The very mention of the word “Germany” brings on revulsion in me – not surprising for a child of survivors who was brought up with concentration camp stories at the dinner table. But the tour I was considering was being led by Dr. Shneyer Leiman, a professor of Jewish history, whose lectures have always enthralled me. He is a walking encyclopedia, with a dry sense of humor, who truly loves to share his erudition with others. Because of a “chance” meeting with another couple near Jerusalem, whom I had met on a tour that Dr. Leiman led in Lithuania, I hesitantly signed up at the last minute, becoming group member 13. It was going to be a small group.
This was my second visit to Germany. The first was just a short stopover, when I was returning to Israel from Austria via Munich. Now I would be spending 10 days in the land of the people who murdered my grandparents and uncles. What a comforting thought!
Traveling by myself a day early, I disembarked in Hamburg. I looked around. Blond hair, blue eyes all around . I felt alien and alone. I imagined what it would have been like if I had landed 75 years ago. Two Gestapo agents with black leather overcoats would have grabbed me by the arm and whisk me away. I took a breath, then sought out a wagon to shlep the luggage from baggage claim. To get a wagon, you needed a one-Euro coin. To change money to get the coin, I had to exit the baggage claim hall. But once you’re outside, you’re not allowed to reenter. I exited anyway, got change, then snuck back in when the electric doors swung open. I waited by the conveyor belt for my baggage, which never arrived. I said to myself, this is G-d’s way of telling me I made the wrong decision.
* * *
In the morning, I made my first foray in Germany by shopping for a few pairs of underwear and other essentials. I bought some clothes at a Levi’s franchise, where the salesman asked me out of curiosity where I came from. I told him Israel. His face expressed surprise. He asked if I was originally from there. I told him I was from the U.S. He was even more curious. He wanted to know what made me want to leave America for Israel. I told him that Israel was my homeland and that as a religious Jew I felt the most fulfillment there. This type of scenario repeated itself a few times.
The next day, I met up with the other tour members. I was surprised to see a fellow who was a classmate of mine at Yeshiva University. This was a very highly educated group of people: one tax lawyer, one medical statistician, one (female) accounting professor, one (female) endocrinologist, amongst others – and Dr. Leiman, who is Professor Emeritus of Jewish History and Literature in the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and teaches at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University. He earned his doctorate from the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and his rabbinical ordination from the Mirrer Yeshiva in New York.
* * *
On the first day of the tour, we traveled to Hamburg, whose Jewish community was started by Sefardic Jews, Portuguese Marranos, in 1700. When they first came, people didn’t even know that they were Jewish. For many years, Hamburg was an independent country. Eventually, both the Ashkenazi and Sefardic Jews were expelled from Hamburg and moved to the neighboring Jewish community of Altena, which was part of Denmark. (For 200 years, the Hamburg rabbis were the spiritual leaders of three communities – Altena, Hamburg, and Wandsbeck – which saved the communities money!)
We headed to the building that housed the Talmud Torah in Hamburg – the first Orthodox educational institution that included secular studies, which was started by Chacham Isaac Bernays in the 1820s. Today it serves as the Jewish community center.
Dr. Leiman told us the story of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Frankfurter, a student of Rabbi Yonasan Eybeschutz, who was a dayan in Hamburg. By 1805, he had “had it” with Jewish education. He thought it was terrible and the kids knew nothing. He realized that the world was changing, and students needed methodology. Rabbi Frankfurter opened a new school, where he introduced the study of Hebrew language and Tanach (Bible) in the curriculum. Although there was no secular studies, that alone was revolutionary. It was one of the first modern cheders, called a cheder mesukan, “improved cheder” (although his opponents, by switching Hebrew letters, also called it cheder mesukan, with the meaning of a “dangerous cheder.”) After Rabbi Frankfurter died, it turned back into a regular cheder.
(By the way, Rabbi Frankfurter had a son named Rafael, and Rafael had a son named Samson. It was common in Germany that you would put the name of your father as a second name. So, Samson called himself Samson Rafael Hirsch, after his father. Hirsch was the name of the father of his grandfather, Menachem Mendel!)
