2010-06-14 17:59:16

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Edward Serotta Talks Helen Thomas, Israel And The Jews Of Central Europe

Filed under: Ed Serotta, Europe, Featured, Germany, History, Holocaust, Hungary, Poland, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Last week, when 89-year-old Helen Thomas of Hearst told the world via YouTube that the Israelis should leave “Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland–back to the heart of the continent, in other words, where most Jews were annihilated in the 1940’s–she touched on a seldom-mentioned truth. The Israelis are never going “back” to Europe, because they’re already home, but there are, in fact, Jews in Europe, specifically in Central and Eastern Europe, where most of the worst of the murder took place.

A tiny handful are the last living survivors of the Holocaust. A few more are their descendants. The majority, from Prague to Budapest, from Berlin to Vienna, are more recent arrivals, emigre Jews of the former Soviet Union and their children.

No one talks about them much, certainly not the Israelis, for whom these communities, perceived as nothing more than dying remnants, have always been a nuisance. After 1948, when Israel was founded, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were supposed to pack their bags and leave the countries where they had been persecuted. Over decades, most of them did, but by 1988, when Edward Serotta showed up in Budapest with his camera and notebook, those who stayed behind had managed to hang on. As Serotta says here, the world that existed before was gone, but something tiny and hardy had survived in its wake, and its survival was moving beyond words.

He resolved to help, and the result is the Central Europe Center, Centropa for short, a Vienna-based operation that started as one man and a computer and became the go-to guide for anyone interested in Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

The Jews of the East were obscure for reasons that went beyond the Third Reich.

After the war, they got stuck behind the Iron Curtain under dictatorships that allowed them to survive without much caring whether they did.

Complicating matters, they fit poorly into the structures of the post-world-war order. The founding of Israel and the ascendancy of the United States, the two great magnets for Jews in the second half of the 20th Century, made the communities of Eastern Europe an inconvenient anomaly, a quiet embarrassment for those who wanted to make the case that after the Holocaust all Jews belonged in Israel, an outrage for those who believed that no Jew could conscionably remain in those countries where their own people had been treated so terribly.

As a result of the first two realities, these communities tended to be impoverished and voiceless. Until the end of the Cold War, most people, including most Jews, had no idea that something worth saving had survived.

Those days are mostly over, and Serotta is a big part of the reason. With the help of several major donors, Jewish relief organizations and a handful of governments, the Central Europe Center has mounted a campaign to being these communities “out of the shadows”, as one of Serotta’s books is titled. In a few weeks, Centropa will host a milestone of an event, a guided tour of the seemingly lost worlds of Prague, Budapest and Viennese Jewry for dozens of educators from around the world.

That’s the next step in the evolution of Serotta’s vision: education. Is it mean-spirited to suggest that Helen Thomas should enroll in the program?

Q:This July, 75 educators, museum directors, diplomats and other government officials from the United States, Israel, Turkey, Romania, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere will come to Central Europe. They’ll meet the Czech Prime Minister, the mayors of Vienna and Budapest and hear from Israeli author Tom Segev. They’ll see Jewish sites and meet Jewish communities in Prague, Vienna and Budapest. What is the essence of what you want them to understand about Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe?

A:Centropa spent eight years and around $2.5 million using new technologies to preserve Jewish memory in 15 European countries. We set up local teams in each major city, brought in oral historians from Boston University and Hebrew University to work with us, and our goal was to spend up to 20 hours with each respondent, digitize their old family snapshots from before and after the war, and create a portrait of how their families lived, not just how they died. We never used video in these interviews, but we now have 22,000 digitized snapshots, every one of which comes with its own keywords, crossreferenced stories.

When we started ten years ago, we had never planned to go into education, but teachers simply wouldn’t leave us alone. And because we—or at least I—knew nothing of educational programming, we hired a core group of 12 teachers from three countries to help us design programs, all using our material, that they could use in class.

