Waldkappel and Harmutsachsen

Rolf meets us in Kassel…never stops offering stories…about everyone and every place…

He collects stories the way he collects music from South India…the Grimm Brothers come from Kassel…museum there…Rosenzweig comes from there…600 books from Rabbi Prager in the library…the Prince of Kassel’s Castle…museum…children dressed

Up like princesses and princes…

Drive to Waldkappel…lots of talk..

The scenery is perfect European countryside

Waldkappel and 15 other small villages all add up to less than 5000

Parsonage across from church..built 1521…though tower was finished in late 14^th century

St Georges…then Lutheran..becasue the prince said so.

Iris…takes care of her own 3 small churches

Rolf picked up the Jews of Harmutsachsen when another pastor died.

Only one Jewish family ever in Waldkappel but many in Harmutsachsen and other small towns…Jewish cemeteries seem to be literally everywhere…

Next day in Sorna, high school named after German martyr, Adam Von Trott… diplomat who worked with Bonhoeffer…met with more than 100 students 10-12^th maybe even 13^th. Amazing questions…how do you feel about visiting us? How do you feel about visiting Auschwitz? Students have never met a Jew…a couple thought they may have seen a Jew//Hassid in an airport???

How do you maintain memories of a community that are no longer living…even though there is a Jewish cemetery literally in front of the door to enter the school…just a few graves, the old cemetery up the hill in the forest…some students did not realize it was a Jewish cemetery…others had never thought about it…but school also has not done anything to make those names apart of their identity…why are Jews buried there when there are NO Jews???

Like Breisach and Irhrigen…communities caring for Jewish cemeteries and Jewish homes and Jewish “ruins”…with no Jews…oxymoronic or a significant new and essential hermeneutic…understanding Jews…with no Jews…ideas..theories…no praxis?

How do you help such communities? How do you///what do you teach…provide them

A theme of the two months…teaching about and FOR Jews where there are NO Jews..

Being the first or ONLY Jew ever to meet..talk…teach…represent???

DEAD JEWS or NO JEWS leaves a distinct impression so that teaching about or explaining about requires more than usual…different than SCSU where there are far more than I have ever realized who like the Germans do not know nor imagine Jews..

With less than 5000 Jews in India…and NO Jews in the villages and towns of Waldkappel and Harmutsachsen…Rotenberg…Sorna..etc..how does one teach in a vacuum? The purpose of the teaching…the goal…how do measure results…?

Creating individual museums…mikvehs…synagogues…gedenken buchen??? Are we doing the work of the Leibeskind museum in the villages…or the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe…for Sarah, social work student…Anne student for the ministry in Hamburg???

Seeing the Jewish homes in Harmutsachsen…like in Breisach…history that makes Jews live…listening to Walter Holstein…bringing a broken tea cup to the Jewish store for 5 cents worth of mustard!!! His smile..and animation in telling the stories…Hammershalg’s store…Ilse Hammershag whose legs were destroyed…who talked to Walter from the window…Jews WHOSE LIVES ARE STILL VIVID IN THE MEMORIES OF GERMANS…Walter whose friend wrote him that he saw Heinz Lorge in Riga>?? Or Kassel>?? And as member of the Wehrmacht gave him a loaf of bread…

How does one remember a class mate…photo from 1933…Heinz…whose home you walked past every day…and then they are GONE….what is the burden of that memory??

Is Walter Holstein indifferent…does he want to repent…for what…to whom…do Jews have an obligation…an opportunity to access those memories has healing…DO NOT FORGET…..BUT FORGIVE??? To whom…from whom Rolf??Iris?Gunther???Louise Jakob?

Louisa Jakob…101..blind…but more alive and sees more than ANYBODY!!

RUDE TO HER FELLOW OLD FOLKS????

Reads in brail and pissed off that books are now limited…novels???in German?

Looked out the window on Nov 9 1938 after hearing the thugs who were attacking Max Hammerschalg…go inside..we did not come to hurt you…she HEARD THE VOICES AND KNEW WHO THEY WERE…she is tough…maybe the TOUGHEST EVER!!!

She grew up with the Jews…is her memory of their lives..their living..more important than the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe????

