The following was written on Friday, May 15th, 2009.
As I have discussed at length in the past, one of Kivunim’s central educational goals is to introduce its students to threads of our story that we never knew existed. When I described this element of Kivunim’s mission statement to people before this year had begun, I would often talk about expanding the mainstream Jewish narrative to include places beyond Europe, the United States and Israel. Our first three trips accomplished this goal by exposing us to Jewish life and culture in places that we might never have thought to connect to personally—let alone on a Jewish level. Admittedly, in trying to explore unknown frontiers of the Jewish world, Central Europe might seem an unlikely choice. Indeed, few regions of the world appeal so clearly and fundamentally to modern Jewish identity. Most Kivunim students, including myself, trace their roots back to Europe.
Yet, an integral piece of Kivunim’s aim to present lesser-known corners of the world and dimensions of Jewish identity is the conviction to reconnect to pieces of the story with which one already feels well acquainted. In fact, places like Central Europe and the issues they represent offer some of the greatest challenges in our education, because they compel us to confront our assumptions and appreciate what we tend to take for granted. Whether my friends and I expected it or not, for many of us the trip to Central Europe, which consisted of one week in Germany followed by another week in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, was the most intellectually and emotionally enriching trip of the year.
Before the trip Kivunim buzzed in anticipation—especially when it came to Germany. Many of us were simply excited to visit Berlin, as a major European city, while many of us also expressed extreme discomfort at the idea of going to the heartland of the Holocaust. Most of us were probably somewhere in the middle. Personally, as a European history student I salivated over the prospect of seeing a place of such rich cultural and historical content, while as a descendent of victims of the Holocaust I anticipated a difficult emotional experience in unprecedented proximity to that part of my own history. I was also very curious about how Germans process that dark period in their history. I imagined that the generation of Germans my age would have inner conflicts to which today’s young Jews might be able to relate. In a similar way to the balance that we as Jews try to find between learning from and maintaining an emotional connection to the memory of the Holocaust, and not wanting to think and act as victims forever, I expected young Germans to be struggling with how to learn from their history without feeling like oppressors. If I expected the trip to be the most thought-provoking and emotionally challenging one of the year, then I was right. Yet no expectations could compare to the difficult and compelling realities that we found when we got there—in the same week, fittingly enough, as the Pope, who has his own modern German identity struggle, visited Jerusalem.
When it comes to American Jewry, I can’t think of a place that is as easy to simplify as Germany. Both as Americans and as Jews we connect most directly to the Germany that existed during World War II, and from both perspectives the pressure to see the country simply as a paradigm of evil is great. We may intuitively recognize that Germany is a very complicated place, and we may even have dealt with it on a more nuanced level in a book or a European history class. However, many of us haven’t had the encouragement, institutional opportunity or even wherewithal to really grapple with modern Germany. As one of the most balanced weeks of the year in terms of combining both academic and experiential learning, the time we spent in Germany was a consistent chain of teachable moments that I think left us all with an unthinkable amount of new questions, and a new sense of just how complicated Germany is.
Our time in Germany was spent under the auspices of an organization called Germany Close Up (GCU). GCU is a new government-sponsored, but privately planned and administered, organization that runs programs for American Jews, introducing them to modern Germany. While it was an honor to be hosted by the government, I can’t say that no one was afraid that we were walking into a propaganda machine. Yet we found the facilitators to be sincerely open and honest people, who encouraged us to ask difficult questions and collect as many experiences and personal stories as possible in our short time there. True to the name of the organization, GCU invited us to zoom in and grapple with Germany as a real and complex modern place that in many respects is as baffled by its history as anyone else. After nineteen years of viewing Germany from a distance through historical documents and narratives—a difficult process in itself—the week with GCU was an unbelievable opportunity to reexamine central questions about Germany, discover wholly new ones, and ask them all personally in the place where they are most relevant.
