Germany Close Up prompts questions about country’s past and future
Seminar takes young North American Jewish leaders to Germany to ask and teach
BERLIN — A seminar predicated on promoting transatlantic ties, Holocaust memory and modern Jewish life raised more questions than answers for Germany Close Up participants.
The 26-person cohort, consisting of North American young Jewish professionals, included educators, graduate students, policy experts and this reporter. Led by Tsipy Gur, founder and executive director of Classrooms Without Borders, the group visited Munich, Nuremberg and Berlin between July 28 and Aug. 6.
Since 2013, hundreds of North American participants, including dozens of Pittsburghers, have visited Germany thanks to a partnership between CWB, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, and the German Academic Exchange (DAAD).
Hours into the 2024 excursion Gur congratulated individuals for previous accomplishments but said selection was based on efforts yet to be performed.
“We do this for teachers because they are responsible for the future,” she said.
Similar sentiment was espoused by DAAD, which noted the seminar is subsidized by the German government’s Transatlantic Program and seeks to “encourage German-Jewish-North American dialogue.”
Participants apply for various reasons. The commonality is an investment made from all parties involved, according to Gur.
Mishmash in the mind
University of Pittsburgh graduate Melanie Silver, 22, joined the trip to better understand her family’s history.
Silver’s grandmother was born in 1941 and survived the war as a hidden child in Poland.
Decades passed before the matriarch spoke about her childhood.
“That part of my family history has influenced so much of my life,” Silver said.
Prior to becoming a Springboard Fellow at Hillel at Washington University in St. Louis, Silver was active in Young Judaea and Hillel Jewish University Center in Pittsburgh.
Silver applied for GCU in hopes of reconciling a tension.
“Growing up, Germany was not something we talked about as anything sort of positive. But when my friends all started studying abroad here, they came back raving about it,” she said.
The clash created a “mishmash” in Silver’s mind.
Not only was the country both a place of both horror and enjoyment but its history was sandwiched: Germany’s present rests on the Holocaust’s heels. For Silver and fellow GCU members, walking tours, museum exhibitions, panel discussions and Shabbat services demonstrated vibrancy and a quest for democracy, but also confounding population totals.
In 1933, approximately 560,000 Jews lived in Germany. By Sept. 1945 — after years of emigration and extermination — only 15,000 remained. About 200,000 Jews now reside in Germany; most arrived after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
“We discussed a lot on this trip about the good and the bad and how that makes people think,” Silver said. “I’ve only come away with more questions.”
Change of place
After arriving in Munich, participants were given notebooks and pens and asked to record ideas. Throughout the trip, several individuals shared thoughts and photos on a CWB blog. Some years, participants use the blog to share poetry. Other years, individuals detail daily activities.
Like previous cohorts, this year’s group ranged in age and religious practices. Bus rides, train transport and meals together fostered dialogue and friendship. German guides Ulrike Koppermann and Katja Grosse-Sommer provided continuous support and insight throughout the seminar.
Gur considered Koppermann and Grosse-Sommer among the best she’s ever worked with.
Whether it’s visiting Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site or Track 17 Memorial in Berlin, the trip presents several challenging stops. Having reliable and thoughtful partners is critical, Gur said.
“So many non-Jewish people have put a lot of hours of work, and a lot of deep thought and reflection, into this program that helps ensure Jewish growth, Jewish continuity, Jewish community,” North Hills resident and cohort member Jason Kikel said.
Kikel, 32, joined the seminar hoping to see a new Germany. Nine years earlier, he studied in the federal parliamentary republic.
Since then, much has changed personally and for the country, he said.
Kikel became a Polish citizen, voted in an election and began regularly consuming Eastern European news.
“I have an increased concern about what’s going on on Poland’s eastern border, with Russia, Belarus, and, of course, the war in Ukraine, just knowing that that’s kind of looming for all of Europe,” he said.
Kikel’s regard for the present dovetails with a retrospect, specifically as it relates to his family’s experience in the Holocaust, he said.
“I have a different interpretation of what Germany is about now and how it handles its past,” he added.
Back to school
Within German schools, Holocaust education is mandatory. However, each of the country’s 16 federal states can determine its own curriculum, Deutsche Welle reported.
At some point in their education, most German students will visit a concentration camp, though only in Bavarian schools is the trip required, according to Euronews.
During GCU, participants visited Dachau Concentration Camp (which operated between 1933 and 1945) and House of the Wannsee Conference (where leading Nazi officials discussed the Final Solution). At both sites, participants observed children present.
Dachau recommends visitors be over 13 due to the site’s content. Wannsee suggests children be at least 14 when visiting the museum.
Germany’s quest for remembrance — the country boasts nearly 2,000 memorial sites — prompts early awareness of the Holocaust. Still, questions remain regarding efficacy.
At the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (a Berlin-based site spanning 4.7 acres, consisting of 2,711 stelae), GCU participants saw children running across the sloping terrain and deftly moving between concrete slabs.
