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294 D Chapter Ninety d QuesTions of fAiTh . . . And Answers Almost three years prior to my appearance at Temple Emanu-El, while attending July 20 memorial services in Berlin, I had met Albert Friedlander, keynote speaker for the somber occasion. I had no idea that this eminent liberal rabbi of Westminster Synagogue in London , Dean of the Leo Baeck College, was to become a key figure in my life as a future Jew. He would gently lead me, step by step, as my mentor and close friend on the road toward my goal. Prior to telling him of my decision to leave Christianity for the Jewish faith, I had shared my intentions only with Elie Wiesel.Without batting an eye,the man just remarked, “Of course—you want to go back to the roots.” Upon my return to Germany from yet another Holocaust gathering in Philadelphia on April 21, 1985, commemorating the end of the Third Reich, I traveled to Dachau to attend ceremonies observing the fortieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation. Prompted by Elie Wiesel, the US Senate in Washington had approached me with the request that I accompany New Jersey’s Jewish Senator Frank Lautenberg on his official visit to the camp at exactly the same hour when Ronald Reagan, having given in to the West German chancellor ’s pressure,visited SS graves at the Bitburg Cemetery.The senator arrived in Dachau with his entourage, including several survivors and officials, among them Dr. Franklin Littell, noted Methodist clergyman and scholar, and the only non-Jewish member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council. Lautenberg remained at the campsite long after the departure of the US media, insisting on learning every detail of its gruesome history. Deeply moved, he stood by my side in the cell where my husband had spent the worst four years of his life. With the public focus being on Bitburg, the German media chose to ignore the senator ’s visit to Dachau;the event was covered exclusively by theAmerican networks CBS,NBC, and ABC. This had as a distinct advantage the fact that all my friends in the United States were able to watch me on their TV screens that day. One monthlater,ElieWieselcametoGermanyand,accompaniedbyourmutualfriend, the filmmaker Erwin Leiser, we went to Martin’s grave in Westfalia. The year before, during a visit to Buchenwald,I had picked up a little stone at the site of the former children’s block, from which the orphaned Elie was liberated.Handing it to him at the cemetery,he placed it on my husband’s grave, and I was sure that it carried a very special message. Although I had left the church as an organization some twenty-five years prior to my marriage to Martin, never to be officially reinstated, the fact remained that I was raised as The Promised Land 295 a Protestant Christian in more than just the religious sense of the word “Protestant.” Even as a small child, the example of my parents had taught me the importance of protesting against injustice. Martin Niemoeller, the century’s most noted Protestant, and his futile appeals to a Christian Church to repent for its appalling failures during the Shoah made me see the church through his eyes. On my journey to shores yet unknown to me, I began to assess Jesus anew—Jesus the human being, Jesus my Jewish brother and my “rebbe,” who never pronounced himself a god, but was elevated to divine honors only long after his death. It was not hard to accept Jesus as God’s son, insofar as we were all His children, carrying within us the divine spark God Himself had planted.Driven by an irresistible impulse to travel beyond the beginnings of Christendom,in the hope of finding answers to all the questions withheld from me until now, I felt like all through my life, much like a spectator in a theater, I had been confined to watching a drama that began with the second act instead of the first. If I were to embrace the Jewish faith, with all the consequences, it had to be for the right reasons, particularly at a point in history when “turning Jewish” in Germany had become some kind of a fad, particularly among certain groups with which I, the daughter and wife of active members of the resistance against the Nazis, an American of German heritage, did not wish to be identified. Stories made the rounds, according to which sons and...

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