Category: Rabbinic Thoughts

ich hatte ja bereits über die neue torah rolle geschrieben, die wir für das kolleg erhalten haben. ein zeitungsbericht aus den usa berichtet noch ein wenig über das ehepaar, welches die rolle für das kolleg nach deutschland gebracht hatte:

German couple that survived the Holocaust return to help restore Judaism

By Tim Townsend

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

11/23/2008

Eva Susskind and Fred Ashner, both in their 20s and single, discovered they shared much in common when they met in 1959 at a Passover seder in New York City.As children, both had been forced from their native Germany by the Nazis. Both had lost parents in the war. Both had traveled a tumultuous and violent road to this moment in a strange new land. A year later, they were married.Nearly 50 years later, the Ashners returned to the place where men had tried to eradicate their faith.Armed with the most powerful symbol of that faith, they flew from St. Louis, where they’ve lived since 1990, to their homeland last month to participate in the re-establishment of German Judaism.The Ashners took a Torah scroll, donated by their synagogue, United Hebrew Congregation in Chesterfield, to the first liberal rabbinical seminary established in continental Europe since the Holocaust.”People ask us why we went on this trip, but it wasn’t a trip for us, it was a mission,” said Fred Ashner, now 78. “It was a mission to signify that we survived. Judaism survived.”Rabbi Howard Kaplansky of United Hebrew said the congregation decided to donate one of its Torah scrolls to the seminary in gratitude for a new scroll it commissioned and dedicated last year.United Hebrew chose Abraham Geiger College, a seminary in Berlin and part of Potsdam University, “because it is training rabbis to help in the rebirth of liberal Judaism in Germany,” said Kaplansky.Before moving to St. Louis, Kaplansky was a rabbi at Rodef Shalom Congregation in Pittsburgh, where his mentor was Rabbi Walter Jacob, a native German and a Reform Judaism leader in the United States.Jacob went on to found Abraham Geiger College, whose namesake is a 19th-century German rabbi and one of the founders of the Reform Judaism movement.”The presence of the scroll (at Abraham Geiger) is like the presence of our congregation in Germany, helping to restore Jewish life to Germany and that part of the world,” said Kaplansky.The Nazis closed the seminary’s predecessor — founded in the 19th century by Rabbi Abraham Geiger himself — in 1942, four years after the Susskind and Ashner families fled Germany. Eva was 4 when her family escaped to the Philippines, and Fred was 8 when his family made it to the Netherlands.Japan occupied the Philippines in 1942, and Eva’s father was killed by the Japanese in Manila in 1945. She and her mother were finally able to make it to Delaware, where they had family, in 1948. Eva, by then 14, attended high school in Wilmington, then moved to New York with her mother.In 1940, two years after Fred and his parents arrived in the Netherlands, the Nazis invaded, and by 1943 the family was imprisoned in a transitional camp there for three months. They were then transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany for more than a year, where Fred’s father died.In April 1945, the Germans put Fred and his mother — along with thousands of others — on freight trains to transport them away from the camp. The train the Ashners were on was liberated by Russian troops just south of Berlin. But by then Fred’s mother had contracted typhus, and she died a few weeks later.Fred, by then 14, buried his mother and made his way back to the Netherlands. His parents’ Dutch friends took him in until he turned 19, then he headed for New York, where he had an aunt and uncle.Although he was not yet a citizen, Ashner was drafted into the U.S. Army in the Korean War. He returned to New York and began working for the agribusiness company now known as Bunge North America.Eva and Fred married in 1960, a year after they met at the Passover seder. In 1990, they moved to St. Louis, and they became members of United Hebrew Congregation a year later.The original plan for the synagogue’s Torah scroll was to have a group take it to the seminary in Berlin. When that didn’t happen, Kaplansky asked the Ashners to carry it across the ocean. They agreed, and last month they returned to Germany.The day before giving the scroll to Abraham Geiger College, the Ashners, accompanied by a rabbi from the seminary’s faculty, visited Fred’s mother’s grave, south of Berlin where she died.The Ashners were impressed by the energy and dedication of the small student body at Abraham Geiger, most of whom are from eastern Europe. Some of them held a chupah aloft as Eva and Fred walked the scroll through the streets of Berlin.”It wasn’t just that we were bringing the Torah back to this German seminary that had special meaning for us,” Fred Ashner said. “But we were walking with a Torah through streets of Berlin, which is, and was, the capital of Germany.”

