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I can’t forget what the Nazis did to my family, but I can be grateful to a repentant Germany
(JTA) — Picture a cute-looking, 6 1/2-year-old girl with curly braided hair. She is standing on a sidewalk, on a cold, dreary day in Leipzig, Germany, together with her parents and my wife and me. My granddaughter Vivi is staring intently at a 75-year-old worker, kneeling on the ground. He is digging a hole through the pavers to install several 4” x 4” brass plaques mounted on cement cubes — memorials to relatives who perished at the hands of the Nazis more than 80 years ago.
In February, we traveled 9,500 miles round-trip to dedicate 12 Stolpersteine plaques in memory of relatives I never knew, or even knew I had. (All 16 of my family members would have stood with us that day, but Germany’s airport worker strike canceled the others’ flights.) They were just some of my late father’s aunts, uncles and cousins who were murdered in the Holocaust, and we regarded the ceremony as a pseudo-levaya, a quasi-funeral that would be the final act of respect and farewell Hitler had denied my relatives.
I couldn’t have imagined, 60 years earlier when I first visited Germany, that I would ever return in a spirit approaching forgiveness, or that I’d feel a deep connection to a country that was once synonymous with brutality, pain, humiliation and suffering.
Stolpersteine, a German word meaning “stumbling block,” refers to a design brilliantly conceived by the non-Jewish German artist Gunter Demnig in the early 1990s. Installed in front of the homes where innocent Jewish victims last freely lived, the brass plaques simply and artistically memorialize, honor and personalize those brutally persecuted. On each plaque are engraved the victim’s name, dates of birth and death. As Demnig once said, “A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten.” Hence, 100,000 of his plaques throughout Europe remind us that Jews are part of a shared history, and a common memory.
Whether consciously or not, the “stumbling pedestrian” instantly recalls the extraordinary evil unleashed by ordinary people, on once vibrant Jewish communities, and the terrorized Jewish neighbors who lived within them. This evil was driven by a blind loyalty to a gratuitous hatred of “the other,” meaning non-Aryans.
Who were these relatives I recently memorialized? Recently uncovered documents suggest my relatives were all decent, law-abiding citizens who contributed to Leipzig’s economy, enriched its cultural life and strengthened its social fabric. Sadly, being model citizens did not spare them from torturous fates.
One of those relatives, Elfriede Meyerstein, my paternal grandfather’s sister, was born Feb. 27, 1871 in Breslau. At 20, she came to Leipzig where her husband Menny ran a textile trading company with his family. They lived at the same address for many years. By 1931, after Menny’s death, she lived with her daughter Käthe Huth.
The Nazis, once in power, immediately expropriated Elfriede’s assets, comprising foreign stocks meticulously accumulated by Menny. The Nazi “Ordinance on the Registration of Jewish Assets” of April 26, 1938, forced her to surrender those securities to the state. In 1939, shortly after Kristallnacht on Nov. 9-10, 1938, the Nazis collected a “reimbursement tax” as “atonement,” from Elfriede and the rest of Germany’s Jewish community, for the damage Nazis did that night.
Just prior to her Sept. 19, 1942 deportation to Theresienstadt at age 71, Elfriede was forced to sign a “home purchase agreement,” the Nazis’ final act of expropriation. The document falsely and cynically promised her a “retirement home,” with free lifetime accommodation, food and medical care, but paid for by her, in advance. The Reich Security Main office confiscated 65,000 Reichsmarks ($300,000 in today’s currency). Her “retirement home” was in a ghetto with disastrous hygienic conditions, starvation, and no medical care. Elfriede died one month later.
After considerable soul-searching and three visits to Germany, spaced over 60 years, my attitudes and feelings today, vis a vis Germany and its citizens, are dramatically different from when I first visited in 1966.
Then, I came with unprocessed emotional baggage. In 1939, my father, Ralph Meyerstein, fled Dusseldorf and my mother, Cecily Geyer, fled Dresden, both for England. My paternal grandparents, Alfred and Meta Meyerstein, were deported from Dusseldorf on Nov. 8, 1941, to Minsk, where they were killed. My maternal grandmother, Salcia, was deported to Riga in January 1942; in November 1943 she was sent to Auschwitz and murdered.
My parents met in Ware, a small town north of London, where some German Jews took refuge. They moved to London where they married during the Blitz and we came to the United States in December 1947.
