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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March 5, 2012 · 9:08 am

A Fan in the Stands

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

A fan in the stands
reaching over the railing
for a foul ball falls 20 feet to his death.
His son next to him witnesses all.
So now tell me there is a God.
Tell me this wasn’t some kind of celestial joke,
exacted upon a father taking his son to a game.
Yes, the world has seen greater calamities,
but is this not a microcosm of the universe’s absurdity
when a tragedy so sudden, personal and wrong
can happen without a second’s notice?
Sure, it is not up to me to ask Job-like questions,
questions beyond my meager capacity to understand.
Yet, I am more outraged by these minor disturbances
than by full-scale slaughter I cannot comprehend.
I weep for the death of an individual,
but “at the immolation of a race, who cries?”

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.

He wrote this poem in response to last summer’s baseball tragedy when a fan fell twenty feet from the outfield stands while reaching for a ball during a game at the Texas Rangers’ ballpark in Arlington, TX. The quote in the poem’s last line is from John Blight’s “Death of a Whale.”

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

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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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February 20, 2012 · 9:34 am

My Neshama Yeterah

(the extra soul you acquire on Shabbat)

by Janet Ruth Falon (Elkins Park, PA)

I welcome her, weekly,
later, in the summer, so I can hold on to the sun,
earlier, when it’s cold, to get away from winter’s bite.
She’s always on time,
bringing what my mother would call a “hostess gift” —
some painted daisies, or cider, or a seasonal pie.
We both wash off the day before dinner
and chat about bits of this-and-that to reconnect
before we join the others around the table.

Everyone welcomes her warmly
with the embrace you give to someone’s frequent friend.
But she’s there for me, alone,
until the next day wanes,
always by my side:
my shadow, smelling like lemon verbena,
my velvet soul,
my sister, the one who I never knew I wanted.
She holds my hand at the table
knowing it comforts me
and fiddles with my hair like hope.
She tells me not to fill up on challah,
and to breathe in this moment,
and appreciates my conversation
even when I’m silent,
even when we’re all alone.

Janet Ruth Falon, the author of The Jewish Journaling Book (Jewish Lights, 2004), teaches a variety of writing classes — including journaling and creative expression — at many places, including the University of Pennsylvania. She leads a non-fiction writing group and works with individual students, and is continuing to write Jewish-themed readings for what she hopes will become a book, In the Spirit of the Holidays.

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February 13, 2012 · 9:17 am

Egyptian Nights

by Ilan Braun (Le Tour-du-Parc, Brittany, France)

Too often, my tired soul filled with doubts
Resumes its journey back to far-away Egypt
How it takes delight to find again the deep and burning nights
Of ancient Egypt
Yes, on the Nile’s shore my soul is feasting
On lentils and meat
On sweet and forbidden fruits
And in the starry darkness appears a beautiful veiled woman
Singing a wild and sensuous song
And dropping her white robe on the silvery dust
Her brown eyes stare at me and beg for me
Her red mouth half opened
And she stretches her arms
While the tent’s sides are shutting at twilight
The Egyptian desire holds me very tight
And forges in my body and heart
Chains stronger than iron
Consenting slave seeking his master’s approval
My desire is a treacherous goddess
And my soul bends its forehead, touching the mire
While high above are lamenting the Angels

Ilan Braun is a retired French journalist who wrote for L’Arche. A poet, writer, painter and amateur historian on the Holocaust and post-war Jewish clandestine immigration to Israel, he has lived in Israel and Australia and visited over 30 countries.

You can read more of his work in Labyrinthe poétique: De la terre au ciel (Publibook, Paris, 2009) and in English (“The Oak of Tears”) in Under One Canopy: Readings in Jewish Diversity, edited by Karen Primack (Kulanu Inc. Silver Spring, MD. 2003).

For more information about his work, visit: www.ilanbraun.dr.ag

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February 6, 2012 · 8:40 am

“Oh, Wow, Oh, Wow, Oh, Wow!”

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

“Oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow!”
– Purported to be Steve Jobs’ last words.

Did you see something?
Or someone?
Visionary on earth,
did your far-flung sight
earn you special access,
a quick peek into the anteroom of heaven?
Maybe He wanted to show you
His new communication system,
a celestial Facebook that would unite
those separated by time and distance.
Or maybe, He wanted to give you a preview
of all future gifts He means to bestow.
Or maybe, He wanted to give you a tour
of His world-wide-web connection.
Tell me, Steve, what did you see?
Before I book passage to the great beyond,
I would like some idea of my itinerary.

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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January 30, 2012 · 8:08 am

A Slice of Life

by Chaim Weinstein (Brooklyn, NY)

My daughter and son-in-law pray in an old-fashioned synagogue where women sit in the balcony and the pale yellow wooden pews are creaky. As their new baby’s grandfather, I feel a little creaky myself. Still, there is in the high ceiling, blood-red velvet ark cover and the long length of the room an elegance, a sense of awe, and none of the modern chic found in many suburban houses of worship.

I like this fine.

The congregants are a mixed group. They wear black hats, crocheted yarmulkes, and those pale blue satin ones which many nonorthodox seem to favor.  Most of them are smiling, anticipating the large kiddush afterwards, perhaps. Few are as excited as I to welcome another Jewish soul into our fold. Some are just happy today simply because something out of the ordinary will take place, a change in routine, an event.

