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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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Trump’s messy new deal with Saudi Arabia shows how far Israel has fallen
The American decision to sign a deal granting Saudi Arabia a pathway toward a civilian nuclear program is a terrible development for Israel — not just because Riyadh could one day turn nuclear infrastructure developed with the United States into a weapons capability.
The agreement reflects the collapse of Israeli strategy under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023; the erosion of Israel’s influence in the U.S.; and Israel’s descent toward the status of a pariah state.
A day after the deal was announced, Trump — seemingly rattled by the flood of criticism that ensued — said it was dependent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. But he did not clarify what aspect of the Accords he meant; there’s no indication that such a requirement is included in the already-signed deal; and Riyadh has made clear that it will do no such thing until there is concrete progress toward a Palestinian state, which is a fantastical notion under the current Israeli government.
For years, nuclear cooperation represented one of Washington’s greatest sources of leverage over Saudi Arabia. It was long believed that prospect would be used to anchor some kind of pact involving normalization with Israel, binding nuclear safeguards, a regional defense architecture and a united front against Iran. Under such an arrangement, Israel would have established formal relations with the Arab world’s most influential power, and gained both a central role in a new regional security system and enforceable Saudi commitments against pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Washington has now at least begun giving Riyadh the prize — no matter what Trump says, amending the deal post-facto will be at best extraordinarily difficult — without Israel receiving any of the benefits.
That dire truth is the outcome of nearly three years in which Israel has confused military brilliance with strategy, and abandoned almost all public diplomacy as its status in the world plummeted.
No one can deny the extraordinary capabilities displayed by Israel’s armed forces and intelligence services since the Oct. 7 massacre. Hezbollah absorbed devastating blows. Iranian military assets suffered setbacks. Hamas lost thousands of fighters and much of its military infrastructure.
But a sense of true strategy is needed to convert military achievement to political outcomes. Strategy can strengthen alliances, expand legitimacy and leave a country in a stronger geopolitical position than the one in which it entered a conflict.
That seems to be completely beyond Netanyahu’s ability.
In the months immediately following Oct. 7, Israel possessed something extraordinarily rare: overwhelming international legitimacy. Hamas had committed an atrocity that horrified much of the democratic world. Moderate Arab governments viewed Hamas as a dangerous extension of the same Islamist forces that threatened their own stability. Former President Joe Biden’s administration recognized that extraordinary alignment, and sought to build upon it, working toward an ambitious regional framework.
In the early months of war, Hamas faced near-unanimous global pressure to hand over Gaza to a reformed Palestinian Authority, backed by moderate Arab governments. Arab states appeared ready to help marginalize Hamas politically and financially, and make life uncomfortable for its leaders.
For a moment, it was easy to see a path forward in which Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel, with other countries following. A U.S.-led regional alliance facing Iran might integrate Israel into the Middle East more deeply than was ever previously imaginable.
That framework offered Israel the chance to translate the trauma of Oct. 7 into a strategic transformation of the region. Instead, Netanyahu chose an open-ended war whose nebulously defined goals were not achievable by military means alone, amid a reasonable and growing suspicion in the public and around the world that he was doing so to preserve his hold on power.
Every few weeks Israelis heard that Hamas stood on the verge of collapse. Each extension of the war was presented as the last before “complete victory” — which Netanyahu kept claiming was “a step” away. Victory remained perpetually on the horizon as Israel’s international standing collapsed.
Now, Netanyahu is wanted at the Hague. Diplomatic isolation has deepened and economic pressure mounted as boycott movements — including many informal ones — expanded.
And critically, American public opinion has shifted sharply, particularly among younger Americans, threatening the bipartisan foundation upon which Israel’s relationship with Washington has rested for generations.
Recent credible polls show that more Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis.
Israelis think this happened because of a propaganda campaign against them on social media, because of antisemitism in Europe, or because of hostile journalists. That is partly true but mostly wrong. These shifts are mostly a result of the posture of the Israeli government.
The reality is that Israel killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, accepted that toll with remarkably little public reflection or regret, and relied on the trauma of Oct. 7 to justify it. Around the world, that proved politically devastating. It is especially absurd considering that Israel paid this extraordinary price without achieving its central objective of removing Hamas from Gaza — which was foreseeable and infuriating.
Things might change if the opposition comes to power in October. The idiotic demonization of the Palestinian Authority might end. Jewish terrorism in the West Bank might be stamped out. Settlement construction beyond the fence line, and certainly illegal outposts, might stop.
