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The State Treaty between the German Government and the Central Council of Jews in Germany
Not A New Beginning

By Rabbi Walter Rothschild

The author, born in England 1954, has worked since 1984 as a Rabbi in England, Austria, and the Caribbean before taking a post as Liberal Community Rabbi in Berlin in 1998. Since 2001, he has served the Liberal communities in Munich, Cologne, and Bad Segeberg. He also works as a lecturer, writer, and broadcaster on religious affairs. The article is used with his permission. His views do not necessarily reflect mine.

On January 27, 2003 a "Staatsvertrag" (State Treaty) was signed between the German Government and the Zentralrat—the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The contract came to many as rather a surprise. News of it broke only a few weeks earlier. There was a great deal of media interest, not all of it—apparently—innocent. As a Rabbi, working in Berlin and other cities, I was approached by many journalists, even from the BBC in England, all keen to understand what was going on. As an "outsider", not a member of the charmed, privileged circle of power brokers who decide these things, I had little hard information to offer. The information that was leaked at the outset was that the sum of 3 Million Euros would be guaranteed to the Jewish community in Germany—i.e. it would no longer be a matter of begging and negotiating each year, but this would become a fixed part of the annual Federal budget—and that this would be a form of 'normalization', inasmuch as the two main Churches—Catholic and Protestant—also had such Federal contracts. (In Germany, for those who do not know the system, membership of the four designated 'main religions'—Catholic, Old Catholic, Protestant and Jewish denominations—is underwritten by the State. One enters one's religion on one's taxation forms, the local authority keeps a record, and a sum is added to income tax and paid direct to the appropriate church.

At present, there is no indication of any desire to introduce the same system for the Moslem or Hindu or Bahai or Buddhist communities, and the 'Free Churches' are also outside this system. If one does not wish to pay to the church, one must formally "deregister" to the local State authority. Links between Church and State are therefore very close in this formal, taxation, and financial context. Church institutions such as Kindergartens, Schools, Old Age Homes, clergy or social worker or teacher training institutions, receive State support to varying degrees.)

It is clear that certain matters need to be organized and financed at a national rather than local or regional level-training of rabbis, support of a national rabbinic organization, archive, administration, student chaplainry, negotiations at national level on issues of immigration or employment rights and so forth. So—in principle—it makes a great deal of sense for a relatively small amount of money (yes, I admit, it would be a lot for an individual!) to be allocated for such matters.

Like all systems, there is an 'up side' and a 'down side' to the German (originally Prussian) procedures for financing religious organizations. The up side is that there is usually a guarantee of some steady funding, and churches do not have to collect old newspapers and drinks cans and run jumble sales to maintain their regular activities or repair the roof. The down side is that this funding is centralized, and therefore whoever controls the allocations has a great deal of power. Resources come from above, not from below. And when the State itself starts to face bankruptcy in the face…it is not good to be part of a 'dependency culture'.

Still, it was clear, a decision had been made at a certain level to "be nice to the Jews". At this stage I have no information on who worked out which details, or even who initiated the whole process and how long negotiations had been going on. There are rumors regarding a desire to make amends for the "Mölleman affair," when anti-Semitic tendencies began to be manifested in a disturbingly public manner during the last election campaign. But the parties in the current ruling coalition did not, so far as I know, ever state such a Staatsvertrag as a part of their election policy. Nevertheless—it was there, in the news. Too much in the news, in fact.

I heard one news broadcast on Bavarian Radio in which the top three items were: Pending war in Iraq; a major threat of industrial unrest in Germany; and the fact that the Jews were to get 3 million Euros from the State. And I wondered—why was this third item "news" at all—3 million Euros is small change in the current national budget in any case—and if so, why was it such important news? Was somebody trying to insinuate that the entire country was going bankrupt, firms were closing, tax income was down, unemployment was rising—and still the Jews were to get 3 Million? Maybe I am paranoid, but I could find no logical, rational reason why this, and not some earthquake in Mexico or economic upheaval in Venezuela, should really be of interest to the average listener. The News Editor had clearly made a decision, and the reasoning behind this decision could be interpreted in several ways.