quelle: www.stltoday.com

An diesem Wochenende heiraten Jona und Alina – ich bin (also) erst wieder am Montag zurück am PC.Den Beiden wünsche ich an dieser Stelle alles Gute und G’ttes Segen für den weiteren Weg.Und allen LeserInnen ein herzliches Shabbat Shalom und ein schönes Wochenende

das neue semester hat mich voll und ganz erwischt und mit arbeit eingedeckt. zeit für eine erste bilanz ist noch nicht, kommt aber bald… da mir momentan nicht mehr zeit für den blog gegeben ist, möchte ich euch zumindest auf die kürze trotzdem von einem schönen ereignis berichten. wir haben eine neue sefer torah erhalten und zu simchat torah eingebracht. zur geschichte der torah kommt noch etwas später.shabbat shalom

Nicht nur mangels Zeit, einen eigenen Artikel zu schreiben, sondern weil mich die Autorin auf der Konferenz in Zypern sehr beeindruckt hat, möchte ich Euch einen Artikel von ihr aus dem Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (April 2003, pages 9, 45) weiterleiten, den ich ebenfalls für bemerkenswert halte. Er beschreibt ein wenig die Stimmung der Konferenz:

Meeting With DaniBy Samah JabrWe humans often ignore our inner voice, and too frequently fail to amplify the whispered admonitions of our conscience so that others can hear them as well. Indeed,we too rarely avail ourselves of the opportunity to liberate our souls in this fashion, while our physical beings remain enslaved and incapacitated by oppression, power, temptation, fear or anger.When we shut our hearts and close our ears to that inner voice, and to each other, we deny ourselves such essential human qualities as beauty, kindness, truth and goodness.It wasn’t easy for me to meet Dani, a middle-aged Israeli man who introduced himself as a former Israeli soldier, in the midst of a group of Israelis and Palestinians gathered in the ‘Dutch’ Christian ecumenical village of Nes Ammim (tucked between the Palestinian village of Al-Mazra’a and the Jewish Israeli towns of Naharia and Carmiel in the northern Galilee. We had gathered there to discuss the lives we lead as Muslims, Christians and Jews in a state of severe political conflict.Dani pointed at me and loudly declared: “Samah looks familiar to me. I served at the Bethlehem checkpoint months ago and I recognize her from there.” He then added, “I come to meet the Palestinians on an equal footing.”Dani’s words left me cold. As an anti-occupation activist, I am critical of Israeli leftists whose Zionist principles presuppose the exploitation of another group and who fail to condemn, on ethical or moral grounds, the Israeli occupation forces, which commanded and shaped so much of Dani’s life and being.Although our eyes often met while we were helping ourselves to meals, attending common lectures, or wandering along the shady lanes of Nes Ammin village, I avoided Dani as I would have were he still in uniform.Near the end of our weekend encounter, the whole group played the Fish Bowl game, in which two people meet and exchange thoughts and feelings before the group at large. The discussion about a peaceful solution brought me to the center of the group. Before I could speak about my vision of peace, however, I was paired with Dani. The big, tall, bald man came to the chair opposite mine, looked me in the eye and said in a blunt, manly way,: “I was an IDF soldier, I served in the Palestinian territories and shot at, and maybe killed, Palestinians. What do you feel about me?”I am used to being asked what I think, what I envision, how I explain things, but I really did not expect to be asked how I feel, especially about such a painful and highly-charged revelation as Dani’s. I didn’t know at that moment whether he was challenging me to a fight or offering reconciliation. All that came to my mind were the endless reflexive images of cold death and bitter humiliation sparked in my mind by the very mention of the IDF.“Anger is what I feel about you,” I finally replied, trying to give the briefest possible answer.“I understand your anger,” said Dani , and went on to express his regret at having served in the IDF and his disgust at their practices. He said that he was haunted by guilt and that he loses sleep because of memories from the time he served in Gaza and the West Bank. He spoke of horrible acts he and his colleagues committed against Palestinians, and then of a sudden awakening he experienced that brings him to such encounters in the hope of reconciling his feelings with himself and with others.I remember talking to the politically conservative, ultra-Zionist, Yeshiva students of New York City’s Washington Heights, and listening to an interview with an Israeli/ South African soldier who participated in, and spoke defensively about, the Jenin war crimes of last April—an interview which was broadcast on South African national TV. Both experiences were much easier than listening to Dani’s emotional confession.Here is an Israeli to the bone, an older man, born in the conservative Gush Etzion settlement, and brought up to hate and dehumanize Palestinians, speaking of his psychological transformation.Although my anger with him and hatred of what he had done did not vanish, I was amazed at his ability to let his inner self, his better self, speak out. Dani spoke courageously of his mistakes, despite the risks: the possible agitated Palestinian reaction and the certain Israeli embarrassment at such a voluntary and scandalous exposure of its occupation policies. That embarrassment was laid bare when Dani, the former Israeli soldier, concluded that had he been born among “the other people” he would be doing what the Palestinians are doing now.When Dani’s chair finally was occupied by another person, the classic question about forgiveness came up. “Samah, now that you’ve heard what Dani has to say, do you forgive the Israelis for what they’ve done and are you willing to live in peace with them?”“It is too soon to talk of forgiveness when the occupation is still oppressing all of us,” I replied. “If I am ever able to forgive, I’ll forgive what I personally have suffered—I can never offer my forgiveness on behalf of other Palestinians.”A German Lutheran minister smiled at me and said: “Samah, you are very Jewish!”When it was time to depart, Dani told me that the other Jewish Israeli participants, who had presented themselves as more liberal than he, were angry with him for his confession. He gave me his business card and told me that he was an occupational therapist and a writer. Like my parents, he is a father of five girls and one boy. I had to wonder why he had not stated that at the beginning. I appreciated that, unlike many “dovish” Israelis, he did not hide his military involvement behind a humanist profession and lifestyle and pretend to be a safe friend.The Nes Ammim encounter was soon over, and we all went back to our real, and profoundly unequal, lives. As I go about my hard life, struggling for a future as a Palestinian in my occupied country, I know that I will never feel less anger and hatred at what Dani had done, and what is still being done to my people. But I know the feelings of rejection and estrangement Dani must be experiencing, the brave yet painful isolation familiar to all who speak their hearts and say what is true, rather than what would please and appease others. In that sense, Dani and I have unintentionally agreed on a moral premise, and could be equal partners in that stand.Reconciling the contradictory parts of one’s self and achieving inner peace is the first step of the long journey toward realizing peace and reconciliation on a much more external and more inclusive scope. Dani gives me hope—and that awareness, at this point in my people’s history, is all that I can give him in return.Samah Jabr is a medical resident in her native city of Jerusalem.

