Category Archives: Jewish identity

July 23, 2012 · 6:51 am

The High Cost of Being Jewish

Cheri Scheff Levitan (Atlanta, GA)

For “fun,” while my husband was out of town, I decided to go back in time and add up how much we’ve spent – er, invested – in developing the “positive and confident” Jewish identities of our two children.  The list included:

  • An annual synagogue membership (to ensure we’d have a place to go for our son’s bris, the kids’ b’nai mitzvot, high holiday services, etc.);
  • 13 years of a day school education (K through 8 at The Epstein School and 9 through 12 at The Weber School);
  • An annual JCC membership to ensure that the kids would be able to attend:
    • Over 5 years of various JCC sports programs;
    • 8 years of various JCC summer camp programs;
  • A semester in Israel with the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program; and
  • Numerous round-trip plane rides to New York, Florida, or Israel to celebrate family holidays and simchas.

While I’m not complaining (actually, I guess I am), this list of “costs” is deceptive.  You see, while membership has its privileges, all of the organizations associated with the list above strongly request (or require in some cases)  – in addition to tuition – contributions to annual fundraising campaigns too.  I’m sure that even my Christian friends and relatives can relate to these challenges.  Adding up the numbers, I almost fainted!

So, how much did we spend in total?  Before I tell you, I must share two things that happened earlier this year.

The “easier” event to talk about involves an unpublicized, perceived act of anti-Semitism at a high school in Eugene, Oregon.  While, admittedly, I don’t know all the facts, it seems that a teacher who has been “earmarked as a racist” inserted an anti-Semitic slur (the K _ K E word) into a question on a discussion sheet about the movie “Swing Kids.”   The movie is an interesting portrayal of resistance by German youth during the Nazi regime.  However, Jewish parents and their students were not warned in advance about the film’s screening or content, especially as it pertains to the ways Jews are portrayed.  As a result, many of the Jewish teens in the class reported feeling uncomfortable, and even traumatized.

The second situation is a bit more complex.  Unless you don’t read newspapers or watch the news, you undoubtedly heard about the rabbi, his two children, and the principal’s daughter who were murdered outside a Jewish day school in Toulouse, France.  A letter from a woman named Becky (Rebecca “Beck” Caspi, Director General, Israel Office and Senior Vice President, Israel and Overseas of The Jewish Federations of North America), who attended the victims’ funerals, crossed my desk shortly after the tragic event.  She wrote:

“I’ve been thinking about how a father, who chose not to pursue fortune or fame, but to dedicate his life to teaching, lost his life because of that decision.  And I’ve been thinking about his wife – now a widow – who lost not only a husband, but her two beautiful sons.  Aryeh was only six and Gavriel just three.  And I’ve been thinking about Miriam Monsonego [the principal’s daughter] who got up to go to school and was brutally murdered instead.

None of them had to be at the Ozar HaTorah School in Toulouse [that] Monday morning.  They were part of a Jewish community that was building a Jewish future – securing our continuity as a people – by investing in education.  And for that, they were sacrificed.”

As both of these situations highlight, we pay a price for choosing to become, to stay, and to be Jewish.  Sometimes, the price is financial.  Sometimes, the price is fear.  Sometimes, the price is anger (and accompanying ulcers).  Sometimes, the price is life itself.

I feel bad about having counted my “identity-building” dollars in the wake of all of this.  Does it really matter how much it has cost us?

The choice to be Jewish – and to ensure the Jewishness of our children – is ours.  With it, there is a price that we willingly pay.  So be it.  Regardless of how it all gets added up in the end, the price is clearly very high to those of us who make this choice.

Cheri Scheff Levitan wrote this piece for her blog, Through Jewish Eyes (http://throughjewisheyes.com), where this excerpt first appeared in slightly different form. It’s reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

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July 16, 2012 · 7:10 am

The God Particle

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

They may have found the particle in Geneva,
but they didn’t find God in heaven.
So, the search continues, in Switzerland, in me.
I applaud their efforts, even though
I don’t understand their physics.
Yet, I know the answer to God’s existence
won’t be found inside a semi-conductor,
but in the intricate tunnels of the human heart.
If I could find a particle of belief,
I would be the most willing convert to orthodoxy.
Nations fight over religion;
families argue the merits over religion
in prewedding discussions with their offspring.
The battle between belief and non-belief
rages across the tough terrain of my soul.
Will you esteemed physicists
now find yourself closer to God,
or will one tiny particle even more convincingly lead
to the gateway of the splendor of His work?
I await an answer from you or God.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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July 2, 2012 · 6:00 am

Breaking the Jewish Taboo on Germany

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI)

I never expected to travel to Germany at all, let alone five separate times.  And the idea of enjoying myself there and making German friends would have struck me as implausible–if not crazy–ten years ago.  Why?  Because I grew up the son of Holocaust survivors and Germany always seemed to me the apotheosis of evil.  I feared and loathed it.