I’ll admit that our first day in Berlin was not particularly emotional for me. When we got off the plane, we didn’t see the Holocaust. I don’t suppose I was really expecting to see it. As I mentioned above, I was one of the students that had more education about Germany outside the world of anti-Semitism. The weather was beautiful, and it was quite easy to be occupied by all the magnificent architecture and wholly modern vibe of the city. Even standing outside the Reichstag, the original but revamped parliament building, I can’t say I was really connected to the difficulties of being where the Nuremburg Laws, which degraded and disenfranchised German Jewry, had been passed. At the national Holocaust memorial, if anything I was impressed by its scale and central location. I tried to come to grips with what had taken place in the city, tried to imagine it ravaged by war. But something wasn’t adding up.
Of course I appreciated modern Germany for what it was—how liberal and modern it seemed. Still, this comfort, this sense of familiarity and simple excitement at being in a new and historically significant place, became a source instead of extreme discomfort. There really wasn’t a sense that Germany was struggling with the memory of the Holocaust, but at the same time there were memorials everywhere. I felt torn at the seams by the distinction of modern Germany and a sense of duty to feel more than simple acknowledgement for the racism that had roamed these streets. Luckily, I was in good company, as I felt my intellectual curiosity boiling over into emotional struggle. The same old conflicts were becoming very fresh and very real very rapidly: I didn’t want to conjure up a sense of victimization and delude myself into paranoia about the normalcy of Berlin just as a means to feel the pain that was on some level expected of me as a Jew, but at the same time I couldn’t walk around the city without feeling a latent sense of discomfort when I thought about how unsafe it had been at one time for a Jew to have a good time in Berlin.
The obvious way to grapple with this tension was to try to figure out whether real, healthy progress had been made. Had Germany recovered from the Holocaust through thoughtful and measured collective reflection that established an emotional conviction never to allow anything like it to happen again, or was it simply an overly-intellectualized part of their past that they could easily put in the “never again” category without dealing with it on a personal level? It was nice to feel safe on the streets, but was it worth it if all it meant was that people had forgotten about the Holocaust? I had spoken about this kind of conscientious processing of the Holocaust at the UN, but hanging out in Berlin gave the questions much more punch. The emotional and intellectual processes of the trip were never really to be isolated from one another. Indeed, they would inform and intensify each other.
A defining moment was in the German History Museum, where we learned about how prominent and assimilated German Jews had been before WWII. I had always been taught that Nazism built fear and hate of the Jews on the idea that they were responsible for the Great Depression, but for the first time it became very clear—as I thought about my orthodox Jewish ancestors on the shtetl in Poland, in contrast to the deeply assimilated and proud German Jews—that anti-Semitism in Germany had rejected Jews if they were visibly different, while hating and suspecting them if they were invisible/integrated/influential in the mainstream.
Our World Jewish Civilizations lecturer Shalmi, who joined us on the trip, would often talk about the “one-sided love affair” of German Jews with their country. When we went to Berlin’s Jewish cemetery later in the week, we would see the section for Jews who had died fighting for Germany in World War One, buried around a monument that read in Hebrew “strong as death is love.” For the first time I began to connect to why German Jews didn’t leave Nazi Germany. As Shalmi explained it, they were sophisticated people, who saw the Nazis as a temporary power. Why would anyone leave their homeland just because some fanatics took over? Besides, Jews hadn’t been a priority for Hitler when he was elected in 1933. In fact, German Jews were generally invisible for the most part; they felt more German than Jewish. Furthermore, they had never heard of the Holocaust. Let the fact that it’s so hard for us to imagine the atrocities even now that they have happened be an indication of how difficult it would have been for German Jews to have truly perceived the threat. For the first time I thought of myself. Part of what made Germany so comfortable for me was its resemblance to Scarsdale, New York in the suburbs, and Cambridge, Massachusetts in the city. I asked myself, could America ever do this to me? The fact that I was so sure it never could was on some level unsettling in itself. Comfort inspiring discomfort had reached a new level.
