Letters to the editor

Counting the Omer shouldn’t be complicated
Dovid Taub goes on and on about the different ideas connected to the Counting of the Omer, but maybe the Counting of the Omer is just simply the Counting of the Omer, counting the days until we received the Torah at Sinai when we became a unified people (“Sefirat HaOmer is too many things,” May 1). Shavuot celebrates our birth as a nation — a continuing and thriving nation — and the Counting of the Omer is the same as when each of us counts the days until our next birthday, our own individual beginning. Life is simple and beautiful; we shouldn’t make it complicated.

Howard Meyerowitz
Pittsburgh

A journey of history, reconciliation and hope
Thank you to the Jewish Chronicle for covering my recent trip to Germany and my participation in Days of Encounter at the site of the Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp (“Germany trip offers Squirrel Hill resident insights on past and future,” May 8). At a time when rising antisemitism and extremism make daily headlines, I found it heartening to witness the efforts of the residents of Halberstadt and Langenstein, Germany, who participate in an organization called Friends of the Langenstein Zwieberge Memorial, led for many years by Hanka Rosencranz, to financially and operationally support remembrance and reconciliation. Historian Gero Fedtke, director of the Langenstein Zwieberge Memorial, continually delves deeply into the history of the camp. For example, Dr. Fedtke did hours of research to find the family of the last known victim of a death march from Langenstein, and that family traveled 14 hours by bus from war-torn Ukraine to attend the Days of Encounter. Gesine Daifi, also of the Memorial, plans event details connected with the camp and the annual Days of Encounter. Students in the NESHAMA project study daily with their history teacher, Hendrik Heicke, along with Dr. Fedtke and collaborate with students in France, Greece, Croatia and Poland to learn about the Holocaust, to travel together to memorial sites including Auschwitz, and to transmit this knowledge to peers. French documentary filmmaker Dorothee Martin, whose grandfather was imprisoned at Langenstein because of high-level French resistance activities, is working diligently on a film about slave labor and the tunnel in an attempt to save it as a memorial site. And, unique to this camp, an International Group of the Second Generation meets regularly under the leadership of Jean-Louis Bertrand, whose father was imprisoned in the camp. Noel March, whose father was a U.S. Army medic who evacuated and treated the Langenstein inmates, and who informed me about this event, has trained over 20,000 American police officers in a curriculum informed by the Holocaust and funded by the German government about avoiding abuses of power, and he also brings these lessons to his students at the University of Maine Augusta. I made the trip in honor of my father, one of the liberators of Langenstein Zwieberge, and I came away enriched and inspired by the efforts of so many people to preserve history realistically and to pass on this knowledge to future generations.

Rosanne Levine
Pittsburgh