The German-issued ID card of Max Israel Meyerstein, the author’s great-uncle, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1942 at the age of 80. (Courtesy Michael Meyerstein)
As an only child, I shouldered much of my parents’ guilt over abandoning their parents, even though it was their parents who, thankfully, had urged them to flee Germany. When retelling their survival story, my eyes still well up with tears, revealing a lifetime of trauma I’ve absorbed on their behalf. That first visit felt almost adversarial in tone. It was I, representing my parents’ personal losses and those of the Jewish people, versus Germany and Germans. I reacted viscerally to hearing guttural Deutsch being spoken. I eyeballed Germans on the street and asked myself: How old are they? Did they commit heinous crimes against my family and my people?
By 2018, when I dedicated a Stolpersteine in my maternal grandmother’s memory, my judgmental attitudes and harsh feelings had softened. Maybe I realized that 75 years later, the ordinary citizen on the street could not be held responsible for the carnage of the Holocaust. Also, working with non-Jewish German volunteers in planning the ceremony showed me their humanity, sensitivity and outright remorse for Nazism’s impact on my family and their German state. Their kindness was an atonement for a past not of their making.
My visit in February shed further light on my evolving relationship with Germany and Germans. Today’s Germany is doing teshuva, or repentance, by strengthening democracy, creating an inclusionary society, responding resolutely to far-right extremism, educating its young about the Holocaust, offering sanctuary to Jews fleeing Russia and Ukraine and being a true friend to the State of Israel. It also is supporting Jewish communal institutions, paying reparations to Israel, to individual victims and their descendants.
My relationship became much more nuanced upon learning that Germany was once home to five generations of my family, as far back as 1760, in the small town of Grobzig where Matthias Nathan Meyerstein was born. On our visit to its mid-17th-century Jewish cemetery, I gazed incredulously at the graves of Meyersteins. I saw schutzbriefen, documents issued by the reigning duke, that assured my ancestors protection, commercial privileges and religious rights. In the old Leipzig Jewish cemetery, I visited 12 relatives’ graves from the 1800s and 1900s, which reflected much about their secure socio-economic status.
Before my retirement, I never knew that Grobzig or Leipzig or other towns were in my family’s history. This discovery led to one conclusion: Unquestionably, 1933 to 1945 was a tragic anomaly in human history, and especially Jewish history. However, I must also gratefully acknowledge the Germany that sustained my family for over 300 years, and Jewish communal life for 1,700 years.
Nazi Germany’s ill-treatment and intolerance of “the Other” still affects me today as I mourn my relatives’ death. On the other hand, I feel heartened by this sentiment written by a non-Jewish German who funded research about my family: “For me, as I am part of this country and its history, it will be a never-ending task to find ways to deal with this horrible past and most importantly, never to forget,” she wrote.
Navigating this complex relationship with Germany and Germans is intellectually and emotionally messy for Jews. My engagement with “the Other,” however, has been profoundly satisfying.
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Shower, shelter, swipe: Israel’s ‘startup nation’ meets Iran war with a wave of apps
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Smartphones have become as essential as shelters for Israelis riding out Iran’s missile attacks, with internet traffic up 25% since the war began on Saturday. From the screaming alerts of the military’s official app that, as one comedian put it, sound like a “baby dragon giving birth,” to bomb-shelter Tinder to multiple apps that tell you when it’s safe to shower, the startup nation is trying to digitize the panic into something more manageable.
At the serious end of the wartime app stack is Home Front Command, the Israeli army’s app available in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. It uses GPS to figure out where you are and only pings you when your area is at risk, with separate alerts for rockets, missiles and terror incidents. In this war, Iran’s long-range fire has come with an extra layer of notice, a warning-before-the-warning that can buy people a few more minutes. The shorter-range threats from Hezbollah, which joined the fray on Tuesday, do not come with that same courtesy.
Bomb Shelter Locator turns shelter-seeking into a map exercise, listing around 20,000 official sites, offering offline city maps and walking routes, and estimating the time it will take to reach the nearest protected space.
For anyone who cannot sprint, Purple Vest tries to close the gap. People with disabilities or older residents can register in advance and request help during alerts, with volunteers using the app to locate them and assist with shelter access or urgent supplies.
For others, shelters are turning into accidental social spaces where people can meet-cute on a mattress. The Hooked app, originally built for speed-dating at events, now doubles as a bomb-shelter icebreaker. Shelter-goers post a QR code at the entrance, and singles who scan it can see who else in the same bunker has the same relationship status. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee — who has not been single since high school — shared it on X alongside the caption: “Someday they will tell their kids ‘we met on a dating app in a shelter while dodging ballastic [sic] missiles.’”
But for some, even showering has become its own risk calculation. Martine Berkowitz was one of many who vented after her attempts to scrub up were interrupted by missiles no less than five times on the second day of the war.
