. Today, Oranienburgerstrasse is a magnet not only for Jewish tourists to Berlin, but serves as a focus for what is now a trendy up-and-coming quarter situated behind the Art Nouveau Hackescher Markt, a hidden network of courtyards stuffed with boutiques and cafés.
A little further out to the north east is the Rykestrasse Synagogue, restoration of which was completed in 2007. This synagogue was designed by Jewish community architect Johann Höniger and completed in 1904, together with the Jewish school that fronts the large red brick neo-Romanesque complex. The scale of building by German Jewry in the second half of the nineteenth century down to the 1920s is stupendous. The great and the good of Berlin Jewry are buried out of town in the massive landscaped Weissensee Cemetery with its imposing yellow-brick Italianate Ohel (Hugo Licht 1878-80). This is claimed to be the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. The Oranienburgerstrasse Tempel had seating capacity for 3,000 worshippers; Rykestrasse for 2,000. The biggest synagogues in Britain can hold a maximum of 1,000. These statistics alone convey the confidence of German Jews in the Era of Emancipation – a confidence cruelly shattered by the Third Reich.
Money for restoration has come largely from State coffers. The landmark buildings have been reclaimed and reused by different factions of the Jewish community. Oranienburgerstrasse has reverted to its historic role as the headquarters of German Reform, the flagship building of a movement that was born in Germany in the first years of the nineteenth century and became the strongest element in pre-war German Judaism. On the site today are housed the Centrum Judaicum, the main research institution of German Jewry, as well as a Conservative congregation and a new ‘open-minded’ Mikveh used by Reform converts. This is because they are barred from using the Mikveh on the premises of the Orthodox synagogue at Joachimstralerstrasse on the West side of the city, the only other ritual bath currently functioning in Berlin. Its 30-40 regular users presumably (I was unable to verify this fact) include members of the Adass Jisroel congregation that has been revived on Tucholskystrasse on the East side, around the corner from Oranienburgerstrasse. The Adass traces its origins to the separatist Austrittsgemeinde of Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, which finally left the umbrella Gemeinde when permitted to do so by the new German Government under a law passed after Unification in 1870. This was in protest at the domination of the ‘official’ community by Reformist elements. The Adass proceeded to set up institutions to serve their own Kehillah: Bet Din, schools, kosher butchers and bakers, a cemetery and Mikveh.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, both Chabad-Lubavitch and the American philanthropist Ronald Lauder are constructing Mikvaot on their respective premises, the latter at Rykestrasse, the old Jewish school building having been put to use by the Lauder Foundation as a women’s seminary. Chabad have spent millions – mainly raised in Germany, we are informed – on their lavish Chabad House in Münsterschestrasse, back on the West side. Their luxurious Mikveh is due to open in autumn 2008. Resentment against both Chabad and Lauder is tangible amongst Reform and secular Jews in Berlin, who see them as operating an exclusive policy that discriminates against ‘patrilineal’ Jews and ‘Mischlings’ – ‘half’ Jews, a highly sensitive issue in a country that experienced the Nuremberg Laws.
Reminders of the Holocaust are everywhere. By the end of our trip we were satiated with the ghastly history of National Socialism. Our excellent guide Thorsten Wagner of Milk & Honey, half-German and half-Danish and about 2 metres tall (we couldn’t lose him in the crowd) has a Ph.D. in German Jewish history and works at the Jewish Museum Berlin. His commentary was very well informed and highly sensitive. We were shlepped around numerous exhibitions by earnest German academics: the subterranean Information Centre beneath the official Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, near the Brandenburg Gate; the German Historical Museum; the Topography of Terror by the remains of the Berlin Wall; the atmospheric lakeside House of the Wannsee Conference; the Museum of the Otto Weidt Workshop (a sort of Oscar Shindler tale) and, of course, the landmark Jewish Museum Berlin.
Jewish Museum Berlin
Photo © Sharman Kadish 2008
For me personally, museums and memorials are a bit of a ‘busman’s holiday’. For my day job(s) I teach Jewish history and work in the heritage ‘industry’. The quality of exhibitions and artwork on display in Berlin is impressive. Daniel Libeskind’s ‘voids and axes’ and Peter Eisenman’s stark concrete blocks are remarkable pieces of sculpture. But they made no emotional impact on me.