Israel might again at least be trying to find a solution to the festering Palestinian issue — or at least prefer to lower the flames. That might, in the long term, bring Saudi Arabia back to the table.
But the U.S, has stopped waiting. That the Saudi deal was signed at all, no matter what Trump says now, suggests that Washington is now basically indifferent to the loss of leverage for a deal favoring Israel.
How to resolve the muddle Trump has made? The key: the agreement appears to not include the possibility of enrichment on Saudi soil, but just general assistance to create a program for nuclear energy. So Trump will be able to say that enrichment must await Saudi normalization with Israel. But Saudi Arabia will still be able to claim the symbolic victory of entering into nuclear collaboration with the U.S.
And so, the regional architecture envisioned in the first months after Oct. 7 has vanished because of the forever-wars Netanyahu has pursued — which also resulted in the deaths of dozens of hostages and more than 1,000 soldiers, badly damaged Israel’s economy, and left the country’s international standing in shambles.
And the strategic alliance between Israel and the U.S. — without which Israel’s very existence will be in danger — is falling apart in front of our eyes, not because of Trump but because we are losing the American people.
This is what you get when you are all brawn and no brain, and all tactics and no strategy.
That realization should define Israel’s coming election far more even than arguments over judicial reform or the Haredi draft. Those who have led Israel into this disaster deserve to be punished. Not just removed from power, but decisively repudiated. They have become a danger to the Zionist project itself.
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Harvard students have questions after Hillel withdraws its brief against Trump
Jewish Harvard students are still trying to make sense of a baffling turn of events, after Hillel International weighed in on the university’s lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking restoration of federal funding withheld over alleged campus antisemitism — and then just as suddenly withdrew its brief from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Hillel International had filed an amicus brief Wednesday supporting Harvard’s suit against the federal government, which seeks to restore roughly $2.7 billion in federal research funding. In its brief, Hillel International acknowledged that antisemitism is an issue at Harvard and other universities, but that “campus life for Jewish students has meaningfully improved” following actions taken by the school.
Less than 24 hours later, Hillel International confirmed that it was withdrawing the brief, citing an error in its internal review process, according to the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.
What’s more, Hillel International filed the brief without the knowledge of Harvard Hillel, a campus organization that operates independently, the paper reported.
Hillel’s reversal followed sharp criticism of the brief on social media from some Jewish public figures. Among them was Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard Divinity School graduate who filed a Title VI lawsuit against the university for ignoring antisemitism. He wrote on X that he was “shocked” by the decision.
“Rather than take responsibility for their failure to respond to the explosion of antisemitism on American campuses post October 7th, Hillel has instead decided to support the perpetrators,” Kestenbaum wrote. He encouraged donors to stop giving to Hillel and choose organizations like Chabad or Jewish day schools instead.
Kestenbaum told the Harvard Crimson that Hillel International President Adam Lehman had not seen the brief before the organization filed it. Hillel International did not respond to an inquiry from the Forward to confirm this.
Hillel’s withdrawal of the brief disappointed Tova Kaplan, a recent graduate who testified at a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearing on campus antisemitism. The brief cited her testimony.
“While I’m not sure what factors led to this decision, it feels like a prioritization of politics over Jewish students,” Kaplan wrote in a statement to the Forward.
“The Trump administration’s attacks aren’t even designed to help Jewish students — instead, they’re designed to instrumentalize our voices and pain to achieve their own political goals,” she wrote.
Siding with Harvard along with numerous other groups, including civil liberties organizations across the ideological spectrum and 18 other American universities, the withdrawn brief argued that cutting research funding is not a productive way to halt university antisemitism. Harvard’s improvement measures, following recommendations from its own Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias, have been more effective than what the brief called the “draconian one-size-fits-all approaches of the sort the government here pursues.”
These measures, the withdrawn brief said, “do not help Jewish students or improve the campus climate” but instead, “they disproportionately impact the very Jewish students and Jewish researchers the government purportedly seeks to help.”
But another recent graduate who said he did not want to be identified, sees Hillel’s opposition to the Trump administration’s actions as taking the wrong side of the fight. He believes the federal defunding of Harvard pushes the university to protect Jewish students.
“I think a major reason Harvard’s been making changes is because they’re under threat,” he said.
