Picture in the current special exhibition “The Whole Truth” accompanying the question: Jew or non-Jew? Marilyn Monroe on the cover of the Modern Screen Magazine, November 1956
© Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe

The number of converts to Judaism is invariably small. According to the data collected by the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland, on average 64 conversions are carried out yearly in the various German-Jewish communities, and since the year 2000, the number has remained fairly stable. Nor has the size of the Jewish communities varied much. For over a decade, the number of members has stabilized at around 105.000. In relation to the size of the community, the total number of converts since 1990, 1.366, makes up under one percent of the Jewish community. The number of Jews leaving the communities is slightly higher, around one hundred a year, yet the number is not particularly meaningful, because it includes people who leave for all sorts of reasons, including financial. By all accounts, today’s Jewish converts are a minute and exotic minority.

Yet the topic is currently being discussed with much enthusiasm. The ETH Zürich held a series of lectures on conversion in fall 2012 (“Konversion. Interreligiöse Übertragungen, Grenzziehungen und Zwischenräume”), just after the University of Trier held a conference on the same topic in June 2012 (“Orts-Wechsel, Blick-Wechsel, Rollen-Wechsel: Konversion in Räumen jüdischer Geschichte”). The Jewish Museum Berlin’s special exhibition “The Whole Truth” presents the fluidity of Jewish identity with biographies of Jews, non-Jews, part-Jews and several converts, among them the actress Marilyn Monroe. Most significantly, the Jewish museums in Hohenems, Frankfurt and Munich together with many cooperating partners, are showing a joint exhibition on conversion, called “Treten Sie ein! Treten Sie aus!” Their perspective is cultural, ritual and psychological, with exhibits and texts illustrating individual conversion stories in three phases of the process: the before, the passage itself and the aftermath. The stories are anticipated by pictograms displaying the religions rejected and adopted. These cover a wide range, including Christianity and Islam, but also Schamanism, Buddhism – and, humourously, Pastafarianism, an atheist parody of religion, which pays tribute to a spaghetti monster as an object of worship. The texts are concise, sometimes ironic, and inclusive, with contributions by converts as well as scientists and intellectuals in the catalog and the extensive program of events.

Bhikkhu Nyanaponika alias Siegmund Feniger in Sri Lanka
© Forest Hermitage Archives, Sri Lanka

If not practice, what then accounts for the widespread interest in a ritual only few are engaging in? Looking around, what characterizes modern German spirituality is not a mass movement to substitute one religious culture for another, but either the attempt to reconcile multiple – on a personal level, in relationships, and within communities or societies – or the rejection of religion. According to the European Commission’s Eurobarometer (2005), the majority of Germans are not religious. Christian churches, which have been facing dwindling numbers of adherents for many years, have begun discussing whether and how to rededicate their buildings. And even the Jewish communities are not nearly as large as they could be. While more than 200.000 Jews have immigrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union alone, the communities number only half that size, which means that the large majority has chosen not to join them. If conversion is becoming a popular subject of debate, perhaps this is due to it being a foil for discussing precisely what it is not: namely, religious loyalty.

Naomi Lubrich, Media

The Involuntary Moose

Last summer, a snigger went viral in the Jewish online community when an eBay entrepreneur posted a pendant of a Navajo moose. Labeled a “Unique Vintage Navajo Moose 925 Sterling Silver Pendant, marking 0.8 grams,” the trinket for sale was in fact a Jewish amulet depicting the Hebrew word “chai” for “life/living.” The motif is popular in Jewish jewelry. It consists of the two letters chet and yod and is not commonly mistaken for an animal. But this particular example simplified the letters and joined them together, which made them appear, quite truly, like an antlered moose in Native American style.