Spielberg testimonies of the survivors…yes, obviously….but of the witnesses???

Should we ask that Spielberg also tape…video…Louise??? Walter??? If only the survivors..then will we be able to hear the witnesses who lived with and among…

How do we help Rolf…how do we leave resources for Sarah and Anne??

We are leaving this wonderful new friend and the many people we never expected to meet and know we will be coming back...to fill the empty and abandoned synagogue of Harmutsachsen.

Reflections on Germany

Germany...we found it very difficult to get seats from India to Europe...finally we got on Air France from Bangalore to Paris>>>Frankfurt>>>Berlin

We went to Bangalore...had a lovely dinner with some of the faculty from UTC...went upstairs to check in for a 2:30 am flight and found out that a terrible storm in Paris had forced cancellation of our flight...hours later in the Bangalore Airport...we were put on Qatar Airlines.

Flying on the Qatar Airlines…was ONE long painful experience of GATE KEEPERS!

Doha…the skyline from afar…real Oil Arabs…Muslims from Indodesia..foreign workers and a Mosque in the Airport with entrances for males and females..

Finally....after arguing and then purchasing a different ticket...we got there

Berlin…a big city with great beer…

The Neue Synagogue…a second visit..climbing all the way to the top

Lots of school children visiting, non-Jews asking questions

Visiting the beautiful Lutheran Cathedral nearby…rebuilt in all its glory..

You can’t get in the small new shul only open for Shabbat..so most people see what WAS!

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe…in the middle of a neighborhood within 100 yards of the completely redone Brandenburg Gate..the street is closed off for the British Embassy…walking to the memorial there are no significant signs…though you see the steelea…we saw several teens playing on them..taking photos..smiling…I was upset..Machelle asked me not to make a scene…a security guard eventually found them and told them to stop…the rows of matte black different heights…”kittywampus”…all angles…NO straight rows…all the rows end at the street…houses, apts…souvinere stores…cafes…then you find the entrance down into the information center…NOT a memorial nor a museum…simple wall INFORMATION of history…then a room with names of the camps on the wall…and in the floor back-lit statements by victims…pictures of handwritten or original statements…translated…different ideas.. very well done…quiet…everyone is tooking down…then several large back-lit boards with families from all over Europe…their stories…large pictures…far right listing of everyone in the photo of who died and where…the diversity of Jewish life that was destroyed..

Shoah and Holocaust are according to Rolf, foreign idioms that do not translate immediately to German…issue of immediate accessibility…MURDERED has total clarity…forever changes KJV translation of Asseret HaDibrot…Nov. Pogrom NOT KRISTALLNACHT which is a REICH idiom…like the use of Maranos or Flashas..

Today Germans who know use, So-Called Kristallnacht

Berlin does really…own its own reality of being the origin of the Unthinkable.. USHMM is not a memorial site like Auschwitz or even Warsaw or Barbi Yar nor is it Yad VaShem where victims and survivors live…whose memory…purpose of the memory…who is asking me NOT TO FORGET??? Berlin understands…this is the place where it began or this is the place where the perpetrators gave the orders…led the attacks.

Train from Berlin to Kassel…beautiful and very quick

The caste system...is really EVIL

The REAL evil of Hinduism…is not idolatry, but the caste system. I have been tutored by several new friends about the ugly reality of the caste system that continues to systemically strangle India at every level. I had read in several books over the years I have been coming and certainly experienced it from afar as I witnessed the social structures as a visiting outsider. Now I am learning from those who live with their own burdens of discrimination how Dalits, the Untouchables and minority or ‘backward’ castes continue to face daily forms of this ancient Hindu social network…even though it is supposedly outlawed. The tragedy is that the caste system is now fully engaged even in the Indian Christian communities…and the missionaries had promised that Christianity was the ultimate anti-dote, the messianic egalitarian society.