In 1821, Chacham Isaac Bernays was appointed chief rabbi of Hamburg. He had been a chavrusa of Rabbi Yaakov Ettlinger back in Wurzburg. Their rebbe was Rabbi Avraham Bing, the Rav of Wurzburg. The first thing Rabbi Bernays did after he became chief rabbi was to appoint himself as principal of the Talmud Torah. (Samson Raphael Hirsch was then a student in the school and became his devoted disciple.)
This is what Dr. Leiman read to us regarding what Bernays introduced to the cheder: “Aside from German (language), history, geography, mathematics, and science, he called for the teaching of the history of religions, a comparative study of the languages of antiquity, a profound understanding of Scripture, and a study of Midrash.”
“Just like any yeshiva today…” quipped Dr. Leiman, with his trademark, mischievous smile. He continued, “One of the graduates of the Talmud Torah was Rav Shraga Kalmanovitz, a rosh yeshiva in the Mirrer Yeshiva in New York – and my rebbe – who was the son of Rav Avraham Kalmanovitz. Rav Avraham sent his son from Lita to the Hamburg Talmud Torah, where he studied until it was closed by the Nazis!”
According to Dr. Leiman, if it weren’t for this Talmud Torah, there might not have been a precedent for American yeshiva high schools like Torah Vodaath, Ner Israel, or Chaim Berlin.
Rabbi Yaakov Ettlinger, author of Aruch LaNer, was the rabbi of Altena in the mid-1800s. His student was Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, who, in 1851, founded a yeshiva that required students to have a significant secular education before entry. He later founded what become known as the Hildescheimer Rabbincial Seminary in Berlin. Rabbi Hildesheimer wrote in his memoirs that his rebbe instructed him to walk every Shabbos to Hamburg to the shul of Chacham Bernays and listen to his drasha (sermon) – which he did for years!
* * *
As I listened to Dr. Leiman, all my fears and hesitations about coming to Germany melted away. I was mesmerized. From Hamburg, we headed to the cemetery, where we saw the tombstones of Rabbi Yonasan Eybeschutz and Rabbi Yaakov Emden, who were involved in an acrimonious and famous dispute.
You see, despite the conversion to Islam of false messiah Shabtai Tzvi in 1666 and his death in 1676, secret societies of Sabbateans (followers of Shabtai), who still believed in his messianic mission, thrived in communities across Europe and continued to be active well into the 18th century. One prominent rabbi who was suspected of being a Sabbatean was the rabbinic luminary, R. Yonasan Eybeschutz of Prague. Although, initially, he successfully dismissed the allegations, when he was appointed chief rabbi of the illustrious triple-community Hamburg-Altona-Wandsbeck in 1750, the suspicions came back to haunt him. They then developed into a full-blown controversy over his suitability as a rabbi. His principle opponent was Rabbi Yaakov Emden.
As I listened to Dr. Leiman’s talks, I experienced a sort of techiyas hameisim – a revival of the dead. The combination of standing before a matzeiva (gravestone) and hearing the deceased person’s life story from Dr. Leiman made it feel as if the person had come alive. This was no textbook character but a flesh and blood human being who was living and breathing at this very moment.
“Rabbi Emden was the Senator Joe McCarthy of his time,” said Dr. Leiman. “If there was one major thing he accomplished regarding this controversy, it was that he completely put an end to Sabbateanism.”
I had many opportunities to catch Dr. Leiman alone and to pepper him with questions. I asked him if there was any basis for Rabbi Emden’s accusations. He told me that there might be, based on an amulet that Rabbi Eybeschutz had written.
“But how could Rav Eybeschutz possibly believe that someone was the messiah after he had already passed away?” I asked.
Dr. Leiman smiled and said, “This kind of thing is going on today!”
“But I thought that the death of their ‘messiah’ was our main argument against the missionaries,” I said.
“There are much stronger arguments,” answered the professor. “The fact that it has been 2,000 years since the coming of the founder of Christianity yet the world is still filled with wars and bloodshed is pretty good proof that this ‘messiah’ was not real.”