Unexpectedly, what ‘did’ it for me was the overgrown railway track at Grünewald Station. This has been turned into a memorial ‘installation’ by the addition of a rusty iron strip along the edges, on both sides of the disused platform. The marker simply states the date, destination and numbers of Berlin Jews deported to the East from this train station between 1941 and 1945. As you walk along the track the numbers decrease, as the community shrank. In the background is the constant sound of the trains passing by on this busy commuter line. Go down the steps and follow the commuters through the subway, as they pass the sign to the infamous ‘Track 17’, by the flower shops through the ‘English style’ station building, with its mock Tudor gable and enormous clock, and the cafés where people sit sipping coffee in the late afternoon sun, and out into the leafy neighbourhood of Grünewald beyond with its million mark pre-war villas...normal life goes on. Here I achieved real insight into the lives of German Jews in the twentieth century. Just imagine London's Golders Green....
Weblinks:
www.milkandhoneytours.com
www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de
www.visitberlin.de
www.germany-tourism.co.uk
www.jewish-heritage-uk.org
www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu
An account of this trip by the journalist William Cook was published in
The Independent on 4 October 2008.
Enlighten, Entice and Encourage - so the headline for the launch of "Discover Jewish Germany" organised by Joanne Lappin, Sales Manager of the German National Tourist Office UK & Ireland in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Berlin, Berlin Tourism Marketing and Milk & Honey Tours Berlin. More than 80 guests and representatives of the Jewish community in London, travel trade industry, Jewish press, political and cultural institutions and the German Embassy were invited to a lunch at "Six13" restaurant in central London and informed about the history of German Jews today as well as heritage tours and tourism opportunities offered by Germany's contemporary thriving Jewish community. The guests included Dr Sharman Kadish of Jewish Heritage UK and Jewish Heritage Europe.
Left-to-right: Miriam Daur (Milk & Honey Tours), Thorsten Wagner (Milk & Honey Tours), Martina Dillman (Jewish Museum Berlin), Ralf Ostendorf (Berlin Tourist Office), Joanne Lappin (German National Tourist Office)
With 120,000 Jews currently living in Germany, the country has the fastest growing Jewish community in the world after Israel. This growth is manifested, among others, by the opening of a large community centre with a synagogue and museum in Munich last November, the opening of a synagogue in Gelsenkirchen and the re-opening of the Ryke St. Synagogue in Berlin in 2006. In Erfurt, a synagogue dating back to the 11th century is currently being renovated and will open in 2009.
Jewish specialist tour operators such as Milk & Honey, based in Berlin, are offering tailor-made programmes aimed at discovering Germany from a Jewish perspective including Berlin, Dresden, Frankfurt, Munich and Cologne tours. The Jewish Museum Berlin, located in a spectacular building designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 2001, has grown to be one of the most popular museums in Berlin. 95 percent of all British travellers visiting the museum rate it as an "excellent" experience. At 11 percent, UK visitors are currently the third biggest group of international visitors after Italian and Dutch tourists.
Joanne Lappin, who initiated the project, comments on the current developments: "The Jewish history and culture in Germany makes for a fascinating opportunity to discover yet another facet of this diverse country. Jews have lived here for almost 2,000 years, an unbroken chain beginning in the era of the Roman Empire and extending up to today. While respecting and remembering the history of Jewish life in Germany, there is scope to approach the new Jewish Germany and travel to the country to see what's new from a Jewish perspective".
Joanne intends to continue the project by organising trips to Germany for the UK Jewish Community and producing new brochures outlining the variety of Jewish heritage tours on offer.
For more information:
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Weblinks:
www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de
www.milkandhoneytours.com
www.visitberlin.de
www.germany-tourism.co.uk
www.jewish-heritage-uk.org
www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, via Jewish Herald Voice, April 2006
Documents recently made available from the KGB archive in Moscow contributed to the recent updating of the Memorial and Educational Site of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin.
The Soviet archives have yielded new information on the role of the Gestapo and police battalions during the Holocaust. The purpose of the original Wannsee Conference, held in 1942, was to delineate the details of the 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish question'. Items on display at the Memorial and Educational Site include a memo written by Reinhard Heydrich, chair of the Wannsee Conference, in which he describes details associated with the 'Final Solution' and the subsequent role in the Holocaust of various conference participants. The memorial site has separate rooms covering such subjects as the development of anti-Semitism; resistance and the role of the German public; the bureaucratic processes behind the deportation of the Jews; and daily life in ghettos and concentration camps. Soviet archives contributed particularly extensively to a display on organized groups of perpetrators such as the police and other offices of civil administration.