Letting go of those feelings prompted me to write My Germany, a combination of mystery, travelogue, and memoir.  Weaving together my story with my parents’ stories, it charts my unusual journey from hatred to reconciliation.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to be invited to speak about it across the US and Canada at Jewish book fairs, colleges and universities, libraries, churches and synagogues, the Library of Congress, and German cultural institutions.  The response has been profoundly accepting and sometimes–it embarrasses me to say–even rapturous. I’ve often had crowds of over one hundred people attend my events.

I’ve also done two book tours in Germany sponsored by the American Embassy in Berlin and the American Consulate in Frankfurt.  And I’ve been interviewed by Der Spiegel International.  And, amazingly, a German TV producer has expressed interest in documenting my next tour.

But American Jewish newspapers and magazines (print and on-line), even ones I’ve published reviews in over the years, have ignored the book.  That’s despite the fact that I’ve been publishing Jewish-American fiction and creative non-fiction for over thirty years, and that the book is published by the University of Wisconsin Press, highly respected for its Judaica and memoirs.

So why the virtual blackout?

I haven’t written the book to urge anyone to like or visit Germany.  It’s a description of how I emerged from my horror of Germany as an idea and then came to terms with it as a reality.  But even that’s apparently too much for many Jewish gatekeepers, who still seem to be suffering from collective PTSD over sixty years past the Holocaust.  Or they think their audiences are.

It’s not just editors who have problems. One prominent professor of Jewish Studies who resisted a visit of mine to his school accused me of offering Germans “forgiveness,” even though my book specifically says nothing of the sort.  But he couldn’t even cope with the word “reconciliation.”  He said that was just “code.”  You’d expect a professor to be more up-to-date: recent anthologies about post-Holocaust relations between Jews and Germans specifically distinguish between the two terms.

Reconciliation doesn’t remotely mean forgetting or even ignoring the past.  It’s acknowledging the historic chasm can never be filled in, but embracing the fact that one can reach across it in compassion and strive for mutual understanding.

A Jewish student at a major university said that when he told friends at Hillel, the school’s Jewish student center, that he was going to my reading, they asked why he’d bother.  (They were already furious at him for wanting to work in the automotive industry in Germany.)  Another college student at one of my readings said her father refused to speak to her about her majoring in German.  I’ve heard many more stories like this.

Even in-laws have asked me how I could possibly go to Germany under any circumstances whatsoever, and say they would never dream of doing what I’ve done.

How can I return to Germany?  Because of all the people I’ve met there who are deeply involved in Holocaust education, whether through teaching, writing, publishing, or community work.  Because when I met individuals agonizing over their parents’ or grandparents’ Nazi past, I realized how much better off I was to be the son of victims as opposed to perpetrators.

Of course, you could argue that My Germany wasn’t widely covered by Jewish media because it lacks worth or substance.  But you know what?  Disliking one of my books hasn’t stopped Jewish reviewers in the past from expressing their opinions in print, going all the way back to my first collection of stories in 1990, Dancing on Tisha B’Av.

That book was controversial for mixing stories about gay Jews and children of Holocaust survivors, and there were many Jewish Book Fairs where I would never be invited to speak about the book.  Attitudes among American Jews about gay issues have changed for the better. But when it comes to Germany, our community seems, for the most part, frozen in time.

Lev Raphael is a prize-winning pioneer in American-Jewish literature, and has been publishing fiction and nonfiction about the Second Generation since 1978. The author of twenty-two books which have been translated into almost a dozen languages, he has spoken about his work in hundreds of venues on three continents. His fiction and creative non-fiction are widely taught at American colleges and universities, and his work has been the subject of numerous academic articles, papers, and books. A former public radio book show host and newspaper columnist, he can be found on the web at http://www.levraphael.com.  He blogs on books for The Huffington Post and reviews for the on-line literary magazine Bibliobuffet.com.

You can check out his latest book, the Jewish historical novel Rosedale in Love, at http://www.levraphael.com/rosedale.html

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May 21, 2012 · 8:24 am

A Poet’s Reflections on Approaching the Edge

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

In looking at my two Holocaust poems–“Accident of Fate,” The Jewish Writing Project, May 14, 2012 (http://tinyurl.com/cpywfs5) and “One Holocaust Movie Too Many,” The Jewish Writing Project, August 22, 2011  (http://tinyurl.com/d7dt7po)–I can’t help notice that there is a sizable difference in perspective.

