Left Over
- Rebuilding Jewish Life in Europe

Excerpts from a Panel, complied by Sandra Lustig

[German]

Members of the panel:

Lynn Feinberg lives in Oslo and has been instrumental in forming two Rosh Chodesh groups. She recently completed her studies in the History of Religions.

Dr. Jael Geis holds a PhD in Contemporary History. Her doctoral dissertation, titled "Übrig sein - Leben 'danach' (Left Over - Living after the Shoah. Jews of German descent in the British and American zones of occupation in Germany, 1945-1949,)" inspired this panel. She lives in Berlin and was an active member of the "Jüdische Gruppe" from its beginnings.

Wanya Kruyer is a sociologist and historian. She works as a freelance journalist in Amsterdam and was co-founder of the progressive, egalitarian congregation "Beit ha'Chidush".

Dr. Eleonore Lappin holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Jewish History of Ideas. She works at the Institute for the History of Jews in Austria and was co-founder of the liberal community "Or Chadash" in Vienna.

Dr. Andrea Petö studied history and sociology. She was an assistant professor at the Central European University, Budapest and has lectured and conducted research at other universities as well. She currently serves as President of the Feminist Section of the Hungarian Sociological Association.

Sandra Lustig was born in Washington, DC, of German-Jewish parents, and has lived in Germany most of her life. She has been an active member of "Gesher - Forum for Diaspora Culture" in Berlin, and was instrumental in organising Gesher's conference "Galut 2000 - Towards a European Jewish Identity" in December 1998.

Lynn Feinberg

When the war broke out on April 9, 1940, there were about 1,800 Jews all in all in Norway. Approximately 760 were deported to Auschwitz. The majority of the rest fled to Sweden. Of the 760 deported, only 25 returned. Of those, my father was one. Jewish life after the war - I was born in '55 - consisted of trying to reconstruct what was there before, trying to make things work. It was like a shell; to me there was no inner spirituality. I was not fed as a Jew more than in a traditional way, and I think that is something probably many of us have experienced. The community is orthodox - that's what they call themselves - but I would say 90 percent of ist members are not orthodox, they would call themselves liberal. It's common that everybody drives to shul [synagogue] on Shabbat, very few keep kosher. Also, increasingly over the years, many of the new members are converted. Today we're about 950 Jews in Oslo, about 250 or even less in Trondheim. In Trondheim, it's been so hard to get a minyan of men [a prayer group of ten men] that women have been started to be counted, simply out of need. (laughter) But in Oslo, we still have the gallery, I still sit up on the gallery.

I shunned the synagogue for many years. I had to seek my spiritual home elsewhere. Somehow, I insisted on finding a bridge, and that is what I think my work in the future is going to be about. Through astrology I came to Kabbalah. I realised that Kabbalah could answer some of the questions, could give me a framework, through Kabbalah I came deeply into Judaism and I think this was also what spurred me to want to do something different, which spurred me on, also in these Rosh Chodesh groups [meeting of women at the beginning of the new Jewish month]. Being a single mother of two Jewish boys, I think my Jewish quest started when I had to choose their brit milah [circumcision], because I was not married to a Jew, and I was in a very difficult situation with my husband, and having them in the Jewish community kindergarten was the way I started to re-socialise, and so I became a "Jew of choice", I was choosing my Jewishness back. I think this might be easier than in Israel because, being so few, everybody is needed. I'm not pushed out, I'm actually welcomed in.

So the first Rosh Chodesh group, I just came with the idea, and actually, one of the most established Jewish women took on this idea. It was an interesting group because they were very interested in learning things. For the first time, we made our own kiddushim [blessing of wine and bread], our own ceremonies, it was the first time we experienced doing things like that. There has been talk about reforming our Jewish community, but I think the talk is threatening, because they still feel reform is the first step towards assimilation, and they don't know of any other alternatives. My idea is, I have to start with the women, with small groups of women, and first of all make these groups feel safe and thereby transform from within.

We have now a very orthodox British rabbi, we have quite a lot of communication and of course he supports us, and says, "Well, of course, you can have a women's minyan [prayer group], that's quite okay for me, but be aware, you're not supposed to split up the community."