möchte ich der netzklempnerin aussprechen. unerschrocken begibt sie sich mit ihrem tool, ihrem blog, beständig auf die suche nach braunem unrat in den (un)tiefen des internets. auf ihren seiten hat sie schon manche unappetitlichkeit aus den bereichen “hass, antisemitismus, fremdenfeindlichkeit und nazi-propaganda” zu tage gefördert und ich befürchte, dass ihe arbeit noch lange fortgesetzt werden muss.ein grund, ihr an dieser stelle mal danke für ihr engagement auszusprechen. 🙂neu in meiner blogroll ist auch der blogs vonmartin schubert, einem studenten aus berlin, der seine zelte nun in stockholm an der paideia (Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden) aufgeschlagen hat. seine (ersten) schritte in schweden können wir nun direkt per blog mitverfolgen:http://martinschubert.over-blog.deempfohlen hatte ich schon mal in einem artikel den blog von sedar. diesmal möchte ich das aber gerne noch einmal offiziell wiederholen. er bringt euch die welt des islams ein gutes stück näher.http://serdargunes.wordpress.com/und dann gibt es irgendwie und überhaupt und so noch einen weiteren blog, der vor kurzem das licht der virtuellen welt erblickt hat und sich einen eintrag in meiner bloglist verdient hat: irgendwie jüdisch. eine bloggerin aus berlin pankow schreibt und es ist lesenswert.hier klicken: http://irgendwiejuedisch.blogspot.com/