We entered the Grindel neighborhood of Hamburg, where Jews had lived from 1900 until the Second World War. It was an upscale area. The Orthodox rabbi of the area was Yosef Carlebach[1], who was shipped to Riga where he died al kiddush Hashem.
We saw gravestones of Jews who died fighting for the German fatherland during WW I. Dr. Leiman read to us memoirs of some of these veterans who were so patriotic, only to be shocked a few years later by the turnabout of Jewish fortune in Germany.
* * *
On Wednesday, August 15, we departed Hamburg by bus, with Berlin as our destination. We took a detour, going due south on Route 7 to make a stop at the infamous Bergen Belsen. During the war it was a concentration camp. After the war it served as a displaced persons camp. That was the first Holocaust-related item on our trip.
On the way there we passed a beautiful countryside and picturesque villages, dotted with shady trees and green fields. On the bus, Dr. Leiman told us that in one town, not too different from the ones we were passing, there lived a holy man and mystic who predicted the Holocaust! I was shocked! I never heard of such a person!
His name was Rabbi Elchanan Pinchas Moshe Chaim[2], more popularly known as Reb Hyla Wechsler. He lived from 1843 to 1894. During his married years, he lived in the town of Hochsberg, near Wurzburg, in the province of Bavaria. In Kislev, 1879 he wrote a booklet in German titled Jaschern milo Debor. In this anonymous work, he describes his dreams, which were so intense that he believed that they were more than regular dreams but, rather, forebodings. He also gave his interpretations. These dreams preceded the pre-Zionist Chovevei Zion movement and the Russian pogroms by three years, Theodore Herzl by 18 years, and the Nazi rise to power by 54 years!). Here are two dreams that relate to the Holocaust:
About 5 years ago I saw myself in a dream standing on a high mountain in Rumania, persuading the Jews there that they should not nourish any false hopes that by the aid of the Alliance Israelite[3], or by the aid of European powers, they would achieve equality. They should rather go to Palestine, settle there and take up agriculture. (Dream 6)
Another time I saw, in the East – in the proximity of Rumania – a terrible thunderstorm, and from there a mass of threatening dark clouds move all around to most of the European states. But it came to Germany earlier than to Austria-Hungary. This struck me very much. Continuing dreaming, I thought: the meaning of this is that the Rumanian spirit of hostility against the Jews will make its rounds in other states, but it will strike roots first in Germany before it grips other countries. (Dream 7)
Tragically, because the work was published anonymously, and contained other dreams that seemed unrelated to the two mentioned here, the booklet made little impact on its readers.
* * *
As we traveled to Bergen Belsen, Jay and Leora Fenster were especially excited. They, like myself, were children of survivors. Leora’s mother and aunt were interred in Bergen Belsen. Leora’s mother, Chana Anna, then 22, was taking care of her sister, Ettel, 19, who had typhus. Ettel succumbed to the disease five weeks after the camp’s liberation by the British Army. During the first five weeks after the liberation, the British buried the thousands who had died and a few thousand more who died in the first five weeks of their rule in a mass grave. After the five-week period, they began burying the dead in single plots. Ettel was buried by her sister in one of them. A few months ago, a Holocaust documentation center was able to locate the location of the grave of Ettel. Just three months before our trip, the matzeiva that Leora had purchased was placed there. Now she would be visiting it for the first time.
We arrived. Leora stood by the grave and showed pictures of her mother and aunt when they were children. She spoke about how the Holocaust affected her mother and how that, in turn, influenced what she taught Leora and her siblings. I could relate to a lot of what she said. Then her husband Jay recited the Kaddish at the grave for the first time.
There was one other gravestone that I remember, that of the famous young diarist Anne Frank and her sister Margo.
* * *
Late in the afternoon, we arrived in the city of Nuremberg, where the infamous racist Nuremberg laws were passed and where the trial of top Nazis took place after the war. After eating supper at the Lubavitch shul[4], we waited outside for our bus to pick us up. The old buildings gave the feel of a very ancient town. The sun was beginning to set, and it felt as if a perpetual dark shadow had engulfed this city. Dr. Leiman told us that it was here that the author of The Mordechai, which is found in the back of all the gemaras[5], was murdered in a pogrom in 1298. The pogrom was initiated by a madman who aroused the residents to kill the Jews. Not a single Jew in Nuremberg survived. It sent a chill through my body.
