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The second gentleman toured Jewish sites and met with leaders across Poland and Germany on a trip that he says left a mark on him.
BERLIN (JTA) — For Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, the final hours of a five-day assignment in Poland and Germany brought everything into focus.
It was here, in the underground data center of Germany’s central Holocaust memorial, that Emhoff sat with several survivors, two of whom had recently fled war-torn Ukraine.
Sitting in a small circle, they shared their stories. One of them “was rescued from the Holocaust when he was a young man, settled in Ukraine and then had to flee again. And he was welcomed in Germany,” Emhoff said in a speech immediately after the meeting. “It was an emotional encounter and an intense way to end the trip. “
The trip, which he made with Deborah Lipstadt, the U. S. special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, included visits to Krakow, Poland; the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum; and the Polish people of Emhoff’s ancestors, Gorlice.
It was all intended to feed into the design of a “national action plan against antisemitism” that Emhoff is working on with Lipstadt and others. The second gentleman has made combating Jew hatred his main focus since entering the White House, touring college campuses to talk on the subject and leading events with Jewish organizations.
But that trip, which began on Friday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, took Emhoff’s efforts overseas and returned him to his ancestral Jewish roots.
Emhoff’s two days in Berlin were a whirlwind. On Monday, he met with U. S. Ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann, German Commissioner for Jewish Life Felix Klein and other leaders. On Tuesday, he and Lipstadt participated in an interfaith roundtable organized through the Central Council of Jews in Germany, before visiting a historic synagogue in the former East Berlin and community assemblymen. He also visited three Holocaust memorials in the city center: one dedicated to the Sinti and Roma victims of Nazism, another to homosexuals and, finally, the immense German monument to the Jews murdered in Europe.
Addressing the small gathering of Muslims, Christians and Jews held this morning at the headquarters of the Central Council, Emhoff said he still couldn’t think about his grandparents, who escaped persecution in Poland and settled in the United States.
“They discovered opportunity and freedom,” he said, “and today, 120 years later, their great-grandson is the first Jewish wife of a president or vice president of the United States, fighting hate and anti-Semitism. That’s something, is he?” he said as if he wanted to pinch himself. It’s a remarkable full circle. “
Abraham Lehrer, vice president of the Central Council, told visitors that interfaith relations between Jews and Christians are smart and that the teams have developed channels of communication “in case of serious conflicts. “
Relations with Muslims are good locally, he says, “but it’s complicated with the leaders of some organizations, because many of them still have ties to anti-Semitic or anti-democratic organizations. “The panellists then commented on the “positive atmosphere”.
“I was very impressed by the young Muslim man [Burak Yilmaz], who is organizing trips for young Muslims to visit Auschwitz,” said Rabbi Szolt Balla, who serves a congregation in Leipzig and is rabbi for the German Armed Forces. “It was a very good and productive thing to meet in this circle,” he added
Emhoff told reporters that the goal of the meeting was to create the most productive practices and incorporate them into the “national action plan” he is pursuing with Lipstadt, U. S. Special Ambassador for International Religious Freedom Rashad Hussain and the White House liaison to American Jewry. community. Shelley Greenspan.
“We’re going to think together and communicate what we’ve learned and then put it into practice so we can scale up the most effective national plan,” Emhoff told reporters after the day’s meetings. He added that he would meet with the United Nations in early February.
Emhoff’s last official act here was his meeting with survivors. He changed his schedule “just in order to meet with them and listen to their stories,” said Rudiger Mahlo, Germany representative of the Conference for Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Sonja Tartakovska, who survived a Nazi mass shooting in her village during World War II, told Emhoff how she had to flee Ukraine last year without changing her clothes. She was among the Ukrainian Jews that the Claims Conference brought to Germany last spring, said Mahlo, who attended the meeting.
The fact that former victims of the Holocaust were now seeking safe refuge in Germany was not overlooked.
“We talked about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, violence and oppression and here in Europe, all those years later, those things are still going on through this unjust and unprovoked war,” Emhoff told reporters after the last meeting of the day.
From people like Tartakovska “you hear these stories of survival. A lot of it was a twist of fate, just some luck. A non-Jewish stranger deciding on a whim to do something, that then led to a life long-lived.”
“I was also struck: One woman” — German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedlaender — “was 101 years old. Imagine living with those memories for 80 years. Those are the kinds of things I take back with me,” Emhoff said.
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