Traveling Jewish in Germany

As noted in my previous post, these travel log postings will be thematic rather than chronological. Today I want to respond to questions I’ve been getting about traveling Jewish in Germany. I don't have a lot of photos to share this time. Watch for them in the future!

Was it hard to find Kosher food?

This is an interesting question. For those who don’t need, it can encompass both locating Kosher restaurants as well as identifying what foods at a grocery store are Kosher. 

In short, it was quite possible to find Kosher food in Germany, but we needed to learn how to do it.

The major cities do have Jewish infrastructure that makes this seem easy in theory. However, we couldn’t rely on just walking into Kosher grocery stories and having things go easily. We flew into Frankfurt, planning to go to a Kosher grocery store before having to learn a new system of locating Kosher foods. However, we didn’t realize that, along with half of Europe, the owners of this Kosher store were on vacation during August. So we took the soy jerky and granola bars we had packed from home and decided to try our luck as we started on the the road trip portion of our trip. 

In Europe, the system for Kashrut works a little differently than in the U.S. Instead of looking for Kosher symbols on packages, we learned to use an app. You scan a barcode and the app will tell you whether something is or isn’t Kosher, or will say it’s unlisted. If unlisted, it directs you to answer 5 questions by scanning barcode, ingredients, name of the item and listing the store where it came from (if possible). A rabbi will respond in about 45 minutes with an answer. We ended up using that a lot in hotels that had packaged yogurt, and then would know when we saw that yogurt again that we could eat it. 

Having to learn this new system was part of the travel fun for me. While Naomi and Uri were packing up a hotel room I might go to a nearby grocery store and start foraging for the family, reading the German labels, using the app and generally trying to plan ahead a day or two at a time. 

Having had that experience with the first Kosher grocery store, we were pretty anxious to reach Munich early enough on Friday to find the store in that city too. There was only one near our hotel and we called twice to be sure we understood the hours. It was a tiny store with mostly Israeli food and a few things I didn’t quite recognize. I ended up using four languages there — English, German, Hebrew and Yiddish — for different things. I wanted to know what those “donut-looking” things looked like in the freezer so I asked if it was sufganiyot, the Hebrew used for donuts at Channukah. There were two young Chasidic-looking girls helping there and I heard them talking with some delight about how I had asked that question. 

Finally, there were also some Kosher restaurants in the three cities we visited. Since we spent most of our time in Berlin we went to one restaurant more than once because it was just a few blocks from our hotel. (The other was an absolute delight with this cauliflower dish that I just couldn’t get enough of, but it was a little more out of our way.)

Did we ever feel unsafe as Jews?

No. Quite simply, no. It didn’t come up at all. 

However, safety is clearly on the mind of the jews who live there. Security was really tight at the two shuls we went too, one in Munich and one in Frankfurt. The Munich shul has a relatively new building built on the site where a much older shul had been destroyed on Kristallnacht. To access this you go through a security system in a community building, then descend stairs to an underground tunnel that then brings you up into a giant box on the other side. I call it a box rather than a building because you can’t see out any windows on the walls. The skylight is magnificent and the interior is beautiful, but from the outside the place looks like kotel-style bricks all around and a giant 10 commandments structure that opens up to let congregants out at the end of the service. We wondered about the architecture. Was it meant to look like Tefillin? Like Israel? Regardless, the message was, “Don’t mess with us. No one is getting in here!”

As noted above, one of the things I really enjoyed on this trip was simply figuring out how to do things like shop for my family. Another trip like that was when I decided in Berlin that it was time to do some laundry. I ubered to a laundromat and had to work very hard to lean how to get things working. When one of the washers got stuck I started to panic and shyly asked for help from the only other person there. Turns out he was Canadian and after we pried the machine open we ended up chatting for the duration of my dryer cycle. It was a relief to connect with someone new exclusively in English and to compare notes on what we’d discovered about Germany. He’d been living there several years already working on a special project as a science in the university. His time there was coming to an end and he shared with me that he was glad to return home more permanently to his partner. I’m not exactly sure how he said it, but it was clear he was outing himself to me as gay. 

