A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [124]
Several years after Irene's first synagogue visit, her Jewish friends—and that was most of her friends—were talking increasingly about their Jewish identity. Their parents had always said they were Jewish, and yet they knew nothing about being Jewish. Now, in their thirties, they were beginning to ask themselves exactly who they were. If they had a Jewish identity at all, it was a negative one. They were Jews because they were not Germans. They couldn't be Germans because of what Germans had done to the Jews. But they wanted to be something more than just not German. A group of them, all officials in the university youth organization, started going together to lectures and cultural events at the East Berlin Jewish Community. Irene found this only slightly more impressive than going to synagogue. “Also very German,” she reported. “You know, they had all the chairs, and then there was the lecture, and then ‘I thank you in the name of blah, blah, blah and thank you for coming/and that was it!”
Nevertheless, in 1975 she became a registered member of the East Berlin Jewish Community. The following year she took her son, Stefan, who, a year past bar mitzvah age, had never been to a synagogue, to a Rosh Hashanah service on Rykestrasse. Stefan said, “For me it was interesting to sit in a synagogue with all the people and to get a hat.”
Stefan had been raised by his non-Jewish father's parents in a village near Berlin. When his father remarried, they moved back to Berlin, a five-minute walk from the Rykestrasse synagogue. Now he was having more contact with his mother, who informed him for the first time, shortly before taking him to the synagogue, that he was a Jew. After Irene had taken him the first time, he would often drop in on a Friday evening. He knew no Hebrew and could not follow the service, but in time he memorized certain passages. Eventually he decided to be circumcised and bar mitzvahed. The circumcision was easy to arrange, since the head of the East Berlin Community, Peter Kirchner, was a doctor and a mohel, someone who performed ritual circumcisions. Stefan remembers almost no one coming to his bar mitzvah. Irene remembers it as a big community success. But Irene was the only family member present. Her father not only would not go, but for years after he refused to speak to his grandson. Stefan's father and stepmother, both non-Jews, were very upset by what they saw as a bizarre extremist activity.
But Stefan was not religious. He simply did it to have a Jewish identity. “In Germany the people don't know Judaism as a religion. They know it as a population,” he explained. “I thought it was a bit of solidarity, and I loved being a member of this population.” He had spent his childhood being moved from one home to another and one identity to another, and as he approached adulthood he was looking for solid things to hold onto. He was drawing closer to his mother at a time when she too was in search of an identity. Mother and son became Jews together. “My mother is Jewish, so I am a Jew,” he said.
But Irene rarely went to services, and when she did, not knowing Hebrew, they made very little sense to her. The first time she ever understood a service was when a rabbi came from Toronto and gave a Yom Kippur service in German. The other thing that stood out about that service was an argument that broke out on the women's side about whether the service was a legitimate excuse to skip the Monday local Communist party meeting. Gradually, Irene got increasingly involved. She began attending the annual Hanuk-kah party and a few other social events. In the early 1980s she was invited to join the board of the Jewish Community.