I'm heading to Hamburg, Germany, from which I will go to Flensburg to help run Pesach sedarim there. Next will be Berlin for Shabbat and Leipzig for the end of Pesach to participate in a Pesach seminar there. Can´t say much more about the trip cuz I just don´t know what´s gonna be!
The days before I left were stressful, culminating with my rushed packing – kind of like some other Jews who rushed about this time of year a while back – only I was on my way to Germany instead of leaving Egypt – and yes, it felt exactly like that.
I´m on the train seeing more of France than I´ve seen yet and ain´t she a fine patch o´ beauty! Seriously, I´m sitting here giddy that I´ll be riding over 48 hours of trains over the next week and a half. I'm thinking that a train ride is a very postmodern way to see a country. Whereas traditionally society tracks and emphasizes a certain number of histories, lives, personages, postmodernism (as far as I understand) suggests our ridding of such hierarchies of importance and recognizing the presence of multiple histories. There´s usually a good reason why certain sites become attractions, but perhaps seeing the countryside, the less universally recognized but equally French houses, skylines, and churches, are also France.
GERMANY
[writing from train to Berlin for Chol Hamo'ed]
SHABBAT IN HAMBURG –
I really did not plan to do any touring during this trip but once you´re here, you don´t have so much of a choice – new cities beg to be explored. Also, the guy with whom I was to lead sedarim is from Australia and thus made sure to see as much as possible since he´d traveled so far. I came with. In Hamburg, we walked all along the beautiful port and ended up at Beatlemania, or the Beatles museum here. Lots of fun.
Over Shabbat we got our first lesson on modern day German Judaism from the Rabbi, his wife and their many guests. On Sunday morning, we were off to Flensburg!
FLENSBURG
The kindest, most gentle-looking, Jewish-Abba-embodying man picked us up from the train station (who we later found out has quite a story of his own, as did everyone we met in Germany, inevitably). He took us to the Jewish community center where we quickly saw that it was not lacking in material objects, rather people to guide the use of the objects. The Russian women who run the center greeted us with a bouquet of flowers each, a sit-down lunch, and handed us pens and paper on which we were to write the schedule for the next few days as dictated to us, through a translator. This was just the first instance of the Russian women running the center with incredible organization, beauty, and dignity. We had a moderately coherent conversation in English, German, and Russian.
They sent us on a day-trip to Denmark the next day since Flensburg is right inside the German border, and we got to visit a camp where Danish Jews were kept (and not-killed) during World War Two. Again, this is just one instance of the overwhelmingly kind treatment we got throughout our time in Flensburg – the community members were so grateful that we´d come!
I stayed with a woman named Marie who spoke zero words of English and held me around the waist as we walked to and from her house each time as if I had broken my foot. Every time she did so I tried to imagine what my French friends would have done, but I went along with it because I knew that she just really wanted to take care of me. Every night, she asked me what time I wanted to be woken up and by the end, we had a solid set of hand motions that made for successful communication. Meanwhile, if in Dublin I suspected that my red-haired father who always says “Ladies and Gents” is secretly Irish, in Flensburg I began to suspect his German roots. Call me ignorant but all my life when he said “Good morgin!” I thought he was just, well, being my father. Just don´t tell me that there´s a place in the world where we pronounce the “k” in “knife.”
THE SEDER
…was really, really nice, albeit hours shorter than what I´m used to. We asked questions together, my seder-leading partner and I told divrei torah, an adorable child sang the mah nishtanah, and at the end certain people told us that this had been their first seder. It was incredible how many people attended - 60 the first night and 20 the second night - especially considering that many had work/school the next day. [The whole Jewish community in Flensburg - most of which is Jewish but also including non-Jewish spouses - is 80 people.] Everyone patiently sat through the process of my partner and I speaking in English followed by translations into German and then Russian.
On the second night, we began the seder by asking the attendees to introduce themselves and explain what Pesach means to them. Talk about exodus stories... more than a few people mentioned personal histories of leaving countries where they had been un-free. My partner and I tried to tell divrei torah about personal, psychological freedom because political, religious freedom was a delicate topic - many people still did not feel 100% free in their new country. It was quite a night - moving, intimate, bitter-sweet - and we went home feeling quite fulfilled, hoping that the Flensburg community felt the same.
We got personal tours of Flensburg from community members throughout the end of the first days and led programs for the few but adorable Jewish children there, and we left with gifts in our hands (and hearts) from the Russian women.
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