In “One Holocaust Movie Too Many,” the earlier one, I am the outsider looking in. I see pictures of the Holocaust, but the screen filters me from reality. I am there and not there, separated from the horror via celluloid and watching from a distance in present time where the world is safe and Jews can be proud of their heritage. In the poem, I do not hear the “awful trains,” except in a vague generational memory. I am as distant as anyone who has not been through the camps.

In “Accident of Fate,” there is a closer, deeper perspective. Yes, there is also the movie screen, but I wished in this poem to state much more emphatically that my involvement in the horror is much more than a memory. It is a feeling that I have been spared, granted life, but should not have been. Except for this accident of fate, I should have been in the barracks waiting to be put to death. The poem raises vividly an unresolved philosophical dilemma: why was I allowed to live while others were marched to the chambers? I realize, of course, there is no answer to this question. In the latter poem I am singed by the fires of the crematorium. I am there – far more so than in the first poem where I exist as a curious spectator.

My different vision for each poem was cast by personal history. My parents escaped Vienna in 1939, and I was born during the war in safe Switzerland. On some level (though not as much as my father), I have suffered from some kind of “survivor’s guilt,” never fully escaping the thought that I, very easily, could have been one more nameless victim.

I never truly understood my father’s torture, but I am beginning to see now that I am not totally unscathed from the horrible history. Though I did not fall in, my toe has always touched the rim of this terrible abyss. In the second poem I move closer to the edge.

Each time I approach the edge, I find myself compelled to write.

Here is a poem that I wrote after thinking about the process of moving closer and closer to that edge:

My Father’s Soul

Two Holocaust poems written months apart,
both describing horrors seen on the silver screen,
both touching on my escape from
the fires of the crematoriums.
In the first poem, I serve as spectator
seeing the barracks from a distance,
realizing I have been fortunate enough
to live free in a Jewish neighborhood.
In the second poem, I am the participant
with the growing sense
a part of me, a part of my father
still lives among the prisoners,
and what’s more, I have no business
being a survivor, being allowed
to live free in a Jewish neighborhood.
I am my father’s son;
his survivor’s guilt is my guilt.
His soul is my soul as I put
one foot ahead of the other,
casting my eyes upward at the smoke.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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April 23, 2012 · 7:12 am

Shabbat: Our tool for attention literacy

by Beth Kissileff (Pittsburgh, PA)

At my book group last night, one of the members told us that she had to fire a student working in her lab the next day. It was not a task she relished, but he was not performing his assigned tasks. Instead of following directions, he was checking his email or texting on his smartphone.

“I don’t understand it. He has a degree in molecular biology. He’s not stupid. But he just does not know how to pay attention. I can’t have someone like that working for me,” she explained.

We were regaled with other tales of people oblivious to those around them— a job candidate who spent the whole time checking his email while he was being given a tour of his new potential workplace and taken to lunch (guess who did not get that job), and a panel where one of the three people on the panel, speaking to a large group, had his laptop open, typing, during the time he was supposed to be a panelist and engage with an audience.

Where has our collective attention gone? How can we learn to exert some degree of control over these devices that are everywhere in our lives?

There is a simple and ancient low-tech answer: Shabbat.

Shabbat is a time to simply exist in the world, not to engage in any of the 39 rabbinically described forms of work that make a mark on the world, but to appreciate and accept what is. The enforced rest of a traditional Sabbath, with a break from the electronic distraction of emails and iPhones, creates an ability to focus and notice the world from a sensory perspective in real rather than in virtual time. It helps with endurance because even if a week is crazy, you know there will be a day off to look forward to. A stoppage of time, a cessation from work. In my Shabbat world, people take time to prepare special food, to sit and eat meals with each other, to be nicer than during the rushed work week, to converse, interact, and learn a bit of Jewish text.

Shabbat is a way to gain what writer Howard Rheingold calls “attention literacy.” http://blog.sfgate.com/rheingold/2009/04/20/attention-literacy/ The ability NOT to multitask (which has been shown by all measures to fail horribly at getting the requisite tasks done because all are done more slowly and less well when one’s attention is focused on multiple variables) will soon become a rare and sought after ability. Employers will flock for potential employees who are able to master the self-control to put down their devices and pay attention. Those of us able to turn off and unplug will be in the minority in the 21st century and valuable to both ourselves for our unusual abilities to focus, as well as to employers for our unusual skills.

The other advantage of turning off electronics for 25 hours is that it allows us to be present to those in our physical orbit. I worry about how my children are learning (or, rather, not learning) to interact with others. Although my daughter can spend the whole day texting, I don’t know whether this deepens her relationships and adds to her friendships. When complaining about this to a psychiatrist friend with a daughter the same age, she said that teens are “connected but at arm’s length.” That is it exactly, the distance that a text or an email puts between people. It is not the same as a letter with the physical imprint of another.

