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The time the man visited Jewish sites and met with leaders from Poland and Germany during a vacation he said had an impact on him.
BERLIN (JTA) — For second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, the final hours of a five-day working trip to Poland and Germany brought everything into focus.
It was here in the underground information center in Germany’s central Holocaust memorial that Emhoff sat down with several survivors, including two who had recently fled war-torn Ukraine.
Sitting in a small circle, they shared their stories. One of them “was rescued from the Holocaust when he was a young man, settled in Ukraine and then had to flee again. And it was well received throughout Germany,” Emhoff said in a speech immediately after the meeting. “It was an emotional and intense way to end the trip. ”
The trip, which he took with Deborah Lipstadt, the US special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, included visits to Krakow, Poland; at the end, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial; and to the Polish village of Emhoff’s ancestors, Gorlice.
All of this was aimed at spurring the design of a “national action plan against anti-Semitism” that Emhoff is carrying out with Lipstadt and others. The second man has made the fight against hatred of Jews his main goal since entering the White House, visiting school campuses to speak on the issue and leading events with Jewish organizations.
But this trip, which began on Friday, aligning with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, took Emhoff’s efforts onto the international stage — and brought him back to his ancestral Jewish roots.
Emhoff’s two days in Berlin were a whirlwind. On Monday, he met with U. S. Ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann, German Commissioner for Jewish Life Felix Klein and other leaders. On Tuesday, he and Lipstadt participated in an interfaith roundtable organized through the Central Council of Jews in Germany, before visiting a historic synagogue in the former East Berlin and community assemblymen. He also visited three Holocaust memorials in the city center: one dedicated to the Sinti and Roma victims of Nazism, another to homosexuals and, finally, the immense German monument to the Jews murdered in Europe.
Speaking to a small group of Muslims, Christians and Jews at Central Council headquarters this morning, Emhoff said he may not yet think about his grandparents, who escaped persecution in Poland and settled in the United States.
“They discovered opportunity and freedom,” he said, “and today, 120 years later, their great-grandson is the first Jewish wife of a president or vice president of the United States, fighting hate and anti-Semitism. That’s something, is he?” he said as if he wanted to pinch himself. It’s a remarkable full circle. “
Abraham Lehrer, vice president of the Central Council, told visitors that interfaith relations between Jews and Christians are smart and that the teams have developed channels of communication “in case of serious conflicts. “
Relations with Muslims are good at the local level, he says, “but it is complicated with the leaders of some organizations, because many of them still have ties to anti-Semitic or anti-democratic organizations. ” commented on the “positive atmosphere. “
“I was very impressed by the young Muslim man [Burak Yilmaz], who is organizing trips for young Muslims to visit Auschwitz,” said Rabbi Szolt Balla, who serves a congregation in Leipzig and is rabbi for the German Armed Forces. “It was a very good and productive thing to meet in this circle,” he added
Emhoff told reporters that the goal of the meeting was to share the most productive practices and incorporate them into the “national action plan” he is pursuing with Lipstadt, the U. S. special ambassador for international religious freedom, Rashad Hussain, and the White House’s liaison to the U. S. government. Jewish community. Shelley Greenspan.
“We’re going to think together and communicate what we’ve learned and then put it into practice so we can scale up the most effective national plan,” Emhoff told reporters after the day’s meetings. He added that he would meet with the United Nations in early February.
Emhoff’s last official act here was his meeting with survivors. He changed his schedule “just in order to meet with them and listen to their stories,” said Rudiger Mahlo, Germany representative of the Conference for Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Sonja Tartakovska, who had survived a Nazi mass shooting operation in her village during World War II, told Emhoff how she had to flee Ukraine last year without a change of clothing. She is one of the Ukrainian Jews whom the Claims Conference brought to Germany last spring, said Mahlo, who took part in the meeting.
It was not lost on them that former victims of the Holocaust were now seeking safe refuge in Germany.
“We have been talking about the Holocaust, talking about antisemitism, about violence and oppression and here in Europe all these years later these things are still happening through this unjust, unprovoked war,” Emhoff told reporters after the final meeting of the day.
People like Tartakovska “listen to those survival stories. It’s largely a twist of fate, just a little bit of luck. A non-Jewish foreigner who decided on a whim to do something, which then led to a long life.
“I was also struck: One woman” — German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedlaender — “was 101 years old. Imagine living with those memories for 80 years. Those are the kinds of things I take back with me,” Emhoff said.
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