What did they like the most—that we are so much more about 20th c. Jewish life than only its destruction.

In order to focus these teachers on our website and archive, we brought them to Europe each summer—in 2007 we coaxed nine to join us. IN 2008, we have 15; in 2009 we had 25. And this year, we’ll have 75.

By the time they go home, they will be steeped in the stories and histories of this land of Kafka, Freud, Canetti and Mahler, and they will have established networks with teachers from other countries—we have 13 countries represented.

Q:Given the horrific nature of what happened during World War II, a lot of people may think that Jewish life in Europe ended in 1945. But that’s not the case, is it?

A:The world that was is certainly no more. My first book, Out of the Shadows, came out in 1991 and in it, I said there was no such thing as “the last Jews of Eastern Europe.” These small communities have been fighting to take their rightful place in the world, and no matter how small they are, they are doing a relatively good job of caring for their elderly, nurturing their youth, and trying to develop a new generation of leaders.

But I do not buy the term “renaissance.” Calling it that does not make it so. Most of these communities do not have a rosy future before them, but whatever efforts they are making should be supported by everyone who can. After all, they paid retail for having kept a Jewish flame alive.

Whatever important will happen Jewishly in Central and Eastern Europe, it will happen in one city: Budapest. With anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 Jews, there are more Jews living there than in Romania, ex Yugoslavia, Poland, Czech and Slovakia and Austria—combined. The stories of tens of thousands of Polish Jews—the offspring of hidden children of the Holocaust—is wildly exaggerated.

Q:It may be hard for people to understand why Jews would stay in Austria or Germany, but you know those communities well. Can you give some insight into why survivors of the Holocaust made that decision?

A:Most Austrian and German born Jews who survived the war (and that was the great majority of them) could not bear to return home at war’s end. These two communities were largely resettled by Jews from further east who were fleeing worse anti Semitism. Some were living in Austrian or German displaced persons camps and had every intention of moving on. But as the ‘economic miracle’ of postwar Austria and Germany gathered steam, some of these Jews remained. They rebuilt their community structures and schools and kept to themselves, never identifying with Austria itself or West Germany. They were living ‘on packed suitcases,’ they would say.

Germany’s Jewish community of some 28,000 souls in the mid 1980s is now well over 125,000—due to the emigration of Soviet Jewry. Obviously there are frictions and problems between the Jews who rebuilt Jewish life during the postwar decades, but in time, they will more than likely sort themselves out, for one simple reason: these Soviet Jews have given the German Jewish community something it did not have a decade ago: a future.

Austria’s prognosis is not nearly so good. The community is small, insular, well organized and has all manner of institutions—schools, kindergartens, social welfare services, eight or nine synagogues, kosher restaurants and large kosher food shops. There are less than 4,500 Jews there whose families trace back to the 40s or 50s (and a few whose roots are genuinely Austrian). The Jews from the Soviet Union who have moved there, however—around 3,000—are all Uzbeks and Georgians.

And here is the fascinating difference between Germany and Austria. Most of the Jews who went to Germany came from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltics. They are—for the most part—well educated, have had little or no contact with Jewish traditions, and are very often intermarried.

The Uzbeks and Georgians in Vienna come from low educational backgrounds, are very traditional (almost every family keeps a kosher home), and are almost never intermarried.

My institute did programs to match up the children of these people with elderly Holocaust survivors, and the results were decidedly mixed. Some of the kids were lively, interested and clearly wanted to learn. Others had no more interest in European Jewish history and culture than we have in 16th century Uzbek literature. Yet Vienna’s Jewish community—even as it continues to shrink—will belong to them someday.

Q:Lately, and once again, 20th Century Jewish history has been making headlines in the US. Last week, veteran White House reporter and columnist Helen Thomas had to resign after she urged the Jews of Israel to go back to Germany and Poland, where millions were killed. What’s your take on her comments and resignation?

