European Judaism

It seems peculiarly appropriate that I should be writing this while living in Potsdam, as it is a most apt place from which to be contemplating the issue of a heritage constructed with mortar, stone, or wood and placed upon the landscape of Europe. Here, in Potsdam, I live in a city which was laid waste by the Allies at the end of the war, a process which was then largely hurried along by a Communist dictatorship. They had no desire to be reminded of the glories that had been Prussia, and were only too glad to be rid of the hated symbols of Germany’s past. How much should be reconstructed is a subject of ongoing, heated discussion in the shadow of the Wende, the reunification of East and West Germany.

The towns of Barnstaple and Bideford in North Devon (England) have had a continuous small Jewish presence from the 1760s until the present day, however they have not always had a worshipping Jewish community. For a period of some fifty to sixty years from the 1760s, a rudimentary community was formed in Barnstaple with virtually nothing so far written or known about it. This is a reconstruction, in so far as is possible from the limited documentary evidence available, of the lives and genealogical connections of these families and their subsequent links to other south-west Jewish communities.

In the year 2001, Bevis Marks Synagogue celebrates its Tercentenary. Situated on the fringes of the City of London, this historic synagogue has been in continuous use since it was opened in 1701. As the oldest Jewish place of worship and the only Grade I Listed synagogue in the country, Bevis Marks bears silent testimony to the stability of Jewish life in Britain after 350 years. Ever since the Readmission (1656) during the Puritan Revolution, Jews have enjoyed uninterrupted settlement in Britain, a record unrivalled anywhere else in Europe.

The sale of books and manuscripts from the Beth Din library in November 2000 was the second phase in the dispersal of a collection put together by the first English Chief Rabbi nearly two centuries earlier. Gathering dust and unappreciated, except by a Dayan, a rabbinic judge, who helped himself to realise their value until his depredations became too evident, the library has become a milch-cow for the United Synagogue. Sent to auction in New York the collection netted over three million pounds, and more came in when the next sale was held in March 2001.

This year the Jewish Museum in Berlin plans to finally open its doors to a curious world. This empty building has already achieved cult status as a Holocaust Memorial so that one almost has to wonder what more can be achieved by the addition of an exhibition, With it being the focus of ongoing worldwide attention, it is perhaps appropriate to glance at what is happening with other buildings of Jewish interest in Germany.

France awoke fairly late to the realisation that specific protection was required for its Jewish heritage. For many years, the only thought was to safeguard a few eighteenth-century buildings of exceptional quality without considering their value as representatives of the Jewish inheritance. Thus, in 1924, the synagogues under threat at Carpentras and Cavaillon were saved by being classified as historic monuments. It was not until the 1980s that a campaign to research and protect this heritage got under way. The regional Departments for the Preservation of Historic Monuments were given the idea of ‘recent heritage’ by their supervising ministerial department.

The sixteenth-eighteenth century stone synagogues of the Right-Bank Ukraine (Eastern Galicia, Volyn and Podolia) as well as of Byelorussia, are a remarkable but still insufficiently studied phenomenon of European architecture.

The German public's perception of Jews is problematic in more than one way: besides an aggressive and latent anti-Semitism, less malicious clichés and even well-meaning efforts to relate to Jewish topics often fail to grasp the reality of Jewish life. Jews are predominantly associated with the Shoah, and thus with National-Socialism. They appear in research projects, documentary films, political debates and historical museums. If Judaism is portrayed as a contemporary culture at all, it is exoticised through visual topoi such as synagogues and kippot, Torah scrolls and paeyes, and transformed into a mysterious and obscure religion. Germans’ imagination of their Jewish fellow-citizens have little in common with the reality of Jewish life in Germany today.

So there I was – sitting at dinner in New College, Cambridge, next to a rather sophisticated museum-going lady from Chicago. She was sharing with me her fury at the indignities suffered by women visiting art museums. As a prime example, my dinner companion cited a sculpture of a nude, by Aristide Maillol, standing at the head of the stairs at the Art Institute of Chicago. What is a young girl to think about a nude torso, headless and armless, intended to greet visitors to this great art museum? With its focus on the crotch, this image of a maimed and helpless woman sends all the wrong messages.

