A Journey in Jewish History by Matterhorn Travel / 2012
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“What had gone
on between German Christians and Jews, and why?
Why had there been such
a promising beginning, so much hope and so much
accomplishment – and so terrible an end?”
W. Michael Blumenthal,
The Invisible Wall
These huge questions, posed by a German Jewish emigrant who became a CEO in corporate America, as well as a U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, have preoccupied eminent historians for decades – since the Nazis and the Holocaust brought a near end to some 2,000 years of Jewish presence in Germany and other regions of Europe.
Fortunately for millions of European Jews, there was an alternative to the persecution and pogroms of the Russian Czar, the anti-Semitism of Germany throughout centuries, and the Holocaust of the Third Reich. That alternative was emigration overseas – overwhelmingly to the United States. That millions of others did not emigrate for whatever reasons, resulting in their murder, and/or the murder of their descendants, adds another huge question to the tragedy – Why didn’t more Jews seek a better life overseas? Why did some successful Jews, such as the Mendelssohn family, continue to chase the rainbow of assimilation, while others, such as Albert Einstein, grasped the reality of the Jewish community’s situation in Germany and moved to the United States?
“Professor Fritz
Stern, perhaps the foremost historian on this
subject, has argued that the history of the
assimilated Jews of Germany was much more than
the history of a tragedy; it was also, for a
long time, the story of an extraordinary
success: “We must understand the triumphs in
order to understand the tragedy.” We must see
the German Jews in the context of their time
and, at the very least, appreciate their
authenticity, the way they saw themselves and
others, often with reason. For long periods,
they had cause to believe in their ultimate
integration, as did most Jews elsewhere in
Western Europe, in the United States, and even
in Czarist Russia. It was touch and go almost to
the end.”
Amos Elon
The Pity of it All
A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch
These two themes – the portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch and the response of emigration to the United States – will be the major focus of our journey. Our trip may not convey all the answers. But our visit to today’s Germany, accompanied by an experienced historian, will bring to us greater understanding of this ancestral saga, and provide an enjoyable, enriching experience.
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Our Ancestral Journey Includes: Round trip transatlantic flights
Dinner six evenings
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The History of
the Jews in Germany
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Fly this afternoon from your departure city to
Frankfurt. Beverages, dinner and continental
breakfast will be served in-flight.
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The Rhine |
Arrive Frankfurt in the morning, local time. Upon arrival, we will be met and transferred to our hotel.
This afternoon we will enjoy a delightful drive along the Rhine—a relaxing time to enjoy the scenery of one of Europe’s great rivers.
See the
vineyards of the famous Rhine wines, the many
barges on this busy waterway, and perhaps best
of all the fairy tale castles around almost
every bend in the River. Of particular note are
the famous Lorelei rocks immortalized in the
classic poem of
A Jew, Heinrich
Heine (1797-1856) was one of Germany’s greatest
romantic poets.
Set to music, his poem tells the story of
boatmen lured to their death by a beautiful
maiden sitting on the
rocks, combing her long blond hair while singing
her fateful song.
After our Rhine visit, we will proceed to wine
tasting at the cave of Georg Breuer, among the
finest vintners of the Rhineland. G. Breuer is
affiliated with Israel’s Galil Mountain Winery
of the Upper Galilee.
G. Breuer owner, Heinrich Breuer, will lead us
in tasting some of the finest wines of Israel
and the Rhine.
Next, we will enjoy dinner with music at the
Breuer’s Rudesheimer Schloss.
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Jewish
Wedding at Worms, Around the 18th
Century
Jewish Museum, Worms |
The first Jews entered the region of present-day Germany with the Roman legions. An edict by the emperor Constantine to the magistrate of Cologne in the year 321 provides early testimony of their presence.
Evidence of Jewish presence reappears during Charlemagne’s rule (768-814). At that time, Jews primarily worked as traveling merchants – a highly esteemed profession, as it provided princes and bishops with luxury goods such as perfume and exotic spices, jewels, and medicine.