Costs of the updated exhibition were over 573,000 Euro, and were funded by the German government. Additional funds are needed, both for a catalogue and for greater technological expansion. The current exhibition was designed by architect Rainer Lendler and includes video installations and other media. It originally opened in 1992 and since then continued research has led to the expansion of the site.
Memorial and Educational Site of the Wannsee Conference:
Open: 10am-6pm daily except for public holidays.
Admission: free. Guided tours, in multiple languages, are available by appointment.
For the full story see
Wannsee Exhibition.
For more information on the Memorial and Educational Site of the Wannsee Conference:
www.ghwk.de/.
(Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Soviet Archives help Update Nazi Exhibit by Toby Axelrod, April, 2006)
After nearly 65 years of operation, The International Tracing Services (ITS) of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will allow limited public access to the roughly 45 million Nazi archival items contained at their headquarters in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
In May 2006, a supervisory board of eleven countries (Britain, France, United States, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Greece, Poland, Germany, and Israel) formally agreed to open the archives to member countries in compliance with German privacy laws. The ITS first granted limited access (approximately two percent of all documents) to historians and researchers in 1996 but later refused to open up the remaining archives, concerned over the adequate protection of personal data. A treaty defining precise access restrictions and regulations, to be ratified by all member countries, awaits final signature.
Near the end of the Second World War, Allied Forces established the International Tracing Service as a way of tracing and registering missing or displaced persons. By 1945 the ITS had developed a central registry in Bad Arolsen, chosen for its central location in the occupied territories, to carry out the repatriation process. As time passed, the ITS shifted focus to confirming the identity and history of European refugees. ITS also helped confirm information during the reparations process. Today, ITS continues to field requests for information on missing persons, directs the Compensation Fund for Forced Labourers, and is transferring its archives into electronic format so as to make them more accessible.
The Nazi archives at Bad Arolsen contain information on roughly 17.5 million people, filling roughly 15 miles of shelving. Germany's initial hesitation about opening them stems from the sensitive nature of the information they contain, as well as concerns over their accuracy. They include a Totenbuch or death book from the Mauthausen concentration camp, detailing the systematic execution of inmates in celebration of Hitler's birthday; the famous Schindler's List, of inmates spared from death camps to work for Oskar Schindler; arrest and prosecution lists for those considered to have defiled the German race, including homosexuals and prostitutes; medical records and details of medical experiments; death and execution lists; information on individuals cooperating with the Gestapo and the names of individuals running the security camps; as well as information on those liberated from death camps and lists of repatriated slave workers.
Most scholars feel that the opening of the archives will shed light on the daily work of the concentration camps and contribute to the further identification of missing or displaced persons, but will not throw new light on the cause of the Jewish genocide, or supply a complete account of all those imprisoned or killed. But it will be a watershed in terms of access to information, especially that which reveals the reality of experience in the concentration camps.
International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen:
http://english.its-arolsen.org/
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC):
www.icrc.org
BBC News:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4988378.stm
The Jewish Chronicle:
www.thejc.com/
An exhibition was held at the Frankfurt Jewish Museum (Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt) which looked at the musical breadth and geographic scope of klezmer, a secular music that began in celebrations at Jewish weddings and festivals but has since experienced a mainstream boom in Israel, the United States, and Germany. Called Klezmer - Hejmisch und hip (Klezmer - Homegrown and Hip), the exhibition followed the style back 300 years to its roots in the villages of Eastern Europe and Russia.
The exhibition followed the style's development, from the poor travelling musicians of the 18th century to today's hottest bands, through photos, texts, musical instruments, and multimedia performances. The exhibit and accompanying concert series closed on 25 June, with dates and performances listed on the above Frankfurt Jewish Museum website. A catalogue has also been published.
www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=1839
Wiesbadener Tagblatt 4 May, 2006
By Kirsten Strasser. Translated by Stephen G. Esrati and as posted by him on the eejh listserv at eejh@yahoogroups.com
(Original headline:'Back to the beloved and hated homeland: Holocaust survivor Charlotte Guthman-Opfermann finds a final resting place in Mainz: Born in Wiesbaden')
It is a return to the beloved, hated homeland, the fulfillment of a last wish. The urn of Holocaust survivor Charlotte Guthmann-Opfermann, who died on 22 November, 2004 in Houston, Texas, USA will be entombed in the grave of her parents-in-law in Mainz, Germany.
