Sophie Steiert opens a bag of kosher gummy bears and offers them to
20 other German teenagers seated around her in their high school
classroom.
“They’re really yummy,” Steiert, 16, says with an enticing smile. “And by the way, does any one of you know what kosher means?”
The students shrug. Most of the 17-year-olds never have met a Jewish
person. In school, they’ve only talked about dead Jews: the 6 million
killed by the Nazis.
For years, the Jewish community in Germany relied on Holocaust
survivors to be its ambassadors. Jews who made it through the horror
were the ones with the moral authority to teach young Germans about the
perils of anti-Semitism and the crimes of their forefathers.
But with the number of survivors dwindling and schoolchildren today
at least three generations removed from the Nazis, young Jews like
Steiert are being tapped to put a modern take on an old message.
More than talking about the crimes of the past, they have been
encouraged as volunteers for a school outreach program to focus on
Jewish life in Germany today. The program was launched amid fresh
concerns about anti-Semitism in schools and on the streets of German
cities.
Enter Steiert and her friend Laura Schulmann, two girls from Berlin
who want to change perceptions and challenge stereotypes as their
community’s 21st_century ambassadors.
Germany’s leading Jewish group, the Central Council of Jews, started
the peer-to-peer education project last year. Both the program and the
90 Jewish teenagers recruited for it so far are called “likratinos,”
which is based on the Hebrew word “likrat” and loosely translates as
“moving toward each other.”
During a recent visit to Bohnstedt-Gymnasium high school in Luckau, a
rural town nearly 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of Berlin, Sophie and
Laura tried to approach the students’ lack of knowledge with easygoing
openness.
One teen raised his hand and shared he had once seen Jews while
vacationing in Austria. They all were wearing black caftans, big hats
and sidelocks, he said.
Laura — dressed in jeans, a grey hoodie and sneakers — explained that
the people he saw were ultra-Orthodox Jews adhering to strictly
observant practices.
She digressed briefly to cover what else very religious Jews do or
don’t do, and ended up explaining that texting and everything else one
might do with a smartphone are off-limits from sunset Friday until
Saturday evening, if one observes the Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat.
“I’m not that religious,” Laura, the German-born daughter of
Jewish-Russian immigrants, added when she saw the dismay on the faces of
the other students. “I use my cell also on Shabbat.”
As part of their training, the Jewish teenagers receive coaching on
speaking in front of groups, talking about the Jewish faith and dealing
with possible anti-Semitic reactions.
Central Council of Jews President Josef Schuster said he thinks the
likratinos project can be called a success after almost 80
presentations. He thinks it’s because Jewish and non-Jewish teenagers
can relate at the same level.
“There’s, for example, this thinking that all Jews have long noses,”
Schuster said. “But when they meet Jewish kids and realize that they are
no different from them, that they listen to the same music, wear the
same clothes, then that knocks down barriers.”
The only problem, he said, is there are more schools requesting workshops than Jewish youngsters to give them.
Germany’s population of 82.8 million now includes only about 200,000
Jews. Berlin has the biggest concentration, about 40,000. Before Adolf
Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power, Germany had a Jewish population
of about 500,000.
Most of the Jews now are immigrants from the former Soviet Union who
were taken in after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, a gesture of
atonement for the Holocaust crimes of the Nazis.
While anti-Semitism has existed in Europe for hundreds of years,
often fanned by Christian churches that blamed Jews for the killing of
Jesus, a large new influx of immigrants from Mideast countries into
Germany has provided new sources of tension, such as the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to German officials and Jewish
activists.
The German Interior Ministry said in its annual crime statistics
survey that police received reports of 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents in
2017— four per day.
The visible reappearance in Germany of the prejudice that resulted in
genocide has aroused alarm. Wenzel Michalski, the Germany director of
Human Rights Watch, said his teenage son was harassed so much for being
Jewish at a public high school in Berlin that he moved him to a private
school.
“Anti-Semitism has crept back into everyday life, and it’s shocking how much lethargy there is about this,” Michalski said.
After a string of incidents, the brazen April assault in the German
capital of a man wearing a yarmulke prompted demonstrations and a
condemnation of the attack from Chancellor Angela Merkel.
A 19-year-old Syrian who came to Germany in 2015 seeking asylum was
identified as a suspect and convicted of serious bodily harm and slander
and sentenced to four weeks in jail under juvenile sentencing laws.
Sophie and Laura, who attend a Jewish high school in Berlin, said
they have not had negative encounters as likratinos volunteers, but are
careful in their day-to-day lives about revealing their Jewish
identities.
Back at the high school in Luckau, the girls told the class that
their parents remind them constantly not to wear Star of David jewelry
in public or anything else that might out them as Jews.
After the lesson ended, Annika Wendt, 17, came forward to thank the speakers.
“I barely knew anything about Jews when I came here this morning,”
Wendt said. “Thanks for telling me about your weddings, your holidays
and what you as Jews think about life after death.”
She paused for a moment.
“What I really don’t understand is this anti-Semitism,” Wendt
confided. “Really, there’s nothing about you that one should have to
condemn in any way. I don’t get it.”
