The Pope and Germany’s Jews SARAH MAC DONALD
Out of the long shadow of the past
Jews all but disappeared from Germany because of the Holocaust. But now the Jewish community is growing again, mostly due to migrants from other countries. As the Pope is learning this week on his journey home, Germany is an increasingly pluralistic society
the German parliament in Berlin and meet civic leaders in Erfurt, Etzelsbach and Freiburg. As always during pontifical trips abroad, the visit includes time with religious leaders, some from other Christian denominations but also others from the Jewish and Muslim faiths. The gatherings reflect an increasingly pluralistic German society. But it is one that still lives in the shadow of the past. Just a few weeks ago, delegates from the
P
major faiths gathered for an international conference that looked back, not to the more distant past of Nazism and the Second World War but to the more recent past of 9/11, and the need for peaceful co-existence in a post- 9/11 world. They gathered on Benedict’s home turf, Munich, the capital of Catholic Bavaria, and the city where he was archbishop before leaving for Rome. Munich is located in the vicinity of the for-
mer concentration camp of Dachau, which was opened just 51 days after Hitler took power in 1933. When Munich was liberated in April 1945, American troops found just seven Jews alive in the whole of the city. One of those was Fritz Neuland, a senator and lawyer who was forced into slave labour by the Nazis. Neuland later became a founding member of a group established to represent the rights and needs of the devastated Jewish community of post-war Germany. Today, Neuland’s daughter, Charlotte Knobloch, who survived the Shoah due to the willingness of a Catholic to “claim” her as her illegitimate daughter, is leader of Munich’s 10,000-strong Jewish community – the sec- ond largest in Germany. She was also the first female president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews. In 1951 she married the late Samuel Knobloch, a survivor of Cracow’s Jewish ghetto, and the couple opted to settle in Germany. Knobloch has an intimate understanding of the complex tapestry of identity that under- pins her community – one that has seen
10 | THE TABLET | 24 September 2011
ope Benedict was this week visiting Germany, his third trip “home” since his election in 2005. The trip will see the Bavarian-born pontiff address
significant growth since the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and its satel- lites. The political “freedom” that followed this liberation unfortunately left many Jews threatened by a resurgent far right, which emerged in many of the former Communist bloc countries and this in turn precipitated an influx of Eastern European Jewry into Germany, swelling the tiny local Jewish com- munity’s numbers to over 120,000. Such rapid change has created both new possibilities and new problems. It has also exposed the ongoing threat of anti-Semitism. Charlotte Knobloch links its prevalence over the last 20 years to economic disadvantage. “The extreme right makes promises that it will improve the situation and many out of desperation believe them,” she said. Thirty-four-year-old Rabbi Elias Dray was born in Germany, though his parents are orig- inally from Poland. His wife was born in Mexico but grew up in Jerusalem and they met at a wedding in Manchester. As a rabbi ministering to Munich’s 9,500 Orthodox Jews, he recalls the joy of 9 November 2006 when the community oversaw the dedication of the new Ohel Jakob Synagogue. The occasion was, however, tinged with portentousness as the date also marked the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938. The new synagogue and its ancillary build- ings in St Jakobs Platz commemorate the city’s previous synagogue of the same name, which was burnt down on the orders of Hitler on 9 June 1938 – five months before Kristallnacht. Visitors passing across from the synagogue to the community centre feel the weight of history in the “memorial pas- sageway” where one wall records the names of 4,500 of Munich’s Jews who were killed during the Shoah. But the changed circum- stances of the Jewish faith is underscored by the fact that Munich now has four synagogues. Thirty-two-year-old Aaron Buck is press
officer to the president of the Jewish com- munity of Munich and Upper Bavaria. In his view, “German Judaism doesn’t exist any more.” Of the new diversity within the com-
A rabbi carries Torah scrolls during a procession to the newly rebuilt main synagogue in Munich in November 2006. Photo: Reuters, Michael Dalder
munity, he explained: “There is a plurality in German Judaism now. There are Jewish com- munities in places where there was no Jewish infrastructure for 60 years, especially in east- ern Germany.” These new communities are predominantly composed of immigrants. So while “they bring Judaism back to Germany”, he suggests that this Judaism “has little to do with the Judaism that was there at the begin- ning of the twentieth century”. The former journalist is one of a minority
of German-born Jews. “I am Jewish only on my mother’s side – my mother is Jewish and my grandmother was Jewish. She married a German who was not Jewish and he saved her life. She lost her whole family during the Nazi era,” he said, adding it is “a typical Jewish German history”. And yet, Buck says, he would “prefer the world of German Judaism from the beginning of the twentieth century to what we have today, even if the political system now is per- fect”. He regrets the loss of normality and the lack of Jewish infrastructure which formerly existed.
Rabbi Dray concurred: “There are almost
no Jews in Germany nowadays descended from pre-war Jews.” His parents left Cracow because “Poland was very anti-Semitic after the war and Jews didn’t feel comfortable there”. Of his flock in Munich today, he explained that “we have a lot of Jews from the former Soviet Union” and this has given rise to new dilemmas around assimilation and identity. There are also young people who are learning of their Jewishness as adults. As Rabbi Tom Kucera of the Beth Shalom reform community in Munich explained: “We have had a couple of cases where a young woman at 18 discovers she is Jewish because her
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