In no country did I feel the pathos of galus as I did in Germany. In Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, I felt churban – total annihilation. It felt different in Germany. Germany was about a never-ending cycle of Jews being invited into a village or town, settling in, experiencing a pogrom, and finally being evicted – until being invited back again. At the end, after a brief glimmer of hope brought by the Emancipation, it all came tumbling down to a brutal end.
You don’t experience that kind of galus in America. Sure, neighborhoods change, but there are no expulsions, no pogroms, no eventually returning to the old neighborhood. America is a different kind of galus.
It was also eerie to see how the Reform almost completely took over – despite the success of the Hirschians and the Neo-Orthodox. How strange it felt to walk into a reconstructed synagogue in Worms, the city where Rashi was once a student, the city where the author of the sefer Rokeach, Elazar ben Yehuda (1176-1238), a rishon, lived – he who lovingly described how his wife piously prayed and learned Torah here and how he was now bereft. She died al kiddush Hashem in a pogrom. We visited the synagogue where pious Jews davened for hundreds of years. And now, when you walk into that synagogue (it was reconstructed after the war), there is no mechitza, because it turned Reform in the decades before the Second World War!
Speaking of Worms[6], the experience of visiting the cemetery there was awesome! We stood by the matzeiva of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, also known as the Maharam Mi-Rothenburg (1215-1293), who was the teacher of the Rosh (Rabbeinu Asher). He was caught while trying to make aliyah to Eretz Yisrael and put in a dungeon, with the demand that the Jewish community pay ransom for him. A large ransom was raised, but Rabbi Meir refused it for fear of encouraging the imprisonment of other rabbis. He died in prison after seven years. Fourteen years after his death, a ransom was paid for his body by Alexander ben Shlomo Wimpfen, who offered the money on the condition that he be laid to rest beside the Maharam. The community accepted his proposal, and the two matzeivas lie side by side to this day. Another luminary buried there is Rabbi Yaakov ben Moshe Levi Moelin, also known as the Maharil (1365-1427). The Maharil’s best known work is Minhagei Maharil. It provides an authoritative outline of the minhagim of the German Jews. This book is frequently quoted in the glosses of the Rama (Moshe Isserles) on the Shulchan Aruch.
The oldest matzeiva I saw was that of Rabbeinu Gershom, Me’or Ha’Golah, in the old Jewish cemetery of Mainz. He was the first Ashkenazi to write a commentary on the Talmud and was also a Rosh Yeshiva. He sat shiva for his son twice. The first time was when he learned that his son had converted to Catholicism[7]. The second time was when he learned that his son had died. To me, that tragedy symbolizes the danger and vulnerability of the Jews in Germany during their long galus. But what was incredible to me was their connectedness to G-d and their faith in the final redemption of the Jewish people.
* * *
We spent a few days in Berlin, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The hotel was located within walking distance of the Central Berlin Synagogue, where we ate our Shabbos meals. It had two other advantages: It offered a kosher breakfast, and it had regular metal keys for shomer Shabbos guests on the lower floors.
Chabad has a huge complex, which includes a large shul, an educational facility, and a high-class meat restaurant. After eating at the restaurant some of us opted for the 40-minute walk to the hotel. Most of the way back was on Kurfurstendamm. This very broad, long boulevard can be considered the Champs-Élysées of Berlin, lined with shops, houses, hotels, and restaurants. Many fashion designers have their shops there, as well as several car manufacturers’ showrooms. It was a dazzling experience. There was also a bombed-out cathedral that was a memorial to the bombing of the city by the Allies during WW II.
