An initiative to re-establish the main synagogue in Hamburg, which was destroyed by the Nazis, met with strong opposition from German supporters of the anti-Semitic boycott movement BDS and left-wing Israeli activists.
Critics of the initiative argue that rebuilding the synagogue is tantamount to “rewriting and erasing history.” The Hamburg Jewish community claims that the resistance is “a terrible insult and a political abuse of a pure intention to correct an injustice that has not been corrected since the Holocaust.” Opposition to the project has already caused some German bodies to withdraw their support for the re-establishment of the synagogue. This is despite the fact that the German government and the Hamburg municipality have already pledged to fund the venture.
The synagogue in Born Square, now known as Joseph Carlebach Square after the Chief Rabbi of Hamburg who was murdered in the Holocaust, was built in 1906 in the Grindel neighborhood, which was the center of Jewish life in the port city before the Holocaust. The large and impressive building, inaugurated in 1906, was at the time the largest synagogue in northern Germany and one of the largest in northern Europe. It had 1,200 seats. During the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, the synagogue was desecrated and set on fire by the Nazis. A few months later, the Hamburg municipality demanded that the local Jewish community demolish the remains of the building at its own expense. The community was also obliged to sell the area on which the synagogue stood at a nominal price to the municipality. An upper bunker was built on part of the area. After the war it was used as an extension on which the synagogue stood a parking lot for the nearby Hamburg University. On the 50th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom, it was decided to build a parking lot in the area, a kind of work of art, which includes marking the contours of the synagogue on a paved plaza, which has become a kind of public passage.
In Hamburg today there are about 2,500 men and women in the Jewish community. It is estimated that another 1,000 Jews, some of them Israelis, live in the city. After a young neo-Nazi tried to commit a massacre in the synagogue in Hala on Yom Kippur a year and a half ago, local politicians decided to pay tribute to the Jewish community and work to restore the synagogue area to the community and establish the new synagogue. A decision on the matter was unanimously passed in the Hamburg Senate in February 2020, also with the support of members of the populist right-wing party “Alternative to Germany”. However, the initiative remained on paper until last summer. The rabbi of the community, Shlomo Bastritsky, turned to Daniel Sheffer, an Israeli-born businessman who is a member of the community, and asked him to join him on a visit to an antique shop where Keter Torah was located, dedicated to the first rabbi of the Bourne Square synagogue, Avraham Marcus Hirsch. Sheffer bought the crown and donated it to the community.
“It was a moment of mixed feelings,” Sheffer tells Israel Today, “on the one hand, happiness that came from connecting with history, on the other hand, anger that we descendants should buy what was stolen from our ancestors. So I decided in the name of injustice – the destruction, the robbery – that remained a reality in today’s Germany, to act to implement the Senate resolution and to contribute to the end of injustice. ” Sheffer set up an organization called “Anti-Semitism, for the Synagogue in Bourne Square” and began mobilizing public and political support for the project. The Bundestag soon decided to devote 65 million euros to the reconstruction of the synagogue. The Hamburg Senate approved the same amount. 107,000 Hamburg residents have signed a petition calling for the implementation of the initiative. Politicians, including the Deputy Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Germany, artists, music bands and sports clubs have joined in supporting the project.
The opposition was started by the historian Miriam Rirop, who previously headed the Institute for German Jewish History in Hamburg and now runs the Moshe Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish Studies in Potsdam. Rirop is one of the cultural figures who recently signed a reading claiming that the Bundestag decision against the BDS movement violates freedom of expression and is contrary to the German constitution. Last week, at the initiative of Israeli professor Moshe Zimmerman, a petition was published by 45 Israelis (some of them descendants of Jewish families from Hamburg), including former ambassador Avi Primor, who oppose the initiative. In an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt, Zimmerman, who is also opposed to the BDS decision of the Bundestag, compared the synagogue’s rebuilding initiative to the call of an extreme right-wing politician to a “180-degree change in German memory culture.” “The message is dangerous: here we are renewing what was in the past and erasing traces (of Nazi crimes).”
“In these words, Zimmerman insulted 107,000 Hamburgers, the Vice-Chancellor, the Foreign Minister, representatives of churches and organizations, by claiming that they were falsifying history,” Sheffer accuses. “His words are absurd, abominable and utterly insulting. We have succeeded in bringing this initiative to the heart of German society, initiating the greatest act of support in such a matter as Germany has known. No Jew, descendant of survivors or victims will forget what happened. The synagogue will be not only a religious place, but a memorial site and a center for meeting and dialogue. “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.”
A senior member of the Jewish community, who wished to remain anonymous, said explicitly: “We expected the far right to oppose the project, not Israelis. There are already several factors that have signaled the freezing of their support for the project by saying: If the Jews do not want it, then who are we? The thing is, a few dozen people do not represent the Jews, certainly not the Jews of Hamburg. No one from Jerusalem will decide for us what will be done. “