My next idea is to begin with a women’s prayer group, maybe once a month, here women can experience how it feels to participate actively in a service. This must not necessarily be a full service, but consist of singing and understanding the liturgy that already is a part of the traditional service; with songs and tunes many already know. My aim is not to change orthodox Judaism, but to ask questions and to begin by practicing and sharing a Judaism that I can relate to.

Wanya Kruyer

The story goes: The Jews in Holland were saved by the Dutch. When I grew up in Amsterdam, this myth was reality: The Dutch fought in the resistance against the Nazis. The Dutch hid Jews, distributed food tickets, and saved Jewish children. No one reminded me of the end of the Anne Frank story: She and her family were betrayed by their Dutch neighbours. This was the fate of 76 percent of the Jewish Dutch population, and over 90 percent of the Dutch Jews in Amsterdam. 90 percent vanished in the Holocaust. When I grew up in the city, what I call the Anne Frank myth was pervasive.

When my conscious Jewish life started in the 80's, I met a lot of people like myself: men and women travelling with their Jewish heritage, a heritage that was very complex, ambivalent, who grew up in families that wanted to be integrated, assimilated, at least integrated into Dutch society, who had their Holocaust traumas, and with this complex relationship with the Dutch environment. I made a lot of trips to the United States in the late 80's/early 90's and visited their small congregations associated with Reconstructionism and Renewal, some Reform in the big cities, and a Jewish life I had not seen in Holland, a Jewish life that was vibrant, easy-going, that was not overloaded with the shadows of trauma. In 1995, I was able to be involved in founding a new congregation: "Beit ha'Chidush", House of Renewal. I came to this sudden, and also for me unexpected step, because I missed the connection to our tradition and our history. Now, Beit ha'Chidush is a congregation like other congregations. It's more open, more informal, more participatory than the established congregations. But we are growing together again.

I have never been married, and I have never carried a child. I am not the only one in my Jewish peer group. The vast majority of my Jewish friends in their 30's, 40's, and 50's have no children themselves. 27 percent of the Jewish population is now organised in the two major congregations, the Reform and the traditional, or orthodox. The 73 percent of formally non-organised Jews still have this very low birth rate. But yet there's something else happening; we're getting a population influx from other parts of the world, mainly from Israel. My family consists of an American student who comes to study in Amsterdam for one semester, and I am her host family. It's a program called Gender and Sexuality of the School of International Training in Vermont in the US and the University of Amsterdam where I studied in the late '70's. And they always find a Jewish girl for me, so I have my little family, with two different Pflegetöchter (foster daughters) a year. Regularly, in the past two years, my Shabbat evenings are joined by a young man of 30 years who works and studies in Amsterdam and whose mother I met two years ago here at Bet Debora. So I made my own little family.

Eleonore Lappin

When we founded "Or Chadash" eleven years ago it was something quite new in Vienna and it could only succeed because there were simply people who were familiar with non-Orthodox Judaism. They were from Switzerland, Israel, and the USA. Since March we’ve got a woman Rabbi - for Vienna is a completely alien idea - Eveline Goodman-Thau, who is a native of Vienna herself.

The Vienna congregation was always a community of immigrants from Poland, Galicia, Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia. It also approximates the composition of the post-war community. After World War II, Austria was a transit country, a stop for people on their way to the USA, to Palestine/Israel, and many of a large number of DPs [displaced persons] did not get any further than Vienna. In 1938, there were perhaps about 180,000 Jews in Vienna. Today the "Israeli Cultural Community" has some 7,000 members. And nevertheless, by contrast with Germany, the community in Vienna is trying to find a certain link to the traditions of the pre-war community. If you’re talking about patterns of identity, the pre-war community still has a certain power, and it was orthodox. There were no liberal houses of prayer in Vienna before World War II.