A:I watched the video, and it was definitely a gotcha moment. I’m not sure how fair it is to corner an 89-year-old woman like that, plant words in her mouth, and have her re-chew them for you. But words, as they say in Yiddish, are like arrows. Once you use them, you can’t get them back.

Q:Her comments did touch on a historical reality that often gets overlooked, the sometimes tortured relationship between Jews who emigrated to Israel and those who stayed behind on the continent where the genocide took place. Can you speak at all about the complexity of that relationship? How do Israelis generally regard the communities of Eastern European Jews? And vice versa?

A:We now spend a lot of time in Israel, working with teachers and students and education ministry officials. Europe for Israelis is a one stop shop of past horrors. 30,000 Israeli high school kids are taken to Poland each year to march around with Israeli flags draped around them as they sing hatikva, write poems about the hateful Poles who would kill me if they could, and that’s why there must be a strong Israel.

There are more than a few public intellectuals who are trying to right this situation, and our programs, which offer multi media films and exhibitions of prewar life in Poland and elsewhere, are being truly welcomed in our pilot schools in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Herzliya.

So things are just at the cusp of change, but at this time, the entire concept of Europe is used by the Israeli right to instruct the country’s youth that everyone hates us and we must never listen to anyone else.

In other words, a certain section Israelis don’t even recognize Jewish communities in this part of the world, other than as potential emigrants.

As for how East Europeans see Israel—many made aliya—certainly from the FSU: more than a million. But from Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria—a very few.

Mostly, they see Israel as a place of refuge, not as a magnet. And that, of course, has always been Israel’s problem but it would be lovely if that changed.

Q:Those who do know something about the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe may regard those communities as nothing more than remnants or vestiges, but that’s something of a misnomer, isn’t it? Tell us why.

A:This is mostly answered in nr 2 above, but on a broader scale, we have to say these communities aren’t remnants of anything. Leaving out Germany and Austria, as they were described above, here’s what we know about Central and Eastern Europe and the FSU: communism basically forbade all religious observance. One could not learn Hebrew (except, oddly enough, in Romania). There were no rabbinical seminars (save of an anemic one in Budapest that barely functioned). Almost no one kept kosher. All Jewish newspapers were silly party organs. Jewish youth clubs and summer camps (except for a lucky few in Yugoslavia, Romania and Hungary) did not function. So clearly, by the late 1940s, that surviving remnant decided to move on and out of the region, save for the Hungarians. And those who stayed had no contact with Jewish life in any form.

Therefore, when Jewish life returned in 1989 and in 1991, it was invented anew. I remember Kostek Gebert of Warsaw saying, “we don’t have any bubbiemeizers” [grandmother’s tales] because we don’t have any bubbies.”

So what we see today is something new and fresh. As I stated above, outside of Budapest, though, I see no real future for Jewish communities here—save for perhaps Moscow, Kiev and Riga.

Q:In countries, where there may in fact be a remnant quality to the community, can you talk about some of the challenges faced by the Jews there? I’m thinking of people in Ukraine, perhaps, or Romania, where the vast majority of the Jewish population did leave. How do Jews there manage to hang on to some semblance of a communal life?

A:In Ukraine they did not. Almost no one lived as a Jew until communism fell. But oddly enough, they died as Jews and the Jewish cemeteries are testaments to that.

Romania is without doubt the most interesting Jewish story in the whole region. For for decades a plump little rabbi with a gold Jewish star the size of a hubcap and black and purple robes ran everything, and was chauffeured around in an aging, sagging Mercedes. David Moses Rosen was his name. He managed to run soup kitchens, Sunday schools, had childrens’ choirs, a summer camp or two. And he had a massive social welfare program for Holocaust survivors that was a marvel to observe.

But this was all very top down. It could not be otherwise in Communist Europe. And no other Jewish community leader in the region was half as bold as he was.

