Berlin's Jewish renaissance

Professor optimistic about Judaism's presence in German city

NORMAN LEVINE
Special to Jewish News

The Old Synagogue in Berlin, burnt down during the Holocaust, is now largely rebuilt and protected by security guards provided by the German government.

Photo courtesy of Norman Levine

"I am Jewish," I said to a class of 20-year-old German students.

As a professor of history, I was lecturing on multi-culturalism in the United States this past summer at the Europa University, Frankfurt/Oder, and made use of my religious faith to illustrate the history of assimilation in America.

"I enjoyed your talk very much," a student said to me after class. "I hope you will come back again in the future."

German university students are bilingual, they were born after Hitlerism, they want to be part of this global age, and their generation wants their country to be tolerant, democratic and cosmopolitan. The attitudes of the students are also the attitudes of the German government, and the reconstruction of the Jewish community in Berlin and Germany are expressions of the desire of German governments since World War II to return to the humanitarian traditions of German culture. The revival of the Jewish community in Berlin was impossible without the support - spiritual and financial - of successive administrations.

Today, 100,000 Jews live in Germany, and of this amount, 80,000 dwell in Berlin. The rebirth of the Jewish community in Germany is a product of Jewish immigration into the country, or a reverse Diaspora. Initially, the Jewish resettlement was fueled from Israel - the few Jews who escaped the Holocaust - and wished to reclaim the life they enjoyed before the Disappearance.

The major source of Jewish immigration has changed, and the primary current of Jews flows from Russia. Currently, approximately 10,000 Russian Jews a year transplant themselves to Germany, and this exceeds the number of Russian Jews who emigrate to either Israel or the United States.

"The madman is defeated," says Judith Hart, editor of The Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper in Berlin written in German. "The loss of 6 million innocents is irretrievable," she continued, "but Judaism is again alive in Berlin, and the whole of Germany. We denied the monster a victory."

When I read a copy of The Jewish Times, I was struck by a story it ran about the reconstruction of a Jewish synagogue in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The Jewish Times is devoted to recording brick-by-brick the torturous but ceaseless process of rebuilding the history of European Jewry.

After leaving Berlin, my travels took me to Dubrovnik, and I decided to test the accuracy of The Jewish Times reporting.

With a map and with the help of local citizens, I discovered the Dubrovnik Synagogue and proved the credibility of the newspaper: The synagogue, on the second floor, in a narrow side street, was recently reopened. It is the religious center for about 30 Jewish survivors in Dubrovnik.

During the Golden Age of German Jewry, from 1870 to 1930, Oranienbergstrasse was the axis of the Berlin Jewish community, but when Hitler came to power the SS burnt down the Old Synagogue and deported the inhabitants to extermination camps. Today the Old Synagogue is largely rebuilt, is anointed with three gold-plaited domes and is protected around the clock by security guards supplied by the German government. All important Jewish sites are provided protection by the German central government.

The streets around the Old Synagogue are the resurrected Old Jewish Quarter, which today contain kosher bagel shops, an Anne Frank Center and the Jewish Cultural Center of Berlin.

The centerpiece of the Oranienbergstrasse resur-rection is the Oren Restaurant. It is a kosher restaurant that only serves Israeli cuisine. Hebrew is the primary language, but the waitresses are conversant in German and English as well, and menorahs decorate the walls. The only wine on the menu is from Israel.

Although the Old Synagogue does not perform services, another synagogue of Joachimstrasse does. It also runs a Hebrew School, and when I visited, approximately 20 10-year-old students were in attendance, reciting their prayers in Hebrew.

Berlin now houses a Jewish Community Center, and this is also situated off Kurfurstendamm. The Berlin JCC is a hub for Jewish cultural renewal. It has a library devoted to German-Jewish history, an ample lecture series, and it also boasts a Jewish orchestra.

Three extraordinary memorials provide a historical background to the Jewish renewal. One, not yet completed, is the Memorial to the Holocaust Victims, the work of New York architect Peter Eisenman. Sketches that surround the building site show that this memorial will be composed of gray concrete slabs, nameless and faceless, slouching toward nothingness.

The Memorial to the Holocaust Victims is a five-minute walk from the German Reichstag, the German Parliament, and two blocks from the Brandenburg Gate, the heart of the German capital. It is not only a grim remembrance of the Hitlerian slaughter of the Jews, but to locate it at the center of gravity for millions of tourists is a testament to the decision of the German people to confront its past.

The second is the Jewish Museum-Berlin, designed by the Israeli architect Daniel Libeskind, and one of the great museums of the world. The exhibit inside recounts the history of the enormous contribution Jews made to German culture and makes incomprehensible the hatred that was turned against them. But the overpowering moment of the museum is at the end at the Holocaust Tower, which you enter on your own volition. Pushing yourself into the room, hearing the click of the closing door engulfs you in a seven-story triangular chamber which is totally silent and almost totally black except for a casket of light at the top which is impossible to reach. As you squint at the walls, there are imprints of fingers that tried to escape but ultimately crumbled to the floor in hopelessness and resignation: Absolute abandonment.

A third is a memorial dealing with the Burning of the Books, the night Nazi hoards built a bonfire of books in front of the Law Library, in August Bebelplatz of the Humboldt University, not far from the Brandenburg Gate. In August Bebelplatz, almost lost in the concrete, is a glass window. Peering through this glass into an underground chamber your eyes adjust to the whiteness that descends into infinity as ghostly library stacks plunge down endlessly, devoid of books.

This memorial remains alive in my memory because when I was there, a class of German high school students were there with their teacher, and they all peered down at this victory of barbarism over culture. Here was living proof that one mission of the German educational system was to inform its students about the past, not to avoid the historical text, but to learn to read it to become better citizens in the future.

Professor Norman Levine of Phoenix was a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar in 1983-1984 and 1987-1988 and conducted a year of research in Berlin on each occasion.

Details

What: "The Renaissance of Jewish Life in Berlin" presentation by Professor Norman Levine
Who: The Tri-City JCC Men's Club (men only)
When: 9:30 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 14
Where: Tri-City JCC, 1521 S. Indian Bend Road, Tempe.
Cost: $8 lecture and bagel breakfast
Reservations: 480-897-0588

Home