The Miracle of Hanuka 2004

The amazing story of the Jewish Community of Frankfurt – Oder



This has being the fourth student delegation to Germany in the frame of the Building-Bridges project which went to visit the German group of teens from the Friedrichsgymnasium high school.

This year we decided to focus on childhood memories of the Jewish community that lived for close to a thousand years in Frankfurt Oder and was erased by the Nazi government during the WarII. In Frankfurt Oder was a beautiful Synagogue that was totally destroyed during the Kristalnijt. We were looking in many places for information about this synagogue but no museum or library in Israel and in the world seams to have. The only memory left is a memorial stone in front of the place were was the synagogue that any person can step on it while he walks on the street.

In the place were of the synagogue, stands a big mall and a pharmacy.

Before the delegation left Israel, we had the chance to interview some of the mature "kids" (on their eighties y/o), that could escape Frankfurt Oder before it was too late for them.

One of them was Helmut Meir , he left this town in 1940, then he was fifteen when he

saw for the last time his parents in the Railway station of F-O waving him for goodbye. His parents disappears with the last transport to the east in 1942.

He left in the kinder transport Miss Rothschild arranged to France in aim to rescue 1500 Jewish kids from Germany and Austria. From France he came to Palestine.

Helmut, a pensioner who works with Tiffany glass, made a window of Tiffany and donated it to the Jewish community of Frankfurt Oder this days.

This Jewish community, composed of around 200 Ukrainian Jewish people , which totally left and forgot their Jewish roots, came to Germany in the law frame that any Jew can come to live in Germany as an act of reconciliation.

This Ukrainian community suffers of poverty, since they cannot find work there and also because there is a high percent of more than 20% of unemployment. Another problem is that they couldn't learn the German language. This community is very isolated.

Helmut Mehir asked from the kids before we left to go in our visit to the community center of the Jewish people of Frankfurt Oder and to look for the Tiffany window he donated, he also asked me to take a picture of it.

While we were in Frankfurt-Oder, I asked my German partners of the project if they

know any person who belongs to this community. Sabine, the English teacher, told me that there's a Ukrainian girl who belongs to the Jewish community that study in the school. This girl happens to be the speaker of the people there, because she is the only one that learnt Germany.

Sabine arranged me a meeting with Irena. I met her in the day of the fourth candle of Hanuka, after our kids made the Hanuka performance in the main hall of the Friedrichsgymnasium.

Irena, a beautiful girl, in her fifteens, told me that they have a Hanuka party in the community and she invited me to come.

At eight o'clock, I went with Sabine and Mazal to the community.

There was a big Hanuka party there, with a local Orchestra, Sufganiot and Hanukah songs.

The Habadnik Rabbi of Brandenburg received us in the front door.

He was there visiting with his family and there were more than 100 people in the party. The Habadnik rabbi introduce me also the the Jewish leader of the community who was very excited to have visitors from Israel. He introduces us to the people of the community but sadly I couldn’t develop a dialog with them.

The Jewish leader took us to the second floor of the building were we enter to a room that looked as a yeshiva from the beginning of the century…the learning sits, the place of the Drashan.

In the wall front of the room stand the Tiffany window. I asked the Rabbi to tell the Jewish leader about Helmut Mehir. The leader was very excited to hear the story, but more exciting was to hear the story of the room.

He told us (by the media translation of the Hassidic Rabbi), that in the place were the Jewish Synagogue of F-O stood, when they started to build the pharmacy, in the ground they found buried the torah scrolls of the synagogue and a book of Rabbi's sister of the synagogue that stands there before 1938. In this book there was a detailed description of the synagogue building including a drawing of its outside and inside.

The room were we stand, that looks like a study room of a Yeshiva, is the reproduction of the inside part of the Synagoge.

They are also building an Aron(coffin) for the Torah script and for the Shulhan Aruch exactly as it was in the synagoge. He was very excited telling us he's plans while he show us with details were everything it will stand. We asked him from were he got the money for making this reproduction, knowing that the community is very poor. He said that inside the book of the Rabbi sister, they also found a nice quantity of money that they decide to invest for the aim of reconstructing the pray room of the synagogue.

Isn't it a "Nes Hanuka"?