Psalm 67 is engraved on this pendant. Amulets in shape of a hand are popular in Judaism and Islam in North Africa and in the Middle East, as well as in Eastern Christianity.
© Jüdisches Museum der Schweiz, photo: D. Hofer

Unintentional as it was, this glitch exposes the ways in which symbols and references can move from one culture to another, sometimes morphing, and generating new myths. As it appears, talismans, amulets, and charms are particularly prone to intercultural exchange. The exhibit “1001 Amulets. Protection and Magic – Faith or Superstition?” at the Jewish Museum in Basel (jointly curated with the Bibel + Orient Museum in Freiburg) presents the idea that cultures have shared, varied, and absorbed each other’s motifs for millennia. “1001″ refers to the collection of stories compiled in medieval Arabic, and published under the title Arabian Nights, or, in German, 1001 Nacht.
Accordingly, many of the amulets on display have motifs common to Jewish and Arabic cultures, such as the Scarabaeus beetle or the chamsa (fatma) hand on the exhibition poster.

The back side of the scarab was retroactively engraved and worn as an amulet. Middle East, 5th-10th century
© Jüdisches Museum der Schweiz, photo: D. Hofer

In Europe, Jews and Christians traded religious iconography with one another as well. In his study on “Jewish Magic and Superstition” Joshua Trachtenberg describes a variety of Christian artifacts with Jewish motifs believed to have magical powers, such as psalm verses, or when knowledge of these was insufficient, pseudo-lettering that was supposed to look like Hebrew.

In late antiquity, zodiac wheels and other Greco-Roman signs found their way into Jewish religious houses, such as the sixth-century Beth Alpha synagogue near Beit She’an, Israel. On a mosaic floor, the constellations are ordered in circular form around an image of the sun god Helios – a representation of pagan polytheism, offending the Jewish prohibition on forming images of the divine.

This pendant has the shape of a cross. The divine name Shaddai is engraved in Hebrew on the front, on the back the letter ה. Probably of Christian origin, 19th/20th century.
© Jüdisches Museum der Schweiz, photo: D. Hofer

Jean Seznec, a historian whose main work “The survival of the pagan gods” was published 1940, one year after Trachtenberg’s study, identified Greek and Roman gods in medieval art, some of whom acquired distinctly Christian traits, such as halos. Others received unexpected attributes. Pluto, the god of the underworld, holds a jug in his hand in a manuscript of Hrabanus Maurus, a ninth-century bishop. Seznec ascribes this unlikely vessel to a confusion of the words orca, for jug, and orcus, for realm of the dead.

In light of the history of religious exchange, it is a pity that the true identity of last year’s eBay Navajo moose was exposed. Who knows what new mythology it might have spawned?

Naomi Lubrich, Media

Jakob Steinhardt, Illustration to the Book of Ruth, 1955-1959, woodcut
© Jewish Museum Berlin, donation of Josefa Bar-On Steinhardt, Nahariya, Israel

Shavuot begins this year on the eve of 14 May and ends two days later. It is a holiday of unusually multifaceted significance, and it is rediscovered and redefined by every generation anew. Originally, the holiday celebrated the beginning of the harvest season, which included a pilgrimage to the Jerusalem Temple. Pilgrims brought their first fruit and two loaves of wheat-bread to the temple. In the Talmud, Shavuot is conceived of as the festival on which the population of Israel received the Torah. In preparation of this donation, the holiday is also described as an Atzeret, a joyous assembly, which involves a night of communal thinking and debating. Tikkun lel Shavuot, as this nightly symposium is called in Hebrew, means literally: ‘The betterment during the night of the Feast of Weeks.’ It was first mentioned in the kabbalistic Zohar-book and gained importance in the 16th century.

The Jewish understanding of collective studying and discussing differs from that of the Greeks; Tikkun lel Shavuot mainly revolves around reading the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and the Zohar. Whoever associates the word ‘symposium’ with platonic dialogue and a banquet, misunderstands the character of the nightly assembly, but participates in a larger trend: over the past decades, the spectrum of the Tikkun was extended to such a degree that this tradition is now followed in Jewish progressive circles, and even in secular ones.

This development might be traceable to, among others, the Biblical story of Ruth, which is read on Shavuot. As emphasized by the theme of the Tikkun lel Shavuot in Berlin, the story tells of female solidarity. In the center of the book are Naomi, an Israelite woman, and her daughter-in-law Ruth, who is a Moabite. After Naomi’s son – Ruth’s husband – dies, she follows her mother-in-law with the words: “for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy G-d my G-d” (Ruth 1:16).

