Who is a Jew in Germany ? The Wankum Question

What if the head of Hamburg’s Jewish community wasn’t actually Jewish?, Tablet [1]

On March 6th 1997, 2.574.000 Jews live in Europe, they were 10.048.400 in 1930; 62.000 Jews live in Germany, they were 564.400 in 1930; 2.900 Jews live in Hamburg, they were 20.800 in 1930 (from Jews In Hamburg - Permanent Exhibition at the Museum of Hamburg History [2])

For years, Andreas Christoph Wankum was the Hamburg, Germany, Jewish community’s favorite son. A self-made millionaire who made his fortune in real estate, he signed fat checks to Keren Hayesod, the influential pro-Israel charity. When Communism collapsed in Hungary, he was instrumental in helping many of that country’s Jews make aliya. He funded scores of Jewish philanthropies in Israel and Germany alike, including a Birthright-type initiative that sent local Jewish students on their first visit to the Jewish state.

There was only one problem: he may not have been Jewish, and the rabbi who appointed him to the presidency of the Hamburg branch of Keren Hayesod, the global equivalent of the United Jewish Communities, may not even been a real rabbi. As if being a Jew in Germany wasn’t complicated enough, this case of identity wars is threatening to tear apart Hamburg’s Jewish community, which is one of Germany’s most resurgent and influential. And, like so many things in Germany, this affair is all about adhering to the rules.

Born in 1955, Wankum first discovered his Jewish roots when he was 13. Observing that his neighbors, the Wolfs, shut down their dry-cleaning business every Saturday, he asked his mother about this odd business practice. The Wolfs, she said, were Jewish, and so were the Wankums, even though they’d concealed it during the war for obvious reasons.

Enamored with his new identity, Wankum reached out to Hamburg’s Jewish community, and even received documents from its leaders that helped him avoid military service. But his Jewish provenance remained questionable, and he never joined the community as a full-fledged member.

In 1999 when Wankum was offered the presidency of the local branch of Keren Hayesod, he found himself facing an unexpected hurdle. To accept the position, he was told, he needed to be an official member of the community. And to do that, he needed to prove, beyond any doubt, that he was indeed Jewish. He was helped in his quest by Rabbi Dov Levi Barzilai, Hamburg’s chief orthodox rabbi. In December of 1999, Barzilai heard four witnesses, including Wankum’s brother and his wife’s uncle, and then signed a paper declaring, officially, that Wankum was a Jew. Soon thereafter, Wankum accepted his new position.

Under Wankum’s leadership, Keren Hayesod experienced unparalleled success. But in late December 1999, following terrible liquidity problems with his company, Wankum declared bankruptcy, which, in Germany’s unremitting political and economic landscape, is a death sentence: Bankruptcy and debt are unacceptable, and forgiveness is never offered. To anyone, that is, but Wankum. Remembering his charitable past, his fellow community members kept him in their warm embrace, and, in 2003, bestowed on him the highest honor imaginable, the chairmanship of Hamburg’s Jewish community.

It was at that time that Wankum aroused the interest of Stefan Knauer, a veteran journalist for the venerated German weekly Der Spiegel. Nearing retirement, Knauer decided to abandon the hard-edged topics he’d been covering throughout his career and examine instead the state of religion in his local community. The Jewish community in particular struck him as insular, further igniting his curiosity. He was especially fascinated by its boisterous chairman, Wankum. Then, one day, he had an epiphany. “[Wankum] was just looking for rehabilitation,” Knauer said in a recent interview, “a place where no one can criticize him after his bankruptcy, and the Jewish community is the best shelter because any criticism about its chairman is immediately tagged as anti-Semitism and Nazism.”

Guided by his suspicions, Knauer started to ask around about Wankum and his religious affiliations. Wankum, on his end, kept referring the reporter to Rabbi Barzilai, and claimed that 2,000 years of Jewish history gave him the right not to talk to the media.

“We started to look in archives in villages around Hamburg where his family used to live,” Knauer said. “There were registration forms with religion identity and we found that Wankum’s mother was named Ruth Morgenstern and she was registered as Lutheran. But you can’t really know because many Jews hid their identity under the Third Reich. On the other hand, how do you explain that his middle name is Christoph?”

Knauer’s quest might have ended up nowhere if it weren’t for Ruben Herzberg. A local educator and a former beneficiary of Wankum’s funds, he was appointed the community’s chairman after Wankum’s term ended in 2007. Soon thereafter, he said, strange things began to happen. “When I was elected as chairman,” he said, “I found out that we basically don’t have any money to maintain ourselves and that we must find ways to cut our expenses. I might be naïve, but I was expecting our rabbi to care about the situation and take a pay cut.”

