IN THIS  ISSUE:

• MECHINA ENROLLMENT SOARS

• YOUTH FINDS JEWISH PAST AND FUTURE THANKS TO WORLD UNION

• GERMAN CONGREGATION MARKS LONG-LOST GRAVE OF PRE-WAR LEADER

• UPCOMING EVENTS

MECHINA ENROLLMENT SOARS

The Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism has entered the fourth year of its mechina military preparatory program with a record enrollment of 25 high school graduates. These young Israeli adults – many of whom literally “grew up” in the Progressive movement - have elected to postpone induction in favor of a one-year program of academic, spiritual and ethical enrichment. The program will help them develop their sense of responsibility and community, and prepare them for the rigors of army life.

The mechina students are living communally in Jaffa, where they are working with Holocaust survivors, people with disabilities and troubled youth. They are also studying with Progressive rabbis and educators, focusing on Judaism, prayer, philosophy and social justice, and taking part in organized seminars and field trips. In addition, they are working part-time to help defray living expenses that are not otherwise covered by the IMPJ. The leadership training they receive can be of tremendous help once they’re in uniform and can help prepare them for leadership positions in the movement once they return to civilian life. Israel’s Defense Ministry officially accredited the IMPJ program last year, a move that appears to have been responsible for almost doubling the enrollment.

This year’s mechina got underway soon after the end of the war this past summer. The coordinator of the mechina, Rabbi Aharon Fox, is a reserve lieutenant colonel who took part in the fighting. The conduct of the war and its implications for Israel and Israeli society will, no doubt, drive much of the debate and individual reflection that are highly encouraged as part of the program.

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YOUTH FINDS JEWISH PAST AND FUTURE THANKS TO WORLD UNION

Feder Peletsky (see photo below), originally from Mogilev in Belarus, is a 20-year-old geology student in Minsk who supports himself as a youth worker for the World Union’s international Zionist youth movement, Netzer Olami. He recently wrote to Alex Kagan, the World Union’s FSU director, how involvement with the Progressive movement had changed his life. Kagan, who called the letter “a testament to the success of Netzer and our movement as a whole in the region,” shares with us excerpts of Feder’s letter.

Netzer Olami youth worker Feder Peletsky, from Belarus

“I had never studied at a Jewish school, and any remarks made about Jews in the street, at school, or in a sports stadium were negative ones. From all the information I had learned about Jews, the one and only positive thing I knew was that my mother was one.

“As time passed, I became more involved in Jewish life and trained to be a madrich (youth counselor). I chose Netzer, as the ideology of this youth group best suited me and my lifestyle. My sister and I both started working for Netzer in Mogilev; the work was so interesting and rewarding that both of us became more involved. I am a member of the movement to this day.

“[Today] I run the Netzer club in Minsk and work as a madrich at Netzer camps and seminars all over the FSU. My sister still lives in Mogilev. She recently celebrated her bat mitzvah and had a zeved ha’bat (ritual naming) for her daughter. Both ceremonies were led by a Progressive rabbi.

“Perhaps we are not the most observant of Jews, but I do know that my sister and I belong to a generation that renewed ties with Judaism and began a new chapter in the history of the Jewish People. Perhaps this history will continue with our parents; it will definitely continue in the families that we establish, and our children will know and be proud to be Jewish.”

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GERMAN CONGREGATION MARKS LONG-LOST GRAVE OF PRE-WAR LEADER

An Australian physician recently traveled to Hameln, Germany, to dedicate the gravestone of his great-grandfather, also a physician, and the last pre-war president of the town’s Jewish community, whose gravesite remained unknown until last year.

Along with other Jewish community leaders of Hameln, Dr. Siegmund Kratzenstein had been dragged from his home by Nazis on the night of November 9, 1938 – now known as Kristallnacht - to witness the destruction of the town’s synagogue. He and the other leaders then were incarcerated at the Buchenwald concentration camp. But Kratzenstein was extremely popular in Hameln, where he often treated patients – Jewish and non-Jewish - free of charge, and following a series of rare protests he was released, only to succumb later that month to injuries he sustained at Buchenwald.

At the time it was illegal to bury Jews in Germany, so Hameln’s Jewish community enlisted a sympathetic, 16-year-old gardener’s apprentice to secretly bury Kratzenstein in the Jewish cemetery. By war’s end, the town’s Jews were gone, having either fled, never to return – much like Kratzenstein’s son, who reached Australia – or gone to their own deaths in the camps. Knowing he could have been executed, the gardener’s apprentice apparently put the incident out of his mind, and the location of the unmarked grave remained a mystery.

Fast-forward to 2005, when retired gardener Josef Speckmann watched a television broadcast on Hameln’s resurgent Progressive Jewish community. In the broadcast, the congregation’s president, Rachel Dohme – who has been dedicated to bringing to light the history and lives of the town’s pre-war Jews - told about the lost grave. Speckmann quickly contacted her and explained that he had been the gardener’s apprentice, and that he could show her the grave. “It turned out that Speckmann, without knowing it, had buried the good doctor in the place reserved for the Jewish community’s most important members,” Dohme later said.

Dohme then contacted Kratzenstein’s heirs in Australia. His grandson, Peter, and granddaughter, Eva, agreed to pay for a gravestone but were physically unable to travel to its dedication. Instead, Eva’s husband, Harold, took their son, David - like his great-grandfather, a physician. They took part in the ceremony led by Rabbi Irit Shillor of Hameln’s Progressive congregation, in the presence of many of the town’s non-Jewish residents. “The newspaper headlines are calling [Kratzenstein] a saint,” one media outlet reported Speckmann as saying. “I knew him, and he really was such a good man.”

Harold (l) and David Brown and the newly-dedicated gravestone for Dr. Siegmund Kratzenstein.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

• Register now for Connections 2007 – the 33rd International Convention of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, March 15-20, 2007, in Jerusalem

• Installation of Rabbi Burt Schuman as spiritual leader of Beit Warszawa, Poland’s first post-war Progressive community, by World Union president Rabbi Uri Regev in Warsaw, October 20, 2006

• Special World Union Mission to South America, November 9-20. (Adobe Reader required for this download)

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