There were several points of issue in the period leading up to the signing. One was the timing. January 27 is the anniversary of the day the Red Army liberated the surviving inmates of the Auschwitz extermination camp complex in 1945. For many, it therefore represents "Liberation Day" or "Memorial Day" for the victims of the Holocaust, and is now becoming officially recognized as such. Was this really the best day to make such a public declaration of generosity and trust between the two parties? There were many voices—mine included—who found the whole thing in bad taste. There is a time for remembering the past, and a time for building up the future, and a pause of 24 hours between the two would not have hurt. (This is why the Memorial Day for Israel's fallen soldiers is marked the day before Independence Day). But it seemed that the date had been deliberately chosen, and there were rumors that there was pressure from Paul Spiegel's office to get the wording of the document sorted out in time—come what may.

This haste meant another important conflict had to be pushed aside as there was no time to resolve it. Who is "the Jewish community in Germany"? The Zentralrat claims to represent all Jews in Germany—that is its official raison d'être and that is why it was chosen as the partner for this contract—in German, one has a "Gesprächspartner", a representative partner to an agreement. Its very title, reflecting its post-war origins, suggests it represents not "German Jews" but "any Jew in the country". But does it represent them all? Particularly in the last twelve years, since the reunification following the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there has been an influx of Jewish "refugees" from these countries—not all of whom have the necessary papers to prove their Jewish identity according to the traditional halachah, the system whereby one is either born with Jewish identity if one's mother were Jewish, or one can acquire it if one has been examined and accepted by a rabbinic court, a Beit Din, composed of three rabbis or experts.

There have also been many new arrivals from Western countries, Jews accustomed to another form of communal organization and a modernized form of ritual and liturgy, and equal rights for men and women. There has also been an influx of (mainly American-trained) Hasidic fundamentalists, who try to represent what they claim is an "authentic" East European quasi-mystic (and often messianic) tradition as taught by the (late) Lubavitcher Rebbe. Other groups from America—such as the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation—have sent rabbis and teachers to several countries in Europe, including Germany, to re-establish a community based on a very strict interpretation of the rules of traditional Orthodox Judaism—rules which are much stronger than almost any Jew in Germany really wants to live by, though few dare say so out loud.

The established communities, mostly dominated for decades by the same handful of people, represented the nostalgic but inconsistent yearnings of 'Displaced Persons' from Eastern Europe who, post-1945, had found themselves here and had built up the existing structure. They usually define themselves liturgically as "traditional Orthodox". But they were ill suited to cope with demands from both the right and the left, from Jews who had little link with Judaism and from Jews who had little link with Germany. In Berlin a scandal erupted when a Lauder Foundation rabbi declared a young, active and committed student 'non-Jewish' because his grandmother had converted to Judaism through a non-Orthodox Beit Din. In Munich (and several other cities) the withdrawal of the American military presence meant that the Jewish chaplains and the alternative flexible, tolerant, inclusive religious presence that they had provided for several decades also vanished, and the remaining Americans, or German Jews who had enjoyed these facilities, found themselves bereft.

The community structure is not democratic. In almost every community either a rabbi or, more usually, a lay leader, dominates the structure and decides what may happen and who may join. The members, if they are lucky, may be allowed once a year to speak at a meeting or once every few years to 'vote', but any attempt to introduce reforms to the liturgy, to provide for alternative services for the new arrivals—offering some prayers or sermons in Russian or English, or providing more facilities for young families or for women, or even providing facilities whereby those who were not yet officially Jewish could convert—met with obstinate and total opposition in a wide variety of communities.

In consequence, many Jews just dropped out and lost interest (though most continue to be forced to pay their 'share' of communal tax), and others, in reaction, established alternative communities—outside the Zentralrat structure—where more liberal services could be provided. But these have had to be financed out of their own pockets, since funding from abroad is very limited. Several years ago several liberal communities banded together into a "Union of Progressive Jews in Germany", a local affiliate of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Some other communities see themselves as more "Conservative" than "Liberal", but still not "Orthodox".