Today, we have no less than three Jewish schools. That’s something that in itself is surprising and for us Jews in Vienna, a fact that fills us with pride. We have a school system. The future of our children has been provided for. The first Jewish school was founded in 1980. Today it has become the Zwi-Perez-Chajes-Gynasium, with an affiliated adult education centre. I sent my dauther there. During my childhood, I really suffered through religious instruction. It was horrible, the waste of one afternoon each week, and afterwards, you couldn’t even read Hebrew. But still, you had a toehold in the Jewish Kehilla [community], that’s why you went. I wanted something better for my daughter, and we really wanted to create Jewish life in Vienna. The school is a good one. That was also important, that the Jewish school be slightly elitist, at least as good as the Lycée Francaise, otherwise we wouldn’t get any students ... that’s because the Lycée Francaise was the inofficial Jewish school. We were better. We require four foreign languages for the "Matura" [school leaving certificate for university bound students]. Our children were simply Jewish geniuses. My daughter was in the first graduating class. Now I look at what became of that class. Two-thirds of them no longer live in Vienna. That means that exactly what I had to listen to when I decided to send my daughter to the Jewish school has happened, "She’s going to become too Jewish. Don’t send her back to the ghetto. How is she going to make it here in Austria?" And I said, "In order to live here, she needs a Jewish education." And now the children don’t live here anymore. My daughter lives in Jerusalem. This really raises a question: If you want to raise children with a Jewish consciousness, and perhaps a bit of Jewish upbringing as well, then you’ve really got to send them to a ghetto somewhere. But then what happens to the Jewish renewal when these children leave? My daughter tells me, "I will not marry some man who I already knew when I was ten years old." That’s the way it is with most of them. It means that children who we keep in closed groups don’t get much of an idea about perspectives for the future. So what’s to be done? That’s something I’d really like to know, because I believe it’s a very important issue for family policy.

Andrea Petö

A national census was conducted in Hungary in the first part of 2001. In this census, there were three questions about religion that might serve as identification or coming out for the Jews. The first one was about nationality. For Hungarian Jews, that was Hungarian. The second was religion. Since 90 percent of the Hungarian Jews have no religious identification, most of them marked Atheist or No Answer. And the third was cultural identity, and that was an open-ended question, which means that most people did not understand what this was. The survey instructions suggested that this question referred to the mother tongue, and that is in most of the cases Hungarian. There was a certain debate about the result, but basically there are certain estimates, that 70, 50, 90 percent – it depends whom you ask – of the Hungarian Jewish population became invisible due to this way of asking in the census. In 1990, the Hungarian Jewish community made the decision that they wouldn't define themselves as a nationality or an ethnic group but as a religion, and in a community that is 90 percent non-religious, this is pretty problematic. The journal of the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association, which tells you about its orientation, "Szombat," Shabbat, was actually the first one to introduce women's issues in its section Esther’s Bag. Several of us women of their 30s decided to start a different type of publication, partly a journal, partly academic writing, and also literature which would reflect on gender issues. So far this is the only regularly published feminist intellectual product in the Hungarian press. But there is a problem: we have an imagined reading audience. We are putting an emphasis of the democratic character of our work. There are always two editors of each issue which secures that we could learn from each other. But we don't really know for whom we are writing these articles. We have fun, and we love spending our time together and reading the articles, and eating – we always make a feast – but the issue is that we are doing two things: we are constructing a community for ourselves, and we are constructing through our writing an audience. Yet the number of issues of the journal Szombat after January 2001 when we started the so called women’s section in it did increased. That was the most surprising impact. Now the Szombat is published in 2,500 copies per month; you might consider that is nothing, but for an imagined Jewish community as it is the Hungarian one, it's a lot. If you count the readers not the copies sold the number of readers is around 10,000.

Jael Geis

Even if it doesn’t exist anymore, the Berlin "Jüdische Gruppe," in many respects paved the way for all of today’s groups that are outside the mainstream. It was formed to protest the march of Israeli troops into Lebanon in 1982 and was opposed to the policy of the Jewish communities here, not in any case to criticise Israeli policy openly, following the slogan, "my country, right or wrong." Most of the members viewed themselves as more or less secular, leftist intellectuals, who adopted a critical position regarding social and cultural questions facing the Jewish and German societies. The aversion between the Jewish community and the Jüdische Gruppe was initially mutual. The rigid structures in the Jewish community are a product of Jewish post-war history in the Federal Republic of Germany. Jewish life was distinguished by the following characteristic facts: a) it was a political issue, b) it was quickly institutionalised but regenerated slowly, and was plagued by the central problems of spiritual, religious, and cultural impoverishment, c) it had an extremely ambivalent position to remaining in "the country of the murderers", and d) a large degree of heterogeneity despite the small number of Jews, until the beginning of the 1990s, there were some 30 thousand members of the Jewish community in Germany, as opposed to nearly half a million before Hitler came to power. The more or less latent feeling of threat and the resulting siege mentality first promoted the development of undemocratic structures within the communities, and second, had the consequence that Jews felt the need to appear in public standing homogenous and shoulder to shoulder. Otherwise they withdrew into anonymity. The invisibility of real Jews was linked to a high presence of dead Jews in public.

