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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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From pop icon to outspoken Zionist: Boy George’s emotional visit to Nova
(JTA) — RE’IM, Nova Festival Memorial Site, Israel – Iconic 80s pop star Boy George is in Israel this week. He’s made all the usual stops on a celebrity visit: met with the president, placed a note in the Western Wall and, of course, performed two concerts. But it was his visit to the Nova Festival Memorial Site near Kibbutz Re’im on Tuesday that underscored the main reason for his visit.
An outspoken supporter of Jews and Israel, even as he has faced a backlash from within the music industry, the iconic ’80s pop star said that hearing about the massacre and seeing the site where more than 360 people were killed on Oct. 7, 2023 had only strengthened his convictions.
“I saw what happened on October 7… I was up very early, and I saw it, and it just horrified me,” Boy George told a press conference on Tuesday, following a tour of the memorial with former hostages, survivors and other members of the Tribe of Nova Community Association.
“But what horrified me more was hearing people that have no connection to what happened telling me it wasn’t true, that it was made up, and that I shouldn’t believe it,” he said.
Boy George, a British singer who achieved international fame in the 1980s with Culture Club and hits such as “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” and “Karma Chameleon,” holds a pioneering place in modern pop history. With his androgynous look, Rastafarian-inspired dreadlocks and oversized hats, the white singer challenged conventional ideas about gender and sexuality at a time when doing so could come at a cost.
He countered convention again in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, speaking out on behalf of Jews and Israel when parts of an entertainment industry were calling for boycotts and blacklists of Israeli performers and their allies.
Boy George, 65, told journalists in Israel this week that he had lost long-time friends over his position on Israel, but said he was not particularly troubled by it, because he felt he was doing the right thing.
“I feel odd being thanked for doing what’s just normal,” he said. “Music should make people feel safe, celebrated, and like they belong. That’s the music I want to make.”
The singer said some of the reactions to his support for Israel have been “shocking to me, but also a bit predictable.”
He said that the attacks against him have ranged from bashing his music to calling him “irrelevant,” and even accusing him of being a “Zionist.”
“Until I started getting called a Zionist, I hadn’t really explored what it meant, and then I was like, ‘well, I guess it must be,’” Boy George said. “In the end, I just put a thing up [on social media] saying, ‘I’m a Zionist, get over it.’”
Two incidents this year solidified his support for Jews and Israel. In April, he arrived in the London Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green and witnessed the aftermath of the stabbing of two Jewish men. He later went on British television, tearily condemning the attack and calling for support for “our Jewish community.”
In May, at a travelling exhibit about the Nova attack, he heard the testimony of a young survivor, May Hayat. The 33-year-old Tel Avivian witnessed the murder of two friends before Hamas terrorists set her free.
Moved by Hayat’s story, the singer wrote “We Will Dance Again,” a slogan he borrowed from the Tribe of Nova community. Released on July 26, its lyrics include, “you say genocide / I say war.”
“One of the things I’ve always hated doing is explaining why I’ve written something,” Boy George said of the song, which drew massive criticism from some in the music industry but has become an anthem for Israelis.
“Very often, what I write is sort of personal, a little bit surreptitious, secretive… but I’m afraid with ‘We Will Dance Again,’ there was no secrecy or subtext whatsoever,” he said.
“I kept hearing that word [genocide] over and over and over and obviously, I’ve done a bit of research on the word, and I know it wasn’t the right word and I felt, well, if it’s being bandied about by every single person that I speak to, then maybe I should put it in the song,” he said.
The singer also highlighted another line from the song: “If you’re ever confused / I stand with the Jews.”
The singer said he doubted the song would get airplay, “but it really wasn’t about that… it was about what do I need to do about what I feel deeply inside.”
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Hayat said she was flattered that Boy George was inspired to write a song after hearing her story, but added that this was precisely why she now devotes her time to telling others what happened on Oct. 7.
“If I was saved and I am still alive, then I have to tell this story for myself and for those who can’t tell their story,” she said. The song “strengthens me in doing what I am doing.”
Boy George said that being at the site of the Nova festival was “very powerful.”
“Obviously, you can see there’s a lot of healing that’s gone on, and that’s really important because an outsider never knows what they’re supposed to feel,” he said, after touring the memorial, which includes photos of each victim, as well as tributes from friends and family.
Boy George was accompanied to the Nova site by Sylvan Adams, president of the World Jewish Congress Israel. Adams, together with the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem and Live Nation Israel. Boy George was accompanied to the Nova site by Sylvan Adams, president of the World Jewish Congress Israel. Adams, together with the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem donated 1,500 concert tickets to Nova survivors and bereaved families so they could attend Saturday night’s concert.
“At a time when too many international artists have chosen to boycott Israel or remain silent in the face of antisemitism, you chose to come,” said Adams. “You used your voice and your international platform to stand with the Jewish people, despite the threats and boycotts. That takes courage. And moral clarity.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post From pop icon to outspoken Zionist: Boy George’s emotional visit to Nova appeared first on The Forward.
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Wisconsin referendum on freedom to worship fails at the ballot box
(JTA) — A Wisconsin referendum that would prohibit state and local governments from closing places of worship in response to a declared emergency was rejected in Tuesday’s election by 52% of voters.