Rabbi Barzilai, however, would do no such thing, and an exasperated Herzberg began looking into the rabbi’s conduct. During one such investigation, he learned that several community members, Wankum among them, had no documents certifying his Jewishness. Alarmed, he asked the rabbi to provide proof that Wankum was indeed a Jew.

“After a while we understood that Rabbi Barzilai has no documents,” Herzberg said, “just four witnesses and that only one of them was Jewish himself.” In his defense, Rabbi Barzilai claimed he was not permitted to divulge the names of Wankum’s witnesses, but Herzberg asked around and learned that no such rabbinic edict existed. Suspicious, Herzberg decided to call the central rabbinate in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, where Barzilai claimed to have gotten his rabbinic certification. They were shocked to learn it wasn’t kosher: the chief rabbi of Netanya wrote Herzberg back, saying that the people who appointed Barzilai had no authority to do so. (Barzilai’s credentials are currently being examined by a German rabbinical court. He refused to comment for this piece.)

At this point, Hamburg’s wars of the Jews escalated. “During our checkup,” Herzberg said, “we found that 20 people were missing documents in their files; 16 responded and brought us the papers, but four, including Wankum and his brother, never answered and were ousted from the community.”

Herzberg fired Rabbi Barzilai, an act he he’s claimed in previous interviews with the press was motivated by financial issues, with the community refusing to pay his pension. Some of his colleagues in the community were so livid about what they perceived to be Wankum’s deception that they suggested digging Wankum’s deceased mother from her grave in the Jewish cemetery and interring her elsewhere. Within months, former collaborators became the worst of enemies.

“I will tell you what Herzberg is according to the Jewish halacha,” Wankum fumed recently. “He is a total schmuck, a pathological liar of the worst kind. He just wants to clean the community from anyone who was there before and he uses methods that Nazis used in order to do it.”

Any attempt to question his sincerity, Wankum added, was malicious. “After all I did,” he said, “the claim that I used Judaism as shelter is a disgusting lie. I have a daughter who volunteered in a kibbutz and lives a traditional life in Israel. So what kind of other proof do I need?” Wankum also said that it was sheer jealousy that motivated his enemies and fueled the fallacious claims against him. “Our fight” he said, “is a fight for Jewish identity.”

Stefan Kramer, the General Secretary of the Central Council for Jews in Germany, agrees. “What Herzberg and his friends are doing is Chillul Hashem,” he said, using the Hebrew term for desecration of the holy. “For me there are more important things in Judaism than whether you mother is Jewish or not. If you support Jewish issues and if you educated a daughter and live in Israel it is much more Jewish to me than people who want to drag you mother out of her grave. Herzberg is Jewish by birth, but him running to the media, letting goyim in, shows me that he lacks Jewish brains. Jews can’t sit in a house of glass and throw rocks outside, definitely not in Germany.”

Russian Jews in Berlin, Germany

In Germany, Jewish pride and growing pains

By Colin Nickerson, International Herald Tribune [1, 2, 3]

BERLIN: Shelly Kupferberg, 31, is the granddaughter of Jews who fled the Nazi terror in the 1930s for the land that would become Israel. Her parents returned to Berlin in the early 1970s, weary of Israel's wars and yearning for their German heritage. She was raised both as a Jew and a German, and takes pride in both identities.

"It's great to be a Jew in Germany," said Kupferberg, a journalist and adviser to Berlin's Jewish Festival. "There's this feeling of a unique culture being reborn - with more people in the synagogues, more Jewish artists, a sense, at last, that it's completely normal for Jewish people to be living and working here. That's something you couldn't say until recently."

In a turnaround few would have imagined, Germany today boasts the fastest-growing Jewish population in the world.

While Germany's Jewish community is full of hope for the future, its rapid expansion has brought new tensions- with animosity festering between longtime German-speaking Jews and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of whom had lost their Jewish traditions, if not their identity, under decades of Communist rule.

"This is a time of difficult transition for a community that was once tiny and insular, but has suddenly grown large," said Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the nation's umbrella organization for Jewish groups. "There is friction, there is anger, there is distrust, there is fear. We have started to lay the foundation for a dynamic Jewish culture in Germany. But we are far from completing the house."

Most newcomers are from Russia - Jews seeking a better life in a more prosperous place, but also escaping the anti-Semitism that seethes in many parts of the former Soviet Union.

The "Russian Jews" - the term embraces the thousands arriving from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states - are joined by a small but significant number of young Jews from Israel, the United States, Canada and Australia.

In 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, Germany's Jewish population stood at 530,000. Berlin, famed for tolerance, was home to some of the world's foremost Jewish writers, philosophers and scientists. By 1943, however, the Nazis had declared Germany "Judenrein," or cleansed of Jews. In fact, several thousand remained hidden in Germany or returned from concentration camps after the Holocaust, which killed six million European Jews.