When I shared with him about the road trip portion of our trip he commented on those being more conservative areas. 

“Yeah,” I commented, recognizing what we had discovered just a day before. “When we arrived in Berlin at the train station it was like arriving in New York. So we were wondering… where we were before in those little towns? Alabama?” I then outed myself as Jewish and he told me to keep an eye out for brass plates on the sidewalks. These plates I now know are called Stolperstein. They designate homes of Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust.

Here lived Karl Gumbel
Local/Deprived of rights
fled and then died

It’s jarring to find these plaques while going about daily business. You can’t ever forget what happened.

Shul number 1

I shared above a description of the Frankfurt shul we attended. We went on Friday night and Saturday morning. Two major things stood out for me there. 

First, mwhen we arrived I was hyper-conscious of not wanting to take anyone’s seat. Naomi and I chose a spot, but then any time another woman came in I paid close attention to see if there was a chance we were sitting in her regular place. 

Instead of siddurim, most of the people on Friday night had these little Kabbalat pamphlets. Some were Hebrew-German. Many were Hebrew-Russian. An older woman came in with hers and we made eye contact, but I quickly established that it wasn’t because I had her seat. She came over to me instead for help finding her spot in the “siddur.” I tried to speak to her in German but she responded, “Ukraine.” 

I had to turn away for a minute, somewhat stunned in the realization that she was likely a refugee and hiding my instantaneous tearing up. I composed myself quickly, then helped her find her page and gestured for her to sit beside me. She clearly wasn’t very familiar with the service at all, but loved the singing. We tried again a few times to communicate. In addition to English, I offered my limited German, Hebrew, Yiddish and Spanish. No luck. She offered me Russian, French and Italian. In the end, about the only thing she could words we were actually able to exchange were her saying, “Mein Mann” and pointing out her husband to me. At the end of the service we hugged and laughed at having made some kind of friendship even without language to help us do so. I’ll never know for sure whether she was visiting, passing through, recently turned refugee or what. But I was grateful for the common non-language of simply sharing a Shabbat service to bring our connection.

The second remarkable experience I had in the shul was simply reading the parsha. The Chumash was translated in German and the parsha was Vaetchanan. This means that while reading the translation I got to experience something akin to actually reading shema and the ten commandments for the very first time. Sometimes it feels hard to pray to a Gd that’s invisible. But then suddenly to say in a new way, “Mein Gott” feels so sincere that I was driven to Daven with a bit more sincerity. 

Shul number 2

We went to the Baumweg Synagogue in Frankfurt. It was enormous and the women’s section upstairs was so hot that I actually thought I would faint a few times. (They handed out paper fans.) The acoustics were such that the chazan’s music was lovely, but I barely understood a word of either the Torah reading or the rabbi’s speech. As impressive as the building was, I didn’t personally feel too connected there. It did remind me a bit of the architecture of the shul I used to attend years ago in Portland, OR before it modernized. 

One last thing I appreciated, though, in both these shuls was a song that they sang after davening that I’ve never heard anywhere else. Apparently it’s part of the weekly service after the Torah reading. So beautiful. I would gladly listen to Avinu Shebashamayim on a regular basis here in the U.S. too. The link I have there is for a version that's a little over the top. Enjoy it anyway!

One final note about Shabbat in Germany. Here I’m returning to the first shul in Munich. I’ll write later about the wonderful things to see in the old town and viktualienmarkt where we stayed in Munich. As Shabbat began to wane, U and N were sitting in the courtyard of our hotel, talking and playing cards. I got antsy (as I do) and went out walking. The streets that had been filled earlier with hundreds of tourists were emptying now, but there were still a few street musicians. I’m still not certain of this, but that accordion player on the corner was doing something eerily familiar. I didn’t want to get too close since I had no money to offer, but I circled around nearby, dodging behind some of the food and grocery booths that were now darkened for the evening.  Could he really have been playing Kol Nidrei?

That pretty well summarizes what it meant to be Shabbat observant in Germany during this trip. A future post will include more connections to Jewish history.