If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be. . .

Tuesday was our visit to Dachau.  Like our Poland Mission in 2009, our plans included visiting a very difficult site and also davening shacharit there.

Dachau is, perhaps to the German consciousness, the paradigm of what the horror of Nazism and its treatment of prisoners was.  A sign on the way into the camp says  “Dachau—the significance of this name will never be erased from German history.  It stands for all concentration camps which the Nazis established in their territory.”  The quote is attributed to Eugene Kogon, a Christian objector to the Nazis who spent several years as a prisoner at Buchenwald, and the author of books about the Holocaust.



Dachau was established in 1933, and did serve as a model for the concentration camp “system.’  43,000 people died of the over 200,000 who were incarcerated.  Like other notorious incarceration and murder centers, it has a gate emblazoned with the cruelly untrue motto Arbeit Macht Free—Work Makes One Free. 

Unlike Auschwitz/Birkenau (especially Birkenau), it was not specifically intended as a death camp—and its prisoners were not, for the most part, Jewish.  (By the time that the machinery of imprisonment and killing was fully operational, the Jews had, by the plans established at Wannsee, been moved “to the east”—for convenient mass slaughter outside the vision of Germany and most of its citizens).

What does it mean to gather at a place like this and recite one’s daily prayers?  To wear Tallit and Tefillin?  There is a certain defiance in it—but a defiance that takes no risks.  There is little triumph in it.  Yet there is SOME—as we DID survive, and we stand in the full witness and admission of the modern German nation. 

Our program and shacharit

Our program and shacharit

Our program and shacharit

Our program and shacharit

Our assembly place—for davening and for programs preceding and during the davening and for reassembling later before departing this accursed place—was near to the Jewish memorial at Dachau.  The ground isn’t paved.  Our chairs and our stage (to see those leading) were set up in what is a field of stones about the size of “silver dollars” or slightly larger.  Difficult to walk on.  Something poetic in THAT.

Colleagues Jen Cohen and Henry Rosenblum led a beautiful, simple, appropriate davenen, and quite a few were involved in songs, poems, and readings.  These were designed by our colleague Steve Stoehr, who was unfortunately unable to join us on the Mission.  He was much missed, but his sense of how to recall the departed, and how to call ourselves to account for their memories, was much present.  People who had a personal connection to Dachau were called forward to participate in a special way.  This included Alice Levitin from our congregation in Columbus and a man from Houston who we met on the tour.  David Bell’s father-in-law was among the liberators, and this clearly made a lifelong impression even on DAVID. 

Those with Dachau connections - including Alice Levitin - come forward to light memorial candles

The Jewish Memorial Site “remembers the murder of the European Jews.  Like a ramp, the path leads into the interior of the structure.  A band of light marble points to an opening in the roof and carries the sevenbranched candelabrum, the menorah.  The marble comes from Peki’in in Israel. . . and symbolizes the continuity of Jewish life”  The Jewish Memorial Site was officially opened in May 1967.  Stunning to think of the difference between May 1967 and, say, July 1967.  I wonder what that felt like in Munich. . .

Jewish memorial at Dachau

Jewish memorial at Dachau



Jewish memorial at Dachau

Jewish memorial at Dachau

Many Jews feel peculiar (or significantly negative) about the presence of OTHER religious shrines at concentration camps.  This is different in different places, and I’d have to say that it’s particularly appropriate to have these places at Dachau—where Jews weren’t (as previously noted) the primary targets or victims.

Other religious memorials at Dachau 

Other religious memorials at Dachau

Other religious memorials at Dachau

After our service, we visited further around the camp—including the gas chambers and crematorium.  If Dachau is indeed the blueprint for Germans to understand the horror of the Shoah, all the PIECES are present:  the barracks piling people upon each other (and one can see 3 versions of these, increasing the overcrowding as the war wears on), the facilities designed for mass killing and for mass disposal of the bodies.

Crematorium...if you've visited other concentration camps, you've seen this same design.  Thousands of camps.  Millions of victims.

Why they needed the crematoriums



Apparently, the gas chambers at Dachau were not much used, and not used on a “mass killing basis.”  But their design, along with the signs making believe that they are places to disinfect people, are creepy enough.  The crematoria WERE used plenty.  But the creepiest thing for me in this visit to this place was the indication that executions—hangings—took place IN the crematoria—on the pipes directly in front of the burning ovens.