For software developer Ben Greenberg, a father of teenagers, Berkowitz’s complaint was familiar, so he built an app called Best Shower Time that spits out a percentage risk score on whether a shower is likely to be interrupted by an alert.
Posts about it spread on social media and what began as a tool for his family is now drawing about 5,000 visitors a day. Greenberg, a California native who immigrated to Israel from New York in 2018, insists it’s “not a joke app.”
“Sirens are just the ultimate example of lack of control in one’s life,” he said, describing the app as a way to “restore some level of control and predictability … in a time when that feels most vulnerable and most taken away from us.”
The app uses real-time alert data from the Home Front Command, and the score is based on four inputs: how long it has been since the last alert, the average gap between alerts over a six-hour window, whether the frequency is trending up or down, and the total alert count over the past 24 hours. Those are weighted into a single score that appears when you open the app.
Users can then set their own parameters, including how long a shower typically takes and how much buffer time they want afterward to dry off and reach shelter.
And for those who have a penchant for extended bathroom breaks, Greenberg added a separate option that relies on the same logic.
It’s not the only app homing on issues of basic cleanliness to emerge this week. Another app, Can I Shower Now?, has developed a following of its own.
Berkowitz said she was “grateful” for apps to help her navigate the question of whether to jump in the shower. After checking and seeing a 13% chance of a missile alert on Wednesday afternoon, she decided to risk it.
“I took a full 20-minute hot shower and washed my hair. It was lovely. And the next warning only came when I was finished and getting dressed,” she said.
Greenberg is piloting a new app, called Best Walking Time, based on the same principle and prompted by his wife, who regularly walks around the neighborhood during work calls but has been afraid to stray from home lest a missile head their way.
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Gavin Newsom says some ‘appropriately’ call Israel an ‘apartheid state’ while questioning US military aid
(JTA) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom provided sharp criticism of the Israeli government during an interview this week, suggesting that he agreed with claims that it is an “apartheid state” and questioning U.S. military aid to the country.
Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, offered his rebuke of the Israeli government during an event on Tuesday with the hosts of “Pod Save America,” a political podcast, while promoting his new memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.”
During the conversation, while suggesting that Israel’s alleged influence over the United State’s strikes in Iran was “pretty damn self-evident,” Newsom took aim at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The issue of Bibi is interesting because he’s got his own domestic issues. He’s trying to stay out of jail, he’s got an election coming up, he’s potentially on the ropes, he’s got folks, the hard line, that want to annex the West Bank,” said Newsom, adding that “others are talking about it appropriately as sort of an apartheid state.”
When a host of the podcast asked Newsom whether he believed the United States should consider “rethinking our military support for Israel,” the California governor replied, “It breaks my heart, because the current leadership in Israel is walking us down that path where I don’t think you have a choice.”
Newsom’s comments come shortly after the politician vowed he would “never” accept AIPAC funding, a stance that has increasingly become a litmus test for Democratic candidates amid record low support for Israel among its base.
While Newsom has been vocal in his critiques of Netanyahu in the past, saying earlier this year that he is “crystal clear in my love for Israel — and my condemnation of Bibi,” his latest comments signal a notable shift in tone as he adopts a more openly critical stance on Israel amid growing pressure from the Democratic party.
“I didn’t expect to be in that place, you know, a few years ago, let alone, you know, where we are today, and it’s accelerating in real time in a deeply, deeply alarming way,” said Newsom.
Calls to strip U.S. military aid from Israel have gained traction among progressive Democrats in recent months, with a record number of Senate Democrats voting to block weapons sales to Israel in July.
In January, Netanyahu said for the first time that he wanted to “taper off” U.S. military aid to Israel over the next decade, a goal that was quickly welcomed by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham as pockets of the Republican party have grown increasingly skeptical of U.S. aid to Israel.
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Andrea Weiss, trailblazing Reform rabbi who merged scholarship and activism, dies at 60
(JTA) — Rabbi Andrea Weiss, a former provost of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who made history as the first woman to ordain rabbis in the Reform movement, has died.
Weiss died on Tuesday surrounded by family at her home in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, following a year-long battle with cancer. She was 60.
“Andrea brought lev shalem — a whole heart to everything she did,” Cantor Jill Abramson, HUC’s interim head of seminary and director of its Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music, said in a statement. “Whether in a classroom or a hallway discussion, she has always been a model of what it means to live a life guided by scholarship and sacred purpose. We will miss her presence in these halls and hold her family in our prayers.”
Weiss’ death strikes another blow for the leadership of the Reform movement, which has also buried two leaders of HUC who died prematurely while Weiss worked there — Rabbi Aaron Panken, then the seminary’s president, in 2018, and Rabbi David Ellenson, its past president, in 2023. The school of sacred music, meanwhile, is named for another luminary of the movement who died prematurely at 59 in 2011.