I spent hours as a teen swooning over letters from boys, felt a thrill to see my name written by him. Hearing someone’s voice directly on the phone is a completely different process from the impersonal one of seeing pixels on a screen, whether on a laptop, iPad or cellphone. If you use no electronic devices for a day, Shabbat forces you to be in relationship with those around you. It is the only time during the week my family of five can be found in the same room, reading, together without risk of a phone to disturb us.

I have been riding a bicycle as my main form of transportation for the last few months. Recently, there was a problem with my bike’s brakes. I didn’t realize it at first, but, gradually, I noticed that no matter how hard I squeezed, the bike would not come to a complete stop. I finally knew that I absolutely had to get the bike fixed when I was going down a steep hill which had a well trafficked street at its base. I clutched the brakes and panicked, realizing I was still careening madly down the hill with no hope for stopping as I was getting closer and closer to the hectic intersection with its whizzing cars. I finally jumped off the bike, banging up my middle-aged knees, in order to get the bike to come to a stop.

I went to my local bike store the next day. When I rode down the hill with $73 of mechanical work on my bicycle, the experience was totally different. I was in control of the ride because I knew that I could stop when I wanted. The pressure of my hands on the brakes slowed me down, and I came to a complete stop, at will. I felt so relaxed and in complete control of every aspect of my trip because I knew that I could control my ride.

For me, this is the perfect metaphor for Shabbat. It’s a day that gives us control of our week knowing we can put some brakes on and stop all kinds of distractions and work from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Shabbat allows me to stop and think so I can manage my to-do lists. Stopping clears away small things so I can focus on larger ones. That kind of attention literacy is something we all need.

Beth Kissileff is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Reading Genesis (Continuum Books, 2013), and has received writing fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo and the Lilly Endowment. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in JewishFiction.net, Tablet, Shma, Zeek, the Jerusalem Report and Jerusalem Post, Moment Magazine, the Forward, the New York Jewish Week, the Jewish Review of Books, Hadassah Magazine, Slate.com, and the News and Observer (Raleigh, NC). She uses her brakes in Pittsburgh, PA where she lives with her family.

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April 16, 2012 · 7:50 am

Writing Practice: Leaving Egypt Behind

Every year when we sit down to begin our Seder, I look around the table, amazed at the effort that it took for all of us–family and friends– to come together.

We have finished cleaning and shopping and cooking and preparing the Seder table. It’s time to open the Hagaddah and recite Kiddush over the First Cup, and then read the first words of the story: “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.”

Each year I’m awed by the sound of these words, the first words of the Hagaddah, as they ring out across the ages. They are words that sing of our people’s endurance and faith, and they remind me as we wash our hands, lift our cups, break our matzah, dip our herbs, open the door for Elijah, and sing our favorite song about the little goat that we have been given a precious gift.

On Passover, we celebrate not only our gift of freedom but the gift of being Jews and sharing a memory of communal faith in whatever it is that supports us as we step into the unknown, one foot after the other, day after day, year after year, century after century.

Imagine what it must have felt like to leave Egypt. We abandoned everything we knew–the comfort of a regular routine, a place to cook, eat, share stories, make love, and sleep every night–all for an unknown future.

Freedom meant learning to live with not knowing where we’d settle the next night or the night after that, not knowing where we’d find food or ways to defend ourselves or a clear path into the wilderness.

For hundreds of years we lived as slaves. How could we have stepped away from all that we knew? How could we have gone from the heartache of slavery to full independence in one night? How could we have taken such a huge leap of faith from the known to the unknown–into the sea and beyond?

Every year, as we prepare for our Seder, it’s a struggle to leave behind whatever I’m doing, to pick up stakes and move on, so that I can focus on the holiday. And then for the week of the holiday it’s a struggle to forego hametz and eat matzah. But then I remember that we managed centuries ago to pack up our belongings and put one foot in front of the other and make our way into the unknown.

Egypt became a memory, a place to go back to one day, and our future became our destination, the place where we could find the freedom to become whoever we were meant to be.

What will you do with your freedom this year? How will you live your life as a Jew now that you are no longer a slave?

Will you celebrate the many possibilities waiting for you? Or will you mourn the past and all that you left behind?

Before taking another step, can you pause a moment and write about the challenges of stepping into the unknown?

How does freedom give you the opportunity to explore a new, different side of yourself?

What does it feel like to look at the world after leaving Egypt now that you’ve passed through the sea and reached dry land on the other side?