These differences may appear minor to the outsider, and are usually blown out of proportion in inner political squabbles, but they represent a yearning, a striving for a form of officially accepted Pluralism—a Pluralism that the Zentralrat claims to encourage but—in practice—obstructs. Of course the political game is played carefully, cleverly and slowly, the blame for a delay is always placed somewhere else, the central office is dependent on a decision by the local office and vice versa, the letter got lost in the post, but the end result is the same—until now, Liberal rabbinic training at the officially sponsored training college in Heidelberg has been promised but not delivered; liberal congregations in Munich, Cologne and other cities get no share in the State funding which is distributed only to those organizations which are "acceptable" to those doing the distributing; and in a few cases—such as in Hanover—a liberal group has managed to convince the State authorities (not the State Jewish Council) to provide some funding independently of the pre-existing structure, effectively going behind the back of the local State Jewish Council (Landesverband).

Reports of Liberal services and activities are simply censored out of the Zentralrat—supported Jewish newspaper, which in its title claims to be "Allgemeine"—"All-Inclusive". So much time and effort and energy is wasted on these internal squabbles, and all could be avoided if only the official communities—which are officially classed as "Einheitsgemeinden," "Unified" or "Inclusive" communities, which own and operate a variety of communal infrastructures and which are classed as "Officially Recognized Corporations" and in receipt of state funding, would simply fulfill their legal responsibilities. They could allow rooms to be used by some of these groups, would meet a few bills for teachers or rabbis, could budget for a few different prayer books to be bought, could support alternative youth or student organizations—we are talking in most cases of, in real terms, peanuts. After all, even by the most optimistic accounts, there are only 100,000 Jews in the entire country. But, with a very few exceptions—Berlin, Frankfurt come to mind, Oldenburg, Weiden, Braunschweig and maybe a few more—they don't.

Now, 3 million Euros of taxpayers' money was to be allocated from the Federal budget for the support of Jewish activities. (There has already been support at State and City level.) Who should get this money? There is no need to describe here every detail of the controversy that followed, suffice it to say here that the Liberal organizations went very public with their grievances that they were being excluded; the Zentralrat went very defensive in its claims to be open to everybody (though they retained the right to define who "everybody" was by their own terms, thus excluding anyone that, according to their definition, did not count as a Jew or a as a Jewish congregation); the politicians got very embarrassed but decided, as good politicians, to do everything possible to do nothing, and not to intervene in what was so clearly an "internal Jewish matter".

Every German politician knows that it is political suicide to be seen interfering in Jewish issues. Nevertheless, the damage had been done, and some of the shine taken off the agreement. The Liberal communities achieved some major national media coverage. The world now knows that not every Jew in Germany feels themselves to be adequately represented by an organization which is self-elected and self—re-elected by a relatively closed circle of lay leaders, most of them non—religious in their personal lives, many of them ignorant of religious matters, and involved for motives that are hard for an outsider to understand. And—out of the 100,000 Jews in Germany, around 99,980 are "outsiders".

So now—let us look at the text of this Contract. Does it represent a new beginning? Does it mark the start of a new era of 'normalization', bringing the Jewish community into the same legal relationship with the Federal Government as the Churches? Does it clarify what the responsibilities of both partners are? Unfortunately—No.

The first problem is made clear in the "Preamble", which begins "In full awareness of the special historical responsibility of the German People ("des deutschen Volkes") for Jewish life in Germany, in respect of the immeasurable misery and suffering that the Jewish population had to suffer in the years 1933-1945, and leading from the desire to support the rebuilding of Jewish life in Germany, and to strengthen and deepen the friendly relationship between the Jewish Faith Community ("Glaubensgemeinschaft").