Somehow this bothered me more than almost anything: they executed people--by hanging--directly in front of the crematoria.

From bad to worse to unimaginable -- sleeping quarters at Dachau

 A Day at camp

 Plus the same place today

US Army photo post-liberation.  Note how much more robust these prisoners (from Dachau) appear than what yo have seen at the extermination camps in the east.



Two moments in the concluding program particularly stand out in my mind.  Colleague David Lipp sang “Dachau Lied,” a defiant hymn  written by prisoners interned at Dachau.  And Simon Spiro’s recitation of the El Malei Rachamim – while I stood by, holding the Cantors Assembly Torah, itself rescued from the Shoah—had the full power of the moment.

Our concluding program at Dachau -- including holding the Torah for El Malei Rachamim



…………………….

After returning to the areas of our hotel for lunch, we re-assembled and visited Munich’s Jewish Community Center, where we met Charlotte Knobluch, a major benefactor and builder of Munich’s Jewish community.  Mrs. Knobluch was elected to be the first woman President of the Society of German Jews in 2006.  We had another presentation by Stephen Berk.



Exterior of the new synagogue (Ohel Jakob) in Munich at the Jewish community center area

Nate Lam and--

Charlotte Knobluch at the Munich JCC

Rabbi of the Ohel Jakob synagogue in Munich

But before that, a memorial program for the Israeli athletes murdered in 1972—with large photos of each, as well as biographical vignettes.  This gave much added meaning to the El Malei Rachamim chanted by Beny Maissner.  Eliot Vogel put together a beautiful program of songs and readings (and the bios).

Memorial for the Israeli Athletes of the 1972 Olympics:

Memorial to the Deporated Jews of Munich in the passageway from the JCC to the synagogue

Memorial to a former Munich synagogue

Ohel Jakob synagogue in Munich

Rabbi and Cantor of the synagogue

2 Cantors



After Professor Berk’s speech, the plan was for us to daven minchah, but I was told that we wouldn’t be able to: the JCC didn’t want us to, the synagogue (Orthodox, which we were about to visit within the same complex) didn’t want us to. 

This put me (us) into an awkward situation.  I understood that the orthodox synagogue wouldn’t want us to daven in our egalitarian way—and it’s THEIR place, so I needed to respect that.  But I also received the impression that they wouldn’t PERMIT us to daven even “THEIR” way.  That wouldn’t have been acceptable.  I asked Seffie Epstein from Ayelet to request permission for us to daven in an orthodox-appropriate way at the synagogue.  And this request was granted.  In FACT, as it turned out, the synagogue’s hazzan was able to be with us and to lead our davenen.  He had a gorgeous “topless” tenor voice.  This occurred after the rabbi welcomed us (he had also done so at the JCC) and told us a bit more about the congregation and community, and after the cantor was asked to sing some demonstration of he would ordinarily lead services at this congregation.  (The cantor is from Israel.  The congregants are mostly from FSU—Former Soviet Union.  And the congregation is, of course, in Germany.)  This all led at some point to our singing together (was it for the last time?) Tzadik Katamar—the so-well-known Lewandowski chorale concluding that Psalm 92 that I had intoned back on Friday night.

There were a few who were unhappy that we had caved in to Orthodox procedure—but I felt that there was no question that the way to pray in that place was to do so according to their custom—and that it was very important for us to pray in that place which has been rebuilt in post-war Germany.  And I also felt that it was important that we be PERMITTED to pray there.  I don’t know whether there really was ever a question about that.  And I really couldn’t speak about that issue to our people at that time.

I would ultimately return to that synagogue twice more during our Munich stay—for Friday night and Shabbat morning services (as well as Shabbat dinner).

With the visit to the living synagogue and the recitation of minchah (notwithstanding the brief egalitarian controversy), the pall had begun to lift from a “lowly” emotional day.

After “dinner on your own,” a group of joyful cantors and others convened at the bar at the Sophitel for an in formal songfest of Israeli songs, in which several dozen participated—to the (mostly) amusement of other hotel guests, including some of the many Muslims present in the hotel.

Lighter spirits back at the hotel Tuesday night



So ended the MUNICH Longest Day that served as a counterpoint to the BERLIN Longest Day just 2 days earlier.

Addie and me with our new friend Yosef.  A whole OTHER story to tell you . . .