Let me begin by expressing my thanks for the warm welcome for us: students of the Martin-Schongauer-Gymnasium in Breisach, their teacher Dagmar Casetou, Juergen Lange-von Kulessa and me. We feel honored for being invited to share this special Shabbat service with you at your synagogue and for the dedication of this service to the project of the Blue House in Breisach.

We would like to thank Rabbi Hirsch, President Benjamin, the parents hosting our students, Dena Kahn, Carl and Rhonda Steeg, Elaine Wolff and Gary Bron, the friends of the Blue house who have travelled far to be here tonight and all friends supporting this unique event.

The Blaues Haus, the Blue House, is located in the former Jewish quarter of the small town of Breisach in the southwestern corner of Germany. A building we found in a state of crude neglect, trash and filth all over and the smell of decay in the air, has been restored with the help of many to a simple beauty. It had been a former Jewish school house between 1828 and 1876 and is a witness to the relationship between Christians and Jews for more than 300 years. It saw the destruction of their human relations, it saw the burning of the synagogue and it housed a praying room thereafter until the deportation of all remaining Jews in October 1940.1)

The former Jewish community center was named Blue House for more than one reason. It is as simple as this - the house was painted blue. And everyone may also feel encouraged to make associations with the color blue - a color of the beautiful sky, of the United Nations, famous expressionist artists named their association Der Blaue Reiter, Blues, a color of Israel…

The entrance hall was turned into the "walkway of remembrance". Here the names of 250 women, men and children, who once were the Jewish community of Breisach in 1933, again are reunited. The association which was founded 5 years ago is dedicated to devoting this house, the former center of Jewish life and learning, again to their memory. They return from exile and from death to stay with us.

To collect and find something about every Breisach Jew is the long term aim, it may be a picture, a saying, a poem, it may be their full story.

We want to give back their dignity, their faces, their names, their identity. They again belong here. They don't have to wander about like ghosts aimlessly in the streets of this small quarter where Jews had settled since 1638. 2)

But this work is not only about the dead. This struggle to retrieve memories is for us, the living, and for our children and really for everyone who wants to take part in this process.

For ourselves it is a difficult, exhausting and painful undertaking to confront what happened during those twelve black years, and to learn what happened to the families and individuals beyond the borders of the Reich in occupied territories, how they were treated after they were spit out by their neighbors, by the Breisach gentile society, when it was the aim to take away their humanity before taking away their lives.

The center of our work lies in and around the Blaues Haus, and naturally the students preparing themselves for their trip to New York met there in the library.

From the very beginning it was our conviction to invite Jewish families back, to welcome them in a common effort to restore the memory of their loved ones, to reach out to them to discuss with the next generations how they feel about themselves and the place into which history has put them. From the very beginning we are working in close cooperation and guidance with Jewish friends and descendants of Breisach Jews.

We are presently shaping plans to turn this house into a place 'to teach any one willing to learn to understand how the world was and in consequence the way of the world today.‘ To be able to learn to act as a human, to respect minorities, to have a clear identity, to fight against racism and to cherish every life. 3)

Between 1999 and today some thousand people have visited the Blaues Haus as it was being restored. Lectures, concerts and exhibits have taken place. Students from Eastern Europe joining with Germans took part in the restoration work. They came from as far away as Moscow and Warsaw to receive their training in the history of the Holocaust during two weeks in a summercamp organized in cooperation with Action Reconciliation.4)

Last year another association was created, an association across the border, namely the Rhine river: Les Amis du Judengarten de Mackenheim. It was formed to preserve and rebuild the oldest burial place of Breisach Jews in Alsace in France. The community of Mackenheim, headed by Mayor Spielmann has finally taken on responsibility and we were happy to devote part of the summercamp to the work there.

The cruel and infuriating reality of today's Alsace - desecrated Muslim, Christian and Jewish cemetaries - we can only confront with this work of love, teaching and working. The young generations continue the work begun by our friend Guenter Boll, a historian profoundly knowledgable about the Jewish history of the region.