With several of these terms, one can take issue. Who currently carries the moral responsibility for the truly horrible events of 1933-1945? Is it "the German People", the "German State", the "then-German Reich government", a specific National Socialist Party, the Churches, or even—to call a spade a spade—all the other European governments which cooperated to varying degrees, in Vichy France, in Lithuania, in Poland? The countries, which closed their borders to refugees or sent them back across the Atlantic, which placed them in camps, which refused refuge when there was still time to help some people save themselves—or their children? Who refused visas or provided official population records? Who allowed their police forces to be involved in roundups? Who closed the access to Mandatory Palestine? Who claimed to be neutral but declared that the Boat was Full? If all were truly guiltless, very few stones would be thrown.

Many of the German People also suffered—Social Democrats, Communists, committed Christians, conscripts, civilian victims of the Total War that Goebbels declared, bombed or driven from their homes. 'Moral Equivalence' is a dangerous game, and should not be played for fun—but when a Federal Government document speaks of the "German People", I should like to know whom they mean by this term. After all, the money is to come from tax income, and some of this tax is paid by Moslems, by new immigrants—even a tiny amount by myself. Are we all included in this National Debt of Guilt for the past?

Suddenly it becomes clear that the old song is being sung. "The Jews were victims in the past—so let us give them some money now". This is a sad waste of an opportunity. I do not know which experts, which civil servants, which Historical Commission advised those who drafted this document—but they have made a dreadful error. It ties this payment to the past, not to the present or the future. It attempts to make a link between past suffering and present payments. The Preamble—should one be necessary—could have said: "In view of the recent growth in the Jewish population of the Federal Republic, we consider the time has come to regularize and formalize the relationship between the Federal Republic and the Jewish Communities, and to place them on the same level as that enjoyed by the Churches". Period.

It doesn't matter that everyone knows there is a terrible historical background of destroyed synagogues, confiscated buildings and assets, derelict cemeteries, compensation pensions paid to survivors and refugees, and special regulations regarding military service for Jews. This does not need to be stated, black on white, in a new document. Without having seen the contracts with the Churches, I am pretty certain that they do not start off by declaring that the Republic is morally responsible for the atrocities committed upon different Christian groups by other Christians in the Thirty Years War or the Hundred Years War. So this is NOT equivalent to 'normalizing' the relationship—the relationship to the Jews is still defined by the Holocaust and by a vague sense of collective guilt. For good or ill.

The beneficiaries—most of them—will not be German Jews or former victims and refugees but new arrivals from the Former Soviet Union, who of course face major issues of integration into a new society with a new language, and who need help. It is perfectly legitimate for the State—or the Federal Republic—to delegate some of this work to the local Jewish communities, and to pay for the services provided, for the social workers, the employment consultants, the re-trainers, the classes required to catch up on the enormous backlog of religious knowledge that results from several generations of state-imposed communist atheism—and I am not attacking in any way the concept of the agreement—but I consider the wording is poorly chosen. It effectively means—"This is how much the Past was worth. This is the Blood Money." Thank heavens it was agreed to pay 3 Million and not 6 Million as it is, with 100,000 Jews currently here, it does not take long to work out that the sum agreed represents 30 Euros per person—and whilst the example comes admittedly from the New Testament, not the Hebrew Bible, one cannot help wondering whether 30 Pieces of Silver should remain a valid price for a person.

And what is a "Faith Community"? Does it include only those who have faith? Can it include those who have lost their faith, can it include those who want to be included but don't yet have the right papers, can it include those who want to learn the faith? Does it refer only to the financing of religious activities or also to educational, social, even political and of course administrative activities? Can one describe the Jewish communities in this way? The word "Church" is not appropriate, and so this is probably the best compromise alternative—but anyone who has learned to read and interpret texts knows the pitfalls that can lie behind every word.

In Article 1, the Zentralrat is described as "according to its own self-definition, open to and representative of all streams of Judaism". This is presumably the 'fudge' that was eventually hammered out in the closed rooms. I find it remarkable that an organization in receipt of substantial State funding can "define itself" in this way.