He also did a brisk business in selling more than 100,000 Jews to Israel. How much he played a role will never be known, but he wanted his Jews to go there, and go there they did, with the Romanian government profiting from it—and so did the Israelis. I once asked him in 1985, “Rabbi, all of Romania’s Jews go to Israel?” He looked at me from under heavily lidded eyes, eyes that had traded in markets far beyond my experience, and just sighed. “Serotta, we’re Jews. Where should we go: Philadelphia?”

Q:Looking back for a minute, the lives of Jews who lived through the 20th Century in Central and Eastern Europe have a tremendous fascination, so much change, so much violence, dislocation and reinvention in a single span of years. Can you give us a couple of quick sketches of lives that you have found particularly inspiring or extraordinary?

A:A woman, Rosie Jakab, who ran a Jewish soup kitchen in Arad, Romania, until she was ninety-five. The aforementioned Rabbi Rosen, who I adored. Jakob Finci and Ivica Ceresnjes, a middle aged lawyer and architect who turned themselves into humanitarian aid specialists when war came to Sarajevo in 1992. That’s when they turned the Jewish community into a free and open house for all. Anna Szeszler, a Hungarian Jewish school teacher who, in 1987, was walking on a street in New York and saw a book called, The Last Jews of Eastern Europe with her sister’s picture on the cover. She said, “well my sister’s not an damn last Jew,” went home, and three years later started the Lauder school in Budapest, the biggest and best in Central Europe.

Q:In addition to a dwindling population of people who survived the Holocaust, there are also growing numbers of young people in some countries. Can you describe a particularly vibrant youth scene in one or two countries?

A:Obviously, Budapest is the place to observe. There are several cafes like Siraly and Spinoza where scores of young Jewish college students hang out. When they hold a festival or Purim party, they get hundreds, sometimes thousands.

The key, however, is summer camp. Studies show that the single best way to infuse kids with a sense of Jewish belonging is to send them to a Jewish summer camp. There are several throughout the region. There should be more and they should be bigger.

Q:How do Jews in Hungary, say, or the Czech Republic, deal with issues of assimilation versus tradition? Given the Holocaust, these questions would seem particularly acute, or is that a false impression?

A:One has nothing to do with the other. Sure you’ll meet an elderly Jew who said, “I came back because I didn’t want to give Hitler a posthumous victory,” but that’s not a serious answer. As stated above, young Jews in this region are coming to Judaism on their own terms, not in ways that worked 70 or 80 years ago. Of course, that statement can be applied to Jews everywhere. Very, very, very few younger Jews in this region are becoming religious. They are involved with Jewish social clubs, take a few weeks to visit Israel to see friends, go to lectures and once a year poke their heads in a synagogue. Again—that sounds like many younger American Jews, too.

Q:A lot of our readers are evangelical Christians, who tend to be well versed in the lives and beliefs of Jews in Israel. In fact, for many evangelicals, the representative Jew is an Israeli, and lots of donor money flows from evangelical churches and organizations to that country. Can you talk at all about importance of the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe to an understanding of Judaism as a whole?

My institute interviewed 1,200 Jews in 15 countries in this region. 99% of them were Holocaust survivors. Of that number, around 750, I would estimate, live at or below the poverty line. Most have no extended families to care for them—the Holocaust saw to that.

There is no comparison between how Holocaust survivors in Bulgaria or Romania live compared to their counterparts in Israel or the US.

We have established two clubs for them—one in Vienna, the other in Budapest. We also help support a soup kitchen in Romania for Holocaust survivors.

We receive around $10,000 from German church groups each year to distribute these funds to these partner organizations. I would be happy to speak with anyone who might be interested in a similar, targeted project.

Q:As you’ve educated yourself over the past two decades in the lives and times of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, what are one or two things that surprised or shocked you, things that you didn’t know before or wouldn’t have guessed before starting this work about these communities?

A:The single biggest surprise was watching the Sarajevo Jewish community turn itself into a humanitarian aid agency during the Bosnian war (1992-1005), as they helped Muslims, Serbs and Croats alike. If ever any organization deserved the Nobel Prize for Peace, it was them.