The Romans and Jews settled along the Rhine and to the West, known today as the Rhineland. The land to the east of the Rhine, inhabited by Germanic tribes, was considered too hostile even for the Romans.
The leading centers of Jewish life in the Rhineland were Worms, Speyer, and Mainz.
This morning we
will visit Worms and its synagogue dating from
1034 A.D. The synagogue mikvah still exists
today . We will visit the Rashi House, today a
Jewish museum, named after the famous
commentator of the Talmud, Rabbi Solomon Ben
Isaac, who studied at Worms in the 11th Century.
His commentary has been included in every
edition of the Talmud since its first printing
in the 1520s. We will also visit the Jewish
cemetery in Worms, the oldest Jewish cemetery in
Europe. The oldest tombstone dates from the year
1076.
This afternoon we will drive into eastern
Germany to Weimar.
Weimar is home of the best and worst in German
history.
The cultural history of Weimar is awesome,
Goethe, Germany’s greatest writer, lived here.
Schiller, who wrote the words to Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony “Ode to Joy,” lived in Weimar.
Johann Sebastian Bach stayed ten years in
Weimar, composing his immortal music.
The Hitler Youth movement began in Weimar.
The former concentration camp of Buchenwald is near Weimar.
“I pray you to believe
what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported
what I saw and heard, but only part of it.
For most of it, I have no words.”
- Edward R.
Murrow, April, 1945
Today we will
have a walking tour of Weimar and Buchenwald,
accompanied by a local guide.
This evening is at leisure to sample a
restaurant in Weimar on your own.
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Moses Mendelssohn (1729 - 1786) |
Today we will visit Leipzig and the home of Felix Mendelssohn, containing much of the composer’s original furniture.
Felix Mendelssohn was the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the foremost Jewish figure of the 18th century. Moses Mendelssohn was a renowned German philosopher, literary critic and man of letters, and among the first to bridge the social and cultural barrier between Jews and Germans. His great ambition was to end the age-old social and intellectual isolation of Judaism—some of which had become self imposed.He was the original advocate of assimilation.
Throughout the
nineteenth century, generations of hopeful
German Jews would celebrate Mendelssohn as their
patron saint; like Mendelssohn, they sought a
larger community of rational men beyond the
confines of religious identity. There was an
intense desire to belong. Social integration
with gentile Germans, it was thought, would be
accomplished by self improvement, education and
religious reform.
Although Mendelssohn, himself, had remained an
observant (orthodox) Jew, his ideas led to a
modernization of Jewish religious practice.
Prayers and sermons in German, a German language
hymnal, choir singing, and an organ were
introduced in synagogues. This created a split
between orthodox and reform sectors of Ashkenazy
Jews, which continues to the present day.
Thus Moses Mendelssohn became, albeit
inadvertently, the father of modern reform
Judaism. The movement spread to England and the
United States.
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Felix Mendelssohn (1809 - 1847) |
Among the six children of Moses Mendelssohn, four converted to Christianity. Son Abraham in turn had his children baptized in 1816, including young Felix, age seven.
As an adult,
Felix Mendelssohn wholly embraced his revised
identity as a Christian. He became a leading
composer of Christian religious music and helped
to revive the legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach,
the most important Lutheran after Luther
himself. Mendelssohn established the first music
conservatory in Germany.
Nevertheless, it was forbidden to play the music
of Felix Mendelssohn during the Nazi Reich –
some 86 years after the composer’s death. Why?
Because he was a Jew. A person’s ancestry – not
his accomplishments, however laudable, defined
his status in the annals of Nazism.
We will tour the House of Felix Mendelssohn, and
then be treated to a private concert of his
music.
We will visit the memorial at the site of the
Great Leipzig Synagogue, destroyed at
Kristallnacht.
We will walk in Leipzig and savor the legacy of
Johann Sebastian Bach, who worked in Leipzig for
27 years.
Even beyond Bach, the music and intellectual
heritage of Leipzig is awesome. Schiller wrote
his soaring “Ode to Joy,” later set to music in
his Ninth Symphony by Beethoven, in Leipzig.