Why is the money being paid? Article 1 continues with reference to "a continuing partnership in the work related to our common interests and which are relevant to the Federal Republic." What may these "common interests" be? Is it in the common interest that further refugees from the Former Soviet Union be brought to Germany to live out their declining years in relative comfort? Is it in Germany's interest to "import Jews" to replace the homegrown variety? Is it in the Zentralrat's interest to have more, or better—educated and more religious Jews?

Most of the remainder of the Vertrag comprises normal technical matters, as to how the money is to be paid, when (normally quarterly), for how long (five years) and—significantly—allowing for regular but "amicable" re-evaluation of the contract should circumstances change. What might change? The possibilities are endless. A new influx from South America? From Israel? A change in the political and demographic structure of the communities? The election of a right-wing government? No one can predict the future accurately. But at least the door was left open for further modifications as and when necessary. And technically, the Bundestag still has to pass this draft contract; technically, a few changes could still be made.

The signing was, apparently, an impressive ceremony. I was not invited. On January 27, I was instead standing at the memorial in Auschwitz-Birkenau with a pathetically small group of elderly survivors and some non-Jewish German students, and a few 'official representatives', marking the events of 1945. In this small, insignificant town of Oswiecim, then a minor railway junction with no university, major industry, major government offices or suchlike, there lived in the 1930's 7,000 Jews. They formed 60 percent—a majority!—of the local population. That is something which no amount of money can or will ever restore. This is why I feel that the past must be respected, must be honored, must be remembered—but must not be allowed to strangle the future. Of course this is an inner contradiction, but inner contradictions are what we all live with, individuals as well as organizations, as well as governments.

The Zentralrat now stands before an enormous challenge. It has to prove itself worthy of its windfall. Not only must an annual independently-audited account of how the money was spent be provided for the Federal Government (Article 4), for of course any irregularities would now bring the Bundesrechnungshof (Federal Audit Commission) into play—and unfortunately there have indeed been irregularities in the past—but it has to earn the trust of those Jews who have until now felt excluded. It has to demonstrate that it can use its resources wisely and fairly. This need not be done by allocating funds to specific congregations—that is mainly a local responsibility—but it could, for example, establish a properly-functioning rabbinic court—or several—to process the mass of applications for recognized conversions; it could do more to encourage young people to train and work within the communities as teachers and rabbis; it could compel the Rabbinic Conference, which it pays, to become more representative and less exclusive; it could encourage a truly pluralistic student or youth movement. It could open up the pages of its newspaper to a full perspective of opinions and information.

It should encourage the training of lay leaderships in the different communities and States, teaching them the realities of Jewish life and organization in other countries, so that the "best practice" can be learned rather than existing, unsatisfactory structures perpetuated. In many cases, this will be a matter of supporting and delegating, allowing other organizations to do the actual work—the Zentralrat has neither the manpower nor the need to do everything itself—but true leadership must now be displayed, and from the top. This might mean breaking the habits of decades. If the German State was prepared to go public with its self-perceived responsibilities, then the Zentralrat must do the same. Transparency will be required.

I was attracted, as a Rabbi, to work in Germany, because I saw in the "Einheitsgemeinde" system a wonderful opportunity not to get bogged down in denominational politics but instead to work together with all others in the tasks in hand—for there is so much work to do, so much teaching, so much counseling, so much healing, so much consoling that has to be done here, so many dialogues to be encouraged, so many holes to be filled. It was a major disappointment to learn—the hard way—that this system was not in fact functioning, that it was a sham.

As a believer in the principles behind system, I urge all those involved—and that includes not only the Jewish communal leaderships but also the German politicians who are responsible for monitoring how these resources are now spent—to do all they can to make an appropriate break with the past, and work for the future, so that the "common interests" of the Republic and a section of its citizens can truly be met, and that a better society, more righteous, more informed, more tolerant, can rise from those memories and those ashes of the past.

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