As stated above, the rebirth of Jewish life in Germany has proven a great surprise, and a welcome one.

The most beautiful thing I’ve seen was the dining room at lunch time in the summer camp in Szarvas Hungary. I walked in—this was in 1990, a year after communism fell—and the dining room was filled with nearly 400 Jewish children—from Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia—all standing on their chairs and screaming out Hebrew songs, then flinging themselves around the table tops arm and arm in wild abandon. Even a year before this, those kids would have been chased away by their own parents and told not to make trouble. And their parents would have lived in mortal fear of losing their jobs.

But the Berlin Wall had fallen, the dining room floor was littered with felalafel and pita, and 400 Jewish kids were once again lighting that tiny flame of Jewish life in Central Europe. You could hear them caterwauling outside the camp, along the Maros River, where tourists in their canoes stopped paddling to listen to this strange singing coming from somewhere through the trees.

Comments (3)

3 Comments »

1. Although I do not particularly like Helen Thomas, I do agree with you that it is a little sad that at 89 she evidently made the comments attributed to her…and who knows how sharp her mind is at this point. Certainly, they will be impacting her legacy and I think that must be sad for her and her family. On the other hand, I would like your take on what does always appear to me to be an anti-Israel bias in the press. Perhaps you have written on this before. In the 70’s it seemed everyone loved Israel….now it seems that so many people…frequently more liberal people….seem to have nothing positive to say about her. Is this a form of anti-semitism? When compared to many countries in the middle east, Israel seems very reasonable to me…but I am not a middle east specialist.

   Comment by Fraulien — June 19, 2010 @ 10:51 am

2. Fraulien, Thanks for the comment.

   Reasonable criticism of Israel shouldn’t be seen as a form of antisemitism, and Israel’s behavior is quite often deserving of reasonable criticism, as are the behaviors of the Arab states surrounding it and the Palestinian factions. Look into the statements and policies of Avigdor Lieberman, and you will find one of the most divisive and destrictive politicians in modern Middle East politics. He should be fired immediately.

   But no one is innocent, and no country should be singled out as above the fray, particularly if the object is to find a peace settlement. Everyone has to give up a lot to make peace work. Arabs must give up once and for all the notion that Israel will ever disappear from the region. They must accept her right to exist. Israel must give up the building of new settlements for all time. All Biblical concepts of the ownership of territory must be expunged permanently from discussion. Everything must be about a practical settlement for the sake of the future. Everyone must apologize for their crimes and excesses, including Israel.

   Israel’s popularity in the 70’s had to do with its underdog status after two wars, the killing of the athletes at Munich and the growing awareness of the Holocaust. After the first intifada in the 1980’s, Palestinians became the underdog, and the Israeli were increasingly seen as the occupiers, and things remain in that position, though Hamas has forever damaged the underdog image for the Palestinians, even with liberals.

   But the real problem is Israel’s image for other Jews. American Jews, in particular, especially younger American Jews, are disillusioned with the Israel of today. They don’t want to be associated with a religious Israel, basically, especially when that religious Israel is involved with the killing of civilians.

   By the same token, most Jews understand that Israel has its reasons. You will rarely hear Jews of any stripe praising the Palestinians. Like most people, they simply want the two sides to get real, sit down together and do the deal. The struggle has killed more sympathy than it has civilians. All in all, it’s a tragic situation, born of the immense tragedies of the 20th Century, and those of us who don’t have to live with it every day should probably be cautioned against any sort of quick and easy judgment.

   Finally, as far as the press goes, you don’t get more mainstream than Fox or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and I’ve never seen them utter a word of criticism against Israel.

   Comment by John — June 21, 2010 @ 9:33 am

3. Thanks for your insights.

   Comment by Fraulien — June 21, 2010 @ 11:49 pm

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