A Tale of Two Strudels

When I was a child, I attended a Jewish Day School in New York, where once a year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, part of the lobby of our school turned into a large memorial hall.  Every year, my sister and I would go with my mother and light a candle for her parents’ families and she would cry and I would watch in horrified fascination as a slide show played on a wall – people’s families, once all together and alive, posing for this picture, brutally murdered only a short time later.  I was terrified by the contradiction between what the slideshow showed and what happened to the people in the pictures later, but I remember wanting to watch it anyway and not really being able to look away.

It was this feeling that was recalled to me as I walked into the building where Limmud Day Hamburg was to take place.  I had had a lovely morning walking around Hamburg with some colleagues and was excited to participate in the lectures that were taking place in the afternoon.  The event was taking place in a Kindergarten in a beautiful old building that had the words “Israelitische Tochterschule – 1883” (Hebrew Daughter School – I can only assume that means girls’ school) over the door. 

The place looked very warm and friendly when we walked in, and as we made our way up the stairs to where Limmud was happening, I saw a big picture of former students of the school taken early last century.  A plaque next to the picture made it clear that they were all deported. 

 

All I could think as I saw this picture was how horrible it would be to go to school and have to see this picture every day and to think, “A girl just like me went to this school a long time ago and she was murdered and so were all of her classmates.”

Although the content of Limmud itself was not directly focused on the Holocaust, it was undeniably in the background.  The atmosphere of the event was very warm and I had a great time with my colleagues.  The lecture offerings were great: I attended a very informative lecture about Jewish identity and the history of matrilineal and patrilineal traditions in Judaism in an absolutely packed room, so packed that I had to sit on the floor.   Meanwhile, we could hear the sounds of Yiddish songs coming from the room next door, where a lecture about the work of Mordechai Gebirtig was taking place.  I was also very curious about the panel discussion on Jewish weddings, but since I can only be in one place at a time, I’ll have to wait until next time.   There were also several lectures in Russian, geared to the many Former-Soviet-Union Jews who have moved to Germany over the years, which I wish I could have attended.  In the later afternoon, I also sat in on a talk on Jewish Portuguese immigrants to Germany after their expulsion and was very interested in a talk on the present-day meaning and usage of the word “Jude.”  From what I could tell from looking at the event program, the only talk to focus on the subject of the Holocaust was one on the Amidah as a Post-Holocaust prayer.  I have no doubt, however, that the Holocaust was in the background in most of the lectures.

At some point, Sarah and I found ourselves in need of a small break and wandered around the school building while we talked.  We eventually ended up on the top floor of the school where a small room functioned as a museum, telling the story of the Jews of Hamburg, and specifically of the Jewish boys’ and girls’ schools in Hamburg, before and during the Holocaust.  The room is beautifully arranged with photographs and artifacts with very clear explanation cards hanging next to them.  I learned that the Jewish schools at the time shifted their focus to education in the way of skilled labor, particularly agricultural skills, that could help their students successfully immigrate.

Eventually the school was shut down and the community was deported.  A glass cabinet to one side held several artifacts, such as yellow stars, letters, and legal documents.  Two suitcases stood next to one picture in the center of the room, where you could read about the deportation process, including excerpts from letters to family abroad.

I found a big photograph of a young woman wearing a yellow star that was hanging in the center of the room to be particularly evocative – she was so pretty in a completely ordinary way and looked so smiling and alive that I had the impression that I would have liked her very much, and it made me so sad to think that here she was in this picture not knowing the cruelties that the future held in store for her.

 

After wandering around the room for a while, Sarah and I sat down to talk.  We both have family that were killed in the Holocaust, Sarah’s from Germany and mine from Poland.  We never really talk about this (since it isn’t exactly a casual conversation topic), but it really is particularly significant for both of us to be placed here on our fellowships as inheritors of our family stories (along with our family trauma).  I can’t possibly process the significance of it every single day, though, or I would probably go crazy.  Most days I don’t really think about it.  But it was so great to have some time to talk with Sarah about what it means for us to be here now as Jews in Germany – not just as Jews in Germany but as Jews working within an established Jewish community in Germany.

Our little chat over, though, we walked back into Limmud Day Hamburg and went back to ordinary life as Jews working with the Jewish community in present day Germany.