Wagner was born in Leipzig, and Mendelssohn
founded the first German conservatory in
Leipzig. Goethe,considered Germany’s greatest
writer, studied at the University of Leipzig.
Today Leipzig
remains one of the great musical capitals of
Europe. See the Gewandhaus, one of the most
modern and acoustically perfect concert halls in
the world.
Next, we will continue to Berlin, arriving in
the late afternoon.
Dinner is included at our hotel.
“I had no idea of the scope of material here.
The building is powerful.”
Henry
Kissinger
This morning we
will go to the Jewish Museum for the first of
our two visits to this extraordinary repository
of 2,000 years of Jewish history in Germany.
The Museum is not a Holocaust Museum. The
exhibits trace Jewish life in Germany from the
arrival of Jews with Roman legions to the
revitalization of the community in recent years
due to immigration from the former Soviet Union.
In the section on the Holocaust, the focus is on
Jewish reactions to the gathering Nazi terror,
not the industrialized killing itself.
Designed by Daniel Libeskind, an American Jew
born in Poland, there is a striking connection
between the exhibits and the architecture. “The
history of German-speaking Jewry is German
history, and in the museum we attempt to tell it
accurately and fairly,” said W. Michael
Blumenthal, the museum director, who fled Nazi
Germany and eventually served as Treasury
Secretary in the Carter administration. “All of
it: the towering highs and the abysmal lows, the
triumphs as well as the bloodshed and
disasters.”
Accompanied by a
Museum guide, we will visit half of the exhibits
this morning.We will return tomorrow morning to
visit the second half of the exhibits.
This afternoon we will tour Berlin with a local
guide. Sightseeing includes Potsdam Square, the
Brandenburg Gate, and a remnant of the infamous
wall. See the Russian War Memorial, Alexander
Square, and drive along Unter den Linden, the
main avenue of pre-war Berlin. Our tour includes
the top of the Kurfurstendam (Ku’damn),
dominated by the bombed out shell of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Memorial Church and its new, starkly
modern replacement. These buildings have become
symbols of the Old and New Germany. They are
among the most impressive sights in Europe.
We will visit
the Memorial of the Lost Synagogues, the site of
the first Synagogue in Berlin (1714), and the
rail station memorial in Grünewald from which
more than 50,000 Berlin Jews were deported to
concentration camps.
Next, we will visit the beautiful Rykestrasse
Synagogue, built in 1904 and today the largest
synagogue in Germany.
This evening is at leisure to sample a Berlin
restaurant on your own.
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On May 10, 1933,
Berlin Students burn the books of
“unaccepted” and |
This morning we will return to the Jewish Museum where our museum guide will show us the second part of the exhibits.
This afternoon
we will visit the New Synagogue, inaugurated in
1866 in the presence of Prussian Chancellor Otto
Von Bismarck. Seating 3,000 people, it was the
largest synagogue in Germany. With services in
the German language and its organ and choir
music, the New Synagogue became a center of
Reform Judaism. The splendor of its
architecture, eastern Moorish style resembling
the Alhambra in Spain, was a reflection of the
rapid growth of the Jewish community in
19th century Berlin.
Having been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943,
the New Synagogue was reopened in 1995 as a
museum and Jewish community center.
Unlike the Mendelssohn family, Albert Einstein
was dubious about assimilation. As noted by his
biographer Walter Isaacson, Einstein believed
that Jews were more than just persons “of the
Jewish faith.” Instead, he defined Jewish
identity as a matter of ethnic kinship, or
tribal companions. Einstein scorned what he
called “the assimilatory” approach that sought
“to overcome anti-Semitism by dropping nearly
everything Jewish.” This never worked; indeed,
it “appears somewhat comical to a non-Jew,”
because the Jews are a people set apart from
others.
“The
psychological root of anti-Semitism lies in the
fact that the Jews are a group of people unto
themselves,” Einstein wrote.
When Hitler came to power, January 30, 1933,
Einstein was in California. He chose to stay in
the United States and never returned to Germany.
“Those who burn
books will in the end also burn people.”