I was not impressed with the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It was way too abstract for me. But I was impressed with the extension to the Jewish Museum that was designed by the renowned Jewish architect Daniel Libeskind, who won the competition for the design of the new World Trad Center in New York, in 2003. Although it was not designed as a Holocaust Museum per se, it was, to me, one of the best Holocaust memorial experiences I have encountered. Unlike Yad Vashem or the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C., where you are inundated with visuals and information, Libeskind designed the hallways in such a way that you experience what the German Jews were going through in a visceral way. In one hallway, with pictures of German Jewish families lining the walls, the passageway get narrower and appear to close in on each other, so you get the feeling of being squeezed in, for, as time is running out, so are your options. At the end of that hallway, you open the door and enter a dark room, where there is an escape ladder mounted to the wall – but out of reach. You get the idea.
It was when I got to Berlin that I was most puzzled by the ways of Providence. It was the German Jews who were assimilated the most, who willingly converted to Christianity the most. Yet more of them, percentage-wise, were saved from the Holocaust than the Jews of Eastern Europe! (Fifty percent of the German Jews, overall, and 60% of the Jews of Berlin survived. And the Berlin Jews were very assimilated!) The Orthodox in Poland and Russia got hit the worst. I read Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s book Rejoice O Youth as a teenager. He has neat and tidy explanations of mida kneged mida (measure for measure) explaining the Holocaust. I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t seem to match with the facts of history.
An example of this seeming lack of Divine justice is when I saw an amazing memorial in Berlin by the sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger, commemorating an extraordinary event at that site in February, 1943. The Nazis had rounded up some 2,500 Jewish men and boys, the husbands and sons of non-Jewish women, and imprisoned them at Rosenstrasse 2-4, the Jewish Community Center. Until then, Jews in mixed families had been sent to forced labor – but not to death camps – and the German wives were pressured to divorce their husbands. Some did, but others remained loyal. In 1943, as part of the Nazis “final roundup” of over 60,000 Berlin Jews, they arrested the husbands and sons of Aryan women and gathered them for deportation to death.
The Nazis wanted to keep the Rosenstrasse detention place secret, but the women found out where the men had been taken. The first day, a spontaneous demonstration erupted as 600 women shouted, “Give us our husbands back.” Other family members joined them.
This was the first public demonstration against the Nazis, and it grew to include as many as 6,000 people over the week. The police dispersed them, warning they would shoot, but the women regrouped, without leaders or weapons. The guards pointed machine guns at them and threatened to open fire. The women held their ground and shouted, “Murderer, murderer, murderer!” After a week, propagandist Joseph Goebbels, worried about the protest’s public relations impact in Germany and abroad, ordered that the Jews with Aryan spouses or parents be released.[8]
These intermarried Jews remained in Berlin throughout the war – and survived! Saved by their shiksas!
I had questions about G-d’s hashgacha pratis (Providence). Why, davka, were these assimilationists so lucky as to experience such a miraculous survival! But how can a puny brain like mine even begin to fathom the mind of the Divine? And an even bigger question came up for me: If these women could stop the Nazis, imagine if a few thousand more, in cities across Germany would have protested “murderers, murderers”! Imagine the whole Nazi program grinding to a halt. But there were no other protests! So, I find it even more difficult to probe the minds of these “cultured” Germans.
* * *
The last stop on our tour was in Frankfurt. The Jewish ghetto was gone, but Dr. Leiman showed us a photo of it. At the end of the ghetto, whose main street was the Judengasse, lies the old cemetery. Some of its distinguished personages include the Pnei Yehoshua; the Chavos Yair; Raizel, the mother of the Chasam Sofer; Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the banking dynasty; and the Maharam Schiff.[9]
Surrounding the cemetery was a wall with little plaques. Each plaque had a name of someone who was killed in the Holocaust, along with the date and where he was murdered. It was very poignant. From there we went to a more modern cemetery, where we saw the matzeiva of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Rabbi Hirsch held the prestigious pulpit of chief rabbi of Moravia. The kehila of Frankfurt had turned Reform, but 11 families asked Rabbi Hirsch to lead them. He couldn’t do it officially, because anything outside the kehila was not recognized by the German government. So they had to form a religious society or “club.” By the time Rabbi Hirsch died, 1,000 families were members of his shul, he had succeeded in getting official government recognition for his secessionist kehila, and the old kehila members decided that, because they hardly had anyone left, they would hire an Orthodox rabbi and turn the Frankfurt Temple back into a shul!
