Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (21 page)

The rapid expansion of Zionist occupational retraining efforts throughout Germany was particularly evident in and around Berlin.
³⁶
The occupational retraining of prospective young immigrants to Palestine was certainly one of the most important and practical tasks of the Zionist movement during the 1930s. The social, economic, and occupational background of most German Jews meant that they were ill-prepared for a new life in Palestine, with an economy in need of agricultural workers and other skilled artisans and craftsmen. Immigration restrictions and quotas imposed by potential destination countries were based in part on the kinds of skills and occupations their economies could or could not absorb. Zionists pursued occupational retraining for ideological reasons as well, with a view of agriculture and the manual trades as necessary components of the “normalization” of the Jews as a people, and the rejection of anti-Semitic assertions that Jews did not engage in wholesome and honest work. Thus, the occupational retraining of German Jews was quickly recognized by Jewish as well as Nazi authorities as critically important in their mutual efforts to facilitate Jewish emigration.

f
Igure
4.3.:
Jewish Gymnasium graduates train as carpenters under the auspices of the Jewish community in Berlin. Photograph by Abraham Pisarek.
Courtesy
: Bildarchiv Preussischer kulturbesitz, Berlin, and Art Resource, New York.

According to the ZJHA, there were already 6,069 Jews in mostly Zionist occupational retraining programs in Germany in March 1934, and that number was expected to increase dramatically in the months to follow.
³⁷
The Zionists had provided occupational retraining in Germany before 1933, and a systematic network of occupational retraining centers (
hachschara
camps in Hebrew,
Umschulungslager
in German) run by the Hechaluz and other largely Zionist-oriented organizations, and sponsored by various Zionist organizations and relief agencies in Berlin, was operating within a year of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.
³⁸
Indeed, membership in the Hechaluz in Germany rose from about 500 in 1933 to 14,000 in 1935.
³⁹
other Jewish organizations, including the Jewish communities in smaller towns and cities, the ZJHA, the kulturbund der deutschen Juden, the Talmud-Torah School in Hamburg, the Advisory office for Jewish economic Assistance, Jewish Agriculture, and small individual groups, such as the orthodox Beth Chaluz of Magdeburg and the keren Tora wa’awoda of Hamburg, established centers throughout Germany for the occupational retraining

of German Jews in preparation for emigration. even non-Zionist organizations eventually established occupational retraining camps. The CV and the RjF opened one at Gross-Breesen near Breslau in 1936 to facilitate the emigration of young Jews to destinations other than Palestine.
⁴⁰
And in 1937, the Gesellschaft für handwerkliche Arbeit (Society for Manual Labor), the German branch of the international organization oRT, opened an
Auswanderungsschule
(emigration school) in Ber-lin with programs designed to teach young Jews the manual trades and to prepare them for emigration to Palestine and elsewhere.
⁴¹

Jewish occupational retraining was naturally focused on agriculture, and therefore likely to be found primarily in the rural areas of the Reich rather than in the urban environs of a city such as Berlin. of course, all retraining programs were generally administered from Berlin, requiring as they did the approval of and strict supervision by both Jewish officials in the Reichsvertretung and Nazi police authorities. These officials also had to negotiate with the regime for the necessary permits. For example, in 1936, the Reichsvertretung concluded an agreement with the Reichsnährstand (Reich Farmers’ Bureau) that formally regulated the establishment, enrollments, programs, and outcomes of agricultural retraining programs throughout the Reich.
⁴²
Notwithstanding the fact that much of the retraining effort was in agriculture, and therefore centered in the countryside, there were significant retraining programs dur-ing the 1930s, particularly in the manual trades, that were very much in evidence in the life of Berlin Jewry. of the fifty-four retraining centers operated by the Hechaluz throughout Germany, twelve were within the city limits of Berlin, and another five were within commuting distance from the city. Altogether, some twenty-four programs were operating in and around Berlin by December 1937, engaged in teaching young Jews such trades as metallurgy and metal processing, carpentry and furniture making, construction work, electronics, plumbing, locksmithing, gardening, horticulture, childcare, and home economics. Some agriculture students from Berlin were able to commute by train to programs on farms not far from the city.

Individual Jews also established small retraining sites on their property, such as the agricultural retraining center at Altkarbe-obermüle in Brandenburg run by a Jewish farmer, Siegmund Levy, and the small retraining programs in Jewish homes in Berlin that taught young Jews many of the skills needed in Palestine.
⁴³
By the summer of 1936, the practice of allowing Jewish agricultural trainees to learn their new trades in non-Jewish settings (farms and other agricultural enterprises)

and with “Aryan” instructors had, with some reluctance, become acceptable to Nazi authorities. The police had come to recognize that the number of qualified Jewish teachers in agriculture, gardening, etc., was small, and that the employment of “Aryan” teachers was unavoidable.
⁴⁴
Moreover, Nazi authorities permitted German Jews to enroll in occupational retraining programs outside of Germany, in Holland, France, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia. By 1938, for example, 226 German Jews were enrolled in “practical training” (
praktische Ausbildung
) programs abroad to become technicians, farmers, and craftsmen.
⁴⁵
All of these programs were designed to teach young Jews the kinds of occupational skills that were in demand in Palestine and elsewhere, skills that they would not otherwise have had the opportunity to acquire in Germany. Most, but not all, of the graduates of Zionist retraining programs ended up in Palestine.
⁴⁶

Finally, Jewish sports clubs also grew rapidly in Germany during the 1930s. of the 126 sports clubs of all kinds throughout Germany, nine were located in Berlin.
⁴⁷
But the Berlin clubs maintained a membership that comprised about one-third of all German Jews enrolled in such organizations. Moreover, almost three-quarters of those in the Berlin clubs were members of Zionist sports organizations such as the Bar kochba and Makkabi clubs.