While I don’t believe that Jews are in danger in America, I am committed to making sure that we never are, which sometimes means asking very difficult questions. As I’ve explored in previous entries, history shows us that the impossible often transitions into the inevitable whether we are conscious of it or not. When we imagine the Holocaust as the epitome of evil, we run the risk of distancing ourselves from it so much that it loses its horrendous place in reality. Again, if we are to rise conscientiously from the ashes of the Holocaust then we must not forget it, but part of that means not simplifying it either, not keeping alive an image that shields us from the very real work of truly ensuring that it never happens again. The difficult reality is that such preventative work seems wholly unnecessary as long as we are doing it right, so the pain of confronting the questions may seem prematurely dramatic, but I don’t believe such thoughts are dangerous as long as they do not become answers, excuses to be preemptively defensive (which can often appear offensive). As Shalmi would say, the Holocaust is the epitome of something that we’ll hopefully never understand, even as it is our responsibility to try.
In our travels to Greece and Bulgaria, we saw some examples of moral courage amidst the atrocities, exploring a more nuanced understanding of the Holocaust as reality. When Kivunim visited Wannssee, the villa where top Nazi officials planned the implementation of the Final Solution, our conceptions even of the most active and apparently evil people involved were challenged by new ideas. Wannssee, in its picturesque countryside location, is the very essence of removal. It is where politicians and bureaucrats got together, away from society, to do their clearest and coldest policymaking. It is not a place where evil ideologues tortured and killed Jews. While there must have been plenty of ideologically steeped Nazi officers, who learned to hate Jews and carry out their duty, Wannssee represents an entirely different echelon of the Nazi machinery. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to posit that there weren’t zealously anti-Semitic Nazis among the fifteen bureaucrats—nine with PhDs—who were convened to plan the extermination of European Jewry. Still, what chills bones at Wannssee is the realization that the Holocaust was planned in a conference room in the middle of the German countryside. At Wannssee eleven million lives were reduced to a stack of paper—a pragmatic public policy that would protect the political viability of the regime.
These fifteen men didn’t even come up with the idea; they just figured out how to implement it. By 1942 the Nazis had gone from trying to get the Jews out of Germany for political stability through immigration incentives, anti-Semitic laws, and ghettos. The death camps were the last step in a long process of policymaking. German-Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt would explain the Nazi crimes with something she called “the banality of evil,” the idea that the Nazis weren’t monsters, but instead were normal motivated people who wanted to get ahead, and would follow orders rather than lose control and abandon their duty.
Apart from how jarring this nonchalance felt personally to me as a Jew, it also shook the core of my interest in public policy. Does the fact that government policy did so much evil represent the potential for it to effect powerful amounts of good too? Or, on the other hand, does the extreme public policy that came to be known as the Holocaust merely serve as the worst epitome for how impersonal policymaking inherently is? One of the hallmarks of President Obama’s governing style seems to be to uphold a sense of empathy, a pragmatic desire to appreciate how policies affect people on a daily basis. Yet, at the same time we cannot ignore how the cheapness of life that characterized WWII has only increased in many ways. Wars are waged from offices. Technology has allowed for a single decision to wipe out thousands of people in a moment. I can think of no greater tragedy than the reduction of real people to the simple status of war cost. Kivunim’s day at the Wannssee villa was a gripping encounter with such tragic detachment, and a very personal reminder of what can happen when power causes normal people, who have the most responsibility to their society, to lose site of the basic human value of others.
Still, as we zoomed in to see Germany with its nuance, the Holocaust was certainly not a mere political issue. Indeed, at the end of the day, the tragedy of the most powerful people, the ones with the most responsibility, having the least contact with the implementation of their decisions is further highlighted by the experience of those who played no part in the decision-making, and yet are still expected to bear the brunt of the blame: modern Germans. As seemingly absent as the Holocaust is from the façade of modern Germany, one does not have to dig very deep to find its remnants festering in the identities of the people. As we spoke with people we met, two points were repeatedly expressed: 1) that people are extremely ambivalent about any expression of national pride, and 2) that young Germans are on the whole resentful of being blamed for the Holocaust.
Over the course of the year, as we have learned about different historical narratives and the ways that societies use history to build their present and future, we have often dealt with the tendency of nations to focus on the distant past and ignore the most recent. From Greece to America to Israel it is clear that much of national identity often stands on a romantic image of the “good old days.” As we have been trained to identify this trend, we have also become pretty efficient at sniffing out what I like to call the illusion of a clean break. This is to say, when societies write their history around idealized events of antiquity, and all but ignore the most recent period, they run the risk of pretending, even unconsciously, that they can escape the world of which they are most directly a product. While the ultra-nationalism of Nazi Germany was one of history’s primary examples of a society adopting a glorified sense of self based in ancient roots, modern German national identity often epitomizes the clean break piece of the model—an all but passive repression of the memories of WWII.