The Israeli artist Adi Nes has dedicated a work to this story that is part of a cycle of biblical figures. Naomi and Ruth are shown here while collecting leftover onions in the poor area south of Tel Aviv, thereby being associated with marginalized groups in Israeli society.

Adi Nes, Ruth and Naomi, 2007
© Adi Nes 2007, shown here with friendly permission of the artist

Since Ruth, who is not Jewish, is accepted into the Israelite city Bethlehem, and King David, from whose house the Messiah is said to one day originate, is one of her descendants, the story is an example of an unusual openness toward foreigners. It would be nice if this Biblical story of female solidarity and social integration would one day spill over from the long night of Tikkun into today’s daily life.

Mirjam Wenzel and Avner Ofrath, Media

Gangnam-style protest reached the art world with particular fervour. Chinese activist Ai Weiwei released a Gangnam Style video in protest of censorship in his country. Reacting to this video, Jewish-Indian artist Anish Kapoor – whose works are on display starting 18 May 2013 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin – animated art museums in England and the USA to shoot a video in support of Ai Weiwei. Shortly thereafter, the Philadelphia Art Museum posted a video with its staff members dancing to the Gangnam tune, though their object of contention is not immediately apparent:

As far as museums go, ours has a particularly large number of causes for protest. And being supporters of civil intervention, especially in modern media form, there is much to be said for producing a Jewish Museum Gangnam-style clip, or one in the style of Harlem Shake, which surpassed Gangnam in popularity in February 2013.

Yet PSY’s use of performative contradiction – he resorts to the very images of consumerism he protests against – might backfire quite awkwardly in a screenplay on religious and social tolerance. We could find ourselves in somewhat of a muddle if the irony of a film showing, say, museum staff dancing horse-style up to a group of drunken men, drinking their beverages and wooing their women would prove to be elusive… Or not? What plot would you suggest for a Jewish Museum Gangnam-style video clip?

 Naomi Lubrich, Media

Book Burning Memorial
This photo by Charlotte Nordahl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

May 10th marked the climax of spring 1933’s “Action against the Un-German Spirit” (Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist), an uprising of German students against professors who were political dissidents or Jewish, as well as ‘subversive writing’ (zersetzendes Schrifttum). We all know the images of the carefully prepared book burning in Berlin. Micha Ullmann’s memorial on today’s Bebelplatz responds to the notorious call to flames with a hauntingly quiet and empty library.

The Jewish Museum Berlin is now exhibiting some of the books which were taken off their shelves and thrown onto the pyre. The items on display are from George Warburg’s collection.

Viewing the bindings, the layouts, and the printing of these works is a pleasure in itself. We were all the more touched by George Warburg’s motivation for building his collection: in this video interview, he explains not only which works are his favorites, but he also describes his collection as an attempt, retroactively, to save the books which were burned, banned, and eliminated by National Socialists.

His “memorial to the idiocy of Nazi censorship” returns the volumes to daylight which are remembered in Ullmann’s subterranean library.

Mirjam Wenzel, Media

“Why do some Jews rock back and forth while they pray? Boris”
© photo: Thomas Valentin Harb, Jewish Museum Berlin

Dear Boris,
Many people have asked why religious Jews sway back and forth while praying. This very old custom is called shuckling in Yiddish and means to rock, shake, or swing. As with many customs, it is easier to describe when and where it was practiced, than to answer definitively, why people shuckle while praying and studying the Torah.

The habit was noted already by the prophet Mohammed, who is said to have advised his adherents not to sway back and forth during religious services.

In 12th century Spain, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi reported that ten or more men sometimes read from just one book. To do this, they each walked up to the book, bent over the text and then took a step backward again, making room for the next reader.

In another source, psalm 35,10, the words “All my bones shall say: ‘HaShem, who is like unto Thee” are interpreted as an appeal to involve one’s whole body in prayer.