He also contends Hillel International’s evidence to back its claim that Harvard’s efforts have improved antisemitism are weak — lacking measurable results.
Dani Kobrick, a rising senior, said she is perplexed by Hillel International’s actions.
“I don’t think Hillel needed to submit anything to begin with,” she said. “But I do think that withdrawing it makes a very big statement.”
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A Jerusalem cafe became a symbol of secular defiance — until Israelis learned it was run by Jews for Jesus
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Jerusalem’s premier soccer team made an unusual announcement last week: It would give a new cafe free advertising on players’ uniforms for the coming season.
Cafe Basimta was facing harassment from haredi Orthodox protesters who wanted it to close on Shabbat, and Hapoel Jerusalem said it wanted to send the message that Jerusalem is “an open and diverse city, where there is room for everyone.”
But on Tuesday, Hapoel Jerusalem reversed course and retracted the offer, after learning via an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Cafe Basimta is an official project of Jews for Jesus.
“Our original intention was simply to support a small business that was being denied its freedom of operation, and we still believe in that principle,” club spokesperson Matan Avrina told JTA. “However, we also realized that this specific story is more complex than we initially knew.”
For the secular Israelis who have flocked to Cafe Basimta in response to the protests, too, the revelation of the cafe’s ties to a Christian missionary organization is complicating what had seemed like a simple skirmish in the city’s culture war over businesses open on the Jewish day of rest.
“I don’t know if it changes my desire to drink their coffee, but it definitely complicates things,” Gabriel, an American studying in Jerusalem for the year, told JTA on Saturday from the cafe’s long line after learning about the Jews for Jesus connection, as protesters yelled. “It’s one layer deeper than I thought.”
Others say the cafe’s Christian character is irrelevant to their defense of Cafe Basimta.
“I understand they hate Jews for Jesus, and I understand what they hate them for,” said Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Adir Schwartz, who is a prominent defender of the city’s secular sector, in an interview. “My father was a rabbi abroad, and I get that they feel they are protecting Jewish continuity.But this is about belonging in our shared city.”
Yoel Ben David, the cafe’s operator as well as Jews for Jesus’ top official in Jerusalem, says the twin culture wars have been good for business.
“Even though financially, it’s great, me and the staff, we don’t love it,” he told JTA from his cafe on Saturday. “We’d all love it to just chill out.”
At first, the tensions over Cafe Basimta seemed straightforward: In a city where 46% of Jews are haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, and only 13% identify as secular, the inverse of Israel as a whole, here was a rare cafe willing to flout religious authorities and open on Shabbat. A handful of such cafes dot the city, but others have given up on Shabbat hours in the past over pressure from religious authorities.
Cafe Basimta, which means “cafe in the alley,” opened at the end of May in the Nahlaot neighborhood of central Jerusalem. The name refers to the neighborhood’s 19th century stone dwellings toppling into one another along tiny streets. Decades ago a center of the city’s bohemian culture, Nahlaot is now increasingly haredi and there are few if any establishments open on Shabbat.
On July 4, the first Saturday it drew protesters, dozens of haredi demonstrators, many of them reportedly minors, descended on the cafe in four separate waves, surrounding it, banging on its windows and overturning tables, according to cafe staff and footage circulated online.
At the time, the cafe’s ties to Jews for Jesus were not public. That changed in early July, when Or LeAchim, a haredi anti-missionary organization that helps Jews leave missionary groups and cults, exposed the connections and began organizing protests against Cafe Basimta.
The group has placed pashkevils, or public billboards, denouncing the cafe in the neighborhood. “The missionary-messianic influence operates all the more forcefully by winning over hearts through food and drink,” the placards say in Hebrew. “And as if that were not enough, they added sin upon crime and began operating the place on the holy Sabbath, with disgraceful Sabbath desecration in the heart of the holy city.”
The revelations surprised and deterred some who had been inclined to support the cafe. But they did not change the tenor of the demonstrations, which remain focused on Basimta’s Shabbat operations.
“People went to demonstrate because it was open on Shabbos. They did not know that it was a missionary place. The demonstration was not useful for us,” said Binyamin Klugger, who works with Or LeAchim as well as other anti-missionary groups, and who was concerned the aggression of the Haredi protesters would undercut his message about the cafe’s evangelizing mission. “People that continue to demonstrate are really not knowing that it is a missionary place,” he said,
During Saturday’s demonstration, cries of “Shabbos!” echoed off the stone alleyways as the line of Israelis waiting for cold coffees stretched into the courtyard.
