The next day, I visited a Jewish kindergarten where the children sang Hanukkah songs and lit holiday candles. The kindergarten is housed in a compound with a beautifully renovated synagogue that the Nazis used as a horse stable. Here, Jewish men can study the Torah in a traditional yeshiva. This flagship center is run by Rabbi Josh Spinner, who was born in Baltimore and grew up in an Orthodox family in Canada. He is vice president of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, which aims to restore vital Jewish life in Eastern Europe. "Wherever there are Jews there should be Jewish life," he insists enthusiastically, aware of the impact such words have in the city where Hitler designed the Holocaust.
While Americans argue about the relationship between freedom and religion, Jews in Germany look to root their religion in everyday life. Sandra Anusiewicz-Baer, a pretty blond, blue-eyed Jewish mom with a 16-month-old baby in tow, wanted to talk to me about Familienmentsch: a quarterly Jewish parenting magazine she has started. It celebrates secular, liberal, conservative and orthodox Jewish identity and traditions.
The first issue is devoted to circumcision, which is a sensitive topic to Jews in Germany because that's how the Nazis identified Jewish men, since few other German men had been circumcised. When Sandra wanted to have a bris -- the traditional circumcision ceremony -- for her son, she didn't know how to arrange it. She discovered that many others wanted to learn more about Jewish religious and cultural traditions as well. She's published articles about circumcision from religious, historical, as well as practical perspectives and will approach other subjects in a similar way.
Several of her colleagues protested when she put a blond, blue-eyed baby on the cover, complaining that he didn't look Jewish. Stereotypes, she reminded them, are wrong. Besides that, the boy on the cover was her son. The magazine is about variety and tradition in the Jewish cultural experience. Her next issue will be devoted to Jewish kindergartens -- the future of Jewish life in Germany. The question has shifted from why Jews would choose to live in Germany to how they will grow up as Jews in Germany. The importance of faith assumes greater importance when it is ruthlessly denied. It always does.