Can you hear the lamentations of those still unwilling to leave Egypt behind?

Or do you hear the joyous sound of Miriam and the women dancing with their timbrels and singing the Song of the Sea?

Bruce Black

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March 19, 2012 · 6:38 pm

Climbing the Ladder

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

Who opens a negotiation with, “I will work
for your younger daughter Rachel for seven years.”
Offer to work for a year, maybe two,
then settle on three or four.
After seven years of labor, what does Jacob get?
Leah, the older sister.
Their father, Laban, tells him, “It is not the practice
in our place to marry off the younger before the older.”
Says he’ll give him Rachel if he serves another seven years.
What choice does Jacob have?

Take a look at Joseph.
He interprets Pharaoh’s dreams and tells him
a great famine is coming, tells Pharaoh he needs
someone to run the country.
So Pharaoh appoints him viceroy.
Now there’s a man who knows how to get ahead.
He even gets a wife for free, doesn’t have to work a stitch for her.
Of course, his descendants end up as slaves in Egypt
for two hundred and ten years, but that’s another story.

Janet R. Kirchheimer, a teaching fellow at Clal, is the author of How to Spot One of Us (2007), a collection of poems about her family and the Shoah. Her poems and essays have appeared in several journals such as the Connecticut Review and Limestone, as well as online at Beliefnet and drafthorse, where this poem first appeared. It’s reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

For more about Kirchheimer’s work, visit: http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?WRD=janet+r+kirchheimer&page=index&prod=univ&choice=allproducts&query=Janet+R+Kirchheimer&flag=False&ugrp=2

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March 12, 2012 · 8:06 am

Meta’s Untold Story

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

The few stories that were passed down to my sister and I were about survival, escape, new beginnings in America. These stories always drew a clear line between the tragic background of the Holocaust and the fate of our family. We never knew. No one told us. My grandfather’s sister, my great aunt Meta Adler, was left behind. Five siblings escaped to the U.S., Israel, and South Africa. Meta vanished from sight and memory.

No one in our family kept Meta ’s memory alive. We have to look back and construct a memory of her life. So we can keep her with us. Some people discover a living relative who they never knew about, a sibling who was given up for adoption or a parent who was long absent. We discovered Meta, an unwed country woman who worked as a maid and failed to pass the U.S. immigration examination because she was too shy or scared to answer the questions.

The silence was broken last year on a sunny April afternoon in Altwiedermus, the village where Meta and the rest of my father’s family trace their roots. We had traveled to the rural enclave, forty-five kilometers northeast of Frankfurt, to see the old Adler house and meet with Gisele, the woman who had spent years researching the fate of the twenty-seven Jewish residents of the village in 1933. I had almost canceled the trip due to a sense of unease about what might lie ahead. Instead, we drove into the past and the vague contours of my German Jewish family history were abruptly reshaped in a darker hue.

It was Gisele, someone I had just met, who told us about Meta as we sat at her dining room table and thumbed through an enormous album of her historical notes, photos, and clippings. Meta stared at us from the past with a direct gaze that ended the decades of erasure from our family tree. As Gisele patiently related further details about the thirteen Jews who perished, I was too stunned to concentrate and can’t recall much of what she said.

How could I not have known about Meta ? Was I told about her as a child, but the story hadn’t lodged in my memory beside the other vignettes with the happy endings that were passed down to me? In the following months I queried key family members about our family history narrative. It was through these conversations that I slowly became aware of the collective family silence about Meta. This knowledge brought deep sorrow, but there would be ample time to grieve for Meta. I felt a much more urgent need to honor her memory and restore her to our family.

That fall I met a Jewish woman whose family had fled to the U.S. even later than mine. “It was because my grandfather would not leave until all family members had permission to emigrate,” she said. “Not my grandfather,” I had to tell her. The silence about Meta was a thin cover for the guilt that must have haunted my grandparents. Couldn’t they have done more to help her escape?

Reclaiming Meta ’s place in our family has not been easy. Only the faintest traces of her life have survived. Many people in Germany, from government archivists to self-designated Holocaust historians like Gisele, have shared clues about her fate. Months of research after our trip to Altwiedermus yielded little more than a set of financial records that the Nazis used to assess whether she could keep her meager Reichsmarks earnings. The trail runs cold on a bare sheet of paper dated May 9, 1942, four years after my father’s family fled to the U.S. The document notes that she was “evakuiert.”

Nine hundred and thirty-eight people were deported from Frankfurt on May 8, 1942. The records from this transport were destroyed, but Meta was likely among the deportees. We think they went east, possibly to the Izbica concentration camp in Poland. The date and location of her death are among many of the unknowns in her story.

