A UNIQUE challenge to history, first posed in Germany 60 years ago, is still awaiting an answer: can a religious culture, once destroyed, be resurrected?
The question was first answered by Rabbi Leo Baeck, the last leader of German Jewry, on his return from the Theresienstadt concentration camp: “German Jewry is dead, never to be revived.”
The six decades since have shown that the cultural achievement that was German Jewry in the l9th and early 20th century, the graceful blending of German secular and Jewish religious culture — which is still crying out for its cultural historian — has not come back.
That still left the hope, among an increasing number of Germans and some Jews, of creating a new German Jewish culture as firm in its identity as Anglo-Jewish or American Jewish culture.
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The two vital ingredients for the creation of any religious culture are a critical mass of people and missionaries to instruct them. The missionaries have so far been lacking. Most of the rabbis who have served the tiny German Jewish communities over the past 60 years have come from Israel or Eastern Europe. Most offered an l8th-century orthodoxy that failed to connect with the bulk of the communities they sought to lead. And they believed almost without exception that after the Nazi mass murder, Jews should not be taking root in Germany again.
That climate is now changing. Germany’s Jews made headines around the world last week when the Central Council of Jews unanimously elected its first female leader, Charlotte Knobloch, 73, a Holocaust survivor from Munich. And in September the first rabbis to be trained in Germany for more than 60 years will be ordained in Dresden. For the past five years Germany has again had a rabbinic seminary, the Abraham Geiger Kolleg in Potsdam, near Berlin, created by the will and vision of one man, Rabbi Dr Walter Homolka.
Meanwhile, a critical mass has now also been assembled and urgently awaits the new rabbis’ ministry. It has gathered in Germany only in the past l5 years. When communism collapsed, the postwar German Jewish community was, coincidentally, facing extinction. It totalled 28,000; not enough, as its lay leader Heinz Galinski told the Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, to ensure a future. So it was decided to top up the numbers from the one reservoir of Jews still existing in Europe, the former Soviet Union.
For a decade and a half, anyone who wished to move from there to Germany was sure of a visa. That migration stopped abruptly on January 1, 2005. It was halted because most of the immigrants had been unable to find work — their Soviet qualifications were not recognised in Germany — and the burden on the generous German social security system needed to be limited. But the major objective of the migration had been achieved. Around 120,000 Jews had come to Germany from the former Soviet Union, together with some 130,000 non-Jewish spouses and children — Jewish fathers came with non-Jewish children, because only the children of Jewish mothers are granted religious Jewish status.
Of those 120,000, some 30,000 vanished into the surrounding secular society. But 90,000 have joined Jewish communities whose total membership is now around 103,000 — some l5,000 of those counted in l990 having vanished through death or non-recorded exits. As Benzion Wieber, the administrator of the Cologne Jewish community, put it: “I no longer have to worry how long I can keep the kindergarten or youth club going. Their future is now assured.”
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But the creation of a new German Jewish culture remains uncertain. For the arrivals do not offer the sort of clay from which to mould a commitment to Judaism. They know nothing about their heritage. Few, if any, can tell the difference between the ten plagues and the Ten Commandments; Sinai and Sabbath are to them concepts devoid of meaning.
In one of the greatest cultural crimes in European history, the Soviet communists wiped out Judaism as effectively as the Nazi regime physically exterminated Jews. A week before the last Jewish new year festival I walked into a Sunday class of 12 to l6-year-olds in what I thought would be an easy revision session.
“What do you know about the Jewish new year — when is it?” was my opening bid.
“When is what?” they asked.
I tried another tack: “Have you ever heard of Rosh Hashanah (the Hebrew name of the festival)?”
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“Of what?” they asked.
Nor had they heard of the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, a name that more than a few secular British citizens know as the holiest day in the Jewish religious calendar.
These most sacred days were never mentioned by their parents, let alone observed. Atheism is the only commitment they have rescued from the wreckage left by communism, and they clutch it like the shipwrecked cling to life rafts.
The woman who runs our Sunday school in Schwerin is an atheist who imparts no religious knowledge on principle. Among 1,000 members we have no one with the least religious knowledge or qualification who could replace her.
To impart some of the basics — such as the reason why Jews are forbidden to eat pork — to a mere fraction of our young and old would require resources we have no hope of raising. The l,700 immigrants who signed up to join the two communities I serve in Schwerin and Rostock in northeast Germany did so because they needed advice to help them cope with the formidable German bureaucracy.
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How many of those l,700 will still be there in l5 or 20 years is an open question. Once our teenagers leave school, most go elsewhere for higher education. No one can guess how many will return. So there has been no question of building new synagogues in Schwerin or Rostock to replace those burnt down in l938. The municipalities have given us school buildings as community centres. Each contains a prayer room, and is adequate for our present needs. With that we have avoided the fate of Dresden. A multi-million euro synagogue built there became a white elephant even before it was consecrated.
In communities such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and Cologne, the immigrants did find structures into which they could merge. Whether even there most of them will vanish into the open and liberal society which Germany has magnificently built from the ruins of Nazism and communism, or whether some of them will remain part of the critical mass from which to fashion a new German Judaism is as yet impossible to predict. I cannot rule it in. And as a man of faith, I dare not rule it out.
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William Wolff is area rabbi for northeastern Germany, based in Schwerin