Uncategorized
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.
—
The post I can’t forget what the Nazis did to my family, but I can be grateful to a repentant Germany appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
250 years of American Jewish life is a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.
When I moved from Belgium to the United States for graduate school in the early 2000s, international-student orientation warned me about three areas in which I would experience culture shock: doctors, dating, and food. They were right: I am still looking for good chocolate. But what nobody mentioned was that culture shock can also work in the other direction: you can encounter something so different in a good way that it, too, takes time to understand. For me, that was American Jewish life.
The Judaism I had grown up with in Belgium was timid and a little subdued; it felt to me as though it did not quite dare to put down roots or imagine itself as fully Belgian. American Judaism bewildered me at first by its sheer pluralism: so many denominations, and within them so many people experimenting with what it meant to be and do Jewish in this country and in this world.
Even more surprising was its creativity — the music, the intellectual life, the social activism, the constant invention of new institutions, rituals and communities. It was also loud and argumentative. American Jews tangled about Judaism, politics, Zionism and one another. The old story about two Jews having three opinions was not a joke here but a reality.
I loved it. Not because I agreed with all of it — I certainly did not — but because even the arguing seemed to me evidence that American Jews did not feel they had to hide or be discreet, not even about their disagreements.
Of course, Jewish success in the United States did not mean that America offered the same possibilities to everyone. Jewish integration took place in a country whose deepest structures of exclusion targeted Black Americans. That inequality is part of the American Jewish story and complicates any account of its success.Nor was the American Jewish experience free of prejudice: American Jews encountered social ostracism, quotas in higher education, exclusion from neighborhoods and country clubs, and violence.
And yet, over 250 years, Jews in the United States became deeply woven into the political, cultural and civic life of the country. How the encounter between Jewish traditions brought from many parts of the world and the particular freedoms, tensions and possibilities of American life produced a distinctively American form of Judaism is a question that has stayed with me ever since, and America’s 250th anniversary seems like a good moment to return to it.
I think part of the answer lies in the American idea of hyphenated identities. In a country of immigrants from many parts of the world, the hyphen suggested a social architecture, albeit imperfect, that allowed for multiple communities to coexist within a larger whole. By contrast the Europe in which I grew up remained more attached to myths of national homogeneity that made Jewish belonging harder.
But today, across the political spectrum, people are asking what America as an idea and a national community stands for. Historically, such moments have often made Jews a test case for the limits of inclusion. To those who imagine the nation as a homogenous family, Jews are strangers; to those who imagine it as a universal community, Jews often seem too particularistic.
Amid rising antisemitism, the aftermath of Oct. 7, turmoil on university campuses and intense political polarization, it is not surprising then that many American Jews are feeling anxious about the future. The pessimists believe something fundamental is broken and wonder whether it is time to keep a packed suitcase ready. The optimists insist that America remains different, even exceptional, and that American institutions and laws are strong. This too shall pass, they say.
As a historian, I am skeptical of both positions. The past is full of moments that look inevitable in retrospect because, once we know what happened, it becomes harder to imagine other outcomes. But in the moment, multiple futures are always possible. History cannot tell us which one will become ours, but it can broaden the range of possibilities we are able to see.
That is one reason I created a new public course at Brandeis this fall, America and Its Jews at 250. I wanted to see what becomes visible when the questions troubling American Jews today are placed against that much longer historical horizon. Over the course of the semester, 28 scholars and public thinkers will examine the relationship between Jews and America from the colonial period to the present. At a moment when so much attention is understandably focused on Israel, I also wanted us to look more closely at the American Jewish experience and what Jews built here.
Doing this at Brandeis is especially meaningful. Many of America’s oldest and most influential universities grew out of Christian religious communities. Brandeis represented something different: the possibility that a university could be rooted in American Jewish life while being as intellectually ambitious and universal as any of them. A course about America and its Jews belongs in that tradition because these are not two histories that happened in parallel; they are intertwined.
Time has cured most of my culture shock, but I have not forgotten the surprise I felt 26 years ago at the vibrancy and pluralism of American Jewish life. Much of our discussions, in this anniversary year, focus on the country’s uneven path toward more justice and equality, and rightly so. But that should not obscure the immense creativity that this messy and contested American experiment made possible. American Jews embraced its possibilities with a vitality that produced forms of Judaism few of their forebears would have recognized, yet that remain deeply connected to what came before. That dynamism also produced disagreements and fragmentation, and anxiety about what still holds Jews together.
Culture and creativity depend on the soil in which they develop. Protecting American jewish life therefore means not only to fight for Jews and Judaism, but also for the pluralistic republic that allowed them to flourish. Perhaps one day historians will give this entanglement of Judaism and America a name. But for now it remains unnamed because it is still being made, and because its future, I hope, is still in our hands.
The post 250 years of American Jewish life is a miracle. Don’t take it for granted. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
El-Sayed defends opposing Israel aid as he woos Jewish voters
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed made opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel a defining issue of his campaign in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. On Sunday, as the party’s nominee, El-Sayed explained why he supported sending American military aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia but opposes sending aid to Israel as it fights Hamas and other armed groups in the region.
“In Ukraine, you’re talking about attacks from a leader of a neighboring sovereign country, who clearly violated international law in attempting to breach the sovereignty of the Ukrainian public,” El-Sayed said in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That is conditional on that circumstance.”
As for Israel, he argued, the United States has “been offering unconditional foreign military aid to Israel independent of the circumstances for years and years and years.”
The distinction comes as El-Sayed tries to draw a clearer line around his position on Israel aid as he moves into the general election, following a narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens, who was backed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel Jewish groups.