The German government has placed Meta’s name among the Holocaust victims at two memorial sites in Frankfurt. Our family of survivors has so far done nothing. My father and his sister inherited the silence of their parents. They had a living memory of Meta, but could not reach back to embrace her. It is left to the “second generation” to look back from a greater distance and tell her story. My move to Germany in 2010 was the first step that made this possible.

My aunt has now broken her silence about Meta and supports our efforts to reclaim her memory. She remembers Meta as a woman in the shadows, perhaps someone who lacked a valued place in the family even before they left Germany. She also recalls that my grandfather, Meta’s brother, left the problem of what to do about Meta to my grandmother.

As a child I yearned to know more about my parents’ lives in Germany and the events surrounding their escape. Decades later I’ve uncovered a hidden truth about my family history: we closed the door on someone we lost. I will now pass down to my children a different Holocaust story than the one I heard as a child. Our efforts to confront the past, while living as Jews in Germany today, have become a new chapter in our family narrative.

This summer we will lay a stolperstein (brass stumbling stone) in the ground for Meta Adler. So she can be remembered, in the village of her birth and within our family. Meta’s stone will join the thousands of cobblestone memorials to individual Holocaust victims throughout Germany.

Donna Swarthout writes about being Jewish in Germany on her blog Full Circle http://dswartho.wordpress.com/. Her recent work has appeared on The Jewish Writing Project and in Tablet Magazine.

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February 27, 2012 · 9:24 am

Glorified and Sanctified

byVan Wallach (Westport, CT)

Recently I heard about the death of a woman I once knew named Adina. She had been one of the very first women I dated after moving to New York in 1980. I found a paid death notice in a newspaper from several years back, saying she succumbed to diabetes and breast cancer. She was fifty-one—younger than I am now.

Adina and I had a tumultuous relationship, thanks to our wildly different social backgrounds and degrees of sophistication: suburban Long Island versus small-town Texas, intense Jewish education versus no Jewish education. Still, we had a connection: we were writers and Jewish and on the prowl. Adina played an influential role in my life at the time.

Our shared practice of Judaism provided many of my favorite memories of our times together. We joined her friends to hear Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach sing during Purim at B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, a favored hunting ground for singles. I attended a seder with her family on Long Island on the snowy Passover of April 1982. With Adina’s encouragement, I visited Israel in May 1982 and wrote about the experience for the Forward newspaper.

The little markers of memory accumulated over the months. I have photos of Adina at B’nai Jeshurun and with her friends Rena, Rochel and Marilyn. She sent me postcards from her trips to Israel and Peru. We called each other “Y.D.,” short for “Yiddish dumpling.”

For what turned out to be our last date, I stunned Adina with tickets to what I called “Bereshit,” the Hebrew name for the book of Genesis—we saw her favorite music group, Phil Collins and Genesis, perform at Forest Hills Stadium in August 1982. That was the end. She called it quits after that.

Other relationships would follow, but as time passed I thought fondly of Adina. We parted in frustration, not anger. Four years later, on a rainy evening on the Upper West Side, we ran into each other again. We immediately had a long catch-up coffee klatch in a diner. Adina had left journalism to study social work, while I was several years into a stint as a globe-trotting freelance writer. Freed from the anxieties of stillborn romance, we shared a warmth and were happy to see each other.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she said in her distinctive, cigarette-raspy voice.

We never saw each other again. The next year I met the woman I would marry. The new flame burned bright and I fed it all the oxygen I had. Old flames flickered and went out.

Long after my divorce in the new millennium, I became curious about Adina and uncovered the death notice. I mentally overlaid my life on top of her last years and wondered what type of friendship, if any, would have resulted from contact. Maybe nothing, but I like to think we would have stayed connected this time as friends with common interests in Judaism, journalism, travels to Latin America and, well, life. I had changed since we dated—becoming more at ease with myself, more Jewishly literate, comfortable in groups. In any case, I found myself aching and sorry that we had had no contact for those last twenty years. I never had a chance to say goodbye to Adina.

That’s one missed farewell in a digital world that logs birth and death regularly. I would never have known about Adina’s passing without the Internet. Online, the once-hidden and unfindable becomes common, jolting knowledge. Through Facebook, I read daily about the illnesses of friends’ families, with prayer requests and mentions of deaths of parents, siblings and, most grievously, children. On Facebook, I learned that the son of one friend from Mission, Texas, for example, was killed in Afghanistan, bringing the war to me in a terribly personal way. We’re in our fifties and older; passings happen and the pace quickens with age.

