An initiative to rebuild a Hamburg synagogue destroyed by the Nazis has been met with fierce opposition from German supporters of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and Israel left-wing activists.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
Opponents of the move say the reconstruction of the synagogue is tantamount to "rewriting and erasing its history." Members of Hamburg's Jewish community assert opposition to the move is "a terrible insult and political abuse of pure intentions to rectify an injustice that has not been corrected since the Holocaust."
Although the German government and the city of Hamburg have already committed to the project's funding, several German bodies have withdrawn their support for the synagogue's re-establishment as a result of the opposition.
The synagogue is situated at Joseph Carlebach Platz, named for the city's chief rabbi, who was killed in the Holocaust. Originally known as Bornplatz, the square was built in 1906 in Hamburg's Grindel neighborhood, which served as the center of Jewish life in the port city up until the Holocaust. With 1,200 seats, the impressive synagogue was once the largest in northern Germany and northern Europe in general.
The house of prayer was destroyed in the Kristallnacht – "Night of Broken Glass" pogrom of 1938 that saw SA militias attack dozens of synagogues, desecrating them, and setting them on fire. A few months after the pogrom, the Hamburg Municipality demanded the local Jewish community demolish what remained of the building at its own expense. Community members were then ordered to sell the land to the municipality for a symbolic price. After World War II, the plot served as a parking lot for the adjacent Hamburg University. Fifty years after Kristallnacht, the decision was made to replace the parking lot with an art installation that would include the demarcation of the synagogue on the paved plaza.
Hamburg's Jewish community currently counts has some 2,500 members. Around another 1,000 Jews, some of them Israelis, are believed to reside in the city.
After a neo-Nazi tried to carry out a massacre at a Halle synagogue on Yom Kippur in 2019, local politicians decided as a gesture to the Jewish community to return the plot of land and re-establish the Hamburg synagogue. The Hamburg Senate unanimously voted in support of the move in Feb. 2020. Nevertheless, the initiative remained just that until last summer. Hamburg's chief Rabbi Shlomo Bistritzky contacted Daniel Schaefer, an Israeli-born businessman and member of the local Jewish community, and asked him to join him on a visit to a local antique shop that had in its possession the crown-shaped ornament that had been placed on top of the Torah scroll dedicated to the synagogue's first rabbi, Abraham Markus Hirsch. Schaefer paid for the ornament and donated it to the community.
Schaefer told Israel Hayom he had mixed emotions about the acquisition.
"On one hand, [there was a sense of] happiness from the connection to history. On the other hand, rage that we, the descendants, have to buy what was robbed from our fathers. So I decided that in the name of injustice – the destruction, the robbery – which remains the reality in Germany still today, to act to implement a Senate decision to contribute to this injustice coming to an end."
Schafer established the "Against anti-Semitism, for a synagogue at Bornplatz" and begin to enlist the public and political support necessary to make the project a reality. Within a short time, the Bundestag had decided to invest 65 million euros (around $77 million) toward the rebuilding of the synagogue. The Hamburg Senate then matched the contribution. Around 107,000 of the city's residents signed a petition calling for the project to be put into action. Politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, artists, music groups, and sports clubs all expressed support for the project.
Historian Miriam Rurup, the former head of Hamburg's German Jewish History Institute who now serves as the head of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish Studies in Potsdam, was the first to voice opposition to the move. Rurup was one of the cultural figures to sign a petition against the Bundestag decision to define the BDS movement as anti-Semitic, arguing the legislation was a violation of free speech and Germany's constitution. Last week, at the initiative of Israeli Professor Moshe Zimmerman, 45 Israelis, some of them the descendants of Hamburg Jews, signed the petition.
Among those to sign was former Israeli Ambassador to Germany Avi Primor. In an interview with German daily Hamburger Abendblatt, Zimmerman, who has also spoken out against the German parliament's BDS move, compared the rebuilding of the synagogue to a radical right-wing German politician's call for "180-degree change to German memorial culture."
"The message is dangerous," Zimmerman said. "They are rebuilding here something that was in the past and erasing the traces [of Nazis crimes]."
Schaefer blasted Zimmerman's remarks, which he said: "insulted 107,000 of Hamburg's residents, the deputy chancellor, the foreign minister, representatives of churches and organizations when he claimed they were falsifying history."
"His remarks are absurd, vile, and an absolute insult. We succeeded in bringing this initiative to the heart of German society, in enlisting the largest support for this kind of issue Germany has ever known. No Jew, the descendant of survivors or victims, will forget what happened. The synagogue will be not just a religious place, but a memorial site and a center for meeting and dialogue. The reconstruction is an opportunity for us to demand our place in today's Germany in a conscious and justified way in the heart of the city," Schaefer said.
A senior member of Hamburg's Jewish community who asked to remain anonymous said, "We expected the radical Right to oppose the initiative, not Israelis. There are already a few figures that have signaled the freezing of their support for the move, saying, if the Jews don't want it, who are we [to decide]? The thing is, a few dozen people don't represent the Jews – certainly not the Jews of Hamburg. No one from Jerusalem will decide what we do for us."
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