Today German identity seems to be defined by a lack of pride. Besides some recent enthusiasm about the national football (soccer) team, which still made many people uncomfortable, expressions of nationalism are completely taboo in German society. While this might seem like a natural and appropriate place for a country with such a spurned past to be in, it is also extremely unsettling. Beyond the fact that the world accepts this muted sense of national identity—and would probably be uncomfortable if Germans were too proud—what does it really mean that no one is dealing with the past in Germany? What does it really mean for the health of the society? What will happen when someday someone comes along and makes Germans feel proud to be German for the first time in a long time? Is the modern age just a polarized swing of the pendulum, from ultranationalism to anti-nationalism, that could swing back in time? Can there be a middle ground? What did communism do to the Germans’ ability to deal with WWII, when half of Germany was taught a simplified anti-fascist curriculum, stifling any inclination to pursue redemption through collective introspection and critique?
As these questions still swirl around my head, I hardly have any answers. Still, I really wonder what German society is doing to address these questions. When I asked young people about how hard it would be for them to be expressly proud about their country—as opposed to being mellow and content in living there—they seemed stretched to consider what future of national identity they were working towards. When one realizes that German people were really just a collection of hundreds of principalities for hundreds of years, that things went horribly wrong the only time they ever really united, and then outside parties immediately split them into east and west for fifty years, it is easy to understand the fragmentation and ambivalence that they have about any national identity. Still, especially when it comes to the Holocaust, while the things that Germans share are the things that no one wants to think about and everyone hates even more to feel, complaisance is very dangerous. It seems to me that there are few nations on earth that have as much of a duty to think critically about their past and connect to it emotionally. Of course, it’s very hard to look inward when the entire world is so critical.
This brings me to the modern dynamic between Germans and Jews. These questions cut to the core of GCU’s primary mission, and Kivunim’s too on some level. While just a few days in Berlin was enough to show Kivunim how little we really know or even think about modern Germany, many people with whom we spoke also made it clear that German consciousness of Jews is mostly defined by WWII. (Indeed, today most Jews in Germany are immigrants from the Soviet Union—Jews who suffered their own separate atrocities at the hands of Stalin, Jews who grew up in a society where assimilation was the name of the game. Jews from the Soviet Union have Judaism that is all but invisible, while modern Germany let them immigrate in the hopes that they would be visible, to show that there is a place in the country for all kinds of people, especially Jews.) This broadly identifiable trend of lack of understanding underscores how little these estranged peoples have dealt with each other in the last sixty years.
GCU is doing some of the most important work that I can imagine. After all, when it comes to how Jews deal with the Holocaust—one of the most centrally defining pieces of modern Jews identity—it seems obvious that they would blame the Germans. Yet, while it’s less explicit, it may be just as obvious that modern Germans should not be blamed. But who else? Must we find some present people to blame? (Of course we may feel justified in attributing blame if we have problems with modern German attitudes towards the Holocaust, but we may also find a role in influencing those in a positive way instead of simply criticizing them.) Even as we have explored how the Nazis themselves were perhaps not as simply evil as we might like to imagine, they will never be forgiven. The natural inheritors of that legacy would be their children and grandchildren, but as a Jew I can testify to the fact that I want to be able to preserve the memory of the Holocaust without raising my children to feel like perpetual victims; only being in Germany could help me begin to appreciate how hard it would be for a country to raise its children with an honest and emotional connection to the Holocaust without in some way teaching them to blame themselves.