I learned about Adina’s passing at the exact same time I was experiencing something entirely new in my Jewish life—a shiva call to a house of mourning. I had attended Jewish weddings and funerals, but had never visited a family sitting shiva, or mourning of a death.

“Not even your grandparents?” somebody asked after I mentioned this anomaly.

“No, not even my grandparents,” I said.

But a death occurred in a family close to me, an uncle of my girlfriend, and I wanted to pay my respects. I had no idea what to expect, although I knew of the traditional rituals of covering mirrors and tearing clothes.

So I visited some people I knew, the relatives of the elderly man who had died. I gave them my condolences. Some wore small black ribbons. I recognized the rabbi who conducted the service, which consisted of prayers I had heard many times before and could read and mostly say in Hebrew. This included the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. This prayer does not mention death but rather magnifies and sanctifies the Name of God. It begins,

Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.

As I looked around the room, I thought about how ancient tradition and ritual created such emotional support at a time of ultimate loss. People are not left to flail on their own in the darkness; they—we—have a way to mourn that links them to generations past and future.

The moment seemed right and as we prayed I said the Kaddish for my late friend. I had finally found a way to say goodbye to Adina, Y.D.

Van “Ze’ev” Wallach, native of Mission, Texas, writes frequently on religion, politics and other matters. His interests include travel, digital photography, world music and blogging, which he does at http://wallach.coffeetown.press. This essay is reprinted from A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist’s Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl by Van Wallach (Coffeetown Press), with the kind permission of the publisher and the author. For more information about the book, visit: http://coffeetownpress.com/

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January 16, 2012 · 9:43 am

In Search of a Baal Shem

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove,PA)

I never heard her call him the “Baal Shem of Michelstadt.”

Instead my grandmother spoke of “Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser” as a “Wundermann,” a miracle-worker.

My first real memory of him is connected to a beam of bright sunshine falling into her parlor window, setting off her “good” blue-and-white Wedgewood dishes glistening on the table. She was feeding me a mid-day meal along with telling me about the famous man.

I was not in her parlor frequently for my parents and I lived in another city and we did not see her often. Even  rarer was the chance of hearing my Oma tell me stories.

Tiny sun motes floated about the room that day as she spoke to me of the rebbe’s wisdom, his kindness and his strong religious faith.

“Both Jews and Gentiles in the small town of Michelstadt south of Frankfurt benefited  from his remarkable skills. Many a person depressed by business or health problems found the Rebbe’s calm, serene manner and his gift for active listening eased his troubles, perhaps even solved them. And when a healed  visitor walked out of Seckel Loeb’s door, it was always with renewed self-worth and confidence.”

Oma had her personal reasons for passing on tales about the great man.

Her own mother, my great-grandmother, Babette Muhr, had been brought to the home of the rebbe as an orphan child.  He had taken her in  and raised her as a member of his own family until the day when, as a grown young woman, she left Michelstadt to be married.

At least a half a century passed before the name of Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser entered  my thoughts again.

Long after I had arrived as a child-survivor of the Holocaust in the U.S, married, and had raised a family of my own, the mail brought a brochure put out by a well-known publisher of Jewish books.

One of the titles advertised for sale read: “The Baal Shem of Michelstadt.”

I could hardly wait until the small book arrived and lay open on my desk.

It was a collection of warm, sentimental episodes taken from the life of a man once renowned as a healer and worker of miracles. The book was written in the early 1900’s by a Swiss rabbi, Naftali Herz Ehrmann, under the nom de plume of  “Judeus.”

I was stunned to find in it many of the stories my grandmother had once told me, stories I had somehow not trusted to have been “real.”

But it was the photograph on the book’s last page which stirred me the most: a picture of a house.

It was a box-shaped wooden structure — two full floors and a triple-window mansard.  The metal plaque attached above the first-floor windows aroused my considerable interest. It read: “In this house the humanitarian S.L.Wormser lived from the year 1826 to his death in 1847.”

The plaque was dedicated as a tribute by his hometown of Michelstadt.

I concentrated on the windows in that photograph. How I wished I could transport myself into the past. This house was surely the home of Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser, the Baal Shem of Michelstadt, and now I knew these were the windows through which my great-grandmother must have looked out at the world.

The more I read about the Rebbe’s life, the more faint images culled from my grandmother’s tales came back to me. I remembered certain details which were mirrored in the book.

After forty-one years I finally decided to go back to Germany.

One important reason for my return was the nagging wish to learn more about him, to find out what I could about the man they called the Baal Shem.

On the June day when friends drove my husband and me to Michelstadt, I carried the book about the Baal Shem with me.