Before the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall, Germany's Jewish population stood at barely 25,000, mostly survivors of World War II and their offspring. Since then, encouraged by liberal immigration laws, the number has swelled to more than 200,000, according to estimates by the government and Jewish groups. Last year, twice as many Jews, 20,000, settled in Germany as in Israel, according to Jewish groups.

Partly to atone for the Holocaust, Germany offers resettlement programs for Jews from Eastern Europe. It is much easier for Jews to win legal entry to Germany than to other parts of Western Europe or the United States.

Israel also keeps its open doors, but many Jews from the former Soviet Union see Israel as either too dangerous because of the struggle with Palestinians, or as too alien because of its Middle Eastern culture and desert climate.

"Germany is Europe, and I am European as much as I am a Jew," said Frida Scheinberg, a veterinarian who recently arrived in Germany from Ukraine. "Germany was a good place for Jews before Hitler. It feels safe and prosperous. Its cities, its climate, its customs all seem familiar. Israel seems strange to me, with the hot sun and the hot tempers."

Still, unease and bickering pervade Germany's Jewish community.

Some question whether all the newcomers can legitimately call themselves Jews; until this year, when Germany tightened the rules to weed out impostors, almost any former Soviet citizen with a Jewish ancestor could qualify.

Traditional law defines a Jew as an individual with a Jewish mother or someone who has undergone conversion to Judaism; Germany now requires that prospective Jewish immigrants have at least one Jewish parent, as well as some command of German and marketable skills.

Integration has been complicated by Germany's recent unemployment woes, with many Russian Jews drawing welfare, and resentment.

But many Jews are confident that once the economy rebounds, differences among Jews will inevitably heal.

"Many problems, yes, but most former Soviet Jews in Germany feel ourselves to be in a much safer situation," said Mykhaylo Tkach, an engineer from Ukraine. "The anti-Semitism here is minor compared to what we experienced in the places from which we came."

"In the old Russia, nothing changes - when things go wrong, blame the Jew. Germans understand such things must never happen here again," Tkach added.

Some Jewish immigrants admit to ambivalence about their choice of a new country, even as they defend it.

"There is a twinge of guilt, some secret shame, I think, in the heart of every Jew who calls Germany home," said Josef Eljaschewitsch, a physician from Latvia. "And yet, for Jews not to come here - to surrender our stolen heritage in this country - would be to give the Nazis a sort of final victory: a Jew-free Germany."

"Most of us come for bread-and-butter reasons, to make money, to ensure our children's futures are secure," he said. "But our dream is also to make Germany a place where Jews and Jewishness can once again flourish. Against all odds, I believe that's starting to happen."

The signs of a Jewish renaissance can be caught in small glints across Germany.

In Leipzig, Rabbi Joshua Spinner, a Canadian-American who has brought a missionary zeal to keeping Orthodox customs alive in Germany, recently presided at the first Jewish wedding recorded in the city since 1938, according to the Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

In Potsdam, Ukrainian immigrants, after years of holding worship services in a cramped, fluorescent-lit meeting room of a civic building, have won a patch of land from the government and are raising money to build a synagogue.

In Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, small but well-attended Jewish schools and kindergartens have opened over the past several years, intended to expose children to the Hebrew language, Torah studies and the spiritual ideas behind ritual practices. For many Jewish youngsters from Eastern Europe, this is their first formal religious instruction. A Jewish academy in Frankfurt trains girls and young women in ancient texts.

But it is in Berlin, above all, where a new German-Jewish identity is being forged. "Berlin is coming back as a center for rich Jewish life," said Irene Runge, a New Yorker who heads Berlin's Jewish Cultural Association. "It's an exciting place to be right now."

For the Orthodox, there is a new yeshiva, or religious school, sponsored by the U.S.-based Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. On more secular fronts, there are Yiddish theater groups, Jewish bookshops, exhibits of Jewish art and readings of Jewish poetry. Berlin's new Jewish Museum, finished in 2001, focuses on the prominence of Berlin's Jewish community from the 18th century to the early 1930s, when the city ranked as one of the most important Jewish centers in the world.

The refurbished golden dome and Moorish exterior of Berlin's old "New Synagogue" is once again a proud city landmark. Pilgrims leave small pebbles as tokens at the grave of Moses Mendelssohn, philosopher of the German Enlightenment.There is a sprinkling of kosher shops that do brisk business in matzohs, gefilte fish and sweet Israeli wine. There are two rival Jewish newspapers, both published in German. And most tourist stands display colorful guides and maps to "Jewish Berlin" -a term that no longer connotes horror.