These are issues that Jews, Germans, and in some way all peoples, face. My time in Germany suggested to me that Jews must recognize that the choice to isolate ourselves from Germany—not to buy products or meet people from the country—breeds resentment. Indeed, as easy as it is to blame “Germany,” the country has changed and almost entirely replaced its population since WWII. At the same time Germans must realize that, while they don’t have to blame themselves personally, they cannot stop at simply feeling resentment towards Jews for blaming them. We must all ask ourselves what we are doing to effectively engage with each other and be reminded in a less hardened, principled and unsympathetic way that, while we all may have changed, we are also products of WWII in very fundamental and painful ways. Indeed, soon the Holocaust survivors and WWII generation of Germans will be gone forever, and it will be up to us to determine the discourse that keeps anything like the Holocaust from creeping up again. It will be easier for us all to greet our responsibilities to memory and the future if we don’t allow distance, generalization and unchecked emotional resentment to let our questions narrow and fade. We must not shy away from the complex nature of moving forward and remembering in tandem. We all have a right to dignity and to painful memories of the time when our peoples came in contact in the worst way, but we must also ask, what are we doing to combat disconnect and help each other reflect and progress healthfully? As we look forward, in my mind the only thing more destructive than disconnect from our history would be ongoing and unaddressed resentment of each other for not appropriately dealing with it.
My experience with Germany Close Up was a big surprise; Kivunim’s relationship with the organization didn’t even exist when I signed up. Yet it was one of the most important pieces of the year. For all the effort that Kivunim puts into coexistence education between Jews and Arabs, it is wholly necessary—and maybe even more difficult—to address our relationship with Germany. I look forward to continuing the work that began when Kivunim visited Germany, because I believe that we were introduced to levels of the modern world and ourselves that we cannot possibly ignore, confronting even more questions that are shaping the world that we will inherit. Perhaps no other adventure outside of our bubble this year appealed as fundamentally to our basic assumptions of the world as American Jews. These are the kinds of challenging and uncomfortable realities that we encourage each other to embrace.
* * *
Beyond the more obvious reasons for American Jews to see Germany, I also found myself confronting questions about the Cold War—questions that appealed more to my identity as an American, a westerner. After experiencing the “in-between” nature of places from Jerusalem to Istanbul, my brain lit up with excitement when I recognized the very real local divide between East and West that existed in Berlin until recently. Here was a city that experienced the division of the Cold War within walking distance. As I stood under the Brandenburg Gate, where President Reagan gave his famous “Tear Down This Wall” speech, I could see the double-brick line running through the street that signified where the Berlin Wall used to stand. This was the first time that I had ever really confronted how little I think about a war that defined the society in which I was raised until the year before I was born. In fact, I am about as old as an American can be without remembering the Cold War, or being raised with consciousness of the threats associated with it. What is more, for most Americans the Cold War reached across oceans, while here in Berlin it was waged across streets. This realization was only the beginning of a consciousness that would always be in the background during our time in Germany—that the East-West divide that defined Germany for fifty years is in some ways still the most central element of modern German identity. As much as our responsibilities regarding our conceptions of WWII and Germany would challenge us for the bulk of the trip, I also walked away with a new sense of just how potentially problematic it is that the generation of Americans who are the most immediate products of the post-Cold War world know the least about it—speaking of modern neglect of the recent in favor of the distant past…
We had spent a week in Germany. We had been to seemingly countless museums and memorials. We had tasted ice cream, bratwurst, baked goods, and beer. We had spent nights wandering around the artists’ colony in Berlin and marveling at the graffiti on the vestiges of the Berlin Wall. We had met with students, teachers, and representatives from the German Foreign Ministry and Parliament. After a day in Dresden, the baroque wonder and site of one of the most merciless carpet-bombing campaigns of WWII, we boarded a train to Prague.
Prague is a special place. Right in the heart of Bohemia, it was a refuge for strange and interesting people from all over Europe. For centuries religious and political dissidents who were exiled from their own countries found a home in Prague, creating one of Europe’s most diverse cities, a place where culture bloomed and billowed. It was the birthplace of the revival of many modern Jewish symbols like the Magen David (Jewish star), the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah, and the illustrated Haggadah that is read on Passover. Prague was a center of the Jewish reformation in the 19th century, and the home of Franz Kafka, one of the great thinkers of the modern world, and a German-speaking Jew.