Heinrich Heine, 1821
This afternoon we will visit Bebelplatz (Opernplatz in 1933), scene of the Nazis’ burning of thousands of books by “degenerate” authors. In addition to a stone marker of Heine’s prophetic words, 112 years before the Nazis ascent to power, visitors can see through a glass plate in the ground and view rows of empty bookshelves – a modern monument to that dark event.
Next, we will
visit the Holocaust Memorial and Education
Center, completed in 2005. The architecture
represents a radical approach to the traditional
concept of a memorial, partly because it does
not use symbolism. The grid pattern, consisting
of 2,711 concrete stelae, which can be walked
through from all sides, leaves it up to visitors
to find their own way in and out of the complex.
The underground information center provides
information on the victims, the places of
extermination and today’s memorial sites.
Dinner with Klezmer music is included this
evening.
Klezmer began in medieval Europe as the music of the Eastern European Jews. By the 19th century, it had become a developed musical style, taking its inspiration not only from the synagogue, but also from the non-Jewish culture that surrounded it.
Berlin has 85 museums. Among the most impressive
is the Pergamon on Museum Island housing some of
the world’s most precious artifacts and
classical antiquity. The famous Pergamon Altar,
dating from 160 B.C., is a masterpiece of Greek
art. Nearby is the magnificent Berlin Cathedral,
the largest Lutheran church in Germany.
Stroll along Unter den Linden to the Brandenburg
Gate. Visit the Reichstag, again the site of the
German Parliament.Enjoy a drink at the Gendarmen
Platz.
From evil to redemption to renaissance, Berlin
has seen it all.
Afternoon Excursion
House of the Wannsee Conference
The murder of Jews by the Nazis increased during
the autumn of 1941, following the early success
of the Wehrmacht invasion of the Soviet Union.
In January of 1942, top Nazi leaders met at a
mansion on the outskirts of Berlin to organize
administratively the systematic extermination of
Jews residing in areas controlled by the Third
Reich – the Final Solution. The meeting became
known as the Wannsee Conference.
Accompanied by our guide, we will visit this
mansion where extermination of the Jews became
the formal, official policy of the Nazi regime.
The mansion is today a museum.
This evening is at leisure to sample a Berlin restaurant on your own.
Search for Your German and/or Eastern Europe
Ancestors with Professional Help
This morning we will leave Berlin and proceed to
Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city. It was
in Hamburg that the first Reform synagogue
opened in 1811.
After German Jews came to the United States and
achieved some success, they encouraged other
Jews to follow. A rabbi in Cincinnati wrote a
poem called “The Jewish Emigrant” that was
printed in Die Deborah, a German Jewish
newspaper, in 1855:
Far,
far toward the West,
There is a great country.
Far across the sea it holds out
To us its brotherly hand.
Thither shall we cross over,
There shall be the home
Where we can find rest
From suffering, ignominy and agony.
For Jews seeking escape from the persecution and pogroms of Czarist Russia, the anti-Semitism during the Kaiser’s Germany and earlier centuries, or from the Third Reich of the 1930’s, there was an alternative – Emigration. Millions of European Jews seized the opportunity. Between 1815 and 1930, more than 50 million people left their European home countries to start a new life in the USA, Canada, Australia, and South America. By 1914, 21% of Europeans lived outside Europe. The great majority went to the United States, which became the largest emigration destination in the world.
Toward America and the New World
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Jewish children
on a street in Zabludow, Poland, in
1916. From about 1600 to the time of the Holocaust, more Jews lived in Poland than in any other nation in the world. |
So many emigrants
sailed from the port of Hamburg that a
village, Ballinstadt, was built to give
them temporary housing. |
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Passengers
board a ship of the Hamburg-America
Line around 1910. Founded in 1847,
the Hamburg-America shipping company
was amoung the first to specialize
in transporting immigrants, rather
than cargo, across the ocean. |
Whenever
possible, passengers spent time on
deck to escape the stench and the
cramped quarters. But space was
limited, and in
bad weather or heavy seas they had to stay below deck |
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For most
emigrants the sight of the Statue of
Liberty in New York
was an evocative moment. Many never forgot this moment that marked the end of a gruelling passage and the start of a new life. |
Albert
Einstein with his secretary Helen
Dukas and step daughter Margot
becoming American citizens in
Trenton, New Jersey, in October,
1940.