I’d like to remind you of the background, on which, in my opinion, the question of the family after the Shoah should be discussed. The extermination attempt by the national socialists was not directed at Jewish individuals, but at the Jews as a people. It included both the history and the future, meaning both children and the potential to reproduce. After the Shoah all potential parents were confronted with the physical and psychological renewal of parenthood, even if individuals did not  pose the question to themselves. A child was a tangible bit of evidence of a person’s own survival and in general played a role in the wishes of the parents for substitutes, continuity, rejection of national socialist doctrines, and the desire to negate what had happened. Every child that was born after Hitler was a triumph over the persecutors. We should, and by "we" I mean all Jews of all ages, not be surprised that we are still dealing with this partially failed attempt to exterminate us. The trauma of the extermination was collective and the consequences are as well.

Post-war Jewish communities in Germany were concerned with an above average number of social tasks: tending to the needs of survivors and their families, and those of orphans and refugees. The were challenged and certainly overwhelmed. The communities tried to compensate for what these mostly incomplete or shattered families, frequently ‘second families’, were unable to do. It tried to meet the needs of the children to lead a Jewish life even after the traditions had been broken a number of times. This was particularly true if the communities adhered strictly to conventional forms of practising Judaism and retained hierarchical structures. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the community clung and gave a great deal of significance to structures that were handed down after the Shoah. These communities were after all just as affected by the devastation and had to be reconstructed under conditions that were just as difficult as those faced by the families.

Open Discussion

Jael Geis

I’d like to ask you something that I do not immediately want to have taken as an appeal. Why is there, in Germany of all places, no organisation of children of survivors? I mean an organisation that is active in this generation and not an offer for it?

Esther Kontarsky

It’s been mentioned that the Jewish community, particularly in Germany in 1945, was in something similar to a state of siege and that this was strongly connected to mistrust. Precisely the word spirituality has a great deal to do with trust. The slippery slope in reference to Jewish identity after 1945 was that it wasn’t enough to have survived something like that. What would be the other side of the coin, then? Trust would be a precondition for it. How can that be developed?

Jael Geis

Do you mean trust in the surroundings? That the others have done their homework?

Esther Kontarsky

I mean trust in the self, a fundamental trust, confidence in life in general, and in what’s around you. There’s no question that the surroundings are a very active factor.

Why do I feel a bit odd with people that are converting or have converted? I know it’s completely unfair and that I’m really sitting down in a bed of nettles when I address it. But I think this discomfort actually comes from the fact that they bring something I don’t have, trust. That has noting to do with envy. It’s just unease. It’s something that I absolutely don’t have. And I don’t know how that will develop with time.

In reference to the question about organisations for the second generation. Rabbi Jonathan Magonet was recently in Berlin and made the observation that it was his impression this question is being addressed much more intensively in Holland. The question that follows that is: What is the difference between the work in Holland and the work in Germany? Both are communities of survivors. I’d like to pass on an impression I got while attending the same psychotherapy workshop one time in Holland and one time in Germany. In the case of Holland, it was clear, that needs and suffering and horrible feeling were much more clearly articulated in Holland than here in Germany, where things are much more strongly sublimated.

Lidia Drozdzynski

Since 1994 there’s been a second generation group in Cologne, perhaps the first in Germany. We worked together for four years, together with a therapist, because we knew that we needed professional help. The issue of the second generation may also not have become publicised, because it’s been made very taboo by members of the first generation within the community. That means that if the second generation wants to break the taboo, then it has to have support. It isn’t a political task, it’s a psychological one. The concept of trust has really touched me. I think it’s very courageous because I am battling with a similar problem myself. We’ve been discussing collective trauma and its collective results. It’s precisely this trauma that fundamental trust was robbed from my parents. That lack of trust has been carried over to me in the second generation and means I’m unable to find spirituality, because I don’t have this trust. I need tangible things because I’m floating in a gap and have difficult finding space for myself.

