Gravity

Friday, May 8, 2009
Cemeteries

This morning the elderly lady who helps to run the hotel told me that she is on night duty tonight and tomorrow night. I should stop by to chat when I get back either tonight or tomorrow.

Today I will visit the Jewish center to gather just a little more information about the community. I was told by the receptionist that I should talk with Herr Fried in the Library. I stepped into the library a few minutes before it was to open, not noticing the hour, surprising the people there that anyone would consider coming in before the precise opening hour. Turns out that Herr Fried is from Latvia, having come to Berlin 20 or so years ago.

Herr Fried was happy to talk to me about the cemeteries in town and about the community. I complained to him that the synagogues don't have open times or tours. If you want to see the inside of a synagogue, you must attend services. But what if you don't want to attend a reform service? Only one synagogue has tours. I mentioned that the Vienna main synagogue has scheduled tours.

We started comparing the Jewish communities in US cities, in Vienna, and in Berlin. He mentioned that many US visitors ask, “Where is the athletic facility?” or “Where is the computer center?” He regrets that there aren't more Jewish facilities. Berlin has a fairly large Jewish community, about 11,000, but he said Vienna is more deeply Jewish than Berlin.

I left to visit two of the city's important cemeteries. First I went to the cemetery on Schönhauser Allee in Prenzlauer Berg. The cemetery is essentially closed to further burials, as it is pretty full. The cemetery suffered considerable bomb damage in the War. Here I ran into some Americans searching for the grave of a distant family member. Nobody had a map of the cemetery, including the overseer. The graves were all marked with a number, but it appears to indicate the order in which the gravesite was used, not the location. Thus, 11204 might be right next to 10667.

In this graveyard were the remains of several famous Berliners, including Moses Mendelssohn's son and the son's family, Max Lieberman, the artist and collector, and Giacomo Meyerbeer.

I then went to the Weissensee cemetery. It is, purportedly, the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. Since it is in what was once East Berlin, the Jewish community in West Berlin did not have access to it for most of the time from 1945 – 1989, forcing them to create a new cemetery in the West. This is a beautifully laid out landscape where Jews are buried even now. In this cemetery are many influential Berliners, including Lesser Ury, the painter. There are also memorials to several famous Jews, including Herbert Baum, the resistance fighter who was killed by the Nazis and Leo Baeck, the Rabbi.

A nap before going to services tonight was very helpful.

I went to Chabad again tonight for kabbalat Shabbat services. You always run into tourists at Chabad. I talked for a while with an Israeli couple. He is a Motorola employee who was sent to Berlin for 3 weeks on business. She is an Israeli who lived in Seattle for 10 years before moving back with her family – accompanying him. At dinner I met a local (German) young fellow, David, studying IE, not Jewish, and planning to convert. I had a good conversation with him about converting and about engineering. As we both had to walk in the same direction, we talked on the way home about his hope of starting an independent business.

He'll be coming to Seudat Shlishi at the Joachimstalerstr. Synagogue tomorrow; thus, I should see him there.

After I got back to my room, I spent some time catching up on my blog entries. I was 4 or 5 days behind.