Since his primary win, El-Sayed said in media appearances that his opposition to unconditional military aid — including funding to the Iron Dome defense system — goes beyond Israel. He pointed to Egypt, where his parents were born, as well as to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, saying those U.S. allies should not receive unconditional American military support either.
“It’s not just Israel,” El-Sayed said, adding, “It’s about the conditions.”
When pressed on whether there was any scenario in which he would support military aid to Israel, El-Sayed said he could consider supporting it if Israelis and Palestinians reached an agreement that guaranteed, as he described it, the “Palestinian people and Jewish Israeli people” equal rights to “peace, dignity, and self-determination.” During the primary, El-Sayed stopped short of explicitly backing a two-state solution.
The Jewish voter test
El-Sayed’s position on Israel is becoming a test of whether he can unite Democrats for the general election in one of the nation’s most important swing states. Many Jewish Democrats remain uneasy with his rhetoric on Israel — including his calling Israel “bloodthirsty” — even as the party needs their support to defeat Republican Mike Rogers and improve its chances of winning back the Senate.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, which backed Stevens and said its volunteers made nearly 100,000 calls on her behalf, said that the “razor-thin margin” in El-Sayed’s victory is evidence that pro-Israel Democrats remain an important electorate within the party.
Halie Soifer, JDCA’s chief executive and a Michigan native, said in a Substack post Friday that Jewish Democrats are standing “on a political fault line” after El-Sayed’s victory. “Jewish voters’ concern with El-Sayed and other far-left candidates is rooted in concern for our safety and security given rising antisemitism and antisemitic violence, including when Jews are blamed for the actions of Israel,” she wrote.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan, but they could still prove decisive in a close race. Michigan has been decided by narrow margins in recent elections: Donald Trump won the state in 2016, Joe Biden flipped it in 2020, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin narrowly won her Senate race in 2024 even as Trump carried the state in the presidential race.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, which spent more than $30 million in the primary, is reportedly weighing additional spending in the general election to boost Rogers. It would likely be joined by other groups, including the centrist Democratic groups Third Way and Welcome PAC, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street — a progressive alternative to AIPAC — urged El-Sayed to take a different approach to the Jewish voters who opposed him. Ben-Ami wrote in a Substack post that El-Sayed should spend significant time listening to Jewish Michiganders and their concerns about vulnerability and antisemitism, while making clear “in words and in actions” that Jews who care deeply about Israel have a place in his coalition.
‘I love and revere Judaism’
In the Sunday interview, El-Sayed sought to reassure Jewish voters who remain skeptical of him.
Asked to respond to President Donald Trump’s comments that El-Sayed “hates” Israel and Jewish people “with a passion that burns in his heart,” El-Sayed said, “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people. I believe they’re a light unto the world.”
El-Sayed recalled growing up in Bloomfield Hills, a metro Detroit community with a large Jewish population, and being invited to Passover Seders, synagogues and bar and bat mitzvahs. “I’m really honored for what I learned and got to share with my Jewish sisters and brothers,” he said. “But they are not the same as AIPAC and Israel.”
The candidate also disavowed some remarks by Hasan Piker, the popular pundit and streamer who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric and who appeared with El-Sayed on the campaign trail. El-Sayed said Piker’s statement that “America deserved 9/11” was “dumb,” though he did not commit to ending campaign appearances with him.
The test in the coming months is whether El-Sayed can win over skeptical Jewish and moderate Democrats without moderating his views on Israel or losing the progressive and pro-Palestinian voters who propelled him to victory.
The post El-Sayed defends opposing Israel aid as he woos Jewish voters appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Nakba exhibit and the importance of historical context
By NOAH STRAUSS When I went to the Nakba Exhibit, I was shocked, not by the contents of the exhibit but by its size. The exhibit was tiny in my eyes, and I thought the amount of outcry was excessive for an exhibit that is less than 500 words. It felt like every other day the National Post had an article about the exhibit, criticizing different aspects of it. But then I had a realization: the exhibit was never criticized because it was “too” big, but because of the contents of it. When I was toured by the curator, I actually asked her, “Where is the rest of it?” I was confused because I had been misled by the media to believe the size of the exhibit was massive.
I believe that every human being should be able to live a free life. No human should be bullied for who they are. That is not okay, and to some credit, the Nakba exhibit does cover this. But where my problem now comes into play is the fact that the museum fails to portray the full history surrounding the Nakba.
The museum is publicly funded; our taxpayers’ dollars go there. It is supposed to represent our nation and our beliefs, not take a side on history. The Museum did exactly that. It took a side, and guess what? It caused chaos.
Whenever asked why it does not show the other side of history, the museum would always say something along the lines of: our space is limited, the focus of the exhibit is solely the Nakba, etc. But to me, these are excuses, and I will call that out.
For context, the Nakba was an event that occurred around 1948 after the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The Nakba continued until about 1949. During this time, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were either forced out or left what is now Israel.
The Museum is contributing to concerns surrounding the rise of antisemitism. The Museum has failed to mention that during the same era as the Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were displaced from Middle Eastern and North African countries, with many forced to leave because of their religion.
Context matters. Yes, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, but what happened during the same era also left hundreds of thousands of Jewish people without homes. When a visitor with no historical context walks in to see what the “Jewish” people did to the Palestinians, of course they’re going to blame the Jews. Because it makes me, a Jewish person, look terrible.
In my view, the exhibit contributes to concerns about growing antisemitism by presenting an incomplete historical narrative.
But then, as Jewish people, we need to know when it’s time to move forward. We need to focus on how we can positively portray the Jewish community and show the world who we are, rather than allowing others to define us through a one-sided historical narrative.
Noah Strauss is a 15-year-old Gray Academy student