The question was raised in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which places of worship were subject to public health orders restricting large gatherings. If approved, the Wisconsin Constitution would have gained language prohibiting the state to “order the closure of or forbid gatherings in places of worship in response to a state of emergency at the national, state, or local level, including an emergency related to public health.”
Critics said that the language of the referendum was vague because it did not define what a “place of worship” was, leaving uncertainty over whether it could encompass someone’s home in which religious services are hosted. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, which opposed the referendum, said the measure is a threat to public health. It added that the law as it stands does not “prevent any person from worshipping God, as such worship can and is practiced on an individual basis in one’s own home during an emergency.”
Rabbi Joel Alter, who leads Milwaukee’s predominant Conservative synagogue Congregation Beth Israel Ner Tamid, said that while he understands the concerns the referendum stemmed from, he voted to reject the prohibition. “I don’t think the state constitution is the way to respond to concerns that people have,” he said. “I would much rather see advisory panels and possibly legislators hold really thoughtful hearings and studies to make recommendations for the next emergency—whether it’s a health emergency or some other emergency—about how to handle houses of worship in the interest of public health.”
The Wisconsin Family Council, a conservative Christian organization, had advocated in favor of the prohibition, saying it would ensure “that your local church is never treated as ‘non-essential’ by the government again.” Other proponents, including a number of local churches, argued that places of worship are “lifelines” during times of crisis, and that closing them is a violation of religious freedom.
Other states—including Kentucky, Oklahoma, Florida and New Hampshire—have adopted similar protections, but the Wisconsin referendum would have offered stronger protections for churches, synagogues and other places of worship than other essential locations, such as schools or grocery stores. Texas adopted a constitutional protection against government restrictions on religious services in 2021.
Because the governor cannot veto a constitutional amendment, the Republican-run state legislature put forth constitutional amendments to bypass the veto of Gov. Tony Evers, who did not run for reelection. Evers vetoed a bill containing similar protections for places of worship in 2021. In addition to the religious freedom referendum, Republican lawmakers also introduced two others, one that would further limit the governor’s partial veto powers, which passed with 51% of voters favoring, and another that could restrict affirmative action and some diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which passed with 56% of the vote.
David Crowley, Democratic governor-elect, said he would vote “no” on all three questions.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Wisconsin referendum on freedom to worship fails at the ballot box appeared first on The Forward.
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Wiener to hold Pelosi’s House seat after race in which both candidates attacked Israel
(JTA) — Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener declared victory Wednesday in the midterm race against his Democratic rival to succeed U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco since 1987.
As of Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that Wiener had 55.5% of the vote compared with 44.5% for his opponent, San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, with 57% of ballots counted.
“I’m humbled to carry forward the powerful legacy of this seat,” Wiener wrote in a post on X in which he paid homage to Pelosi’s work on behalf of San Francisco and during her time as speaker of the House.
“Speaker Pelosi came to Congress to fight AIDS when too many wanted to look away, and she never stopped fighting for our city and our country. Madame Speaker, thank you,” he wrote.
Wiener, who is gay, wrote that his victory was “historic” because he would be the first open member of the LGBTQ community to represent Northern California and San Francisco in particular in Congress.
His statement focused on affordable housing, universal health care and clean energy.
“On Election Day, voters across the country delivered a powerful mandate for Democrats in Congress. I’m deeply inspired by the trust they placed in us to take big swings to lower the cost of living, stop the endless wars, hold Trump and his cronies accountable for their corruption, and rein in the threat of artificial intelligence,” he wrote.
Israel, however, was one of the talking points during the campaign, with both candidates accusing it of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza over the last three years.
Chan ran to Wiener’s left on Israel. Wiener, a self-proclaimed “lefty Jew,” opposes offensive weapons sales to an Israeli government not committed to peace, but supports defensive systems. Chan supports a full arms embargo and says that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to areas within sovereign Israel.
Wiener’s statement that Israel committed genocide sparked backlash from major Jewish institutions and cost him his leadership role in the state legislature’s Jewish caucus. He has also clashed over the years with anti-Zionist Jews, saying in 2024 that the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace served to “give tokenistic cover to people who make antisemitic statements.”
Wiener was harassed by protesters criticizing his positions on Israel and Gaza at the San Francisco Trans March in June. He said the protesters forced him to leave the event and called their confrontation “antisemitic.”
Some local Jews urged their community to support him. Arthur Slepian and Jan Reicher, the current and former presidents of the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area, said that Wiener “did not abandon his commitment to Jewish security, Jewish education or the physical safety of Jewish institutions” in an op-ed in J, The Jewish News of Northern California. They argued that Chan represented a greater threat, saying her supporters “have undermined Jewish safety and seek Israel’s outright destruction.”
Wiener was backed by J Street, the liberal pro-Israel advocacy group, whose independent expenditure arm, J Street Action Fund, announced a $60,000 ad campaign vfor him in the primary.
Chan was supported by JVP and the Bay Area chapter of IfNotNow, another left-wing Jewish group. She also received an endorsement from Pelosi, despite the former House speaker’s more moderate politics and longtime support for Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Wiener to hold Pelosi’s House seat after race in which both candidates attacked Israel appeared first on The Forward.
