Journal 3 in 2003
Unser Erbe

weiter I Übersicht I zurück

Toby Axelrod
Reclaiming the Past

A Memorial Plaque for Bertha and Hermann Falkenberg

Berlin is a city of many stories. Now, Edna Sovin has brought one back to London with her. Recently, she came here for an unusual ceremony: The unveiling of a plaque dedicated to her grandparents, Bertha and Hermann Falkenberg, activists in the pre-war Jewish community of Berlin.

The dedication also marked the start of Berlin’s third Bet Debora conference for European Jewish women, May 23-25, which drew some 150 participants from Europe, the USA, Israel and the former Soviet Union.

One of their role models should be Bertha Falkenberg, said conference organizers Lara Daemmig and Elisa Klapheck. Falkenberg was a pioneer for the rights of Jewish women in the pre-war years. A longtime president of the Berlin Jewish Women’s League, she fought for the voting rights of women as synagogue members.

Hermann Falkenberg, “the man who made Bertha’s work possible,” said Klapheck, was a pioneer in his own right. He founded a liberal synagogue on Berlin’s Schoenhauser Allee, which bore his name until the Nazis shut it down in 1938.

The new plaque, affixed to the outer wall of 22 Lottumstrasse in former East Berlin, marks the Falkenbergs’ last address here.

Sovin never knew her grandfather, who died in 1936, two years before she was born. In 1939, she and her parents fled Nazi Germany for England. “We left my grandmother behind,” she said. Bertha survived the concentration camp Theresienstadt only to die in 1946, two days after getting a visa to Great Britain.

“She was a little shrunken thing, with fire in her eyes,” said Sovin, who recently found letters she and her grandmother had written to each other in 1945.

“I was seven. My mother must have made me write as an exercise,” Sovin said. “This was terribly emotional for me to see her letters, to realize that to her I was extremely important,” said Sovin, whose husband, Stanley, is an attorney. They have three children.

Now, on a brilliant spring morning 57 years later, Sovin stood outside the graffiti-covered, five story building for a dedication ceremony. Several police officers stood across the cobblestone street, and a young man peered down from his third story window at the uncommon sight of a crowd, TV cameras and microphones on the street below.

“What Bertha Falkenberg did for the Jewish community, especially for Jewish women, is seen as normal today,” Hermann Simon, director of the Centrum Judaicum Foundation in Berlin, said. “In the same way, maybe in a few years no one will be so amazed any more about female rabbis and cantors. Have patience,” he said. Yes, “one must have patience,” said Sovin, who said the dedication represented “a repair, a bringing back, a healing” after a “deep disruption to the soul.”

“One must be patient, hold one, and things will work out again,” she said. “And in a world of such pain, maybe some of the other broken lives can be healed as well.”

“My children have no feeling of connection to their grandparents and to the past and to Berlin,” she added. “I hope I will have the strength to repair that breach.”

Sovin later explained, “It’s too heavy for my children. They are respectful, but they want to keep it remote because they are aware of the pain.”

After the ceremony, as the crowd drifted away, Uwe Lehmann, co-owner of the building, took Sovin by the arm. He had arranged to show her the apartment that was likely the one where her grandparents had lived. They disappeared inside the building, together with her aunt Lotte Falkenberg, and came out again several minutes later.

“My aunt was pretty sure this was the apartment,” Sovin said. “But the entrances had been altered. And to me, the physical remnants were less important.”

“I was always curious about what happened to the Jews here,” said Lehmann, 45, who grew up in East Germany. “This history was taboo in the German Democratic Republic,” he said. “I knew there were many Jews living in this part of town, there were many Jewish neighbors.”

“But that these people lived in my house, that completely surprised me,” he said. “I tell my children: In any window here, there could have been Jewish people,” Lehmann said. “And their non-Jewish neighbors could have looked down and seen the deportation, just like people were looking out today.”

(Berlin, May 25)

Toby Axelrod - Germany correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Jewish Chronicle, lives in Berlin