'Some day when you are no longer alive,' a good friend once said to her, 'when you have passed away, you will be buried in Theresienstadt (the site of a Concentration Camp). That's what you really want.' Charlotte Guthmann-Opfermann did not then disagree, perhaps because this sentence made sense then. Part of her had already died, back then in Theresienstadt, with the other victims of the Holocaust. But as her end drew near, she decided otherwise. Shortly before her death in November 2004, she told her daughters that she wanted to be placed in the grave of the Opfermanns - the family grave of her former husband. This last wish will now become true. On Friday, 5 May, the urn of the deceased will be installed in the main cemetery in Mainz.
Why? One may very well ask. Her relationship to her German homeland - Charlotte Guthmann-Opfermann was born in Wiesbaden in 1925 - was ambivalent, made up of love as well as hate. To top it off, the Opfermanns of Mainz were Catholic, while Charlotte was a Jew, and almost all her relatives were murdered by the Nazis. Yet fate tied her closely to the Opfermanns, not only because Charlotte married an Opfermann son in her youth, but also because both families suffered under Hitler's terror.
Many here are familiar with the fate of Charlotte Guthmann-Opfermann. Although she emigrated to America a year after the end of the Second World War and lived there until her death, she visited Germany regularly, especially the Rhine-Main area. She dedicated herself to common sense and understanding, gave lectures, led discussions with schoolchildren, read from her books. She told the story of her life again and again, at least the parts that could be told. Some horrors could not be spoken.
Charlotte, called Lotte, grew up in Wiesbaden as the daughter of a highly regarded Jewish lawyer. She had roots, too, in the tiny Rhineland village of Eich, which became one of the first places proclaimed 'free of Jews' after they beat Charlotte's grandfather out of town. The old man later died in a concentration camp, exactly like Charlotte's father, who was murdered in Auschwitz, and her brother Paul, murdered in Mauthausen.
Charlotte survived the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. She entered that hell at 17 and emerged from it at 20. All around her was a constant dying, as she called it. Again and again, the young girl woke up next to corpses. She also survived 'liberation' by the Russians, during which she was raped.
The young woman left Germany in 1946 and a couple of years later she married a friend of her youth from Mainz, Heinz Rudolf Opfermann, who called himself William Henry Opfermann in his new American homeland, where he wanted to distance himself from the past. The former soldier in the Wehrmacht would not allow his wife to speak of past sufferings and the recent past, not even with their daughters. This broke up the marriage, Charlotte Opfermann-Guthmann said years later, after she had broken her own silence.
And though her marriage to William Henry Opfermann had dissolved, she must have felt closely bound to her in-laws, for only that would explain her wish to join them in their grave.
Reinhard Frenzel of Mainz was able to dig up some of the family history, with the help of Diane Porter, daughter of Charlotte Opfermann-Guthmann. Frenzel taught at a girls' high school and took on the task of learning what happened to former students, and even the Opfermann family had Jewish roots.
Ignaz Opfermann, a master builder and an ancestor, built the main synagogue in Mainz in the mid 1800s.
The parents-in-law of Charlotte Opfermann-Guthmann were Consul Wilhelm Opfermann and his wife Cornelia, a Jew.
The mother of the consul was Sophie Opfermann, born a Henkell.
And while Wilhelm Opfermann worked as a master vintner with a family that was famous for its production of wines, the relationship suited him to a 'T,' because Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister from 1938, had also married into the Henkell family. His hand hovered protectively over the Opfermanns, according to Reinhard Frenzel, until this became impossible.
When the Third Reich was going under, not even Ribbentrop could do anything for the family, Diane Porter learned. Cornelia Opfermann was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. She hanged herself in her cell. Her husband later poisoned himself. Both are buried in the main cemetery in Mainz, where their daughter-in-law Charlotte Opfermann-Guthmann will soon join them. She never tired of raking up the awful past that resulted from blind hatred.
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