Nazi Reality

In spite of considerable growth and progress in its efforts to change Ger-man-Jewish life in preparation for emigration after 1933, the German Zionist movement would have to face unanticipated obstacles presented by Nazi Jewish policy. For example, the National Socialist assumption of power tended to aggravate rather than neutralize some of the long-standing conflicts between the Zionists and the assimilationist Jewish organizations in Germany. The conflict was exacerbated no doubt by the ZVfD’s interpretation of the new realities facing Jews in Germany after 30 January 1933 as affording it an opportunity to assume a dominant role in German-Jewish life. Traditional differences and rivalries were placed in a different and more dangerous context when the state declared all Jews to be the enemy of Germany, which necessitated that the various Jewish organizations create a single Jewish response.
⁴⁸
These tensions were particularly evident in Berlin, where all of the major Jew-ish institutions, organizations, and media outlets were headquartered.

The tenuous and often difficult relationship between the ZVfD and the CV, which existed prior to 1933, continued for the next five years, until all autonomous Jewish organizations were dissolved in 1938. of course, the CV resented and initially resisted the ZVfD’s public drive for political pre-eminence in Jewish life in Berlin and throughout Germany. Notwithstanding the obvious dependence of the Reichsvertretung on the cooper ation of the CV and the ZVfD, the mounting pressures on the non-Zionist CV to support Jewish emigration, if not the Zionist preoccupation with Palestine, did not at all reflect any inclination to accept Zionist ideology as the salvation of German Jews, let alone Zionist leadership in Jewish affairs. even when it reluctantly accepted the inevitability of Jewish emigration by 1936, the CV criticized what it believed were the efforts of the ZVfD to direct Jewish emigration to Palestine at the expense of other suitable destinations.
⁴⁹
Moreover, the fundamental aim of Nazi Jewish policy to promote the emigration of Jews from Germany naturally resulted in a much larger role and higher profile for the ZVfD in the Jewish community, particularly in the Reichsvertretung. This also entailed the steady decline of the CV, as Jewish emigration became the only permissible option.
⁵⁰

The relationship between the ZVfD and the RjF was also characterized by friction. At times, the new realities in Jewish life in Germany threw the two into open conflict, reflecting the tensions inherent in the traditional Zionist-assimilationist rivalry among Jews in Germany.
⁵¹
while some in the RjF and the CV had long accepted the idea of Zionist work in Palestine for the benefit of persecuted Jews from eastern europe, they always rejected Zionism as anything remotely relevant to the situation of Jews in Germany. The RjF, although neutral in internal Jewish politics before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933 and generally content to defend the interests of Jewish veterans of world war I, was forced to adopt a more politically active role in Jewish affairs in Germany after 1933. while it supported Zionist efforts to create a refuge for a small number of Jews as well as for Jewish religious traditions in Palestine, the RjF initially would not countenance any rationale for nation-building abroad by any German-Jewish organiz ation
⁵
.
²
In July 1934, Captain Leo Löwenstein, Chair-man of the RjF, prepared a lengthy report outlining the continuing conflict between the RjF and the ZVfD.
⁵³
The report emphasized the RjF’s rejection of a Zionist “building of a political national Jewish community” and reaffirmed its “ties of more than a thousand years to the German homeland.” Although Löwenstein described the willingness

of his organization to cooperate with the ZVfD and the CV in the creation of the Reichsvertretung in 1933 as a unified Jewish response to the altered conditions of Jewish life in Germany, the RjF and the ZVfD would remain in fundamental conflict over the nature and form of that response at least until 1937.

Certainly the ZVfD’s most bitterly contentious relationship, one played out mainly within the institutional framework of the Zionist movement in Berlin until the dissolution of all Jewish organizations in 1938, was with the small rightwing Revisionist Zionist movement in Germany. The remnants from the internal divisions within Revisionist ranks in Germany in 1931 were forced by the Nazi assumption of power to come together in April 1934 in the new Staatszionistische organisation (State Zionist organization) under Georg kareski.
⁵⁴
The reconstituted organization worked independently of and usually in opposition to the ZVfD in an effort to establish its own separate relationship with the authorities, control over the Zionist movement in Germany, and, by extension, over the affairs of the Jewish community as a whole. Like all other Jewish organizations inside Germany, the State Zionists also sought to accommodate themselves, albeit in a more public manner, to the policies of the Nazi regime. The ZVfD was already sufficiently alarmed by July of 1934 over the activities of the Staatszionisten when, in a circular letter to all of its local branches, it noted that Revisionist activities “deserve the attention of all members of the ZVfD and forces us to take decisive counteraction.”
⁵⁵