My new tutors have all affirmed that my sense that Hinduism breeds pacifity…people accept their destiny-by-birth. Everything that the Manu, the ancient Hindu lawgiver, stipulated about the caste remains now after more than 3000 years.! While typing this blog entry, a student at UTC came to me asking for help, after caring for his wife’s serious health care needs, he requires help with his tuition costs…there are no grants, scholarships or even loans…he has been threatened and humiliated by the bursar’s office. When I asked why a seminary would treat him this way, he said, that the administrators were a higher caste…that he is from a very small minority group, which has no power in the church body. I met a physicist who is interested in Hebrew and has visited Israel and taught at the Hebrew University…he too felt that the caste limits him at his laboratory. Even among seminary professors there are painful experiences of caste not scholarship being the primary context of their destiny.

Caste confuses me because it is so OUTRAGEOUS that you would expect people to throw the system off as an ancient yoke of fundamentalism, but even the brightest people seem resigned to it being an anchor to the soul of India. It is far force that racism or social class competition…it defines every aspect of a complete destiny. It is expected that if you are in a caste which puts 18 above you….that you will be oppressed by all that are above you and that those below you EXPECT you to do the same to them. Regardless of your intellectual insights the entire village, family community, religious community, school and professional communities…they all sustain, maintain and expect the system to work.

I went to the Ghandi museum in Madurai and followed his famous Salt Walk in which hundreds of thousands eventually joined him to protest the British..I naively wonder why hundreds of thousands of Dalits and minority castes are not in the streets protesting even single Brahmin application of the ancient caste law..? Everyone of the children in the Living India Home of Hope is a Dalit…an untouchable so for me this is not just an intellectual concern.

I am wondering about Dalits and Jews…how the parallels work?

Temple Town...

Temple town….Madurai, Tamil Nadu…the ancient capital and famous for its Sri Mennakshi Temple, one of the three largest in all of India…where literally thousands of devotees flock to worship as Hindus..its sheer size is beyond description, 4 towers for the four directions..nothing in Madurai can be taller than these towers..in vivid colors, the many gods and goddesses of the Hindu culture

The Temple of Pandai…a much smaller local temple where I saw to live goats sacrificed..amazing experience. Surely this will be as close as I will ever come to physically experiencing the ancient cult of the Bible. The goats had garlands of flowers to signify that they were sacred…they were washed with buckets of water. Then a man, not a priest, interestingly, dressed in a traditional lungi and black shirt, with a long curved knife cut off the head of the goat and one hoof. The animal “kicked” for several minutes as it bled out and then was taken to the priests, the meat is cut up and made into food for the people of the local village. On a simple straw mat where the heads of several goats and chickens/roosters-cocks…it was very hot yesterday, nearly 90…the remains of the sacrifices were attracting “thousands” of flies.

I had tried to find some common religious realm in the large temple as I watched hundreds of Hindus offer baskets of ‘food’, flower garlands, incense, and fire to the many idols and priests. Again I tried to open myself to whether I could DO this, sacrifice animals as Leviticus requires in very detailed discipline…I actually wanted the animal sacrifice to be ‘extraordinary’. I have taught for many years that there is NO spirituality per se in the biblical act of worship…and as I witnessed yesterday, it is “work”…which is the play on the Hebrew-Avodah! I went with a new friend, John Samuel, an excellent OT/ Hebrew Bible scholar who wrote his second PhD on Gen 22-An Interfaith Perspective. John had never been to this Temple and was also deeply “shaken” by the experience. He said several times, if this is just two goats, a few severed heads…what must it have been like when tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands came during the festivals to Jerusalem, imagine the blood and physical remnants of the animals, the heat and stench. I no longer need to imagine what the Bible is describing, and can say without any equivocation that I could not and would not have “enjoyed” the religion of our biblical ancestors.

Temple Town...I have SEEN IT ALL...NOW!

Sights/Sounds/Experiences in Paris

Sights and experiences in Paris:

More fashion in every store window than I can fathom

Immigrants from Senegal are now selling the trinkets that 40 years ago..the French sold.

Lots and lots of expensive motor cycles/bikes with winter lap warmers.

Chocolate is everywhere…and I ate a lot of it.

The Metro like London’s Tube has the best people watching…

Walking in Paris, like NYC, London and Barcelona….is the breathing of global realities.

The Memorial to the Martyrs of Deportation in Paris near Notre Dame is a military memorial…highlights those who resisted…and Jews.