Questions on the wall in the special exhibition “The Whole Truth”
© photo: Thomas Valentin Harb, Jewish Museum Berlin

Another explanation explains rhythmic movement as a way to concentrate on praying and learning, and ward off distracting thoughts. According to the mystical text Zohar, a person’s soul emanates from divine light. Every time a Jew engages with the Torah, the light of his or her soul ignites, which is why he or she moves like the flame of a candle. This striking image illustrates the desire of many religious Jews to connect directly with God by learning and praying.

Some rabbis of the past have permitted their congregants to shuckle only during select prayers. In the 19th century, German Jews were eager to adapt their behavior to that of majority society, which is why most rejected shuckling. Today, shuckling is generally understood as a physical accompaniment to the rhythm of prayers and as a way to concentrate on them more deeply.

Miriam Goldmann, Curator of the Special Exhibition “The Whole Truth”

This work by Iris Blochel-Dittrich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Information about fines and tickets occasionally lands on my desk, since I am in charge of a team that travels around Germany in our museum bus doing mobile educational work at schools. In the struggle against ignorance and anti-Semitism, speed is of the essence. So I flipped through to the second page to ascertain how much we owed this time: € 104,80. For animal custody and veterinary services?! This is no normal parking ticket.

I turned back to the first page and read the letter from top to bottom: “Saving Ms. K’s cat.” Did my colleagues run over a cat, or did they find one and take it to the animal shelter? I puzzled on. Eventually I understood that Ms. K had died and her cat had been taken to the city veterinary emergency room. Since the Jewish Museum Berlin was a part-inheritor of Ms. K’s estate, we were liable for a share of the resulting costs. Ms. K was a benefactor of the museum and in her bequest was – among other things – responsibility for her cat. I had unjustly suspected my team of speeding.

I opened the next letter: a fine from the Hanseatic city of Rostock for driving 8 km/hour over the speed limit. Well, then.

Ariane Kwasigroch, Education

PS: The rescued cat that belonged to Ms. K is doing well, by the way. After a week she was picked up from the emergency vet by her caretaker.

Apocalyptic Landscape by Ludwig Meidner, 1913
© Ludwig Meidner-Archive, Jewish Museum Frankfurt-am-Main

Yet in the first scene of Schindel’s novel a world unfolds: Vienna of the Waldheim affair, from 1985 to 1989. During the 1986 Austrian election campaign, a debate ignited around the conservative candidate, Kurt Waldheim, who was indicted for war crimes. In his autobiography, he had concealed his time as a Wehrmacht-officer. Represented in the novel by the figure Johann Wais, he professes “that he had done nothing that one hundred thousand other Austrians had not done, too.” This is precisely why he functions “as an involuntary clarifying machine.” The prototypical Austrian, who would have liked to be a proud executor of duty yet never more than a spectator, and, actually ‘Hitler’s first victim,’ rallied artists and intellectuals constituting “the other Austria” against him. Accordingly, theatre and literature play an important role in the novel, in particular the Viennese Burgtheater, which, led for the first time by a German director, sparks controversies by staging political plays. Schindel also picks up on historical debates surrounding the anti-fascist monument in Vienna.

© Suhrkamp Verlag

The author helps himself to the ‘quarry of history.’ But he constructs autonomous characters, who emancipate themselves from their historical counterparts and function even without knowledge of their political referents. Surrounding the literary renditions of Waldheim, Peymann and Hrdlicka, as well as Simon Wiesenthal are a large number of other figures who are not based on any specific historical model. The Jewish fighter in Spain and survivor of Auschwitz, Edmund Fraul, and his wife Rosa, who is also a Jewish survivor, convey the historical experience of ‘surviving’ as being a matter not settled once and for all. Rather, their challenge is to “continue to live” (weiter leben, as formulated in the title of Ruth Klüger’s autobiography, which was translated into English as still alive). This pertains in particular to their encounters with former tormentors, who had been acquitted or had received only short sentences. The emotional and climatic coldness surrounding the eponymous protagonist seizes the readers and provides a vivid image for the consequences of Auschwitz, as do the “quagmires of thought” and “anthills under skullcaps,” which haunt the married couple in their sleep.

