By: Scott Brinton
In talks with elected leaders and students today, rabbi sees past Germany's Nazi history
Rabbi Ronald Brown flew to Berlin recently to meet the German foreign minister, president of the parliament and president of the country.
Brown, spiritual leader of Temple Beth Am in Merrick, and a contingent of 45 rabbis went to lobby for measures that would require German companies to pay $5 billion to Holocaust survivors whom they had forced into slave labor during World War II.
Brown, who serves some 600 families from Merrick and Bellmore, made the three-day trip as vice president of the North American Board of Rabbis. His mission was of obvious importance, the kind that helps transform lives for generations.
Only 20 percent of the survivors eligible for the $5 billion are Jewish, Brown noted. Eighty percent are of other religious and ethnic backgrounds, from Catholics to Gypsies.
The survivors, who are well past 70 years old, are dying, said the rabbi. "Some survivors are so old," he said. "It seemed to us only fair to begin distribution" of the funds.
By the end of the rabbis' trip, the companies had agreed to pay reparations to the survivors. A major victory, for sure.
As far as Brown was concerned, though, his truly big victory came when he chatted with a class of German students at a Protestant high school outside Berlin, the Evangelisches Gymnasium Hermannswerder.
It was a casual get-together. The students came dressed as students, in blue jeans and solid sweatshirts. The meeting room was inconspicuous, the tan walls barren except for one clock. There was none of the grandeur that went with lobbying the highest-level German officials.
For Brown, however, this meeting represented the culmination of a decades-long personal transformation, which ultimately, he believes, has made him a better human being.
Brown, 54, grew up during the 1950s in America, hearing of Holocaust atrocities. "My father embedded in me that you don't buy anything German -- German cars, German products, anything like that," he said.
And he didn't.
In 1991, the rabbi and his wife, Tsipora, traveled to Stuttgart, Germany, to visit two of her uncles, who survived the Holocaust. Tsipora Brown, who is an Israeli-American of German descent, lost much of her family to Nazi death camps.
"The time we were there, I didn't buy anything," Brown said. "We stayed with my wife's family, but we didn't buy anything.
"When I saw someone in their 70s, I wondered what they were doing during the war."
The rabbi took his then 11-year-old son to a trial in Stuttgart of an accused Nazi. He didn't realize at the time that his boy was sitting in the courtroom next to an elderly woman who had been active in the Nazi Party during the war.
The experience sent a shiver through the rabbi and only reinforced his aversion to all things, and even all people, German. "I had no desire or interest in anything German," he said.
In 1997, he had an epiphany.
A group of students from Hamburg was touring the United States during the Jewish High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are celebrated in September-October. One of the students' stops was Long Island. They needed lodging.
Brown issued an appeal to his congregation for help. A handful of people volunteered to house the high school seniors.
That lack of interest in aiding the young people led Brown to seriously examine Jewish stereotypes, particularly his own, of modern-day Germans.
He convened a meeting among congregation members and the students. They assembled in a room at Temple Beth Am on Merrick Road and talked, just talked, about Germany, about America, about life. They confronted one another not as enemies, but as people.
"There was one girl who said very often that she's not proud to be German," Brown said.
The girl's incredible sorrow for her country's sins affected the rabbi deeply. He saw her without the clouded lens of history. She was simply a person who felt horrible guilt for a past for which she was not at all responsible.
"After our discussion, we saw each other as individuals," Brown said. "We saw them [the German students] not as their grandparents, but as 17-year-olds. They were kids. They were children."
Stanley Newman of Bellmore, 56, is president of Temple Beth Am and an investment banker. He was among those who "reluctantly" took in the German students. Like Brown, Newman had no desire to buy anything German, or visit Germany, or meet anyone German.
Newman, who is of German descent and lost a branch of his family to the Holocaust, said, "It was an embarrassment being of German heritage. How could they [the Nazis] do this to my family?"
The student whom the Newman family took in for two weeks, Kate Lubert, completely changed his mind about Germans. "She really worked into our hearts. We still e-mail. We send cards," he said. Kate, whom Newman described as charming and intelligent, addresses her correspondences: "To my dear American family." Newman and his wife, Roberta, plan to attend Kate's college graduation this summer at Canterbury Cathedral in London, England.
"Unfortunately, there is still a lot of hatred, a lot of anti-Semitism in the world," said Newman. "All we have to do is look at what is going on in the Middle East. Ultimately, the way to solve these problems is on a people-to-people basis.
"It's easier for people to hate a concept without putting a face, a human expression on it, than it is to hate someone whom you know, you like, you can identify with on a personal level."
That is the very reason that Brown wanted to meet with average Germans, particularly young people -- so he could learn more about them, and they about him. He wants hatred among Germans and Jews to stop.
Brown believes his trip to a suburban school outside Berlin, in the former East Germany, was vital. Today, people there are hurting, with unemployment hitting 30 percent. During desperate times, people seek out scapegoats for their troubles, as the Nazis did with Jews in Germany before and during World War II. Of late, Nazi skinheads have cropped up in growing numbers in the former East Germany.
The best weapon with which to battle skinheads, Brown says, is personal contact.
"We should get rabbis from all over the U.S. and have them talk to people [in Germany], open and frank discussions. In that way, you'll be building bridges of understanding," he said.
For Germans and Jews alike.
