Israel in Germany

The day she flew into Münster/Osnabrück and found herself on foot with two suitcases alone in Münster, she found how welcoming the Jewish community in Münsterland could be. They immediately took her in and helped her get settled. Coming to a strange land to study, so far from home, takes great courage. But this young woman is not short on courage. People wanted to know how her German language skills had been so finely-tuned so quickly, considering she grew-up a speaker of Hebrew. She believes that the upper level German language course she took at the Goethe Language Institute in Israel had something to do with it. Perhaps having a German-speaking Opa from Vienna helped as well. Last evening as the local Synagogue opened its doors for the curious among the Münsteraners, she was our guide and our source of information about Judaism. The session was a barrage of questions about every aspect of Jewish life in general to the specifics of how many of the Jewish community here actually can speak or read Hebrew. Reading Hebrew is one of the keys to being able to take the Torah down from its resting place and reading aloud to the congregants. The other factors include gender and age. You must be able to read Hebrew fluently, be male and at least 13 years of age. To pray properly in a synagogue you need to have a minyon which means ten males over 13 years of age who have been through bar mitzvah. Sometimes they have to place a call to get the ten there despite the fact that there are around 900 members in the community. Somewhere between 60 and 95% are east European, mostly Russian, from the former Soviet block. A reminder to wash your hands before participating in most synagogue activities is posted in Cyrillic above each sink. All three custodians are Russians who speak rather limited German if any. She explained to us that the congregation is officially conservative since liberal Jews can still pray in a conservative setting but conservative Jews could never participate in a liberal setting. She carefully described how the kitchen is kosher and how to get kosher meat you would have to order over the internet or send for it from Dortmund where the resident rabbi slaughters meat the kosher way as well as pursues his quest for scholarly knowledge. Women of course sit upstairs and they don't need to cover their heads or pray. They already have a good relationship with God is what she told us. She said the community is immensely important to her even though she is not terribly religious herself. She explained how a synagogue is much more than a house of prayer. They have no rabbi but they do have a choir and a song leader and a multitude of other active groups. The building was erected in 1971 but they need to expand because the community is growing. When asked about life in Israel she responded with a short story which is a common Jewish way to make a point. She said a survey was taken in which people were asked whose side they would take: the residents of the Gaza Strip or those in Israel. Respondents sided with the Gaza Strip inhabitants. One year later the same respondents were asked in a slightly different context if they would side with Israelis or the rest of the Middle-East and people sided with the Israelis. It seems people like to take the side of the underdog. It seems she is one of three members of the congregation who speak Hebrew. I was trying to put that together with the fact that one needs a minyon of 10 to pray and that one needs knowledge of Hebrew to read from the Torah. Perhaps being able to read aloud is different from being able to speak and function in the language.
We learned that if you honor the Sabbath as the conservatives do you cannot allow your soup to boil on that day but you can place it on a hot plate which maintains a constant temperature. She told us that this synagogue is not orthodox because if it were members would have to live within 200 meters of the building and that the high price of real estate simply wouldn't allow that. She passed around a piece of an already-spoiled Torah hand-written on soft leather and explained that the readers aren't allowed to touch the Hebrew letters with their fingers and must use a silver pointer instead in order to protect the integrity of the written letters. As we exited the synagogue we could see a green-striped police car keeping watch. I wondered if it is always there in the evening or only because of the open house event.