There are two generations of Jews in Germany. The “first generation” survived the Shoah and went on to rebuild Europe’s decimated communities, and the “second generation” is their children, who are fueling a renewal, according to Berlin scholar Elisa Klapheck.
Traumatized by the war and displaced from their homes, the first generation started rebuilding the communities in which they found themselves after 1945, along prewar lines, as if nothing had changed. Not all of them were born in Germany. In fact, the work was done largely by Poles, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians; a mostly Orthodox remnant, they established a brand of Judaism that resisted modernization.
It was museum-like, a Judaism almost as much for the departed as for the living, Klapheck suggests.
Today, said Klapheck, a rabbinical student and spokeswoman for the Jewish community of Berlin, the dusty, fearful traditions of first-generation Judaism are giving way as the second generation embraces a pioneering spirit of renewal. That spirit includes a willingness to accept new ideas at the forefront of a set of pressing priorities.
Klapheck will discuss the state of Germany’s Jewish community in a lecture tomorrow at Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon. Her talk is entitled “On the Ruins of the Shoah.”
She will also deliver her lecture Monday evening at U.C. Santa Cruz.
While many Jews in Germany have begun the new year cautiously, in the shadow of anti-Semitism, for an active minority — especially a growing population of Renewal Jews — the year will be a time for continued historical reflection, archival study and cultural revival.
It’s a tale of two cities, according to Klapheck, editor-in-chief of Jüdisches Berlin, the magazine of the Jewish community of Berlin.
But whereas residents used to be divided by the Berlin Wall, they are now divided by conflicting visions of what it means to be a community of German Jews 60 years after Hitler and a decade since the end of the Cold War.
Though her lecture is downbeat in title, her message is actually quite positive.
“I am that new generation,” said Klapheck by phone from Dusseldorf, where she was recently visiting her father.
“I was born in the 1960s. For me, it’s always a problem that as a Jew from Germany people expect that there is anti-Semitism. Or that we as Jews in Germany have to be a scared of German society. It’s very hard to speak about the positive aspects of what’s going on — that there’s a new generation that is doing something for the revival of Judaism in Germany.”
Originally from Dusseldorf, Klapheck has lived in Berlin since 1986.
She is studying in the Aleph rabbinic program, the Renewal-based ordination program founded by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
She is also one of the founders of Bet Debora, a biennial conference of leading European women rabbinic scholars, held in Berlin.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Jews from all over Western Europe discovered an Eastern Europe still practically devoid of Jews.
As Klapheck tells the story, what remained were the monuments — buildings and cemeteries too solidly rooted in the dirt to be pried up and dispersed — and the archives, finally available for inspection.
Yet, though the hated wall had come down and Germany was about to be accepted back into the world of nations, to many it still looked and felt as if the Holocaust had occurred only days before.
What happened next was critical, Klapheck said.
Students, writers and historians, many with progressive agendas, began to poke through the dust looking for meaningful discoveries to connect contemporary Jewish life with something, anything, from the immediate past.
Historical figures long dead began to come to life, and whole movements came back into the light of history.
The researchers activated a powerful revivalist spirit that today is one of the strongest engines of European Jewry. The clock of European Jewish history, standing still for decades, had began to creak forward again.
Seeing all those abandoned monuments, said Klapheck, gave Europe’s activist Jews a kick; “since then you can actually talk about a revival of European culture.”
Klapheck herself explored this territory in her study of the life of Regina Jonas, a feminist Jewish pioneer who had been nearly forgotten.
Jonas attended the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the famed Jewish studies program, but was refused ordination by the progressive Rabbi Leo Baeck. Eventually she sought a more liberal rabbi, Max Dienemann, who ordained her in private in Berlin in 1935.
Jonas was later killed at Auschwitz.
Jonas should be a large figure in Jewish history, but the facts of her life were buried in a dusty East German archive for four decades.
Instead, Sally Priesand — ordained in 1972 — is largely known as the first woman rabbi.
Stories such as Jonas’, said Klapheck, are just the tip of an iceberg of discovery that is fueling a spirit of German renewal.
“That’s a typical example where you can see that a new generation is both rediscovering their own roots, and also doing something in the present.”