The menorah. The first finds of such a seven-armed candlestick date back to the 1st century BC
Photo: photocase/owik2Di
Herbert Lappe from Dresden, born in 1946 as the son of Jewish communists, struggles with the converts. “Above all, they never talk about why they converted.” They often have no sense of the sensitivities of Jewish families with regard to the Shoah. In the recently published volume “Shabbat in the Heart. Longing for Belonging” from the Lichtig publishing house, the electrical engineer with a doctorate, reports on a memorial service on November 9th in the Kreuzkirche, and on the reading of the names of the deported and murdered Dresden Jews. Students recited the names. The Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, was spoken by a convert who has no family connection to the Jewish past. “You could also use an actor.”
Conversion is not generally discussed in Judaism. “Jews by choice,” as they are called in the USA and Great Britain, have equal rights in every respect. And yet some remain uneasy; The memory of the Shoah and the transgenerational transmission of psychological trauma are part of the essence of Jewish identity in this country. But due to the large number of conversions to Judaism, older community members in particular feel their identity threatened. In general: Who decides who is Jewish and who is not?
In the same book, edited by Nea Weissberg and Alexandra Jacobson, Sonja Ahrendt, who was born in 1947, tells of her “miraculous becoming Jewish”: As a “Jewish father,” she was always told by spiritual leaders that she had to make a “giur” without having a Jewish mother. a lengthy conversion to faith. “The irony is that some rabbis today are converts themselves and are now explaining their Judaism to the native Jews and keeping the father Jews away.” The other rabbis in this country mostly come from the USA, Ukraine, Russia or Israel and are familiar with the peculiarities of the German Reform Judaism had little idea, so Ahrendt had actually already given up the project of “certified Jewishness.”
But after a Jewish friend died and was buried in a Christian cemetery by the goyim of her Mischpoke, Sonja Ahrendt made another attempt. This time with a rabbi who was also a historian. She showed him the photos, birth certificates and family records. But the rabbi was particularly interested in the Jewish community’s food entitlement certificates from 1947. “Your case is so clear,” said the man, “that I don’t even charge the processing fee! You don’t need a giur.” All she has to do is submit a status determination to the Beth Din, the rabbinical court. In fact, Sonja Arendt was already included in the Jewish community in Berlin when she was born, where the laws of Reform Judaism still applied to the few survivors of the Shoah – father Jews were treated equally. The halacha, which requires maternal descent, was only introduced in Berlin in 1953. The rabbi laughed: “So you’ve always been Jewish!”
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