This week I flew to Munich, Germany, to attend the Conference of European Rabbis (CER) Convention, where, as guests of the Bavarian Government marking 1700 years of Jewish settlement in Germany, a jam-packed three day seminar was held for rabbis and rebbitzens across the continent. We were certainly made welcome in the city, and the new Jewish community centre in Munich is large and beautiful.
Working for Shimon Cohen at The PR Office, I helped manage the English-speaking media at the event.
From Sunday night until Wednesday morning, the Westin Grand Hotel Munich was filled with black hats, long coats, and beards. 350 rabbis from 43 countries worldwide attended, flocking from Azerbaijan, Austria, Moldova, Estonia, Ukraine, France, Turkey, Tunisia, Iran, Russia, Italy, Morocco, the UAE, Israel, the UK, and more. The rabbis gathered to shmooze, study, and dine together. It was a remarkable and inspiring event.
Yet for me, attending the CER Munich Convention was also a deeply personal experience. My great-grandfather, Rabbiner Hans Isaak Grünewald, was the rabbi of Munich after the War. My grandfather, Rabbi Yaakov Grunewald, later to follow in his father's path as a much-loved United Synagogue rabbi, grew up in the city (he now lives in Rechavia). Both father and son were members of the CER and for years attended their bi-annual Conventions too - albeit as rabbis, and not to help with the media. I visited my grandfather's old apartment (on Kolosseumstraße) and even met rabbis and a lay leader who remembered the Grunewalds there. For three days, I was able to walk in their footsteps.
However, there was an uncomfortableness, a lurking uneasiness, with this whole trip. What?! How can you visit Germany? Why even enter that country after the Holocaust?
These are not just empty sentiments. We have to be cognisant of this recent harrowing past, filled with terror, horror, and brutality. Millions of Jewish men, women, and children, our family, were turned on by their neighbours; robbed, expelled, and then butchered on European soil, where they had lived for a millennia. My grandmother, for example (on my father's side), refused to accept German reparation money and my father won't set foot in the country. As Jews, we must always carry our national and historical story.
However, at the Convention these troubling issues did not really come into play. It was not so much about the past as about the present. The rabbis of the CER are concerned with the here and now and the future, spending their days caring for communities that genuinely need them, wherever they may be.
For three days, I met over 350 selfless leaders dedicated to only one thing: helping people. Wherever there happen to be Jews in need of a rabbi, be it in Tehran or Talinn, Vienna or Madrid, these rabbis have decided to live, working in often isolated conditions, tirelessly supporting their flock spiritually and physically, and often succeeding in reviving and building flourishing communities. I overheard these rabbis conversations, filled with passion about the initiatives they were so fervently working on, be it increasing synagogue engagement and learning opportunities, or the pastoral care offered to the elderly.
After Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine, Rabbi Bakst of Odessa managed to bring his entire thousand strong community out of Ukraine to safety, refusing to leave until he was able to transport every single person to safety in bordering Romania, including an orphanage full of children. In Poland and Moldova, Chief Rabbi Schudrich and Rabbi Saltzman spent sleepless nights for months supporting Ukrainian refugees, providing them with shelter, child-care, clothes to wear, and simple medicines, the very basics that they lacked.
My great-grandfather, my grandfather explained and as rabbis on the trip told me, was in many respects a real German, conversant in Goethe and Schiller, refined and yekkish. Circumstances beyond his control compelled him to return to Germany in the 1960s, becoming a rabbi first in Hamburg and then in Munich. Both his parents had been murdered in Auschwitz, and, to ensure his children received a Jewish education, he had to send them off to England. Returning to Germany certainly wasn't easy. Yet, when all is said and done, his service to the Munich Jewish community, I was told, was immense. His fluency in German enabled him to communicate to wide audiences, and he was respected by both Jews and non-Jews alike.
The same is true with all the rabbis I met. Regardless of the dark past of these European locations, nevertheless, these rabbis are now needed there, and, often as the sole leaders in their cities or countries, are devoted entirely to Jewish life in those places. Sustained by faith and a steadfast loyalty to Jewish law, they ensure that Jews today can have access to learning, communal prayer, and Kosher food, and are cared for from their birth until they pass on, in whichever part of the globe they may be.
I was truly inspired. Europe certainly has a dark past, we should never forget that. But with the rabbis of the CER, those Jewish communities of Europe, large and small, seem to be led by those who can bring the continent into a brighter future. What a Convention.