This paper was originally a lecture I gave to a group of rabbis and lay leaders who were participating in a yearly workshop called ‘Partners in Leadership’, the purpose of which was, obviously, to find ways in which those groups could work more effectively together, as groups and in individual congregations. I have no idea of what effect, if any, the talk may have had, though it was published sometime afterwards as one of a series of pamphlets put out under the auspices of Leo Baeck College. I know some of my colleagues and student colleagues read it and found it useful, if only to confirm their own perceptions, and then it sort of sank. The issues I tried to address came up from time to time in various circles (they still do, over and over and over, as if they never had before), but with real seriousness only among the women rabbis, who didn’t need my article to tell them what the scene was. Their own experience was amply informative. I think some of the women rabbinic students who came across it later found it helpful.

In thinking about how to address this subject, three possible points of entry come to mind. Firstly, there is the theoretical approach. I could, for instance, start with some definitions. What is family therapy? What are its central tenets? What techniques do family therapists use? These are important questions and I will have to address them in some way. However, talking a great deal about theory always runs the risk of dryness, so perhaps it is better to find a more imaginative way of giving you answers to these questions.

Synagogues are organisations. For those who associate the word ‘organisation’ with business, industry or public bureaucracies this statement may be shocking. Nevertheless, when we move beyond the private world in which individuals and small groups of family and friends work together totally informally, we enter the world of organised activity (Hillis, 1989). This world includes synagogues.

In the current wave of academic and media interest on the apparent renaissance of a Jewish community in Poland after 1989, it has become customary to define the new generation of Polish Jews by the element of choice in their identity construction. Such a distinction is poignant in the light of Poland’s troubled postwar history. Following the tragedy of the Shoah, in which ninety percent of the 3.3 million prewar Jewish population perished, those who survived and remained in the country were almost entirely polonised. After 1947, manifestations of Jewishness were increasingly curtailed as part of the Stalinist drive to create an ethnically homogenous nation.

German TV and correspondents from the major papers thronged to this conference which dealt with one of the most difficult aspects of Holocaust history: faked biographies of Holocaust victims which put into question the genuine testimony of the survivors. Professor Julius Schoeps and his Moses Mendelssohn Centre in Potsdam near Berlin assembled a large number of scholars from the USA, Switzerland, Germany and Israel to comment on the strange case of a world wide bestseller Binjamin Wilkomirski: Fragments, which claimed to present the reconstructed memories of a child who survived the concentration camp.

I will never forget November 17, 2000. I had flown from Florida to New York the night before (it was Thursday) to attend Rabbi Schindler’s funeral in Westport, Connecticut on Friday morning. I drove from New York, arrived very early at the synagogue, and walked into the sanctuary – empty, except for rows of pews and hundreds and hundreds of empty chairs. There, in front of the bimah, stood a lone, simple, closed, unadorned pine casket. Two thoughts rushed through my head; first, the enormity of the realisation that this warm loving friend of over thirty years was in fact gone; and second, the symbolism and honesty of that plain pine box.

Yellow warblers breeding and the vision of Ezekiel

A poem for Job

Reading Yehuda Misfits?

1940 Prague 1943 1944

R’Fuah Sh’Laymah

Gallery

Minstrel of the Dawn

Why no woman lost her looks The terror of Isaac, an American version circa 1930

Christian self-hatred

When I travelled to Vienna in May, I carried Hella Pick’s new book in my shoulder pack. I needed it. Schizophrenia and paranoia are registered citizens there, which is only natural. After all, Freud, Jung, and Frankl found it the perfect place for their practice, even if they themselves were infected by Austria. (I think here of an incident which happened many years ago. Rabbi Dow Marmur wrote Viktor Frankl and asked him to speak in London. No reply. He phoned the great psychiatrist. ‘You spelled my first name with a c and my last name with an e,’ said the great man; ‘I will not come.’ And he hung up.) The hang-ups continue. As my taxi passed the statue of the great general, the driver turned to me and said in all seriousness: ‘We need another Prinz Eugen to save us from the Turks!’ I could not agree.