Judaism is beginning to flouish again in Berlin
The survivors who accompany groups to the camps are driven to inspire the next generation
BERLIN IS a strange city. Ultramodern and uber-cool today, it is a place that stands as a living memorial to the pain of the Second World War. “It was supposed to be better than the others, our 20th century, but it won’t have time to prove it”. So wrote the Nobel prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska towards the close of the century. In the German capital, you experience the scale of that failure.
Physical memorials permeate every aspect of contemporary Berlin. They are on a series of lampposts recalling the discrimination of the Nuremberg laws; they are engraved on the remains of the Berlin Wall that once divided this city; and they are underfoot in the form of the “Stolpersteine”, the “stumble stones” that mark the places Jews once called home. Above all, they exist in the form of the thousands of stones next to the Brandenburg Gate that comprise the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Whatever you think about the suitability or effectiveness of these marks of memory, in Berlin they are inescapable.
The city is on my mind this week, having recently returned from a visit as an educator for the remarkable March of the Living UK.
My role was to guide and teach, yet immersive journeys of this sort often mean that I learn as much as the participants. On this particular trip, I had a new insight into the true purpose of a memorial.
It was the inspirational Harry Olmer, survivor of Buchenwald and the forced munitions factory of Skarzysko-Kamienna, a place he described as “hell on earth”, who said it best. After a discussion on the topic, he simply quoted the verse from Deuteronomy, recalling the attack of Amalek against the Jewish people after they left Egypt: “Remember what Amalek did to you.” The purpose of a memorial he said, is “Zachor”, to remember.
And on this particular journey, remember we did. We remembered the journey of the Jews of Berlin to their deaths from Platform 17. We remembered the journey of Mala Tribich to the notorious Ravensbrück, a predominantly female-only camp north of Berlin. For Mala, a person of immense courage, dignity and grace, it was the first time she had returned since departing Ravensbrück for Belsen more than 75 years previously. And in Belsen itself, we remembered, together with representatives of the regiments of the British Armed Forces who liberated the camp, the dedication and commitment of the British to heal and support the desperate survivors. “We did what we could”, read the wreath they laid at the site and those words struck a particular chord with me.
For when all is said and done, that is the task each and every one of us have on this earth. Yet there was another, different, type of remembrance that also moved me immensely during the time we spent in Berlin. On Shabbat morning, several of us visited the shul of the Kahal Adass Jisroel community, now expertly led by Rabbi Dovid Roberts, formerly of Edgware. The shul survived Kristallnacht and has recently been renovated to precisely replicate its pre-war appearance. Thanks to the visionary leadership of Rabbi Josh Spinner, CEO of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, we were privileged to meet a flourishing community there, demonstrating its commitment to remember the pain of the past by literally coming back to life.
We experienced the joy of an aufruf for a young couple due to get married the next day. We heard about the school which now has some 250 children enrolled. We saw the myriad outreach programmes working to inspire the next generation of young Berlin Jews. And we learnt how the legendary pre-war Hildesheimer Rabbincal Seminary is now once again training German-born rabbis to lead Orthodox Jewish communities across Germany.
Berlin is indeed full of memorials, the primary task of which is simply ‘Zachor’, to remember. But in order to last, remembrances for the past must somehow find a way to inspire the living. That, I think, is why our survivors accompany groups back time after time and why they relentlessly seek to pass on their critical message to the next generation. And in that sense, too, it is the current, flourishing community of modern-day Berlin which is today preserving the memory of the Jewish past of this city in the best possible way — by living the Judaism of the future. There can be no greater living memorial than that.