Again Jews are dwelling in Breisach. Presently there are five Jewish families from Russia, Ukraine and Moldova assigned to Breisach and now settling here. They could leave their countries thanks to a treaty between the German government and the states of the Former Soviet Union. The group is growing, while struggling to learn German and find work. As our guests, the group meets once a month for a Friday night service in the former praying room of the Blue House. Members and non-Jews are invited to the service and to the Kiddush afterwards.

We are now in our second year of having a young volunteer, sent by Action Reconciliation, working for the Blue House, helping with the organizational work, expanding and reaching out to young people.

During the last five years a new bond has been created and deepened between Breisach people old and young and the Jewish families. Three times they have come back for a week to stay and be part of a program of commemoration, discussion and learning. I am extremely happy and grateful to welcome many of them here at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue today.

One day during every such week, we organized teaching about the Holocaust and meetings between our visitors and students of various levels in their schools. In June of this year the Blue House was full of life when Jewish guests and students alike came to listen to the survivors speak.

Josef Kornweitz started a project with us in which he projected the faces of the former Breisach Jews onto the walls of the houses where they once lived. They came alive for these hours and were present again among us, providing the opportunity for memories to be exchanged as we became a part of this enactment.5)

A conference on the founding families of the Jewish Community in Breisach this summer was designed to attract genealogists, historians and descendants of Jewish families worldwide to join for lectures, discussions, excursions and exchange.

After last year's meeting for the dedication of the renovated house, Carl Steeg suggested to work for an exchange of American and German youths to take the idea to the next generation, to actively involve them into the dialogue and to let them explore how they are facing our common history.

I was asked to comment on the difference between today and yesterday in regards to our education, having been raised after the liberation from the Nazi Regime. I share these experiences with Dagmar Casetou and millions of Germans of my generation.

I would like to describe the atmosphere of my childhood years as a vast grey cloth with certain objects and certain events sticking out, popping up.

There was no mention of Jews having lived in the neighborhood where I was brought up nor of the crimes of Nazi Germany. There was no anti-Semitic rhethoric because Jews were not part of what was said and told, they were simply non-existent.6) Parents and teachers explained the post-war situation to us as the results of the evils of Communism, and friendship with the Americans seemed to be a guarantee for our safety.

A few examples I would like to mention here:
- A cup was given to me and my sister to play with, a cup different from all other toys in the dolls' kitchen. This cup was put in a box once I left home after graduating. I took a second look at it many years later as an adult. I found a Magen David, the manufacturer’s symbol, and at that time I knew what it meant. It was a Jewish cup. A precious coffee cup had been given to me, little girl, to play with, at great risk of its breaking, where, under normal circumstances, it should have been placed behind glass in the living room. Recently I asked my mother lately for the first time where this cup came from and she said she has never seen it.

- At the age of six I became a close friend of Doris, a Jewish girl, whose parents had survived Auschwitz and had settled close to Bergen-Belsen where they had been liberated. She told me later that she knew as little as I did from her parents. There was a difference and a bond, a friendship that was important. I got angry and depressed when her parents decided to move to New York and leave me behind.7)

- A neighbor disappeared in jail and rumors spread that he was accused of having committed a crime during the Nazi Regime.

- I remember to have followed news from Jerusalem about the Eichmann trial, reading the paper at the age of 11!

- At the age of 12 my school mates and I were taken to the first exhibit shown in postwar Germany. We went without being prepared or talked to and could see photos of enormous size taken at concentration camp sites.8) I do not remember any discussion or explanations to us. This first experiment of teaching the destruction of the Jews became a troublesome experience with no possibility to understand and to express feelings of despair.

Approaching adolescence, there were feelings of a deeper gap and an alienation towards our parents and their generation. My favorite and beloved aunt exposed herself as a true anti-Semite and I broke up relations with her without discussions. What we had learned in Sunday school we could not apply: how can we honor and respect our parents if they have not obeyed the basic laws of humanity?