Lara Dämmig & Elisa Klapheck

We also belong to the second generation ourselves, but as time has progressed, we’ve begun to reject the concept. By using it, you define yourself through the Shoah, that our parents and grandparents experienced, not us. With the concept, our Jewish identity remains trapped in trauma and unable to reach a positive foundation. That is why we’ve started saying – this may now sound provocative – that we see ourselves as the first generation, the "first generation after". We want to build something new that is based on the old traditions. That is why this conference is being held here, in the women’s balcony of Berlin’s largest synagogue, the place where Rabbi Regina Jonas did her work.

Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

This whole notion of reconstructing Jewish life: I think we have to do it with the materials of who we are now and we start with ourselves. I'm addressing both the issue of spirituality, and also that comment about, "We send our children to Jewish schools, and then they get terribly Jewish and don't want to live with us any more." The Zionist dream is gone, and thank God we are not in a situation with that, because we don't want our children to all run off to Israel. And I'm not saying we don't want Israel, we don't want our children to run off to Israel, we want our children to find a way and a path whoever they are, wherever they are, as Germans, as Hungarians, whatever, it's a real task.

Sylvia Rothschild

I was boiling inside listening to some of the things I've heard! The question really is: What does it take - I don't know if it's just the women - for the Jews of Europe, post-Shoah, to actually claim their own authenticity? Because I'm hearing people talk about the "real" community in which "we" are all invisible. And the "official" community, and "we can't split them". And so on, and so on. It seems to me ridiculous. Jewish communities have always been plural, it is traditional to have many different kinds of Jewish community. And yet, the whole time I've been here, I've heard about a "lack of authenticity" in anything we're building, because the "real" community is somehow out there, it's official, it's traditional,...

Andrea Petö

It's rich!

Sylvia Rothschild

...it's rich. So what?! You can set up a community in somebody's kitchen! You don't have to wait for the money to come in to you. You don't have to worry what the Germans think about the Jews in Germany. You don't have to worry about what the "Einheitsgemeinde" thinks in Norway or whatever. If most of the community are outside of the official community, that tells you something. One of the things I learned some years ago, is that the word "author" - somebody who writes something - is connected to the word "authentic". Actually, you write your own authenticity.

Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

What I think we've got to do is: be honest, bring all the different elements together, about where we live in our situation, whether it's in Vienna, or it's Budapest, or it's Berlin, or it's Norway, wherever we are, that we are honest about where we are, and living with that and owning it, together with exploring our Jewishness, which is to me not going about through the past, but recognising our own journey as a Jewish journey, and finding a way of connecting with the symbols and the ideas and the stories.

Elisa Klapheck & Lara Dämmig

What Rabbi Rothschild said is very important. We hold Bet Debora in the community, here in Berlin. We have been to America, to Israel, in order to orient ourselves. But at some point we thought we have to be authentic, in our place. We do not see Bet Debora as something that is outside of the community, quite the contrary. We want to spark a discourse within the community and outside of it as well, in non-Jewish society. We see ourselves in this society, not it some niche outside it. And we simply have to be able to handle it when not everyone in the community loves us.

Wanya Kruyer

I agree totally: Beit ha'Chidush, the new community I represent, is fully part of the community in Holland, and if others don’t recognise us, they have a problem.

Alice Shalvi

One of the most interesting developments in Israel recently has been "reclaiming the Jewish bookcase." People who are not in any way religiously observant, who feel they have been denied their heritage because they went to the state school system and not the state religious school system, are now setting up numerous batey midrash [study houses] to study Judaism. I find this a wonderfully encouraging development.

Wanya Kruyer

When I was talking about discovering Jewish life in Amsterdam, I was exactly talking about this reclaiming of our bookshelves, from the mid-80's on, in Holland, reclaiming our culture, reclaiming our theatre, etc. etc. Much later this concept developed in Tel Aviv, and so I'm proud to be more in the vanguard of this reclaiming our bookshelves than walking behind! And now a small group is also reclaiming our rituals and reclaiming our spirituality, and not only reclaiming it but also renewing it and rediscovering it, how to fit it into contemporary life. So, by reclaiming our bookcases, we have a very open and inclusive Jewish cultural life.

The complete discussion appears in: Sandra H. Lustig, Ian Leveson (eds.), Turning the Kaleidoscope. Towards an European Jewish Identity, Oxford, New York 2002