I asked Dr. Leiman how Hirsch could accept the position as far as parnassa was concerned, since there were only 11 families. Dr. Leiman smiled and said, “One of those families was none other than that of the wealthy banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who paid not only Hirsch’s salary but funded all his institutions. Rabbi Hirsch was no dummy!”
We also saw the matzeiva of Willy Rothschild, a grandson of Mayer Amschel, who was a baal teshuva. Hirsch learned b’chavrusa with the young man, who later was a major benefactor of Lithuanian yeshivas, and was extolled by Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinski for his magnanimous philanthropy.
Two other places of note: The first was the West End Synagogue in Frankfurt. Originally Reform, it was not destroyed by the Nazis because it was in a very upscale neighborhood. It is now Orthodox, and the shul is gorgeous. On the balcony the pipes of the organ the Reform used on Shabbos still stand! The second place was the magnificent and awesome medieval mikva in the nearby community of Friedberg. Built by Yitzchak Kublenz in the middle of the 13th century, the masonry and architecture and the long winding stone stairwell make one marvel.
* * *
I left Germany with many impressions: most of all, the wonder and amazement of how the Jews managed to survive there. Then there were the rolling hills, green forests, and medieval towns – and the tragic fate of Jews who lived in them. There was the dazzling city of Berlin with its 10,000(!) Israeli residents, its graves of pious rabbis and teachers, and the stories of their lives. I saw a new Germany that wants to atone for its past (unlike the Poles and Lithuanians). What will become of Germany? I left with questions that I may never get answers to.
[1] The famous singer Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach is from that family.
[2] He learned in the yeshiva of the Ksav Sofer in Pressburg. For more information on this fascinating individual, Dr. Leiman suggested these sources to me: “Start with Berthold Strauss, The Rosenbaums of Zell (London, 1962). Aside from its rich content, it includes a reprint of the original German publication by the Prophet, Rabbi Hyla Wechsler. Then go to James Kirsch, The Reluctant Prophet (Los Angeles, 1973). Now you are ready for the studies by Rivkah Horwitz. See her “The Mystical Visions of Rabbi Hyla Wechsler in the 19th Century,” in K.E. Grözinger and J. Dan, eds., Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism (Berlin, 1995), pp. 257-274….”
[3] The Alliance Israelite Universelle is a Paris-based international Jewish organization founded in 1860 to safeguard the human rights of Jews around the world. It is noted for establishing French-language schools for Jewish children throughout the Mediterranean in the 19th and early 20th century. Wikipedia
[4] I must declare that one of the highlights of the trip to Germany was the incredible mesiras nefesh (sacrifice) of the shlichim (emissaries) throughout the country. The catered kosher (and sometimes home cooked) food that they served us made the logistics of the trip considerably easier.
[5] Before the Tur was published, people learned the Rif. The Mordechai added all the Ashkenazi customs and piskei halakha.
[6] There is a famous room there with a table and chairs that is known as Rashi’s bais medrash. Rashi did study in Worms when he was around 20 years old, but he didn’t teach there. And the building didn’t exist until 200 years after Rashi died. As you pass through the gate of the old city walls of Worms, there is an indentation. Legend has it that Rashi’s mother was pregnant with him and as a carriage with horses was passing by and she was about to be crushed, a miraculous indentation in the wall occurred and she and Rashi were saved. The problem with that is that Rashi was born in Troyes, France, not in Germany.
[7] We have no information regarding the cause of the conversion – whether it was done willingly or under coercion.
[8] Lucy Komisar, Berlin Sculptures Tell of Women Who Defied Nazis www.thekomisarscoop.com/2005/09/berlin-sculptures-tell-of-women-who-defied-nazis/
[9] Maharam Schiff was one of the favorite peirushim on the gemara of my TA rebbe, Rabbi Joseph Rottenberg, amu”sh. He also liked to quote the Pnei Yehoshua.