Israeli police stepped in to cordon off the protesters, preventing them from approaching the cafe. Some secular Israelis yelled back, with a handful at one point breaking into “Shalom Aleichem,” the hymn traditionally sung at the Shabbat table.
Residents stared down at the altercations from their balconies, the screams shattering an otherwise quiet Shabbat morning. Yael Levy, who moved to Israel from California and lives in the building directly beside Cafe Basimta, was handing out cookies to build goodwill.
“It’s very sad, especially during the Three Weeks,” she said, referring to the mourning period between the 17th of Tammuz and Tisha B’Av, when Jews commemorate the destruction of both Temples, a destruction rabbinic tradition attributes to baseless hatred among Jews. “This is just bad energy during a time that calls for positive energy.”
Outside, a long line of coffee fiends waited their turn to choose from an extensive drinks menu, as Ben David greeted customers and monitored the demonstration.
There were no visible signs of the cafe’s affiliation with Jews for Jesus. But Ben David confirmed that the organization owns the building and the cafe, which joins a growing network of similar outposts across the country. He said he is aiming to strike a balance between missionary work and just offering a pleasant place to work or meet.
“Everyone accuses us of that,” Ben David said about proselytizing. “The Jesus goal is not completely out, but it’s not front and center.”
Jews for Jesus is a flagship organization of the diffuse movement of Messianic Judaism, which believes in the divinity of Jesus while claiming to practice Judaism — an overlap that no denomination across the Jewish world accepts as compatible. While hard numbers about how many Israelis hold Messianic beliefs are scarce, both Messianic leaders and their critics believe the number is growing. Last year, one of the two Israeli embassy workers killed in an attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., came from an Israeli Messianic family.
In 2024, Jews for Jesus appointed a member with an Israeli background as its CEO for the first time, and the Israeli branch of the global organization took in roughly $6 million in revenue that year, supporting a local staff of 60. On its website, it solicits donations for its Israel work, including, in one December 2025 appeal, $225,000 to launch a coffee shop and ministry center in Haifa, which it called a “welcoming space where Israelis can encounter the hope of Yeshua,” the Hebrew name for Jesus.
Ben David has worked with Jews for Jesus for more than two decades. He was born in Israel and came to believe in the divinity of Jesus as a young adult, together with his wife, around the time of his stint in the army, where he served as an Orthodox rabbi. He has a master’s degree from a Messianic seminary and once helmed training for missionary staff in Israel, according to Jews for Jesus’ website, which says he “now leads our work in Jerusalem, bringing the gospel back to the city where he first believed.”
Missionary activity is not illegal in Israel, with the exception of proselytizing to minors without their parents’ consent and offering religious conversions in exchange for a material gift. But many Israelis believe that it is, in a reflection of the deep cultural norms in Jewish communities.
Or LeAchim says it is planning a future protest that will focus more squarely on Cafe Basimta’s missionary ambitions.
“We are planning to hold a massive protest there soon — involving thousands of people — on a weekday,” said Rabbi Binyamin Vulcan, the group’s head of counter-missionary activities. “In the meantime, we are trying to get the place shut down through the municipality.”
Ben David said Jews for Jesus, anticipating such a response, bought Basimta’s building instead of renting it from a landlord who could be susceptible to a pressure campaign. At the same time, he insisted he didn’t understand the uproar.
“If Jesus is the Jewish Messiah,” Ben David said, “what could be more Jewish than believing in Jesus?” As for the missionary label, he insists the cafe is about more than just theology: “We don’t put crosses in our espresso,” he said.
Klugger said he is mystified about why the same secular Jerusalemites who are uncomfortable with the growing haredi character of the city are willing to buy coffee from someone who wants them to stop being Jewish altogether.
“If you don’t want haredim influencing your children,” he said, “you also can’t want missionaries influencing your children.”
Some Shabbat customers, meanwhile, say they have heard the warnings and aren’t swayed — for them, who owns the cafe is beside the point.
“I’m not going to convert because of the coffee, unless it’s really good coffee, then maybe,” said Lior Stern, who drove from the Tel Aviv area to support the cafe after hearing about the protests. “It could be Buddhist, it could be Muslim, it could be Jewish, it could be Christian. That’s not the point. The point is freedom.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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