We knew that questions were not welcome; our curiosity was suppressed. With a growing yet unconnected knowledge about the Nazi crimes, we knew without experiencing it that we as Germans might not be welcomed crossing the borders in Europe.

Yet I decided to leave my family and country for a year to become an exchange student in the United States. There, to my great surprise, I met the children of survivors. Until today in an ongoing process Germans of my generation are trying to overcome the silence and begin to communicate.

I want to call it the family ‚Album‘ - everything that was told and reported, explained and shown to us as children. Again and again we have to confront the content of this ‚Album‘ with the facts as we find them in the archives and in historical research.

Encouraged by a deepening dialogue between myself and Josef Kornweitz, a Jewish psychoanalyst and collegue, about the impact of history on both our families, I wanted to inquire about what side the members of my family had taken and what role they had played in the Holocaust.

As psychoanalysts we are concerned about the impact of the destruction over generations - the ways in which our history affects the way we are now.

Acquiring more knowledge in books and archives turned out to be helpful in again questioning my parents, and a reshaping of the ‚album‘ seemed necessary. The items and experiences sticking out of the grey cloth can now be connected and make sense.

Being involved in both the research about the Breisach Jews and about the members of my own family is an ongoing painful but extremely enlightening task. The rewarding feeling is to really know where you come from. Zygmunt Baumann was speaking about his personal experience opening up to what his wife had to say about her survival of the Warsaw ghetto. He chose to describe his conclusion as an image: The holocaust is no painting on the wall, neatly separated from its surrounding – it is a window through which we can discover things we cannot discover otherwise.9)

Spiraling outward from the dialogue between Josef and myself we are spreading the word. Now we are seeds of the spirit of the Blue House. All of us became fertile seeds blown in the wind.

I am wondering if you were as touched as I was when I heard and saw tears in the eyes of our Secretary of State Joschka Fischer when he was handed a yellow star in a blue velvet case. It was the yellow star which Solomon Passy's grandfather who had survived as a Bulgarian Jew had been forced to wear.

This grandfather had asked his grandson once: What do you think, could we not give the star back to the Germans one day? And as a chairman of the international conference on Antisemitism taking place in Berlin in April of this year, time had come for him to do so.10)

1. In one of the earliest deportations 6500 Jews were taken prisoner in 137 places in southwestern Germany (Baden and Saarpfalz) in the early morning hours of October 22, 1940, deprived of their property and deported to Camp de Gurs in southern France from where all those, who couldn’t escape were deported to Auschwitz beginning in August 1942.
2. Jews had settled in Breisach twice before in the 14th century. The first Jewish community was murdered in 1349; the second existed from 1376 on and was expelled in 1426.
3. Manuela Wyler: The Blue House: A time to break down and a time to build up. Facing history and ourselves. Presented at the Conference on the Founding Families of the Breisach Jewish Community Breisach June 29, 2004, p. 4
4. Students from the local schools and members of the association, old and young, helped in the reconstruction work.
5. Josef A. Kornweitz, Guenter Boll, Christiane Walesch-Schneller: ZONE 30 – RETURN FROM EXILE. Freiburg 2003 modo Verlag. Photos by J.A. Kornweitz, essays and poems by Primo Levi and Freddy Raphaël in English, German and French.
6. Being born in the city of Goettingen, I grew up in Hanover.
7. As a teenager I first visited the memorial site of the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen secretly by bicycle.
8. The exhibit showed pictures published in „Der gelbe Stern“ – „The Yellow Star – The Persecution of Jews in Europa 1933 – 1945“ by Gerhard Schoenberner
9. Bauman, Zygmunt: Modernity and the Holocaust. Oxford 1989. Preface
10. Solomon Passy is Secretary of State of Bulgaria and was chairman of the conference on Antisemitism organized by the OSCE, Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, in April 2004 in Berlin. <(ol>

    Thanks to Gary Bron and Sharyn Jackson for their patience.