In an unusual, moving, yet blunt description, Fraul opens his armor of coldness upon meeting, of all people, the former concentration camp overseer Rosinger, and ends up crying “tears of ice.” Though Rosinger also suffers from insomnia, the novel is careful not to blur the line dividing perpetrators from the persecuted. The past is made immediate when “both residents of Auschwitz” tell one-another stories “about our home” from their diverging perspectives.

“nutritious letter-dishes”

The novel’s present is told with much humor and via a large number of viewpoints. Since many figures act as first-person narrators, each chapter arouses a tension as to who is speaking. Much of the large cast of characters work in arts and politics, but some are cardiologists, as befits the theme of emotion. Various generations, genders and standpoints are represented within the landscape of memory – which is at times better described as a landscape of forgetting. Yet the characters are not confined to specific types. On the contrary, only few novels equip their figures with the amount of desire for love and life as Robert Schindel’s. The young Dolores, who adorns her voluptuous neckline with a Star of David, for instance, is a counterweight to her painful name. As Stephan, her non-Jewish boyfriend, notes in his diary, she is passionate in bed and invites him to a “merry celebration” of Pessah. The figures, and with them the readers, at times lose oversight in the midst of erotic desire, bringing the novel closer to life than any conceivable sociological categorization. The author appears to love his figures; even Johann Wais is portrayed with a certain amount of sympathy.

More than six hundred pages offer ample “nutritious letter-dishes.” Along the way, the readers re-encounter acquaintances from Gebürtig and, by the end of the novel, forge ties with new ones. Since Schindel recently spoke of a trilogy, there is good reason to hope for a sequel by this artist of narration and language.

Mirjam Bitter, Media

Numerous Iron Crosses can be found in the Jewish Museum’s collection, in many cases together with the respective certificates.

Iron Crosses in Kreuzberg – view of the object data bank of the Jewish Museum
© Jewish Museum Berlin

They nearly all date from the time of the First World War, in which around 100,000 Jewish soldiers participated on the German side. Among them were Julius Fliess (1876-1955) and Max Haller (1892-1960), whose medals are now in the Jewish Museum’s possession.

Medals given to Max Haller (1892-1960), 1915-1918
© Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of I. Dinah Haller, photo: Jens Ziehe

A special variety of Iron Cross was known as the “Cross of Honor”. President of the Reich Hindenburg bestowed them in July of 1934 – on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the beginning of World War I – on former soldiers and the widows and parents of fallen soldiers. In the C.V. Newspaper, a weekly of the Jewish press with a high circulation, an article about the Cross of Honor from 19. July 1934 elaborates:

“… The German Jews to whom the conditions of the bestowal applies, but indeed all German Jews, will bear the Cross of Honor with pride and will thus keep the memory of their participation in a great era of collective German history alive.”

Twenty Crosses of Honor from the years 1934-1937 are now in the Jewish Museum’s collection. Bit by bit in the coming months they will be made accessible to the public, together with biographical information on their one-time recipients, in the online databank of the Jewish Museum.

Medals given to Julius Fliess (1876-1955), 1914-1918
© Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Dorothee Fliess, photo: Jens Ziehe

In the memory of German-Jewish families – especially for the children of participants in the war and for those who have made familial bequests – the stories and the preservation of material legacies from the First World War have great significance. Frequently these memorabilia are offered to the museum as the primary, and sometimes only, surviving object of a family’s history. In many conversations with donors, World War I was and remains a central theme. The stories about it are always intertwined with the later catastrophe and, for us, chronicling the era is a key concern.

I can still vividly recall an encounter I had in my office in the Libeskind Building on 28. September 2000, one year before the museum opened. An elderly lady, native of Berlin now living in Sydney, told me about her father, a highly decorated participant in World War I and member of the Reich’s league of Jewish front-line soldiers. On that very day in the year 1938, as the family prepared to leave Germany for Australia, he went with his daughter for the last time to the Berlin park of Tiergarten. There, weeping, he threw his Iron Cross into the river Spree. This moment etched itself indelibly on his daughter’s memory, and she spoke about it 62 years later as if it were yesterday.

