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July 2003
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July 2003 e-Newsletter
“I think this project
is a world-healing and personal- healing miracle.
From the moment we started, the healing began...”
Touring Jewish Berlin
by Mina Cohen, USA
We’re now going to take a bus and walking tour of Jewish Berlin. Our guide is German-Israeli. As the neighborhood where we are staying in Berlin is close to the East, we soon enter an area with a lot of new buildings and construction mixed in with old grandiose neoclassical architecture. The bus stops at a nondescript but brand new office building. Inconspicuously, on the wall, are two photographic panels of a baroque style synagogue, one an inside view and the other an outside view. There is historical text explaining that near here stood the synagogue with seating for 1,800 people. We walk behind the office building and come upon rows of concrete pews and a small grove of trees. These pews are in the exact place where the pews of the synagogue were…the trees mark the spot where the aron kodesh (holy ark) stood. The synagogue was destroyed in Kristallnacht, and then after the war the area was bulldozed by the East Germans. The pews are powerful. The Berliners in our group have never seen this place.
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| Memorial at the site of a destroyed Synagogue, Berlin | Memorial at the site of a destroyed Synagogue, Berlin |
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| Rosenstrasse memorial |
Honoring Courageous German Women
by Eve B. Rennebarth, Germany
The Grossen Hamburger Strasse is the oldest Jewish Cemetery in Berlin that was destroyed by the Nazi’s in the early 1940s. Adjacent to this hallowed ground is the memorial in the Rosenstrasse. This is where the non-Jewish wives involved in officially despised, so-called Mischehen, (mixed marriages) demonstrated in 1943. They thereby undermined Goebbel’s plan to make Berlin “clean” of Jews. The demonstration came about when one day the women’s husbands were all arrested in their places of employment, taken to jail with the intent of ultimate deportation. But the Nazis wanted to avoid public embarrassment and thus the women’s protest was successful: the men were released. The unspoken question arises, “ What would have happened if also in other places there had been major demonstrations against the deportations?”
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| Jewish participants sing the Sh’ma at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp |
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| Beate, Martin and Katarina comfort Ingrid as she shares her painful story |
Ingrid: A Story of Resistance
by Mina Cohen, USA
A core part of our project included listening to Germans with widely varying experiences during WWII. These sessions were deeply moving–and healing–for listeners and speakers alike. — Leah
Ingrid helped Jewish family friends during the war by smuggling money and jewels. Her courageous mother was arrested and imprisoned in Ravensbruk concentration camp through the end of the war. She survived the camp, but barely…
Ingrid’s mother was an early resistor. When the Nazis told her she had to have a German flag, she said she didn’t have the money…then in 1936 for the Olympics, she bought a 3-story high Olympic flag and flew it from her window.
"This project is a living model to take to other hot ‘rifts,’ to invite possibility... Truly awesome!”
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