My heart is in very good condition..I walked to the top of Notre Dame and all the steps through Momartre up to the Scare Coeur…but I still gained weight eating.

Walking through the Paris Flea market…is amazing, right next to North African leather jackets and tennis/basketball shoes..

When you get out of the train station at Versailles the first things you see are a McDonalds and Starbucks!

Shouldn’t there be a law that outside of America we are banned from such shamelessness?

We need more cafes! In both Paris and Copenhagen..regardless of the weather, people stopped and sat down and talked…we need to bring European cafes to us if they get Starbucks and McDonalds?

The amount of Euros..guesses are as much as 12 Billion Euros (???) being spent on Versailles’ restoration is OBSCENE…no matter the source(s)…the greatest symbol of opulence in European history…nothing left of the peasants’ world except the Millennial Goals which could be reached sooner if the West chose to postpone the restorations of history’s extravagances… how strange that the gold leaf around window frames and roof frames is necessary in order to bring Versailles back to pre-revolution elegance…even as there are 6,000 children @ day that will die for lack of clean window…how can we do this…? In our world of truly obscene gaps between wealth and poverty we have yet to achieve even a consensus on human communal obligations to each other. I and my family have all we NEED and in my view should NOT have all we WANT at the expense of some having merely what they need to survive!

Marais…Paris’ Jewish quarter…we felt immediately at home…challah warm…great pickles…art…books…Jewish stars…

Louvre and Muse D’Orssey… Art that sustains the soul…provides perspective from within history..the restorations and modernization of the Louvre is thrilling…

Leaving Paris...and Denmark reminds me that the WEST is called DEVELOPED...past tense while India is called DEVELOPING...present tense. The truly historic and uplifting civilization of the WEST cannot be merely 'past', yet landing in Mumbai with its teeming streets filled with garbage is where the future is being forged...its past is surely as grand in every aspect but not as accessible as seeing Paris...I am wondering if our use of words has backed us into a corner of many misunderstandings.....I need to think about this...

Denmark..parenting...Paris...vacationing

Sorry...it has been a while since my last blog...I spent a couple of days teaching in Gujarat, think I ate something that is still creating problems...flew to Mumbai picked up T and Eve...then flew through Paris to Copenhagen to Aarhus...to bring Eve to school. Flying from 87 degrees to snow and 10 degrees in one day...from one of the largest cities/airports to one of the smallest, 400,000 with an airport smaller than a large strip mall...that is CULTURE SHOCK.
When we got in the cab in Aarhus, Eve said..listen Dad...and the taxi was playing "Casey Jones" by the Grateful Dead...the driver said he saw them in Copenhagen in the Day! It was a sign according to Eve.

Next few days I was only available to the girls...oh and that problem from Indian food!
Aarhus is really great...an amazing Lutheran Cathedral with 15th cent. frescoes and an organ we heard on Sunday...thrilling.

Had coffee at a wonderful bookstore that claims it has the BEST BARISTA (by competition!) in all of Europe....not sure I could taste...but NO big machines do the work...serious old time stuffing the cuff, the way my son believes it should be done. The weather was very cold, the coldest we are told in 23 years....Machelle surprised Eve by trying to get their on Sunday...she did several hours late because of weather in Copenhagen...we left her...and as of yesterday she is having a great time.

We spent 2 days in Copenhagen, in the midst of a mini-blizzard seeing the town, which I imagine during the summer is truly wonderful. Saw their new Jewish museum designed by David Leibskind...wonderful! Synagogue closed and no phone contact...bummer! Flew out very early yesterday to Paris, visiting our two nieces going to fashion design school...and to fulfill some promises to Machelle and Talia.

Our first day was great..wandering...Opera House, being completely redone on the outside, saw the Chagall ceiling...I saw it 40 years ago when I was here on my way to Israel to study...saw the Eifel Tower at night...dramatic! Our little apt is around the corner from a street that is right out of the movies...delightful.

Going to Notre Dame etc...this life is beyond wonder...travel...seeing your daughter get to the Danish school of journalism..where her classmates are from Prague...Belgium, Milan, Iran, Madrid...okay! More later....