Prague was emblematic of the old/new nature of the trip like no other place. The city’s nearly 750-year-old Old-New Synagogue stands as one of Prague’s earliest gothic structures, and serves as the home of the Gollum—the mythical clay monster created by Rabbi Judah Leow ben Bezalel, or the Maharal, to protect the city’s Jews from pogroms. The entire city, when viewed from the old castle of the Holy Roman Emperor literally seems to spread into modernity, from the 14th century Charles Bridge to the modern skyscrapers in the distance. The city was the epitome of a quaint European city, with breathtaking architecture and culture so rich you could see, smell, hear, taste, and simply feel it everywhere. In Prague an inescapable air of fantasy and history consumed us.
We spent one of our three days in the Czech Republic at Thereisenstadt. It was the first concentration camp I had ever visited. In Germany we had visited Rail 17, where thousands of German Jews were deported to Thereisenstadt. Now being at the camp was one of the most difficult days of the entire trip. In keeping with Kivunim’s penchant for the complex, Thereisenstadt was a powerful example of the confusion and disorientation that Kafka had coined in his writings even before the Holocaust ever occurred.
The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II originally built Thereisenstadt in honor of his mother Maria Theresa, as a garrison town to protect against Prussia. Its fortress was a famous European prison that at one time held Gavrilo Princip, the Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and all but started World War One. Unlike the other Nazi concentration camps of WWII, Thereisenstadt was seen as an exemplary camp. It was a hallmark of Nazi propaganda, a place where the Nazis brought the Red Cross to show that their detention of Jews wasn’t so bad. It was a place where annihilation was postponed, where “special” Jews were kept indefinitely. It was a transient place where people stayed “for the time being.” As a camp devoted to Nazi indecision about certain Jews, it was the quintessential “in between”—being in the country side, it was not a ghetto, nor a death camp, but many died, and when the transports did occur due to limiting factors like space, the Nazis still left it up to a council of prominent Jews to make the decisions. People didn’t know that the Holocaust was happening; they knew that a war was happening, and many were thankful for the opportunity to wait it out. Still, there was vague fear of the transports that took people east never to return. It was as Kakfaesque as it was Samuel Beckett’s waiting.
Even as 35,000 people died there due to causes ranging from malnutrition to disease to fatigue—along with about 90,000 who were sent to other death camps—people didn’t run away. Not only did the 17,000 or so survivors of Thereisenstadt have to live through the horrid conditions and treatment at the camp, they also had to deal with being considered survivor-lite in the aftermath because it was a unique camp that was considered less overtly evil than places like Auschwitz.
Being at Thereisenstadt challenged and confirmed every image of the Holocaust at the same time. It epitomized the challenge that characterizes Holocaust study in general: trying to make sense of something completely senseless. It was a place where culture flourished as these Jews of the intellectual elite expressed their anxiety and confusion through theater, painting and music. While suffering seemed to bring people closer to their faith, as there were four synagogues and a surge of Zionist fervor, the prisoners produced the culture they loved—German culture, the culture that had rejected them. All this productivity occurred as people were being weeded out and sent to death camps. While there was a post office and schools in the ghetto where the Jews lived and worked, Thereisenstadt was also the only camp that was run almost entirely by Jews. This meant that amidst autonomy Jews were expected to be responsible for the selection and deportation of their own. After six months of visiting synagogues all over the world, we crammed ourselves into one that seemed carved out of the wall of the ghetto, and prayed, sang and cried. One personal account in the museum summed up the incomprehensibility of the place, as a man spoke in one paragraph of the cold, the lice, the transports, the best rendering of a Czech play he had ever seen, and his new girlfriend.
To top it all off, the camp is in one of the most beautiful places in Europe. It is not cold and barren, but fertile and picturesque. As we stood on the bank of the river just outside the camp, where the Nazis had disposed of the ashes of the deceased, I thought about the contrast between Thereisenstadt and Germany. While in Germany the presence of the Holocaust was less apparent, and even eerily cold and political, Thereisenstadt saw it on the ground. While the Holocaust was policy in Germany, it was life and death at Thereisenstadt. Yet in some ways the tension between comfort and discomfort was still potent. It rained while we were in the camp, and was sunny and beautiful when we held a short memorial service on the river. It was a mass grave, and a tranquil spot to sit and think at the same time.
