Dancing With the Torah on a Street Once Named for Hitler
by Yehuda Sugar – chabad.org
On a thoroughfare once named for Adolf Hitler, where Nazi troops goose-stepped and saluted in all-too-familiar infamous scenes from before and during World War II, the Jews of Freiburg, Germany, marched with joyful abandon against a backdrop of blaring Chassidic music to inaugurate a new Torah scroll and Chabad center earlier this week.
“At one point in the procession, one of the participants shouted, ‘Can the music be any louder?’” Rabbi Yakov Gitler, who co-directs the Freiburg Chabad center with his wife, Chava, told Chabad.org. “Then another could be heard responding, ‘On a street once called Adolf Hitler, it can’t be loud enough!’”
The ceremonious filling in of the final Torah letters took place in a building believed to have been a meeting place for Nazis, followed by a 20-minute singing and dancing romp to the new Chabad center, through a city square and down a central shopping avenue now called Kaiser Joseph Street.
Among the crowd of 250 to 300 were people from the Gitlers’ growing congregation, fellow Chabad emissaries from neighboring countries, “non-Jews astounded by the scene and a police force that surprisingly insisted on a route that would provide for the most public exposure,” said Gitler, adding “that was a change.”
From Fear to Pride
More than one participant expressed how they had never experienced such an event, noted the rabbi. “People were taken aback about how much pride was exhibited and expressed how it was time to change their attitude from being fearful to proud about being Jewish,” he said.
Many of the 800 to 1,000 Jews of Freiburg are of Russian descent, having lived both in the shadow of Germany’s past and with embedded memories of Soviet oppression, he shared.
The Gitlers arrived in the city, about 400 miles southwest of Berlin, four years ago, originally from New York, providing Torah learning, prayer services, and Shabbat and holiday meals in their home until six months ago, when they rented a storefront for operations. The Torah dedication on Sunday doubled as an inauguration of their new facility, he said.
Added meaning was derived from the fact that the Torah was brought from Israel by the Chabad Terror Victims Project and its director, Rabbi Menachem Kutner. It was sponsored by an anonymous donor with some of the letters filled in by family members of terror victims over a 14-year period.
