A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [12]
After the fall of East Germany, it was discovered that about a half-million East Germans had contributed to Stasi files. These Stasi revelations had cost people like Irene not only their jobs but some of their friends. Still, the old-line Communists understood. Mia Lehmann, 84, said, “If you believed in your country and a government agent said, ‘This is for the good of the country/wouldn't you cooperate?” Many people might answer negatively to that question, but among Irene's circle were many who had said yes. In the last years of the German Democratic Republic, Irene had grown increasingly disenchanted with the government and, at the same time, increasingly interested in Judaism. After the GDR collapsed, she had no job, no party, no country really, but she did have the Jewish Cultural Association, or Judische Kulturverein, which she had created. She was also a paid member of the Jewish Community, but that was mainly Wessis. If not for the American movies and her unshakable determination that “Wessis make better popcorn,” she wouldn't go over there at all. At her Kulturverein she gathered a small group of the kind of people she had always been around, Jewish Communists.
Unlike the Jewish Community, the Kulturverein was something she could run herself. She liked running things, holding them together with her own wild charisma and whimsy, shouting in her harsh Berlin German or her harsh New York English. She had been born in Washington Heights, New York, where many leftist Jewish families had taken refuge from the Third Reich. Most of the Jews at her Berlin Kulturverein had lived part of their life somewhere else. That was how they or their parents had survived.
These days, Irene's lifetime beliefs earned her only the contempt of the Wessis. There was no more party, no more Stasi, no more inside line. But she did have an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem who called her every Friday and before every Jewish holiday and gave her religious instructions and holiday wishes. Then there were the Lubavitch Hasidim, who had been quick to come to the aid of this little East Berlin community. Lubavitchers are a sect of the Hasidic movement, a more-than-two-hundred-year-old current from Eastern Europe that takes a more spiritual, less intellectual approach to strict observance of Jewish laws and customs. Unlike other Jews, the Lubavitchers have a missionary zeal of near Christian proportions for searching out secular Jews and bringing them back to religion. This has made them unpopular in some Jewish communities, but since the collapse of Communism, they have found fertile ground in Eastern Europe, where Jews for the first time in their lives are trying to learn about Judaism. A West German journalist who happened to be Jewish telephoned Irene to ask about her Passover plans, and as she started describing the event, he asked, “What is your thing for Lubavitchers?”
She explained, “They are poor people without pretension, and they are easy to relate to.” In other words, they act like Ossis, not Wessis.
In 1989, Irene had gone to Brooklyn to see Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the white-bearded Rebbe who at almost 90 was leader of the Lubavitchers. Schneerson, who regularly predicted the coming of the Messiah and according to some of his followers was himself the Messiah, told Irene to get money and help from the official West German Jewish Community. Irene patiently pointed out that he was talking about West Germany, but she was in East Germany. What did this New York rabbi know about Germany? She patiently explained, “But Rebbe, I am in East Berlin, you know. I mean, there's the wall.”
‘Yes, yes, yes. I know,” replied the Rebbe in his Yiddish-inflected English. “But this will not stay. It will change. Everything will change.” Seven months later, to the amazement of almost everyone but Schneerson, the wall came down.
Now, for several weeks before Passover, Irene, who had never