We reached Michelstadt in the middle of the day. Ancient houses embellished with distinctive “Fachwerk” decorations lined the cobblestoned streets. I closed my eyes and pretended to be back in the medieval hamlet of southern Germany that was once the destination of many a Jewish and non-Jewish pilgrim headed for a visit to the bushy-bearded saintly man with the kind brown eyes known throughout the neighborhood as teacher and healer.

After a hearty meal in the oak-beamed dining room of the Green Tree Inn, I no longer needed to pretend. I was close to realizing my fanciful daydream. This very hostelry was a favorite with Jewish travellers who visited Rebbe Seckel Loeb. Many stories about the Baal Shem of Michelstadt grew into legends here, nurtured no doubt by glasses of excellent local beer. Because of their fondness for the inn, some patrons even nicknamed it “The Jewish Canteen.”

Armed with the family record, I finally entered the tall doors of the “Rathaus Annex” and headed for the chief of tourist reception. I told the man I was looking for links to an ancestor who grew up in the house of Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser. Immediately I felt my tourist stature increase to that of a VIP.

Meanwhile I could hardly wait to see the house of the Baal Shem.

No one knew the Wormser House by that name, so it took much searching and asking for directions before I located it. Suddenly I stood in front of it: my photograph had come to life.

One hundred and thirty-five years after Rebbe Seckel Loeb died here, the house was still in use. I walked around it and inspected it from every angle. Now it was occupied by a law firm, but no one was in. I was disappointed that I could not enter. I so wished to see the rooms where the Master taught the Holy Books, where the wise man counseled the troubled on urgent problems now long forgotten, and where my own ancestor climbed the stairs.

I left the Wormser House hesitantly and returned to the Rathaus-Annex where I had an appointment with the town archivist.

In one wing of this ancient seat of the mayors of Michelstadt, a Herr Hartmann presided  over  records dating back to the 13th century. His amazing collection of documents owed its survival to the little bomb damage the town sustained during World War II

I knew nothing about my great-grandmother except her name: Babette Muhr.

Herr Hartmann delved into his well-preserved archives of the Jewish community. Within a few minutes he located a page listing the death of a rabbi named Wolf Muhr in 1848. This is really a coincidence, he told me, because he had never come across that name before, let alone the name of a local rabbi.

I was convinced that there was a connection between Rabbi Muhr and my ancestor and asked the archivist to trace it.

We did not succeed that day, but I found a book of local Jewish history on his shelf and he allowed me to browse in it.

I discovered that Wolf Muhr was Seckel Loeb’s cantor who handled the town’s rabbinical duties in Michelstadt until 1826. During that year Rabbi Wormser returned after a lengthy stay in the town of Mannheim where he worked as a healer at the local hospital.  Upon his return to Michelstadt he resumed his post of rabbi there.

I had gotten closer in my ancestor search. The archivist promised he would continue it. Perhaps we would find the connection someday.

The old Jewish cemetery was too far from town. I wanted to stay in Michelstadt a little longer to meditate at the grave of Rabbi Wormser, but my time ran out. I did not make it to his last resting place and to the new gravestone which replaced the desecrated monument of the Nazi period.

However, a final touching experience awaited me during my last hour in town: I was given  a tour through the Baal Shem’s synagogue. Like most German synagogues the original tiny structure, built in 1791, was torched by the Nazis. Only its exterior shell remained.

One Jewish family still lived in Michelstadt in 1969 when members of a few remaining Jewish communities in the state of Hesse met and decided to restore the former synagogue as a museum.

It was named the Lichtigfeld Museum in honor of Dr. I.E. Lichtigfeld, a postwar rabbi of Hesse, who tried to revive Jewish life in the area. The Lichtigfeld Museum primarily memorializes Rebbe Seckel Loeb Wormser, the Baal Shem of Michelstadt, whose love for humanity once brightened this town.

Ritual objects, books and mementos filled the showcases along the walls of the modest ex-sanctuary. Among them were two new additions I had brought from America: the English translation of  “The Baal Shem of Michelstadt” and a copy of my own biography of Elie Wiesel, “Witness for Life.” Having them in this place is an honor I cherish.

The site of the original Almemor had been preserved. I stood near the spot where the holy man once prayed and I reflected on the tremendous faith he inspired.

What was the real nature of the Rebbe’s “miracles?” Were the stories his deeds generated just that–exaggerated accounts of local happenings, blown out of proportion by his simple fellow country–Jews who needed someone or something to believe in?

The hatred-bearers did extinguish the spark of life here and they succeeded in wiping out the  decency and healing which once existed. But they could not erase the memory of the Jewish spirit that long ago filled this building and this town.

And who knows? Perhaps the special memory may be the most lasting of this Baal Shem’s many miracles.

Born in Germany, Ellen Norman Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel.  Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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