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German
emigration peaked in the years 1854, 1872, and
1881. Thereafter, the period of mass migration
from Eastern and Southeastern Europe began.
Between 1933 and 1939, between 275,000 and
300,000 German Jews left their homeland.
The primary port of emigration was Hamburg. More
than 5.2 million people from all over Europe –
mostly Jews – sailed from the Port of Hamburg
from 1850 to 1939.
A major reason for the predominance of Hamburg
was its Ballinstadt Emigration City at the Port.
Ballinstadt is named after Albert Ballin, a
Hamburg Jew who owned the Hapag Shipping Company
(today Hapag-Lloyd). Ballin built a departure
city for the emigrants, offering accommodations,
food, shops, church, a synagogue, and medical
facilities. This transition venue for emigrants
awaiting departure of their ships was enormously
helpful to emigrants and made Hamburg the
leading port of emigration from Europe.
Accompanied by a museum guide, we will tour
Ballinstadt this afternoon and learn more about
the epic emigration movement out of Europe.
After our tour, tour members can trace their
ancestry, assisted by Ballinstadt staff trained
in geneaology, who will help us with research
and building a family tree.
Tour members who do not complete their ancestry
search this afternoon can make an appointment to
return to Ballinstadt tomorrow morning.
Dinner this evening will be at an historic
restaurant in Hamburg.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne
back ceaselessly into the past.”
F. Scott
Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
Where do we come
from? Who are our ancestors? These questions
have occupied the minds of people for
generations. Millions of Americans are retracing
the steps of their ancestors.
The huge database contains lists of passengers
on ships leaving Hamburg between 1850 and 1934,
which were digitized and indexed during years of
work by the state archive in Hamburg. A total of
270,000 images were created, containing around
five million names. It’s the largest collection
of passenger lists from emigrant ships in the
world. Birthplace, place of residence and
profession were details registered by the
emigrants back then—a treasure trove for those
researching their family now.
Those of us not returning to Ballinstadt this
morning will have a tour, with local guide, of
sites of Jewish life and history in Hamburg.
The first Jews in Hamburg were Sephardim who
arrived in 1580, after being expelled from
Portugal and Spain. The first Ashkenazim arrived
in 1621.
A tour of
Hamburg via motorcoach is included this
afternoon.
Our farewell evening will include dinner and
music.
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| A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People |
This morning we will be transferred to Hamburg
Airport to board our return flight to the U.S.
Arrive back in the U.S. this afternoon.
W. Michael
Blumenthal
Director, Jewish Museum Berlin
Return to Berlin
Michael
Blumenthal is a former Jewish refugee from Nazi
Germany, who went on to serve as US Secretary
of the Treasury. Here he describes for BBC News
Online why he decided to return to Germany to
direct the
Jewish Museum in Berlin.
In 1945, I was
among the millions of people who had fled the
Nazi holocaust. I was one of the lucky ones. In
the first postwar years, the United States
assumed its historical role as a haven for
immigrants and opened
its doors to people like us The population
generally welcomed us and we were quickly
integrated into American society and culture.
More than a half century later, I have returned
to Berlin and am once again a part-time resident
of the city from which I fled with my family. I
came here because, though an American citizen
since long ago, I accepted a
government invitation to lead Europe's largest
Jewish Museum.
I am often asked why I agreed to do this job,
and why I consented to return to this place
where family members
and close friends were murdered while some
Germans actively collaborated in this atrocity
and most others looked away. The reason is
simply that it is time to turn the page, to face
the challenges of the present and the future,
rather than to allow the disasters of the past
to rule us.
However, we must also not forget the past.
Today's young Germans were not alive in the
1930s, and even their parents were either unborn
or too young to be involved in the holocaust.
Yet they do have a national responsibility to
remember. That is what the German government has
in mind in creating the Jewish Museum, and other
"institutions of memory".