Provocative selfies, yoga on-site and jumping between stones, prompted Berlin-based Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira to create a digital project in 2017 combining photos taken at the memorial with scenes from Nazi extermination camps.
The page, according to Shapira, was visited by more than 2.5 million people.
“The crazy thing is that the project actually reached all 12 people whose selfies were presented. Almost all of them understood the message, apologized and decided to remove their selfies from their personal Facebook and Instagram profiles,” he wrote.
Sarah May-Stein, 33, participated in this year’s cohort. May-Stein teaches world history at Pittsburgh Public Schools’ Brashear High School. Her curriculum includes the world wars and the Holocaust.
“I have a major focus on the governments, the actions the governments did and how those impacted people and led to the rise of fascism,” she said.
By the time May-Stein’s 10th graders enter her classroom they’re familiar with the Holocaust’s “gory horrible details,” she continued. “I want them to dive into what made this possible.”
May-Stein spent GCU photographing documents and places, questioning guides and jotting notes.
“This trip was tailored exactly to what I want to teach my kids, so they can be on guard and they can always question the government and think about how certain policies are going to impact people — maybe themselves, maybe other people,” she said.
In Pennsylvania, Holocaust education is not mandatory. A decade ago, Act 70 was signed into law, but the 2014 legislation only recommended Holocaust, genocide and human rights education.
Months ago, Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano introduced a bill mandating schools offer age-appropriate education about the Holocaust, genocide and human
rights violations. Though some lauded his effort, it raised alarms for some GCU participants because of Mastriano’s anti-immigrant sentiments.
Both in the U.S. and Germany, there’s an odd echoing occurring, Kikel said.
Seated in a Berlin office building, the North Hills resident noted the change in rhetoric surrounding immigration since he last studied in Germany in 2015.
“It does kind of mirror a conversation in American politics,” he said.
Days of future past
Former Squirrel Hill resident Josh Leib, 27, joined GCU in order to understand modern Germany’s approach to the past.
“It was a bonus to get a lot of the educational side, but the best parts of the trip have been seeing the historic recollection and reconciliation that the Germans are going through,” Leib said over a cup of coffee in a Berlin courtyard.
Leib studied history at Franklin & Marshall College.
“I was thinking about how meaningful the memorials have been on this trip, and how memorials I’ve been to previously in my life never struck the same chord,” he said.
A week into GCU, participants visited Track 17. The memorial at Grunewald railway station commemorates the deportation of approximately 10,000 Jewish citizens to extermination camps by Deutsche Reichsbahn (the German National Railway).
“Without the railway, and in particular without Deutsche Reichsbahn, the deportation of the European Jews to the extermination camps would not have been possible,” according to Deutsche Bahn.
Hovering mere feet from the rail ties are steel plates detailing deportation dates, number of Jews carried and destinations, including Lodz, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Theresienstadt.
Track 17 was the only site GCU participants visited without a tour guide.
As the group quietly observed the memorial, and heard nearby trains still running, rain fell. The drops caused printouts with passages celebrating dignity, democracy and a “respect” for human life to tear.
“I don’t know where in my head this came from,” but the experience prompted a memory, Leib said. “There was a line that I had read somewhere and wrote down and it was like, ‘And their sorrow was so great, the world wept.’”
The Pittsburgh Allderdice graduate said he’s still processing the visit.
Hours before ascending the memorialized platform, Leib and fellow travelers toured the House of the Wannsee Conference.
Placed beneath glass were 15 pages of typed notes, compiled by SS officer Adolf Eichmann, detailing a 1942 meeting of leading Nazi officials.
“In the course of this final solution of the Jewish question, roughly eleven million Jews will be taken into consideration,” read one document.
“Jews should be removed from the territory of the General Government as rapidly as possible because it is precisely there that the Jew constitutes an eminent danger as a carrier of epidemics and he also constantly disrupts the economic structure of the region through his continuous illicit trading,” read another page.
Before leaving the museum, Leib and this reporter stopped at an information stand.
A sign said, “Publications free of charge — please donate for survivors of Nazi persecution in Ukraine.” Numerous pamphlets lined the shelves. One booklet contained a list of memorial sites. Another item featured a collection of photographs taken by the German Reich between 1938 and 1945. The pictures showed the final moments of persecuted people before deportation.
Carefully placed in front of the pamphlets was a pen bearing the Alternative for Germany party’s logo.
Originally founded to combat European Union bailouts in the early 2010s, AfD transitioned to opposing immigration following the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis.
Months ago, investigative journalists from Correctiv reported members of the far-right party held secret meetings in 2023 to discuss plans for mass deportations of foreign-born Germans and those with German citizenship.
AfD is supported by 18% of German voters and stands to become the second largest party in parliament, according to an Aug. 6 report by Statista.
GCU participants retrieved the pen and delivered it to security at the House of the Wannsee Conference.
Printed on the instrument, adjacent to AfD’s logo, were the words, “Schreiben wir Geschichte.” In English, “We write history.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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