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Tuesday, August 1, 2017

The Irish Savant : the Rykestrasse Synagogue in Berlin




Can somebody please help me? I seem to be going insane.

We know what happened to the Jews in Germany during WWII.  They were mercilessly hunted down, to the last man woman and child, and, after a Death March, were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Belsen or wherever. In fact wherever the Germans went the same thing happened, from Paris to Moscow, from Vilnius to Belgrade.

How do we know this?  Well everybody knows it, from hundreds of films, thousands of books, dozens of Holocaust museums, millions of church sermons, from every approved history of the period.  So that seems clear enough.

But then I come across this, an excerpt from the history of the Rykestrasse Synagogue in Berlin, written by a former Head Rabbi at that institution. (Hermann Simon (Die Synagoge Rykestraße (1904–2004), Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich and Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin / Centrum Judaicum, 2004, (Jüdische Miniaturen; vol. 17)).

 “The Jewish school in the front building was forced to close in 1941. However, the Jewish community formally remained proprietor of the site. In May 1942 the borough of Prenzlauer Berg declared its will to acquire the site paying the ridiculous sum of reichsmark 191,860 and with effect of 1 September 1944 the site was conveyanced to the borough. When on 6 May 1943 the Jewish community applied at the Gestapo for a sale permission, since all its property was under custodianship as were any sales proceeds, it named the Heeresstandortverwaltung I Berlin (German Army garrison administration no. I) as the tenant of all the site, except of two little apartments in the front building still rented out to residential tenants.”

So here we have, according to the Rabbi of the synagogue in question:
in the middle of World War II,

the Jewish community,

negotiating,

with the Gestapo,

for the sale of their synagogue,

which happens to be down the road from Hitler’s HQ.
Now tell, am I going insane, or have I momentarily stepped outside The Matrix? And what's that green man with the TV aerial ears doing looking in my window?

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