Born on Sept. 9, 1965, Weiss was raised in San Diego where her family belonged to Temple Emanu-El. In 1987, Weiss received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and was ordained as a rabbi at HUC in 1993.
Weiss joined the HUC faculty in 2000 alongside Rabbi Lisa Grant, who served as the director of the school’s rabbinical program.
“There was actually four of us, four women, who started at the same time, and we really changed the whole gender balance of the faculty, which was very exciting and thinking about, long term potential of what that would mean for the culture of the school,” Grant told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
During her tenure at the school, Weiss led multiple initiatives including a curricular redesign, the launch of the Virtual Pathway for Rabbinical students and the creation of the Seminary Hebrew Program.
Weiss taught several courses at the school, including “The Poetry and Power of the Psalms,” “Literary Artistry of the Bible” and “Teaching Bible to Adult Learners,” a course she co-taught with Grant beginning in 2003.
“Rabbi Weiss has been a transformative presence at Hebrew Union College for more than two decades,” said the school’s current president, Andrew Rehfeld, in a statement. “Her scholarship, vision, and fierce commitment to the formation of Jewish clergy have shaped this institution in ways that will endure for generations. We are grateful beyond measure for her service and hold her and her loved ones in our hearts.”
Weiss received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, where her research centered on metaphor and biblical poetry, scholarship that informed her later work including her 2006 book, “Figurative Language in Biblical Prose Narrative: Metaphor in the Book of Samuel.”
In 2008, Weiss won the National Jewish Book Awards Book of the Year as the associate editor of “The Torah: A Women’s Commentary,” the first comprehensive collection of Torah commentary written entirely by female scholars. Sen. Elissa Slotkin chose the text to be sworn in on last year.
In 2016 and 2020, Weiss led a nonpartisan, interfaith initiative titled “American Values, Religious Voices” that brought together 100 faith leaders to write letters to former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump as well as Congress during the first 100 days of their administrations. The letters were later published as two books.
Weiss described the initiative at the time as “a national, nonpartisan campaign created from the conviction that scholars who study and teach our diverse religious traditions have something important to say about our shared American values.”
Grant said Weiss offered a model of Jewish engagement that was validated by the ancient rabbis.
“There’s a great Talmudic debate about which is more important, which is greater, study or action, and the rabbis have this back and forth about it, and in the end, they conclude study because it leads to action,” Grant said. “She certainly lived that, that her study and her teaching led her to be an activist as well.”
In 2018, Weiss was appointed as HUC’s provost, becoming the first female rabbi to ordain rabbis in the Reform movement.
Grant said the honor was “extraordinarily meaningful and very heavy” for Weiss.
“She would make the time every year to meet individually for an hour with every single student, to hear about their story, their journey, their learning,” said Grant. “And she would craft that into a short blessing upon ordination.”
As news of Weiss’ death spread on Tuesday, many of her former students and rabbis whom she ordained eulogized her on social media.
“Rabbi Andrea Weiss helped me to grasp and appreciate biblical poetry in a way that nobody else could,” wrote Evan Schultz, the senior rabbi of Congregation B’nai Israel in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in a post on Facebook. “Her wisdom helped shape me as a rabbi and a writer. She was brilliant, kind, and genuine.”
Rabbi Binyamin Minich, the leader of Kehilat Daniel in Tel Aviv, recalled in a post on Facebook being a part of Weiss’ first ordination cohort.
“I remember this feeling of awe, understanding that our 2019 cohort of Israeli Rabbinical Program alumni would be the first ordained by a woman,” wrote Minich. “That meant the idea of women being rabbis settled fully in the Jewish contemporary life and ascended to a next level. It was the real proof of [lalmud velelemed leshmor vela’ashot] – ‘to study and to teach, to preserve and to act.’”
Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, the executive director of Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation, recalled connecting with Weiss in 2019 in Jerusalem and hearing about a bar mitzvah project Weiss had helped organize for her son. The project brought his baseball team to Cuba, where they donated equipment and met with locals.
“It was a big project that they did that was really inspirational; it inspired my son, Ami, to do a baseball-related mitzvah project for his bar mitzvah,” said Epstein. “Definitely not as ambitious as theirs, but Rabbi Weiss really taught me both Torah and the living Torah, of how to turn what you care about and your interests into tzedakah and action in the world.”
Weiss is survived by her husband Alan; her two children, Rebecca and Ilan; her father, Marty; her siblings, Mitch, Laura and Roger; her sister-in-law Catherine; and her nieces, nephews and cousins.
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