As we boarded the bus back to Prague, we were baffled. We were shocked and uplifted, depressed and reflective. Thereisenstadt was truly one of the most confusing places we visited—indicative of the whole year’s struggle not to simplify, and truly pushing the envelope in our confrontation with our roots.
We spent the following day in transit, bidding Prague farewell, and stopping for lunch in Bratislava, Slovakia on our way to Budapest, Hungary. I think three countries in one day was a new record for Kivunim, bringing us more to the brink than ever before of being able to appreciate the power and value of our experience this year. The distance between all these countries makes them seem like the northeastern United States, but the borders here aren’t just remnants of colonial settlements—they are dividing lines between languages and cultures. That day of travel put in perspective how cursory our exploration of these places really is—even when we spend more than a day in each place.
In Hungary we learned about the political polarization and social difficulties that have plagued the country since the fall of communism. We learned about the latent extreme nationalism that exists around the territories that were lost in World War One. We learned about notable Hungarian Jews, and met Jews in a country where the word “Jew” can be taboo. Hungary is also a place where the most progressive education happens in Jewish schools; we visited one where only a very small percentage of the students are actually Jewish because the quality of the education draws people from many backgrounds. On our last evening in Europe, we took a boat out on the Danube for a party with some local Jewish students. After visiting the Holocaust memorial on the bank of the river—a simple group of empty cast-iron shoes lying on the dock—I thought back to the river at Thereisenstadt. These rivers were the lifeblood of Europe, and more than any other place, they saw the depth of destruction of WWII. Rivers reflect the way the world is filtered and distorted by perception, as its flow makes the reflection of the nature around it flawed. All we can do, as we watch it pass by in constant movement and flux, is try to take in as many pieces and perspectives as possible. I opted for a reflective conversation with one of my close friends as the music blared. I could not imagine a more fitting scene for the end of the trip.
Kivunim’s trip to Central Europe was a uniquely enriching experience. After basically concluding our unit on Mediterranean and North African Jewry after Turkey, Central Europe represented a whole new region of study in our exploration of Jewish civilization around the world. It was neither east nor west—somewhere in between, per usual. It showed us the modern amidst the old, in art, architecture, thought, and identity. With so many different peoples living in such close proximity, it was a humbling jumble of new languages and worldviews. It was a crossroads that turned us inside out and made many of us confront our most immediate roots in the Jewish world. Grappling with modern Germany and the ongoing discourse on German unity, while soaking in the vibrancy of Prague, the din of Thereisenstadt, and the persistent anti-Semitism in Hungary, we felt the deep scars and rich cultural struggles and triumphs that make up Europe’s modern actualization as a continent. As history is alive and well there, along with some of the past neuroses, we discovered a new level of appreciation for emotional processes without closure and intellectual curiosities without conclusions. This was how the heart of Europe found a place in our hearts.
* * *
Flying over Tel Aviv as we prepared to land in Israel for the fifth time of the year, with the old-new themes in mind, I thought back to a Chasidic story that a Chabad community leader in Prague had told us. I don’t remember it perfectly, but the basic story tells of a man from a rural town in Eastern Europe who has a dream about a chest of gold buried in Prague. He travels miles and miles to the exact place from the dream, and finds policemen there monitoring a construction project. The police ask him where he is from, and what he is looking for, so he sheepishly explains the dream and his long journey. One of the officers lights up, as if recognizing the man from somewhere, and exclaims that he just had a dream about a chest of gold buried under the man’s house in his town. When the man returns home, he does in fact dig up the chest of gold.
As we descended over Tel Aviv, the moral of the story—that we may search for miles and miles only to find that what we have been looking for was under our nose the whole time—seemed to ring true. The name of the city Tel Aviv, combining tel, an archaeological term in Hebrew for a hill or mound made up of accumulated layers of past human civilizations, and aviv, the Hebrew word for spring, the season of new life, is in itself an expression of appreciation for “old-news.” Indeed, even Israel, as a modern version of a nearly two thousand year old idea is about as “old-news” as it gets. On some level the moral of the story has been a subtle truth of Kivunim from the start. If it is the essence of any journey, it seems especially relevant to one involving routes to roots.
