“Seeing Nazis under every rock — that’s very much in the American Jewish mind. But it’s not objectively accurate…It’s a different country.”
At the same time, he said, Germans lack even the most basic knowledge about Jews.
“They know very little about Jews and Judaism,” he said last week during a stop in San Francisco. “And they know absolutely nothing about the American Jewish community.”
DuBow hopes to suture these gaps more effectively, starting this summer when he becomes the first director of the only German office maintained by any American Jewish communal group.
The AJCommittee office will open in Berlin on a site once owned by a prominent Jewish family who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The new landlord is offering the space rent-free for a decade.
While many Jews might question the virtue of opening an office in the country responsible for the Holocaust, DuBow asserts that Germany is vital to Jewish interests today.
His goals include lecturing about Jews and Judaism to German students, reaching out to German Jews, evaluating the country’s Holocaust curriculum and expanding adult exchange trips between Germany and the United States.
About 60,000 Jews now live in Germany, including 20,000 to 25,000 from the former Soviet Union who have arrived in the past five years.
In addition, he said, the American Jewish community shouldn’t ignore Germany’s growing prominence.
“Germany is really the most important country in Europe. It’s the economic engine that runs Europe,” said DuBow.
Economic ties are particularly strong with Israel. Germany is Israel’s second largest trading partner, he noted, and Germans comprise the second largest tourist contingent to Israel. Only the United States outdoes Germany on either count.
“We want to make sure that the connection continues and that the Germans understand that the American Jewish community has an interest in that,” said DuBow, who has a neatly trimmed white mustache and wears a small pin in the lapel of his navy suit.
The pin — a replica of a German medal he was awarded in September called the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit — symbolizes DuBow’s already strong ties to Germany. He received the honor for his work in improving German-Jewish relations.
“I thought long and hard before accepting it,” said DuBow, who has worked for AJCommittee for three decades. “I’m old enough, so I have a sense of history. But then I decided to do it.”
In addition to his work with AJCommittee’s exchange programs, DuBow’s efforts in Germany have included reaching out to East Berlin’s Jews in the early 1980s. After learning that the community hadn’t had a rabbi for years, he helped bring in an American rabbi.
Two years ago, DuBow served as a visiting professor at Bayreuth University in Bavaria and taught a three-month course on American Jewish culture, history and religion.
He found students and faculty “to be very receptive, much more than I expected,” he said.
By opening a German office, AJCommittee is in some ways coming full circle. The organization was founded in the early 1900s by prominent German Jews who had immigrated to America.
Currently, AJCommittee’s only office outside the United States is located in Israel. After World War II, the organization opened an office in Paris to aid refugees. That office finally closed in the early 1980s, DuBow said, because the refugee problem was long over and the office became too expensive to operate.
The site of the new German office itself has a complicated past.
In 1933, when Nazism was on the rise, a wealthy Jewish newspaper-publishing family fled Germany. This family, the Mosses, left behind two pieces of property in Berlin, both of which ended up in communist-controlled territory east of the Berlin Wall.
After the wall came down in 1989, the property was restored to the Mosse family’s descendants, who then chose to sell it.
The new owner decided it would be appropriate to have a Jewish presence in the building and eventually offered the office space rent-free for 10 years to AJCommittee.
Though DuBow can’t be sure the Berlin office will live up to expectations, he said it is worth the try.
“We have to be willing to take the chance.”