I am greeted with shabbat shalom, or good shabbos, or, less commonly, git shabbes. Regardless of dialect, I know that each person wishes us a mazal tov and a peaceful, enjoyable Sabbath. My eight-day-old, very cute grandson will have his bris this morning. To them, it is not so much my grandson that is special, but the occasion. For me it’s all of it, especially the newly-formed family: my beautiful daughter, her sweet husband, and this new bunch of deliciousness that is my grandson.

My son-in-law’s brother leads the morning shacharit prayer, my own son leads us in musaf. I am transported by all of it, as well as by my own prayers and gratitude that my daughter is well and past the pregnancy, the family is all here in good health, that all present will meet my newest grandchild for the first time as a full-fledged Jew. I am amazed and excited at seeing the magical line come glittering to life, the line connecting this baby to his and our eldest forefather, Abraham.

From the moment that my daughter and son-in-law had called several days before to ask me to be the sandek, I bawled like a baby at the honor, the specialness and this precursor of closeness I prayed for to be between my little grandson and me.

This marks the first time in my life that I have been asked to be the sandek, meaning that my infant grandson will be placed on a pillow on my lap while the mohel does his thing (oops).

Being the sandek is a great honor in our Jewish tradition.

Sandek is a Greek word meaning “don’t look at what the mohel’s doing or you’ll turn green, hurt the mohel, or both.” Just kidding. Actually, sandek comes from the Greek word, suntekos, which means “companion of child,” which is what I want to be for him, as I hope to always be for all of my grandchildren.

So here I am, sitting in this plush chair to the right of Elijah’s Chair on the Ark platform. The little munchkin is placed on my lap, and I lovingly look only at his eyes, his forehead, and his quivering mouth. I watch the teal-blue pacifier near his lips bob like a buoy as he alternatively screams in pain and gasps for air. I whisper cooing, encouraging words to him, but they are not honest  words. What I really want to say is, “Give me a second, Bud, just hang on while I stiff-arm these people like an NFL pro and run for the door.” I check all the exits and see that the one behind me is my best bet. In my brain’s image I scoop him up before the mohel feels the downdraft from my moving blur, and we are out of there, no pain, truly no gain. My protectiveness is fueled by unbidden imagery of what is about to happen and I wish for Samantha-types of blinking power to teleport us out of there.

I stay, of course.

I can feel him straining hard to break free from my hold. It’s crazy, but I want to help him. I’m his grandfather, for crying out loud, I’m supposed to help him with all the fun stuff, not allow him to suffer. Let his parents deal with all the have-to’s, that’s their job. I know I’m conflicted, this is part of what the human family calls meshuga time. I know that I’m one of his peeps who is the transmitter of traditions such as the one we are all gathered here for. But I think: if he looks like me, then perhaps his tastes are like mine. I therefore formulate a plan to take him to the nearest Starbucks because we are so in sync, my baby grandson and I. So we’ll have a cup of coffee and schmooze about the scrapes we escaped from together.

Sigh.

Again with the fantasy, I know. What’s with me? Where are my personal prayers? I can’t. He has to endure this ceremony, no matter how painful for him, no matter how painful for me. So I steel myself for the task before us and hold his feet immobile, as the mohel has instructed me.

The wine-soaked gauze-pad they will place in his tiny lips will not fool him for a second, and I know that what he really wants is chocolate with almonds, or maybe a muffin, with that fresh hot coffee.

Soon, my eyes fall on the mohel’s tray, and when I see a little blood near the mohel’s instruments, it takes all my self-control not to perform a bris on the mohel himself for what he was doing to my grandson.

But the truth is, it is all just so moving and meaningful.

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, all the way to my grandfather, then my father, me, and now my little grandson. A long line down through time, all obeying our Father’s request, all part of the same family.

I tell you, it’s enough to make you give up coffee.

For more than thirty years, Chaim Weinstein taught English in grades six through college in  New York City public schools as well as in several parochial schools. Three of his poems, “The Shul is Dark,” “Mr Blumen,”  and “Unlikely Pair” have appeared on The Jewish Writing Project, and an early short story, “Ball Games and Things,” was published in Brooklyn College’s literary magazine, Nocturne. He is currently working in several genres and is hoping to  share a larger selection of his work in the future.

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January 23, 2012 · 9:11 am

A Woman of Valor, Who Can Find?

by Rachel Roberts (San Jose, CA)

She is old and young
all at once.
She carries centuries
and a language no longer spoken
in a stewpot
fastened to her back,
with a ladle to draw deep,
as she smiles, only remembering
as far back as yesterday;

The family complains that
her chicken has cholesterol
and that the flanken is fattening.
There is too much shiny oil
and not enough fresh green
to comport with vain standards of modern health;

But to me, the smell of onions in a pan
is beauty and perfect love
in the midst of a world malnourished
by exact measurements
and starved of substances that cannot
be easily quantified;

She knew how to love without hurting.
She loved us even when we did not love ourselves.
She forgot our infractions,
and stopped us from carrying anger in our hearts
simply by virtue of her example.
She overcooked her food and overwatered her plants.

Simple. Small. Innocent Diviner.
Her price is far above rubies.

Rachel Roberts wrote this poem in honor of her grandmother, Ida Rubin z”l, and  read it at her funeral in Livingston, NJ on February 21, 2011.  You can read more of Rachel’s poetry at her blog, A Postalcard from Ashkenaz: http://postalcard.posterous.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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