Leonore Maier, Collections

This was a truly extraordinary experience. The best moments were when the visitors started talking not just to me but to each other, and we wound up talking about Wagner and the weather rather than ‘just’ about growing up Jewish – or, more specifically, in my case as the daughter of a Jewish-American mother and a German, (formerly) Protestant father – in Germany and how odd it was to be sitting in a glass showcase in an exhibition.

Signe Rossbach in the exhibition “The Whole Truth”, April 8, 2013
© Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Michal Friedlander

I was reminded of the moment in 1998 when I returned to Germany from the U.S. (although I did not want to see it that way at the time). The German publisher I was working for in New York had just been appointed State Minister of Culture by Gerhard Schröder, and I continued working for him in the Federal Chancellery, first in Bonn, then in Berlin. Back in New York, an editor at Henry Holt said to me: “Well, well, isn’t that a great job for a good little Jewish girl, working in the German government?” I thought about it, and said: “Exactly.”

So, I guess this was what brought me to sit in a glass showcase in a show at the Jewish Museum Berlin, where I have been working for twelve years now, on a seemingly quiet Monday afternoon. In my two hours of being a living exhibition object, I …

… was asked:

By a German woman: “Is it obligatory in Judaism to attend synagogue?”

By a French woman: “Don’t you agree that it was a big mistake of the Allies after WW II (sic!) to found the state of Israel?”

By a German student: “Is it true that the Jews don’t look forward to rewards in the afterlife, but center their deeds on the present life?”

By an American speaking German to me with a heavy accent even after I volunteered to speak English (obviously he was addressing a larger – largely imaginary – audience than just me in the box): “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself to sit in this showcase? Do the poor Germans now even have to rely on the Jews to help them understand Judaism better? Is that really our job?”

By a couple of older German women: “That’s all very well, but is your son circumcized?”

… got to be part of the different conversations that arose from this odd set-up:

An old-school American gentleman, whose parents had come to the U.S. from Kiev in the early 1900s fleeing the Czar’s pogroms, talking to a school teacher from Bremen, whose father was a simple, not very well educated carpenter who refused to join the NSDAP. There had been no significant repercussions, he told his daughter, born in 1941, insisting that all Germans who joined the Nazis did so of their own free will, even if they presented it differently after the war.

A group of German twenty-somethings talking to a thirty-something Israeli couple, who were in Germany for the first time and felt horribly uncomfortable whenever they heard German spoken in the streets, especially over the loudspeakers in train and subway stations. She realized it was unfair and irrational to feel this way, the wife said with a stony face, but she had nightmares and couldn’t wait to leave. “How can you stand living in Germany?”

A Rabbi from New Jersey, who was born on an U.S. Army base in Munich in the 1960s and has two German birth certificates: one that reads “Religion: Protestant” and a second one, in which – after his father, an army chaplain, complained – the entry was changed to “Mosaic.” The explanation at the time was that German bureaucrats would not write “Jew” or “Jewish” on an official document.

A very shy older woman from Dresden, who smiled sweetly, and, when I asked her whether she had any questions for me, answered: “I have many, many questions, but none that you can help me with. I am full of questions for my parents, who were ardent Nazis, but they are long dead and I didn’t ask them when I still had the chance.” Her eyes filled with tears, so did mine – and then she quietly thanked me for being there in the showcase, at this Jewish Museum.

And in a random, funny coincidence, at 2:30 p.m. I talked to an 80-year-old American Jewish couple from San Francisco, who came to Berlin to see the complete Ring at the Staatsoper (their fifth), and at 3:15 p.m. I met a young Jewish soprano from New York who just sang in Parsifal at Deutsche Oper.

… and, finally, I learned:

That a Jewish mother, when her children come home from school, doesn’t ask “what did you learn today?” but rather: “what questions did you ask?”

I’ll have to remember that when my daughters and (uncircumsized!) son start elementary school.

Signe Rossbach, Events Curator