The lessons of history
To remember
means to learn the lessons of history and to
apply them not merely to avoid the errors of the
past, but also to help meet the challenges
confronting us all today and tomorrow. That is
the relevance of the mission of the Berlin
Jewish Museum.
That is why I have chosen to help in this work.
That is why I decided to return to Berlin and to
support my many like minded German friends
determined to make sure that the lessons of
history will not be forgotten.
Excerpt from BBC News, Road to
Refuge - The Way Ahead
A Pilgrimage to Germany
After my
visit to Frankfurt and Worms, I had the same sad
feelings that
I had experienced in Poland in 1989 and a year
later in Vilna, Minsk, and Kiev.
For I realized that in Germany, too, I had seen
some of the remains of a Jewish
civilization. This similarity raised the
question: Why do Jews visit Eastern
Europe in organized Jewish heritage tours but
avoid Germany, even though
the latter offers many significant Jewish
historic sites? Is there not an equal
obligation for Jews to memorialize German Jewry?
While most American Jews
feel a particular identification with their
Eastern European ancestors, they may
discover another kind of kinship and heritage in
pre-Hitler German Jewry. The
early and long experience of German Jews in
confronting and responding to
modern Western culture has significantly
influenced the ways in which
contemporary Jews of Eastern European origin
accommodate and adapt
religious traditions. Germany Jewry of the
nineteenth century formulated the
fundamentals of American Jews’ major religious
ideologies: Reform, Conser-
vative, and neo-Orthodox. (Significant events in
the early development of
these religious movements, especially of the
latter, are associated with Frank-
furt.) It is at least arguable that the
Jewishness of most religiously affiliated and
active American Jews of Eastern European origin,
shorn of their Yiddish
heritage, more resembles that of their
counterparts among historic German
Jewry than of their preimmigrant ancestors.
The comparison with pilgrimages to Eastern
Europe highlights another
significant meaning in commemorating German
Jewry A Jewish pilgrimage
to Germany, particularly in an organized Jewish
heritage tour, would symbol-
ize, perhaps even more markedly, the failure of
the Nazis to erase Jewish
memory, for it was the Jewish civilization of
that nations that was first targeted
for extinction. That failure would be powerfully
demonstrated by a visit to sites
of Jewish significance in the very heartland of
what was once the Nazi empire.
Furthermore, such pilgrimages by Jews would
recognize and support the
“other Germany”- its accomplishments in
reclaiming Jewish history and its
seriousness in coming to terms with the past and
with itself. If such efforts
indeed manifest a spirit of atonement, are not
Jews today obligated to
acknowledge and reciprocate them?
Perhaps such an awareness of the “other
Germany”, as well as of the
necessity of preserving the memory of German
Jewry, would help many Jews
confront and transcend their pain and rage.
Perhaps a Jewish pilgrimage to
Germany would prove to be restorative.
J O S E P H G R E E N B L U M
J U D A I S M
A
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF JEWISH LIFE AND THOUGHT
PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONGRESS
Issue No. 176 / Volume 44 / Number 4 / $6.00 / Fall 1995
Kenneth E. Block, M.A.
A graduate of Princeton, Ken Block has studied at the University of Berlin and holds a Masters Degree in history from Columbia University in New York. He has served as a Naval Officer and as a Foreign Service Officer with the Department of State in Europe and Asia.
Ken founded
Matterhorn Travel and has 43 years experience
designing and operating history travel programs.
In addition to World War II in Europe, Ken has
put together history programs covering Colonial
America and the Revolutionary War, the Civil
War, the Western Expansion, and World War II in
the Pacific.
Ken is a member of the Kneseth Israel Synagogue
in Annapolis, where his grandfather was among
the early
members beginning in the 1920's.
Other historians may also participate.
Organizations are welcome to bring their own historian.
| Hotels | |
| Franfurt | InterContinental |
| Weimar | Dorint |
| Berlin | Westin Grand |
| Hamburg | InterContinental |
| Depart USA | Return |
| August 25 | September 4 |
